Lift Me Up/Where You End – Moby
It has become very vogue since the mid-90’s to meld the realms of soul and body, and Moby has always been at the front of this crusade. His pulsing beats combined with soulful voices invite cognitive emotionalism. And in recent years he has tried to produce this sound more independently – using his own voice rather than old spiritual covers. I think critics knocked him for unoriginality. Well, his album Hotel suffers for the lack of voices that can go deeper and further than little Moby, but his beats have not diminished. In fact, Lift Me Up/Where You End cuts its own path as a blues song.
The song begins with a lament. Drab words are killing him; he is confined to a cerebral cell and is forced to plead: “Lift me up, lift me up!” over and over – rising to a shout. It’s a prayer of release and a cry from quicksand – aided here by electric guitar and background singers to add a little more gusto.
The agony like Dante’s lost souls howling from a well end the prayer just as it began it, but Where You End starts in mid-form – moving us back to the physical. There was no voice from heaven. Rather, Moby comes to a sobering recognition: “Some things fall apart.” So what can we fix ourselves to that is “real” and invigorating? Sensuality, which scares us to no end, is Moby’s grace. His yearning for touch is more than carnality. Sure, when he says, “Where you end is where I begin,” he’s is definitely speaking sexually. But, there’s something else here. There’s incarnation and the sacramental grace of divine touch, like a divine finger touching the index finger of Adam. Soul meets body. Bodies are gateways to souls. Moby’s been on to that for years.
Wes
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Best of 2008 - #8
Death and All of His Friends/The Escapist – Coldplay
People either love Coldplay or think they are crap. I’ve witnessed both sides argued passionately. True: Coldplay does sing like the crazy man at the library who keeps spouting everything so urgently that you feel he must be on to and on something. Some people hate that. Other people hate them because their tunes tend to plant themselves onerously into your skull. But, lunacy and redundancy aside, Coldplay also creates some truly haunting, beautiful music.
Their recent release, Viva La Vida or Death and All of His Friends, was made famous by – surprise, surprise – an iTunes commercial and the title track (which is like Beethoven stuffed into a British club with futbol fans … btw, didn’t this happen in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure). But, beneath the pomp and strain of international music demi-gods, the album is also laced with Asian minimalism. Those are the songs I enjoy, and the acoustic version of Lovers easily triumphs over the amped-up version like it was Bruce Lee against Chuck Norris.
I’m particularly smitten with Death and All of His Friends/The Escapist, which begins with the type of nonsensical poetry that is evidence “A” for the half who disdain Coldplay. But, they soon leave that behind and begin working into mantras: be patient, don’t worry. That’s a message I don’t mind having stick in my head.
The other thing about Coldplay is that they like to build into crescendos of emotion – aided by precise strumming, drumming and pounding of the piano. That would be where this song goes, and the bohemian chanting emerges as a solid protest: “No I don’t want to battle from beginning to end. No I don’t want to cycle, recycle revenge. I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends .” It is a fight for life. And you do have to fight for it.
But, then it ceases and reverses course one more time. Back to the Asian-minimalism, this time with a haunting electo-mix of wind and pulsing beats. This is close-of-the-day stuff here, the twilight of life. “And, in the end, we lie awake, and we dream of making our escape.” The Oriental winds are moving across a fertile steppe, and the pulsing of a digital parade, like the UFO’s from Close Encounters were singing. Then fading, then giving up. But a peaceful submission. The resignation of Buddhism leads to life. Digital dreams. The end.
Perfect really. Three movements, the three cycles of life: the whimsy of youth, the struggle of adulthood, the relinquishment of old age.
Wes
Monday, February 23, 2009
Best of 2008 - #9
Society – Eddie Vedder
Eddie Vedder laid out one of the most solid albums in recent years when he did the soundtrack for Into the Wild, which was in itself the best movie I saw in 2008. If you’re familiar with the movie, you know the story of Chris McCandless, the young man who takes leave of his white-collar, white-washed suburban existence and heads due west on an existential journey. This song serves as the protest that fuels Chris:
“It’s a mystery to me. We have a greed with which we have agreed. And you think you have to want more than you need. Until you have it all you won’t be free. Society, you are a crazy breed. I hope you aren’t lonely without me.”
Two motifs strike me within this song. One is the intimate sound of Vedder’s voice – brilliantly communicated throughout the whole album – that speaks Chris’ mind in the scenes where he travels further into himself. The second is the loneliness of this song, the sadness. It holds both the melancholy of a person who has to say goodbye to someone very dear to him, even if that person has caused a great deal of pain. But, as it ends with the line “I hope you’re not lonely without me”, what is really being said through Vedder is that Chris himself is bound for loneliness – a loneliness that will develop from severed ties to the outside world. For when he seeks to be loosed from the ills of society, he also becomes unbound from others and the connections that make him human.
Wes
Eddie Vedder laid out one of the most solid albums in recent years when he did the soundtrack for Into the Wild, which was in itself the best movie I saw in 2008. If you’re familiar with the movie, you know the story of Chris McCandless, the young man who takes leave of his white-collar, white-washed suburban existence and heads due west on an existential journey. This song serves as the protest that fuels Chris:
“It’s a mystery to me. We have a greed with which we have agreed. And you think you have to want more than you need. Until you have it all you won’t be free. Society, you are a crazy breed. I hope you aren’t lonely without me.”
