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I hold hands with the business plan for the guillotine man
I have slept about six hours total in the last two nights. My recently prescribed inhaler may not be doing the job it's supposed to. It is my opinion that nothing about this month needed to be as difficult as it has been.
I don't think I have once in my life in the Boston area rented an apartment that resembled the configuration in which it was originally built, meaning my prosaic first reaction to this post is a solid bet on stairs to a former mother-in-law apartment or Philadelphia-style shared second floor that was walled off during a previous renovation; the ominous scratches around the deadbolt look entirely consistent with socketing it into the door well after the fact with about the level of competence I have personally experienced in property-managed repairs. The only part that strikes me as unusual is the accessibility of the stairs. The ones in our bedroom closet are blocked off.
Earlier this week I was stuck listening to a rather terrible cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989), but it made me realize how much the original song impresses me for creating a narrative with nothing more than a list of cultural references and almost no verbs; it's the way it accelerates. The first verse spans events from 1949 to 1952, the second from 1953 to 1956, the third from 1957 to 1960, the fourth from 1961 to 1963, and then suddenly as if the Kennedy assassination broke time—what else do I have to say—the final verse hurtles from 1965 into 1989, leapfrogging pop culture and atrocity into an overwhelming pileup of history that will keep on coming as it always has whether the narrator can take it or not. Among other faults, the cover threw its post-Cold War references together without regard for chronology, which seemed to kill the entire point.
In my intermittent way of colliding with music videos, Spoon Benders' "Dichotomatic" (2023) strikes me as one of the better variations on the vampires of capitalism since Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), less fetishistically sexual and more working perhaps literally stiff. I also just like their lo-fi sludge-wall of sound.
I miss my little cat.
I don't think I have once in my life in the Boston area rented an apartment that resembled the configuration in which it was originally built, meaning my prosaic first reaction to this post is a solid bet on stairs to a former mother-in-law apartment or Philadelphia-style shared second floor that was walled off during a previous renovation; the ominous scratches around the deadbolt look entirely consistent with socketing it into the door well after the fact with about the level of competence I have personally experienced in property-managed repairs. The only part that strikes me as unusual is the accessibility of the stairs. The ones in our bedroom closet are blocked off.
Earlier this week I was stuck listening to a rather terrible cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" (1989), but it made me realize how much the original song impresses me for creating a narrative with nothing more than a list of cultural references and almost no verbs; it's the way it accelerates. The first verse spans events from 1949 to 1952, the second from 1953 to 1956, the third from 1957 to 1960, the fourth from 1961 to 1963, and then suddenly as if the Kennedy assassination broke time—what else do I have to say—the final verse hurtles from 1965 into 1989, leapfrogging pop culture and atrocity into an overwhelming pileup of history that will keep on coming as it always has whether the narrator can take it or not. Among other faults, the cover threw its post-Cold War references together without regard for chronology, which seemed to kill the entire point.
In my intermittent way of colliding with music videos, Spoon Benders' "Dichotomatic" (2023) strikes me as one of the better variations on the vampires of capitalism since Peter Strickland's In Fabric (2018), less fetishistically sexual and more working perhaps literally stiff. I also just like their lo-fi sludge-wall of sound.
I miss my little cat.
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ETA context: I think the song landed differently because of immigrant parents.
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It is an extremely U.S.-centric song even when incorporating worldwide events, but it had never occurred to me to think of it as a story rather than a catalogue until the cover prompted me to think about its use of chronology and I like that it works to tell one in this fashion, whether I agree with its reading of history or not. Oppenheimer is out there arguing that time broke in 1945. It used to be the First World War. I acknowledge that I have been saying that time went weird in 2020, but I know it's subjective: I can watch people all around me behaving as though nothing has changed since 2019.
ETA context: I think the song landed differently because of immigrant parents.
I don't know if it's a matter of the song landing differently: I'm interested in the way it works, not whether it reflects a version of the twentieth century I subscribe to. I am generally skeptical of lapsarian narratives whether the fall is supposed to have occurred Biblically or at any point on the historical record since.
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Ah, that makes sense. For me it was mimetic of "The personal is political" because I was the right age to have instructors telling me that, annually, then and for the next few years--and because I knew even then how old he was; he grew up through that sentence, kind of. Thus I can't help but read the song as his good luck that his ability to make a collage resonated with a slice of potential listeners. It doesn't feel like a catalogue to me; the juxtaposition of pop and serious is a deliberate lens on lived experience, where one often doesn't have the distance to split stuff neatly by type or intensity until much later, if at all.
I'm interested in the way it works
Yes, me too. My Gen Z kid said almost involuntarily, "OK, Boomer," when hearing a bit of the original (not the FOB cover) via Tiktok, then paused and asked me, "Is he?" Yeah.
but also extremely tired
Sorry about the tiredness, and (always) no worries. *hugs*
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I wonder if it was the same cover! It was playing while I waiting for my prescriptions on Tuesday and I recognized the riff without paying much attention to the lyrics—I was reading a Victorian ghost novel—and then all of a sudden the phrase Prince and the Queen die crossed my awareness and then the next line was about 9/11 and I immediately gave up and went back to not paying attention.
