Post by Jeff on Feb 19, 2006 4:22:29 GMT -5
Hey guys,
I am up late, I feel wonderful, and I have a copy of the new Lips CD. I’ve listened to it twice all the way through. And I’ve listened to a few of the songs several times. It’s the best CD since The Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut Funeral, which you should also have. I thought that I’d write up a little something, since I’ve got nothing better to do. I am going to talk about the ideas here, not the music. But they are a remarkable whole. Maybe Justin will comment more on the music.
The CD encapsulates many of the most important themes of this board, the ones we always seem to come back to, the ideas that haunt us. It’s called “At War with the Mystics,” an ambiguous phrase. Are we together with the mystics who are going to war or are we fighting them? I think the Lips intend both, and I’ll try to qualify their brand of mysticism in what follows. It is peculiar, much like the kind that gets expressed here. In any case: War. If you remember the Lips’ last CD “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” then you know the song Fight Test. In that song, you hear a pacifist argue that there are things worth fighting for…what things? Communities and hope and… There comes a time to fight:
'Cause I'm a man, not a boy
And there are things you can't avoid
You have to face them
When you're not prepared to face them
One of the evolutions this CD presents is the outright embrace of the fight, but in a caring way, one which underlines our shared humanity. War always involves simplification. Essentially it is the reduction of an issue to a moment, of complexity to power and violence. If that step is going to be taken, it is best to keep the heart in mind. Reduce your expression to simplest terms and bank on our common ability to feel like each other. At its essence war is a forced binary choice, a false dichotomy, a yes or no, but we can confront the choice with a prickly sense of self or with a recognition of our near utter ignorance of the world.
It makes me very sad to see creatives reduced to fighting for their life. Justin is my metaphor for that forever. When I think of him almost bleeding to death in a ditch, I want to punch someone. What a waste. But today all the people I love the most are fighting stupid battles because they have to. Today the Lips say, “If you could take all the love without giving any back, would you do it?” And they probably answered this question for themselves when they were 7. Still, these are the words they must say now. The science-religion connection that they dreamed about on the Soft Bulletin in songs like Race for the Prize and A Spoonful Weighs a Ton will have to wait. We can only hope that they aren’t permanently derailed by airplanes colliding with buildings.
I’ve written about this before, but where Justin and the Lips get it right (and Radiohead and NIN get it wrong) is in a fundamental humility before the extraordinary mystery of the world. For them, there is no economic reduction, no historical analysis that suffices, no class that is wholly to blame—there is nothing more than this moment. Folks always misunderstand that. It is not a reduction to the now. It is an exhortation to explore the manifest mystery of what is immediately before you. When you really take a look at things, the overwhelming impression you get is how small are all our efforts, and how incomplete any statement about WHAT IS must always be. We are so very ignorant.
“It’s a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want, because you cannot know yourself or what you’d do with all your power.” The self is an abiding mystery. The wise admit it, while the foolish think a story or a book is a Modern Oracle. A different kind of reduction, but a reduction all the same. Ignorance is a virtue whenever the matter is one we are truly ignorant about.
“The confidence of knowing
Descending to relieve us of the struggle
To believe it's so”
What a strange message for folks to get their minds around: Wake Up! You are radically insecure, everyone you know someday will die, you don’t have anything that won’t be taken away, and in this moment you can either embrace that or flee. Stay. Stay with us.
If it were a live and let live world, the Lips could wander away from the people who don’t get them. So, there is a simplification of the message here. The themes in “At War with the Mystics” are nothing new. And the music also feels like a step toward the mainstream. Everything is less subtle. The CD is political. And the aim is at the folks who believe that they know the answers, that they have the secret and unequivocal power, that they have no reason for dread. Wake up! Even if Jesus is in your bed you are still sleeping alone, just like everyone else.
So here is what I think of the individual songs. I’ll write with an eye toward the intended audience: the part of each of us that feels more secure than we should:
1. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song... (With All Your Power)"
Yes/No. If you must choose, always side with human smallness. We are more prone to error than truth. We are liable to reason but we live very comfortably in error. Not the other way round.
