No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.10 - "Nuclear" (Ryan Adams)

Fuck Ryan Adams.

The problem with the things that shape your past is that the past can't be reforged. It can only be burned away out from under you.

"Nuclear" is almost certainly the first Adams song I ever heard, one of the tracks of a "Best Of 2002" CD that came free with the NME. It was, and remains, special to me. The lyrics about the burned, radioactive remains of a once glorious relationship that exploded with blinding force chimed perfectly with the kind of callow youth who saw nothing inappropriate about comparing the atrocity of nuclear weapons with how much is sucks to get dumped.

(If indeed that's what's happening here. Maybe Adams is singing about the arrival of a new love laying waste to his current relationship. Of lying awake at night, trying to tell himself to be content with what he has rather than go rushing after something new and thrilling, all the while knowing that all that really matters is whether she'll say "yes".)

If the lyrics have faded in importance, though, the music still stands up - a glorious waltz of slide guitar over crunching rock chords, the epitome of "alt-country" that the hot new things were hyping as The Hot New Thing for all of seven minutes back in the day. The restrained, steely bassline. The gradual collapse into near-howls of anguish. A "Dear John" letter, either read or written in hell.

I loved the track so much that, off the back of it and NME's review of "Love Is Hell", I bought both CDs of the latter, and - up until recently - never looked back. Things changed as time drifted onward. NME soured on alt-country as it looked for something new to sink its pre-hate prep into, and I soured on the NME, as I recognised what I’d mistaken for a music magazine was a oblique series of lonely hearts ads, penned by men convinced rock would get them fucked if they could just have enough OPINIONS about it.

Adams, though, stayed. The returns diminished, yes, though on a trajectory more akin to a fairground buzzer game than a ski slope. But that call-back to my youth – one not so much wasted as chronically under-appreciated – never completely lost its energy. The flare of fission had flattened into the background radiation of my life.  My Geiger counter still twitches, from time to time, as my eye passes across his albums in my collection.

I think it's easier to separate the art from the artist when it only becomes an issue late in the game. But it's never been the ease at issue, has it? It's the morality. Just because you can find your way to enjoy good art from terrible people, it doesn't follow that you should.

These songs wind like arteries through my history, personal, romantic, and musical; though the whole point of NAFTIR is that those are distinctions without a difference in any case. As Craig Finn put it, certain songs get scratched into your soul. You can't fill those grooves back in, even if you never sing - or speak of - those songs again. 

And why should I? Haven't Adams' own actions burned away enough fo what I've built myself on? Do I have to knock out the struts that remain, blackened and warped, but still standing? There's nothing to replace them with - the lumber from which I built myself upwards out of my youth is a resource long since lost to me.

Does any of that justify me reminding you all that Adams exists, though? That these tales of heartbreak and longing only take the forms they do because he was savy enough to realise setting lists of the women whose careers he tried derailing to music probably wouldn't shift quite so many discs?

I don't know. I hope so? I hope I can talk about the music who made me the person I am without endorsing or lingering on the flaws of the people who made the music who made me the person I am. For better or worse, "Nuclear"'s fire burns within me still.

All that said? Fuck Ryan Adams.

(Adams-free B-side)