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I've always thought that "We Didn't Start the Fire" would make a great karaoke song! XD I was in second grade when the album came out, and I remember because the singles got played all the time on the radio--I still think this one is really impressive, but I prefer "Leningrad" (about a Russian circus clown) and "The downeaster Alexa" (about a fisherman from Long Island). I guess I think he's better at telling smaller stories?
I miss my little cat.
I'm so sorry. *all the hugs*
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I mean, it's going to! (Thank you.)
I was in second grade when the album came out, and I remember because the singles got played all the time on the radio--I still think this one is really impressive, but I prefer "Leningrad" (about a Russian circus clown) and "The downeaster Alexa" (about a fisherman from Long Island). I guess I think he's better at telling smaller stories?
Thanks to my idiosyncratic relationship with contemporary pop culture, I managed not to hear almost any Billy Joel until college except for a couple of random outliers like "And So It Goes" and "The Longest Time," both courtesy of high school a cappella. Agreed that his more personalized stories are better songs, I just think it's so neat that it's possible to tell a story through nothing but shout-outs and timing. I bet you're right about the karaoke.
I'm so sorry.
*hugs*
I am wearing the T-shirt with his name on it. My mother thinks he will always be sitting on me.
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And that song makes me cry so hard now. Because I remember when it came out, when I was a kid, how it didn't feel ridiculous that they were singing, "watching the world wake up from history," with the Berlin Wall coming down and the fall of communism in the USSR, the Singing Revolution in the Baltics and Solidarity in Poland and Mandela getting out of prison in South Africa that...as a kid, maybe yeah? maybe this was the opposite kind of break from what Billy Joel was singing about, he was singing about everything collapsing into this maelstrom of catastrophe, but two years later, I'm alive and I'm waiting, waiting, I'm alive and I'm waiting for you.
And then...everything since. Because history isn't something you can wake up from. But whenever people talk about the cynicism of the '90s, I think of that song, I think of Natalie Merchant's voice fronting 10,000 Maniacs singing "These Are Days," and I think...yeah. So cynical, if that was the only story you were willing to hear....
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*hugs*
I don't think you can wake up from history any more than history can break, but I do think that changes happen and it isn't ridiculous to recognize them, any more than it is to grieve the swings back, or work to make things change again.
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... I got this when I was a young parent: there'd be some period with kids that was really rough, and my mother would say, Wait five minutes. And sure enough, the situation, the kid, the everything had changed. Of course the opposite was also true: there'd be wonderful moments, blissful times, but those slide away as well.
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I had to look it up, but it was indeed.
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I’m sorry your inhaler is screwing you over, given how breathing is so central to sleeping. *hugs*
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I don't normally think that art needs a raison d'être, but I can't figure out why it seemed like a good idea.
I’m sorry your inhaler is screwing you over, given how breathing is so central to sleeping.
Thank you. I miss the thinking, too.
*hugs*
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That's a really interesting consequence of an extension. Did you build the more house out, or the people before you?
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I really like your idea about the song structure -- to me it also reads as very personal (he was born in 1949) so of course there's that big focus on 63, which was like a prelude of 68 when everything really came crashing down. The video kind of does that too, altho it weirdly falls down with the last verse. And like Mrissa says, it came out in late 1989, less than two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution. de Klerk meeting with Mandela. And the supposed birth of the WWW, altho I don't know if Joel knew about it -- but the song eerily forecasts that too, with its hectic pace and five-second clips and fleeting references. It is super US-centric, but when I think of it as the musical summing-up of a Boomer who actually lived through all that, it bugs me less.
But Seriously Yolks: Avengers Didn't Start The Fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-onk-Qm7ATw
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I have not gone out of my way to listen to more than I heard standing around a pharmacy. I looked at the lyrics. "Obama, Spielberg, explosion, Lebanon."
It is super US-centric, but when I think of it as the musical summing-up of a Boomer who actually lived through all that, it bugs me less.
It works much better for me as a generational slice than an assertion about history. Your points about his birth year also makes me wonder if part of the crashing compression of the last verse is the difference between the pace of childhood and middle age suddenly slewing up in the windscreen.
But Seriously Yolks: Avengers Didn't Start The Fire
Okay, that is the single best piece of media to come out of the entire Thanos clusterfire.
("Bucky Barnes is back again" is funny.)
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*hugs*
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I agree with you and the linked article on the catalogue quality of both songs, although I think they are using the name-drops toward different ends—"It's the End of the World as We Know It" feels much closer to "We Didn't Start the Fire" to me, especially in the apocalyptic pileup sense, although the internet informs me it was actually, directly influenced by Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues."
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I haven't had the misfortune to hear that cover, but it sounds terrible! (and now I kinda want to see if I can find a good cover)
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Thank you! I did manage to sleep some, although nowhere near what my body seems to think would be enough.
I haven't had the misfortune to hear that cover, but it sounds terrible! (and now I kinda want to see if I can find a good cover)