Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley? via beer (and ricky)
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive? <10
Have you ever discovered a new band and become so obsessed with them that you can’t quite function properly? I mean, you go to work and get shit done, but half of your brain is constantly circling around certain mystifying lyrics, memorizing melodies? And you try to listen to other bands/artists but they just make you impatient? And you sort of can’t wait to stop whatever it is you’re doing so you can put your headphones back on, even when you’re doing pretty fun things like hanging out with your friends at a bar?
The weirdest part about being in one of these phases is that you know it will end soon, though you admit this to yourself grudgingly, based only on overwhelming evidence from the past. The first thing that will happen is you’ll be listening to your iPod on shuffle and you’ll skip one of their songs. Then, several months later, the same thing will happen, only you will listen to the song in full, and will be crushed with sensory memories from the time of your obsession: the almost-spring outfits of the people on the bus, the lightly acrid smell in your room from the half-empty Odwalla bottle you kept forgetting to throw out, the ghostly image of the boy or girl or mom or brother you were missing at the time with a low-level but terrifyingly constant ache.
So yeah, clearly I’m in one of those phases right now with The High Dials.
Destroyer hates hipsters. Sometimes when I walk by the Academy of Art and see some kid in Capital E jeans smoking and looking soooo sad and bored with life, I think, “You know who would hate you? Destroyer!”
This song is set during the Eastside Culture Crawl, an annual event in Vancouver during which hipster artists hawk their wares on Union Street. This is actually his most cheerful and sympathetic song dealing with so-called artists, and my favorite, perhaps because I probably classify as “so-called” myself these days. (Meaner Destroyer songs are populated with villains like “yet another visionary profitous East Van punk” or “your precious American underground / born of wealth / with not a writer in the lot.” Oooh and in one song, “the wealthy American underground weeps at the sight of Rhode Island sinking into the sea,” which I imagine is a reference to RISD, or maybe just the next affordable-housing destination beyond Brooklyn.)
The choice at the end of “your blood vs. your blues” depends on how you want to interpret “blood.” Maybe it signifies struggle (you’ll never be an artist if you can call your dad while watching roaches climb the wall etc etc), but I prefer to hear it as life itself — life and excitement and passion and virility. Like he’s saying: Don’t be bored! Your blues are not as interesting as being alive!
-Holly Brickley
It’s possible I was just really drunk last Saturday. But I’m pretty sure Chris Earley danced to this song. That’s how good it is! Who can resist shaking their booty to a song about Lucky the Pig and his woman with a carrot-based shell and black-lace thighs (who may possibly be less of a woman and more of a blinking neon sign)? Not me. And not Chris, either! I only wish it were longer.
-Holly Brickley
When Elvis was 21 years old, he was Declan MacManus. He was broke, unhappily married with a young son, and nobody cared about his music. He worked as a computer operator in London (this was when computers filled a whole room and needed a man in a white coat to stand around them frowning). On the train ride to and from work everyday, he passed this amazing art deco building where Hoover vacuum cleaners were once made; you can see a picture here. This is how it looked at night when he was coming home.
The Hoover Factory gives Declan sudden happiness–a flash of aesthetic satisfaction in the midst of overwhelming drudgery. It’s thrilling and relieving, but also somehow brings him closer to his own pain. The Hoover Factory inspires an equation in his brain, which I would loosely paraphrase as: drudgery + beauty = what is the point? The Hoover Factory is as perfect as anything can be, and yet is still “not a matter of life or death”… so what is? Certainly not himself, an ugly chunk of misery on a train at night!
IMHO: The answer buried in the soul of the song, which departs from the existential analysis above and probably has nothing to do with what the young Declan was thinking at the time, is that art can never be a matter of life or death, and to equate art with one’s own humanity is a folly. But we do it anyway. Especially young people, I guess. So I’m really glad someone wrote a song about it.
-Holly Brickley
