Thursday 10 November 2016

No Apologies for the Infinite Radness 1.1.17 - "Gone To The Movies" (Semisonic)




This is a difficult day to write, or to think, or to suck in air. It's been less than 30 hours since I woke up yesterday afternoon and reached for my phone to confirm what had seemed more or less inevitable in the early hours of the morning.  Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

There's a Xander quote rolling round my head all the time right now.
  ...First she stopped his heart, then she replaced it with darkness, then she made him live his life like that. But he still had to go do his job and see his friends and wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, but he had to do it all empty. Without anything to look forward to. Ever.
Harris isn't talking about shitty political news, obviously. Still though, the similarity is clear. You go about your day, because you have to go about your day. But something profoundly important just doesn't feel like it's there anymore.

"Gone To The Movies" is a sweet, sad song, and I will never not be in the market for sweet, sad songs. Even the fairly obvious ones. The acoustic guitar picking, the slowly-building swirl of strings, the white guy singing about loneliness - only the defiantly uncool licks of slide guitar can even hope to claim themselves more than cliche. Still, it works because it works.

Besides, it's the lyrics here that matter. It might be one more song about a dude who's lost his girl, but it's also about all the things in his life going on around that loss. It's about standing by the window and noticing that it's leaking. It's about looking around your bedsit flat and realising you never even had the time/space/money to stick a chair in there. It's about knowing your car is on the verge of collapse and having to plan for alternate transport in the morning. Because you've still got work tomorrow, no matter how pointless heading out seems right now.

It's about not being allowed to stop. It's about having to do it all empty.

B-side:


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