And there we go. My last piece for the soon-to-be defunct Geek Syndicate website.
If anyone happens to exist in the hypothetical intersection of liking my IDFC work, and not following me/knowing of me anywhere else, then rejoice! I've grabbed my own domain name, and IDFC will live again! Starting Tuesday October 3rd, I'll be putting up three revised versions of the essays I've already published per week. Once that's done, in about forty weeks or so, I'll move on into the new stuff.
(Which reminds me, Need to get back to "Desert Crossing".)
One of the reasons it made sense to disguise an autobiography as a list of song recommendations is the degree to which certain songs become rooted in a sense of place and time. Every time I hear "Enamies/Friends", I'm back on Grajski Gričin in September 2008, walking up towards Ljubljana Castle.
The idea of travelling to "find oneself" is one that gets a lot of kicking, practically all of it deserved. Rich white kids incapable of understanding they are not the centre of the world unless they see more of it are objectively terrible human beings, and not just because seeking spiritual enlightenment in the Eastern Hemisphere is one more way of trying to push your own work onto people of colour.
That said, there is value in finding yourself more than a thousand miles from anyone you've ever known, and figuring out where to go from there. Once all the other voices drop away, it's much harder to ignore the one inside you. There is no guarantee you will like what they have to say.
I didn't, anyway. 2007 and 2008 had been pretty wretched years. My love life was a radioactive wasteland, and my chronic depression almost hilariously out of control. Doubtless there was a link there, but it was hard to check how much that particular Venn diagram overlapped, because the entire intersection was on fire. Bad times across the board.
"Enemies/Friends" felt like the right song at the right time. Ultimately it's message is simple. Don't let the grudges of your past spoil your time with the loved ones in your present. Separated from those loved ones for essentially the first time in my entire life, so light a suggestion nevertheless carried a lot of weight.
Or, you know. That's what it seemed to be saying at the time.
Hope Of The States never clicked for me over their two albums. The dark, murky dissatisfaction of their debut in particular made their name seem too ironic (I guess calling the album The Black Amnesias should have been a clue). It was only on this song where they allowed thesmlves to approach the idea of hope earnestly, and it worked perfectly. It might seem an odd comparison, but the militaristic drumbeat and prominent fiddle-and-piano of the song reminds me of early REM - not in the actual sound, but in the fact they seem more like what a 19th century psychic would have visions of modern music being than they do actual modern music itself.
There's also a useful comparison to "Everybody Hurts" here, both in the simple picked electric guitar intro riff that somehow takes up far more space than it should (though "Enemies/Friends" quickly moves on from that simplicity in a way the REM song deliberately doesn't), and the total lack of irony or distance with which a message about grappling with sadness is delivered. "Take comfort in your friends" feels like it could be "Enemies/Friends" mission statement, even if by that point in their career REM had completely jettisoned the Reconstruction-era trappings this later song (and even more so its video) wears on its dusty sleeve.
Which I guess means irony surfaces in this after all, because for years I hated "Everybody Hurts", to the point where I refused to engage with the band (to be fair, I also don't see the appeal of "Losing My Religion"). I still consider it one of their most overrated songs, as much as I now love the band overall. Maybe it was the standard and wonderful alchemy of music, whereby somehow a first person narrative allows you to connect with a song more directly than one actually being sung to someone, someone that could theoretically be yourself.
Or maybe it comes down to something as simple as thinking Stipe was diagnosing the obvious, whereas Herlihy was offering a prescription. Even here, years before I had any concept of what the Left even truly was, this song's idea of recovery from the wounds of the past being something people did together, and as an act of defiance, made perfect sense. "Enemies/Friends" might be a reminder to not let your life be dominated by what your enemies have done to you, but it fully accepts those enemies exist.
It knows who they are, too:
All the money in the world won't save you We're coming home All the prisons that you build won't hold us Just let us go
Compare this to the stunningly obvious exhortations of "Everybody Hurts":
Don't let yourself go 'Cause everybody cries Everybody hurts sometimes
I realise Stipe, as usual, is delivering his message with more detachment that I gave him credit for at the time - likely my problem with the song is less the song itself and more the way it was interpreted. Even if we accept Stipe is being intentionally earnest - even cornball, to use his own term - to make a point about the universality of sadness, though, there's an obvious difference here. One might even call it left vs liberal. Stipes' explanation of our sadness is that it's a simple fact of life, one we survive by recognising it happens to us all, and eventually things will get better. Herlihy holds that sadness is something inflicted on us by the powerful, and will never truly get better unless we take that power for ourselves.
Our enemies won't matter in the end precisely because we're going to beat them.
None of that quite made sense to me in 2008. I was just a lonely guy in a foreign country forced to figure out what he needed to do next. But standing on Castle Hill, looking out at the glittering Ljubljanca, the furthest I had ever been from home, I didn't need to hear that things can get better.
