Satanist and Sleeping Beast
Superstars and such
The fall semester is winding up and I am feeling already how much I am going to miss my “Concept Album” class—a lovely group of students who have been both willing to accept my far-flung invitations to listening out of their comfort zones, and have given me plenty to chew on as well.
I can thank them for bringing Phoebe Bridgers to my attention, and I followed her to “boygenius,” the “super-band,” which actually is quite super, with her and Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, all three writing and singing in front (and playing various instruments), and a bunch of other heavy-hitter indie musicians filling it out in back (I’m particularly partial to Carla Azar’s drumming), all of which will be known to the millions that are aware of them, and quite unknown to the millions that are not (like me, last week). The lineups that are visible on things like the Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel, and SNL, are all-female, all dressed in black suits and ties, kind of a Reservoir Dogs look? So: badasses.
This week, primarily for the benefit of my class, I decided to dive into an interpretation of one of the very inviting songs on the band’s first release, entitled The Record. The song is called “Satanist,” and it has this winning opening line: “Will you be a satanist with me?”
It’s got quite a cool form, this song. Three verses, and no chorus really—a recurring rock-out between verses on the same chords functions as a sort of chorus. The verses are shared among the three singers, and each begins with a similar invitation. Here’s the second in full:
Will you be an anarchist with me?
Sleep in cars and kill the bourgeoisie,
At least until you find out what a fake I am,
Spray-paint my initials on an ATM,
I burn my cash and smash my old TV.
There’s no particular depth to the version of anarchism being proposed here: it seems more important that it is something to do “with me,” embracing the antisocial, the we-won’t-go-along-with-the-crowd energy that connects satanists, anarchists, and nihilists. “Kill the bourgeoisie” is thrown in next to sleeping in cars and spray-painting ATMs. And the speaker offers to “smash my old TV,” probably because old TVs smash better, or maybe to preserve their actual TV. They’re “a fake” too—so maybe a fake like in the movie plots where one half of the rebel-couple is rebelling out of love and not ideology—faking the commitment to the cause for the sake of love.
The song is in two distinct parts, just like, oh I don’t know, “Sleeping Beast,” by the wonderful Edith Judith:
I wrote about that a lot more a little while ago. OK but back to “Satanist.” What we see in the second half of the song, after a large and extremely pleasing explosion of musical energy and screaming, and a big ritardando, is a new reflection on those three proposals. Now suddenly they look like lifelines thrown to someone slipping away from the social world entirely:
You wonder if you can even be seen
From so far away,
A slow pull, a seismic drift,
Leaning over the edge of the continent.It’s so hard to come back,
You hang on until it drags
You under, you under
You under, you under.1
It’s someone out on a precipice overlooking the sea (Gloucester-like?), or perhaps already in the sea, on the continental shelf looking into the abyss beyond the continent. That sounds like a description of deep depression, depression building and sinking deeper under its own weight, “a slow pull, a seismic drift.” If I am right about this, then the first part of the song is about fighting the drift through good old-fashioned rage and rebellion. So: a love song then, reaching out to drag someone back from the slope they are sliding down.
The SNL version is quite nice too, with appropriate red lighting:
I actually feel significantly transformed by this class. I have never had a contemporaneous relationship with popular music, at least, not after my teenage years when I did get into things like Peter Gabriel at the same time everyone else did (but then I was really too young for much of what he was doing, so—still out of alignment). With me, Radiohead became interesting 10 or 12 years after they were huge. Nirvana I came to love more like 25 years after a roommate had them blasting in our room in 1991—to my absolute disgust at the time. So it feels strange to be up on a group like boy genius, the kind of group that would appear on SNL when I watched SNL and the audience would go mad and I would always be like—who? And it all feels a lot more natural now: I can like a band like Edith Judith, where I know the players quite well, or Moontype, where I kind of know one, and I can like boy genius too.
What I feel is lacking in me now (and I don’t miss it) is any kind of skepticism in response to their mass popularity. I’m sure there are differences between these bands that could account for their different levels of fame, but those don’t seem like artistically significant differences—they seem more about luck and good marketing and that kind of thing.
The truth is, most generically popular music is, like most other music, not very popular: it mostly flows between small groups of people, and sometimes fills a bar or a larger rock club or a small hall where its energies are amplified. And with some luck it might stabilize at a level of local or regional acclaim, enough to be “established,” to be consistently booked, for new records to be sought and printed. Or maybe not. And none of that seems bad.
What am I saying? I’m not saying that superstars don’t exist on the merit of their talent and hard work: they clearly do. It’s been more clear to me with classical musicians, where their musicianship and connection to, for lack of a better word, the spirit, is so luminous and radiant that it is almost blinding: it’s obvious there what it is possible to achieve given the right confluence of factors, the planets aligning in the right way, and through their massive commitment and massively intelligent, directed work ethic. With popular music, it seems much more about other kinds of things aligning in order to create superstardom, or for an artist or a band to become something that millions of people want to be a part of, in person, together. But I don’t sense that there is something fundamentally different from what’s going on with some of the stars and some of the undiscovered.
And I mostly don’t feel resentful about it, or that it represents a grave injustice. I say this with a lot of hesitation, but it seems like the music industry is in some ways fairer now than it has been in the past, and that great and celebrated live acts are profiting from their popularity more directly than was once the case. I might be wrong. And certainly in many, many other ways, our society and economy seem backwards and wacko in the way they mostly do not support artists. But: those that don’t have huge followings can still take tremendous pleasure and satisfaction from sharing their music with people, even if it doesn’t make them wealthy. I have now seen that phenomenon up close, with people I know. And, in the realm of jazz where I live, I’ve experienced it myself—indeed, do experience it just about every time I perform. The pleasure and satisfaction is really unquantifiable. It’s a healing energy: I felt it intensely a few nights back in a speakeasy in Minneapolis. I started the gig fatigued, having slept poorly the night before. I was playing with a new musician I didn’t know, and as is the case for a lot of jazz gigs, the set list was drafted but kind of sketchy. By the end of the night I felt like a new man, once again filled with the common spirit of this music, the phenomenon of finding a common language with strangers, common access to something life-giving, ordinary, miraculous.
I have added some more punctuation to this than is out there. Popular music seems pretty against punctuation in general.