2. "Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading With a Suicide Bomber)"
One of the things we like to do is pretend that we are more advanced than everyone else. Again, the illusion is having a safe point of operation. Resist such an opinion. Why? What is the force? Are the Lips saying that they know something lots of others don’t? YES. There is no contradiction in saying that the universe is mysterious BUT there are some basic things we know. Is history completely for naught? Everything grows and must do so or die. The force of the "must" is the real question, the real struggle.
3. "The Sound of Failure/It's Dark... Is It Always This Dark??"
This one is about a girl who decides to give up the quest to be popular and well-liked. She decides to live her life from the inside out instead of from the outside in. But just because we should live this way (say the Lips—remember this is WAR) doesn’t mean that we must hope for the worst for our enemies. We just want them to learn.
4. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life as Blazing Shield of Defiance and Optimism as Celestial Spear of Action)"
The titles of songs by this band are a lot of fun. This one—at least—makes sense. The confession of ignorance is not complete. Even Socrates couldn’t maintain such a position. “Only a fool believes that he is different from the birds in the sky.” Connect yourself before you take on your great decisions. And remember you will be adjusting inside and outside. Expect the inside to change more than the outside. Even electric blankets are deceptive. And there is a spiritual (!) argument for sleeping in the cold. The message: Operate from the inner world, but realize it is always in flux and must be for you to appreciate reality.
5. "Vein of Stars"
This is the place Adam needs to look. (I mean no offense, there, Oh Adam My Captain!) If the scientist and philosopher must recognize human ignorance, then a fortiori the religious must as well. “Who knows? Maybe there isn’t…” If we must contradict the Bible, this is the ground. We don’t know. That is what faith is for. It is not a kind of knowledge. It is a wish for a gathering.
6. "The Wizard Turns On... The Giant Silver Flashlight and Puts on His Werewolf Moccasins"
An instrumental. Steven Drozd is playing, and he is a stunning musician. He has the ability to imply both the search and the goal. A philosopher’s theme music.
7. "It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big... I Am So Small... Do I Stand a Chance?"
Undoubtedly the best song on the CD. The centerpiece in every respect. We are floating out of control. But recognizing our need to control is part of recognizing who we are. We (and elephants and killer (?) whales and God only knows what else down here) are gifted with a cerebral cortex able to ponder the fact that “I’m there looking up at the sky; and I’m scared thinking about the way that I don’t understand anything at all and how it overtakes me and I’m just so small. Do I stand a chance?” Well, do we? Stand for the chance.
8. "Mr. Ambulance Driver"
How should we then respond to otherness? “Our lives are strangely our own.” Doesn’t your heart go out sometimes? Isn’t this as important as your desire to know, maybe more so? However right you think you are, doesn’t that take a backseat to care and concern?
9. "Haven't Got a Clue"
“You haven’t got a clue and you don’t know what to do. You used your money and your friends to try and trick me. But you won’t trick me.” This is the song where the commitment to the objective comes out. “I still can’t believe all your plastic surgery. Now it’s everybody’s problem that you’re unhappy.”
10. "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)"
Can the concept of power be rehabilitated? Yes! “We got the power now. Motherfuckers that’s where it belongs!” “We're the enforcers, the sorcerer's orphans and we know why we fight!”
11. "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung"
The volcano as symbol of universal destruction. Our fates are united. There is no lead vocal here, only a choir.
12. "Goin' On"
“We hold our breath till the morning comes and at last the sun shines through. But the night’s so hard that it seems impossible, but what else can we do?” “Listen, you’ll hear it. We’re getting near it. It’s comin’, I can feel it. CAUSE I KNOW YOU’RE GOING AWAY!” Everything changes. This too shall pass.
Rush out and get this CD when it appears for the True Believers on April 4th, or use Emule to downloaded it now, then support this band with your dollars later. They are around the block from you and won’t mind. In fact they’d prefer it if you pressed the CD into the hands of every Christian you know. That’s my guess, anyway. But what do I know?
