SongO’TheDay

I really liked the previous post about using music as a drug. An MSG soundtrack to heighten the flavors and sensations that we already feel. Music offers this sort of sense that you can wrap melodies together and do a fade-out, and have yourself a clean ‘artistic’ end, and go on refreshed to your next games — sort of like SOTD?

This song, by the Arcade Fire, is a real buzzkill. It’s actually really really scary to me. I LIKE lulling music that can take my mind off the eventual demise of me and mine. Instead, Neighborhood #1 gives me a scary sense of deja vu from dreams that I have known. Confused sweaty panicky dreams, where I can hear myself whimpering, and I know something is wrong but I don’t know what. Fictional lovers are neither nobel or pathetic– merely tunneling away from a room in death’s house. Desperately wailing and atempo, this is a love song bent back to look in on itself.

This isn’t artifice. Reading the footnotes, the main band members lost several close relations during the making of Funeral. Using heartbreaking imagery, Butler and Chassagne don’t sermonize. They let me project for myself… that our last moments are _not_ inevitably painful and alone, and yet I will not accept an easier death.

This is how people end up Scientologists. I advise you all to go take another hit of Sleater-Kinney. And then decide what you want to DO with your lives. It’s a whole new year, you know?

– Darius Roberts

BTW, SOTD was fun! Thanks for playing! I encourage you to add me on last.fm and facebook, so we can be ‘music discovery pals’.

Sorry about the death-focused last post. It’s something I really personally wanted to talk about artfully. (maybe someday I’ll manage it.)

The arcing trajectory of songotheday has been a grand experiment, and Chris deserves much applause and acknowledgment for seeing it through. Make sure to buy him a beer and get him to tell you about his next writing project — He downplays it, but I think it sounds pretty fucking worthy!

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