Two motifs strike me within this song. One is the intimate sound of Vedder’s voice – brilliantly communicated throughout the whole album – that speaks Chris’ mind in the scenes where he travels further into himself. The second is the loneliness of this song, the sadness. It holds both the melancholy of a person who has to say goodbye to someone very dear to him, even if that person has caused a great deal of pain. But, as it ends with the line “I hope you’re not lonely without me”, what is really being said through Vedder is that Chris himself is bound for loneliness – a loneliness that will develop from severed ties to the outside world. For when he seeks to be loosed from the ills of society, he also becomes unbound from others and the connections that make him human.
Wes
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Best of 2008 - #10
If I Had Eyes – Jack Johnson
Jack Johnson’s Sleep Through the Static album may have been the best release of 2008. The opening track of the album seems like it’s a little late on the anti-Bush bandwagon (the opening two songs are ripe with themes of war-mongering and loss), but it appropriately subdues the whole album with the reminder that there were too many things “we got too proud of” and – like Icarus – “we went beyond where we should have gone”. Johnson aims to heal us by bringing us to earth, and his humble yet hopeful voice is able to do just that.
But to do that, he has to make us realize that some battles can only be won when we cease trying to fight them. If I Had Eyes is just such a song. Thematically, I guess it’s best to call it a “break-up” song, like Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. And like Gaynor’s Survive, this song goes beyond romance to self-differentiation. This is a song of new beginnings, and when the song swells like a tide I catch surf on one line and one alone: “Sometimes time doesn’t heal, no not at all.”
It would take too much to explain the significance or meaning behind that lyric to me, but let this suffice: in 2008, I had reached a breaking point and I needed to have someone say clearly and loudly, “Sometimes time doesn’t heal”. Sometimes the only thing that can renew us is change and a break from the old.
Wes
Jack Johnson’s Sleep Through the Static album may have been the best release of 2008. The opening track of the album seems like it’s a little late on the anti-Bush bandwagon (the opening two songs are ripe with themes of war-mongering and loss), but it appropriately subdues the whole album with the reminder that there were too many things “we got too proud of” and – like Icarus – “we went beyond where we should have gone”. Johnson aims to heal us by bringing us to earth, and his humble yet hopeful voice is able to do just that.
But to do that, he has to make us realize that some battles can only be won when we cease trying to fight them. If I Had Eyes is just such a song. Thematically, I guess it’s best to call it a “break-up” song, like Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. And like Gaynor’s Survive, this song goes beyond romance to self-differentiation. This is a song of new beginnings, and when the song swells like a tide I catch surf on one line and one alone: “Sometimes time doesn’t heal, no not at all.”
It would take too much to explain the significance or meaning behind that lyric to me, but let this suffice: in 2008, I had reached a breaking point and I needed to have someone say clearly and loudly, “Sometimes time doesn’t heal”. Sometimes the only thing that can renew us is change and a break from the old.
Wes
Saturday, February 21, 2009
The Best of 2008 - #11
Why I Sing the Blues – B. B. King
B. B. King is the king of the blues, and I finally entered the king’s court. He’s known for “Lucille”, that sweet little six-string that sings its way through B. B.’s fingers, but he’s also famous for the way he puts the struggles of African-Americans into lyrical story. Well, this song has ‘em both.
It starts out with Lucille and a little rhythm drums, and then B. B. comes in with a defense, “Everybody want to know why I sing the blues …” Then he takes you through the harsh history of slavery to slum-life, and in between these remembered miseries, Lucille testifies – raising a cry of desperation and hope. And just when you might start to think B. B. is beginning to exaggerate his miseries, in typical blues fashion, he keeps comin’ at you with more and more reason to sing the blues. The tempo picks up – moving fluidly into Rock n’ Roll – and B. B. starts asking for “one more fellas” like James Brown, like some Pentecostal preacher. That’s when I really start diggin’ it.
Number eleven on this year’s Best of 2008 is a blues song. Fitting as it is. It won’t be the last of the blues either.
Wes
B. B. King is the king of the blues, and I finally entered the king’s court. He’s known for “Lucille”, that sweet little six-string that sings its way through B. B.’s fingers, but he’s also famous for the way he puts the struggles of African-Americans into lyrical story. Well, this song has ‘em both.
It starts out with Lucille and a little rhythm drums, and then B. B. comes in with a defense, “Everybody want to know why I sing the blues …” Then he takes you through the harsh history of slavery to slum-life, and in between these remembered miseries, Lucille testifies – raising a cry of desperation and hope. And just when you might start to think B. B. is beginning to exaggerate his miseries, in typical blues fashion, he keeps comin’ at you with more and more reason to sing the blues. The tempo picks up – moving fluidly into Rock n’ Roll – and B. B. starts asking for “one more fellas” like James Brown, like some Pentecostal preacher. That’s when I really start diggin’ it.
Number eleven on this year’s Best of 2008 is a blues song. Fitting as it is. It won’t be the last of the blues either.
Wes
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