No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.1 - "A Jackknife To A Swan " (The Mighty Mighty Bosstones)

When Franz Nicolay quit The Hold Steady after three-and-a-bit albums, he explained his choice by saying he felt like "a fox in a hedgehog band". For those unfamiliar with the analogy, foxes are pretty good at doing a bunch of different things. Hedgehogs absolutely excel at their one trick. Clearly this has worked for them, evolutionarily speaking - we can't really blame Mother Nature for not predicting cars. What keeps small mammals alive and what keeps New Hampshire jazz-accordions invested aren't likely to intersect, though.

Personally, I've never seen a problem hedgehog bands. My obsession with the Hold Steady themselves is proof enough of that. Then there's the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. You get two flavours with these loud lads: ska with rock, and rock with ska. The song will be about Boston.

It helps, of course, that both mixtures are great tastes that taste great together. Brass and bass, together at last since the 1970s. It also helps that Dickey Barrett has one of the most distinctive voices in music. Dude sounds like a chain-smoking badger who just found out his badger wife is cheating on him. And while I'm not really qualified to talk about Boston in general, the inciting incident that this song is based around is a perfect fit for one of the least ska-tinged rock-with-ska songs the band has ever done. The horns here are more seasoning than they are component, not even sounding until the track is almost a minute in. The song is predominantly carried by a propulsive, headlong guitar attack, Barrett's exhausted rage, and drums like a horrified heartbeat. Images flash by, each one more desperate than the last, like the view from a commuter train bound for hell.

On the 2nd October, 1973, 24 year-old Evelyn Wagner ran out of petrol in the Dorchester neighbourhood in Boston. She walked to the nearest gas station and bought herself a cannister of fuel. On the way back to her car, she was accosted by six teenagers, who forced her into an alley. There she was made to pour the petrol over herself, after which the teens set her on fire. She died in hospital four hours later.

"A Jackknife To A Swan" can be meant in two ways. There's the reference to moves made in diving, and the idea of violently killing something beautiful. It's clearly the latter which is meant here, but both meanings share the concepts of a rapid descent toward finality, w. Whether it be the diver entering the water, or a human being existing the world, the direction is always down. It still matters when the velocity changes.

The final moments of Walter, the song's protagonist, are drenched in the fear (ultimately realised) that he's about to die. He's watched the slow descent of his hometown for three decades, and suddenly he's terrified the final fall will come all at once. A lighter, flashing into a puff of smoke. This is a desperately bleak song about the moments of existential terror that punctuate the slow collapse of our lives. About a man whose only hope is that he's home from his night shift in time to see his family wake up in the morning, forced into a situation where he might not even get that. The fact he's ultimately killed by the same trains he's been riding to and from work his whole life twists the long-buried knife still deeper. A jackknife to a swan, and he was gone.

Various places on the internet site Evelyn's murder as indicative of the rising racial tensions of '70s Boston. The band deliberately ignores this angle (perhaps fortuitously, given their paeans to racial harmony tend to be well-meaning but clunky), focusing instead on the way anyone's life can be upended and ended in the time it takes to unfold a pocket knife.

I remember the first time I heard this song. It was early/mid 2002. I'd just said goodbye to a friend I no longer remember, and gotten off the bus to walk home. I stuck my newly-bought copy of "...To A Swan" into the portable CD player that would be stolen at my first real job two years later. It was the middle of the day, and home was barely five minutes walk away. My hometown sees fewer murders in a year than Boston does in a week.

This track still connected. Implausibly, even ridiculously, it drilled straight into whichever part of the human brain worries that something is going to get you as you make your way home. That there only needs to be one bad split-second, and that that bad split-second's coming around, waiting for you to walk into it.

A jackknife to a swan, and you'll be gone.

B side

D CDs #471: Nowt So Queer As Folk

This one was a bastard to write. I just don't get folk. 

Wait, no; that's not it.

I don't get my reactions to folk.

Part of this is the variance. The best folk is transcendent - a perfect alloy of history, politics and raw emotion so strong, you can fully believe what Woody Guthrie's guitar kept telling people. Bad folk is revanchist, ramshackle nonsense, endless self-indulgent variations of saying absolutely nothing. White people's jazz.

That the gap between best and worst can be measured in (bright) light years is true of every musical genre, naturally. What make folk unusual is how completely I can't get a handle on what makes the difference.

It's tempting to say a lot of it is just sticking "rock" on the end. In practice, though, that just seems to mean "a plug is involved". Which does help, yes, and it's vaguely amusing to me that it turns out I'd discounted the Newport Folk Festival hecklers as demonstrable fucking idiots years before knowing the details of who they were. That doesn't really get us anywhere, though; not when artists as diverse* as Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and (as a protean form) the Beach Boys all got to claim the term.

I want to take I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight as a case study. See if it can get us to a unified theory of good folk. It seems pretty clearly in the upper tiers of the genre, after all. Perhaps we can establish a yardstick here, and use it to beat the fash-loving banjo botherers unaccountably allowed to get famous on folk’s farthing.

So: reasons …Lights Tonight folk rocks.

• It knows the past was awful.

Nostalgia is a disease, and not one that only hurts those infected. Fuck folk that focuses its gaze at our great-grandfathers’ navels. …Bright Lights seems to make this mistake, on a surface reading, with the protagonist of  “End Of The Rainbow” lamenting the state of today’s world, compared to his childhood. The point though is that the narrator is obviously pathetic, unable to distinguish his own problems from that of a newborn baby. Bad news for you between breast sessions, mate; your sister’s a whore. Try not to find that too hideous a revelation.