Jeff
I am up late, I feel wonderful, and I have a copy of the new Lips CD. I’ve listened to it twice all the way through. And I’ve listened to a few of the songs several times. It’s the best CD since The Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut Funeral, which you should also have. I thought that I’d write up a little something, since I’ve got nothing better to do. I am going to talk about the ideas here, not the music. But they are a remarkable whole. Maybe Justin will comment more on the music.
The CD encapsulates many of the most important themes of this board, the ones we always seem to come back to, the ideas that haunt us. It’s called “At War with the Mystics,” an ambiguous phrase. Are we together with the mystics who are going to war or are we fighting them? I think the Lips intend both, and I’ll try to qualify their brand of mysticism in what follows. It is peculiar, much like the kind that gets expressed here. In any case: War. If you remember the Lips’ last CD “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” then you know the song Fight Test. In that song, you hear a pacifist argue that there are things worth fighting for…what things? Communities and hope and… There comes a time to fight:
'Cause I'm a man, not a boy
And there are things you can't avoid
You have to face them
When you're not prepared to face them
One of the evolutions this CD presents is the outright embrace of the fight, but in a caring way, one which underlines our shared humanity. War always involves simplification. Essentially it is the reduction of an issue to a moment, of complexity to power and violence. If that step is going to be taken, it is best to keep the heart in mind. Reduce your expression to simplest terms and bank on our common ability to feel like each other. At its essence war is a forced binary choice, a false dichotomy, a yes or no, but we can confront the choice with a prickly sense of self or with a recognition of our near utter ignorance of the world.
It makes me very sad to see creatives reduced to fighting for their life. Justin is my metaphor for that forever. When I think of him almost bleeding to death in a ditch, I want to punch someone. What a waste. But today all the people I love the most are fighting stupid battles because they have to. Today the Lips say, “If you could take all the love without giving any back, would you do it?” And they probably answered this question for themselves when they were 7. Still, these are the words they must say now. The science-religion connection that they dreamed about on the Soft Bulletin in songs like Race for the Prize and A Spoonful Weighs a Ton will have to wait. We can only hope that they aren’t permanently derailed by airplanes colliding with buildings.
I’ve written about this before, but where Justin and the Lips get it right (and Radiohead and NIN get it wrong) is in a fundamental humility before the extraordinary mystery of the world. For them, there is no economic reduction, no historical analysis that suffices, no class that is wholly to blame—there is nothing more than this moment. Folks always misunderstand that. It is not a reduction to the now. It is an exhortation to explore the manifest mystery of what is immediately before you. When you really take a look at things, the overwhelming impression you get is how small are all our efforts, and how incomplete any statement about WHAT IS must always be. We are so very ignorant.
“It’s a very dangerous thing to do exactly what you want, because you cannot know yourself or what you’d do with all your power.” The self is an abiding mystery. The wise admit it, while the foolish think a story or a book is a Modern Oracle. A different kind of reduction, but a reduction all the same. Ignorance is a virtue whenever the matter is one we are truly ignorant about.
“The confidence of knowing
Descending to relieve us of the struggle
To believe it's so”
What a strange message for folks to get their minds around: Wake Up! You are radically insecure, everyone you know someday will die, you don’t have anything that won’t be taken away, and in this moment you can either embrace that or flee. Stay. Stay with us.
If it were a live and let live world, the Lips could wander away from the people who don’t get them. So, there is a simplification of the message here. The themes in “At War with the Mystics” are nothing new. And the music also feels like a step toward the mainstream. Everything is less subtle. The CD is political. And the aim is at the folks who believe that they know the answers, that they have the secret and unequivocal power, that they have no reason for dread. Wake up! Even if Jesus is in your bed you are still sleeping alone, just like everyone else.
So here is what I think of the individual songs. I’ll write with an eye toward the intended audience: the part of each of us that feels more secure than we should:
1. "The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song... (With All Your Power)"
Yes/No. If you must choose, always side with human smallness. We are more prone to error than truth. We are liable to reason but we live very comfortably in error. Not the other way round.