No. This album’s soul resides not with an imagined dead rainbow, but with the poor little beggar girl, forced to make her money briefly distracting the rich dickheads she holds in contempt. 

If there's a romance to the past here, it's only in the sense we all know it; we didn't always know just how difficult it is to get through the years.

Speaking of which...

• It knows the present is awful.

Tossing coins to disabled beggars dancing in the street isn't something we see much of any more, but it's not like abasement to the rich as a survival mechanism has gone away.  Capitalism still kills us all by inches, until it chooses to kill us outright. Fascism escaped its just garrotting by Guthrie's guitar strings. "Withered And Died" tackles this head on; we emerge butterfly-like from our teenage years, and like butterflies, we're all too easily crushed.

But there's hope here, too. It's a canny move to follow "Withered And Died" with "I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight". We switch gears from the misery of what life has taught us, to how we might be able to set it aside. Yes, a night on the town is just a temporary solution, but they're all just temporary solutions.

This tug-of-war between existential melancholy and finding hope in revelry is critical to the first half of the album. It's right there in the opening track; "When I Get To The Border" suggests that if you can't go down fighting, the next best thing is to go down drinking while on the run. If the album seems balanced between its twin concerns, well, just remember which song got to be the title track.

• It’s clear-eyed about getting blurry-eyed.

Alcohol is a recurring concern of ...Lights Tonight, operating at various times as both an accompaniment to misery, and a way of warding it away. The narrator of the title track can't wait to enjoy "drunken nights rolling on the floor", while that of "...Border" tells the friends he's leaving behind that, when he eventually dies, they can basically assume it was drink that did it. 

Folk feels intimately connected with alcohol. Hang around any pub that prides itself on its collection of real ales (fake ales continuing to be one of the greatest crises Britain must face), and you run the constant risk someone will pull out a concealed mandolin, to fire crotchets at you without consent. I'm not sure what the link is between self-indulgent jam sessions, songs about hills, and people who get ludicrously snooty about their dipsomania, but it's definitely there.

...Lights Tonight touches on this as it closes out its first half. Once again, this is impeccable sequencing. "Down Where The Drunkards Roll" doesn't just round off the loose but undeniable thematic cohesion on Side A**. It follows directly from "...Lights Tonight" itself, showing us that song's narrator, and those like her, through the eyes of others. Kids looking grand until they get themselves fucked up. Lonely people who find comfort in the bottle because it eluded them everywhere else. People who crave the delusions drink delivers. There's no condemnation here, though. No simple desultory philippic, this. All we find is sympathy. An awareness of shared sadness; of wine that runs thicker than blood. They're all just temporary solutions. The lies come so easily because the truth is so terrible.

• It doesn't outstay its welcome.

This is a zippy platter (certainly, it's far less self-indulgent than this essay). Ten songs in barely thirty-five minutes. There's a tightness here that counts for a lot; the sprawling cycles of irrelevant variation that mars so much self-indulgent folk is nowhere to be found. It doesn't hurt of course that, the one time the album feels like it's sliding into jamland, it's with the sublime melee of solos that carries the opening track into the distance. 

The slimness of it all also helps with the one real criticism worth making here: it's a pretty front-loaded disc. None of the offerings in its back half are actually bad - "The Little Beggar Girl" in particular cuts plenty deep enough. Still, there's a noticeable slackening of momentum past the halfway mark, as a determined march through hope and horror slows and stumbles. You can feel the album bleeding its last energy out as it topples to the dirt just beside the finish post.

Still, I could never get endings right either. And another way to say ...Lights Tonight collapses in the final seconds is to say it left everything out on England's green fields.

Surely that's the capstone of the structure holding all this together. Surely that's folk as fuck.

Seven and a half tentacles.

*Within the already established narrow ethnic corridor, that is.

** Only "Calvary Cross" feels somewhat out of place here, though this could well be at least partially related to the extremely strong association I have with that song.

Friday 40K: A Banner Year

 Got round to finishing my Dark Angels Ancient. Behold: Old Steven.

Standard uber-simple paint job, this one, to fit in with the rest of the now 44-year old army. I did a bit of shading on the robes and seals, just because there's so much cloth and parchment that the miniature would look too flat otherwise.

Here's the bannerlad with my Captain and Company Champion. How he'll be slotted into the army structure is currently undetermined. Frankly, I'm struggling to be bothered, given how obnoxious the 10th Edition has been so far in terms of Firstborn marines. I was bang on in December when I predicted the incoming round of codexes would further buggerify my greenest boys. Deep-sixing some of the Firstborn datasheets was probably inevitable, and it's only my four servitors which are now completely unusable, with no "counts as" equivalent. It's the ludicrous restrictions on unit sizes and war gear that's pissed me off. Enforcing ten-men Tactical Squads already meant my Razorback could only carry a Devastator or Command Squad; now Command Squads have gone too, replaced by "Company Heroes" which aren't allowed in Razorbacks.

Even more bafflingly, Company Hero squads must include an Ancient and Company Champion (the latter of which cannot be fielded in any other way) plus exactly two veterans, one of which must have a heavy bolter.

I'm actually quite lucky, given all these ridiculous constraints. I can move the lascannon marine I used to have in my Command Squad to my nine-man squad, and swap my melta-gun veteran for a heavy bolter marine from a different squad. A quick paining session to add/remove the orange trim I use to denote veterans, and I'll have an army that's entirely useable aside from the servitors (and presuming no-one refuses to accept my Bikers as Outriders or Land Speeders as Storm Speeders). Honestly, though, I'm just struggling to justify even such minimal effort. It just feels like I'm going to be wasting more and more of my hobby time trying to rearrange my armies so they just about remain playable, rather than actually painting cool things that make me happy.

Bah.