2. "Free Radicals (A Hallucination of the Christmas Skeleton Pleading With a Suicide Bomber)"
One of the things we like to do is pretend that we are more advanced than everyone else. Again, the illusion is having a safe point of operation. Resist such an opinion. Why? What is the force? Are the Lips saying that they know something lots of others don’t? YES. There is no contradiction in saying that the universe is mysterious BUT there are some basic things we know. Is history completely for naught? Everything grows and must do so or die. The force of the "must" is the real question, the real struggle.
3. "The Sound of Failure/It's Dark... Is It Always This Dark??"
This one is about a girl who decides to give up the quest to be popular and well-liked. She decides to live her life from the inside out instead of from the outside in. But just because we should live this way (say the Lips—remember this is WAR) doesn’t mean that we must hope for the worst for our enemies. We just want them to learn.
4. "My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life as Blazing Shield of Defiance and Optimism as Celestial Spear of Action)"
The titles of songs by this band are a lot of fun. This one—at least—makes sense. The confession of ignorance is not complete. Even Socrates couldn’t maintain such a position. “Only a fool believes that he is different from the birds in the sky.” Connect yourself before you take on your great decisions. And remember you will be adjusting inside and outside. Expect the inside to change more than the outside. Even electric blankets are deceptive. And there is a spiritual (!) argument for sleeping in the cold. The message: Operate from the inner world, but realize it is always in flux and must be for you to appreciate reality.
5. "Vein of Stars"
This is the place Adam needs to look. (I mean no offense, there, Oh Adam My Captain!) If the scientist and philosopher must recognize human ignorance, then a fortiori the religious must as well. “Who knows? Maybe there isn’t…” If we must contradict the Bible, this is the ground. We don’t know. That is what faith is for. It is not a kind of knowledge. It is a wish for a gathering.
6. "The Wizard Turns On... The Giant Silver Flashlight and Puts on His Werewolf Moccasins"
An instrumental. Steven Drozd is playing, and he is a stunning musician. He has the ability to imply both the search and the goal. A philosopher’s theme music.
7. "It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big... I Am So Small... Do I Stand a Chance?"
Undoubtedly the best song on the CD. The centerpiece in every respect. We are floating out of control. But recognizing our need to control is part of recognizing who we are. We (and elephants and killer (?) whales and God only knows what else down here) are gifted with a cerebral cortex able to ponder the fact that “I’m there looking up at the sky; and I’m scared thinking about the way that I don’t understand anything at all and how it overtakes me and I’m just so small. Do I stand a chance?” Well, do we? Stand for the chance.
8. "Mr. Ambulance Driver"
How should we then respond to otherness? “Our lives are strangely our own.” Doesn’t your heart go out sometimes? Isn’t this as important as your desire to know, maybe more so? However right you think you are, doesn’t that take a backseat to care and concern?
9. "Haven't Got a Clue"
“You haven’t got a clue and you don’t know what to do. You used your money and your friends to try and trick me. But you won’t trick me.” This is the song where the commitment to the objective comes out. “I still can’t believe all your plastic surgery. Now it’s everybody’s problem that you’re unhappy.”
10. "The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat)"
Can the concept of power be rehabilitated? Yes! “We got the power now. Motherfuckers that’s where it belongs!” “We're the enforcers, the sorcerer's orphans and we know why we fight!”
11. "Pompeii Am Götterdämmerung"
The volcano as symbol of universal destruction. Our fates are united. There is no lead vocal here, only a choir.
12. "Goin' On"
“We hold our breath till the morning comes and at last the sun shines through. But the night’s so hard that it seems impossible, but what else can we do?” “Listen, you’ll hear it. We’re getting near it. It’s comin’, I can feel it. CAUSE I KNOW YOU’RE GOING AWAY!” Everything changes. This too shall pass.
Rush out and get this CD when it appears for the True Believers on April 4th, or use Emule to downloaded it now, then support this band with your dollars later. They are around the block from you and won’t mind. In fact they’d prefer it if you pressed the CD into the hands of every Christian you know. That’s my guess, anyway. But what do I know?
Jeff
