metric reflection

Note: I’m focusing on an entire album this week just because it’s so damn good.

1998 was a lost year. Bogged down by an education I wanted in a field I didn’t care for, seeing my friend pool contracting as marriages proliferated and the trials of those first few years after high school pulled people apart, I was the stereotypically adrift college student. Seriously, my most poignant memories of the year are filled with the shadows of dusk or lit by streetlight; my writing from the time period was self-referential and pitying without really being illuminating - a climber fumbling around for the next fingerhold.

This album was my theme. It’s one of the best explorations of male post-adolescent depression I’ve seen. From the outset, Jarvis Cocker’s characters don’t know how to deal with a machismo society; how to grapple with the sexual tension of the age.

The first song, “The Fear,” sets the tone:

This is our music from the bachelors den;
the sound of loneliness turned up to ten;
a horror soundtrack, from a stagnant waterbed
and it feels just like this

This is the sound of someone losing the plot
making out that they’re ok when they’re not

The facade: trying to determine which face to display to the world as it rushes by. And grabbing little bits as it goes by is wearying; this resignation is conveyed throughout the album in snippets. From Party Hard: “Why do we have to half kill ourselves just to prove we’re alive?” Like a Friend: “I’ve done this before/ And I will do it again / Come on and kill me baby / while you smile like a friend.” Glory Days: “Oh my face is unappealing and my thoughts are unoriginal” and “Come share this golden age with me in my single room apartment/and if it all amounts to nothing - it doesn’t matter, these are still our glory days.” Finally, “I’m a Man” on the battle over masculinity: “Your car can go up to a hundred and ten / You’ve nowhere to go but you’ll go there again /And nothing ever makes no difference to a man.”

The disillusionment and raw distaste with society’s expectations were empowering. They provided the express flight to a world of Londonian or Parisian cafe decadence: late night discussions over too many drinks of Sartre or Fanon, shaping yourself as an intellectual for the purpose of learning. Thanks to the anthemic backing music and Cocker’s rich warble, they painted euphoric pictures of writing on the train, inspired by the trees and old stone houses whizzing past. Of anything but the outer suburbs, freeway systems, and mindless entertainment dictating life. (It wasn’t a bad life, of course. I had food and clothes and shelter, and a couple great friends who shared my disillusionment.)

But what really struck me, what cemented this album in the canon, was “The Day After the Revolution.”  It’s a song about waking up to a changed world; bordering on the cliched image of the deep sleeper murmuring awake post-disaster, a closer listen points to the importance of recognizing what you need to change to make yourself happier:

I love the way you do it.
I love the way you put them on.
You know the answers but you get it wrong. (Just to confuse things).
Why did it seem so difficult to realise a simple truth?
The revolution begins and ends with you.
Now all the breakdowns and nightmares look small.
Now we decided not to die after all.
Because the meek shall inherit absolutely nothing at all.
If you stopped being so feeble you could have so much more.
The answer was here all the time, you see.
Just how I missed it is a mystery to me.
I have waited and waited for this day to arrive.
The revolution was televised.

This part of the song is used in this compilation of the Civil War comic series (which I know nothing about; maybe my roommate should talk about it a bit sometime?):

Let me tell you a story:
My friend and roommate at the time worked the night shift at a hospital on the edge of town. It had been built 5 years before, while we were still in high school, in the middle of a field that was still tilled just the year before that. By 1998, the land around the hospital was still undeveloped (though that’s changed in the last decade) such that the 2 lane road to the hospital was, briefly, a country road bisecting 2 dirt fields.

I often picked him up at 4am for some godforsaken reason - I’m such a pushover. One night, driving along this deserted road, absent of even an ambulance, watching the tract home streetlights fade in my rearview mirror, this song came up. Something in the emptiness of the moment - the California dust, tinged by summer, hanging in the air - the sleeping people a mile away - the machines fighting for people’s lives, pushing air forcefully into their lungs ahead of me - made the song all the more poignant. I pulled over, a cloud of dirt and gravel bouncing off my back tires to listen.

This is what a revolution would really be like, I thought. It could be a momentous occasion, heralded by rhetoric and iconicism, but most people would go to bed that night, and wake up the next morning ready to continue their routine. The real revolutions are the battles you fight with yourself; those are the ones that change your outlook.

The stars were obscured by the vast city light of greater Los Angeles, but the ones that were still out shone indiscriminate of anything I had to say. It didn’t matter who I was, just so long as I was myself. I got back in the car, threw on A Little Soul, and picked up a disgruntled roommate annoyed at my lateness.

Today I’ve been stuck listening to Deastro for some reason.  Ages ago, I had an extra download on eMusic - one of those perilous situations where I didn’t want to waste the 25 cents, or whatever it’s actually worth, soI spent an hour looking for that one perfect track that will complement the 99 others I just spent half a day downloading (of course, I almost always blow through my allowable downloads the first week I realize they’ve reset) - and ended up randomly grabbing Deastro’s The Goodman of the House.  Goodman is a sprawling track that starts off brooding before exploding into a fantasy synth and guitar driven rock anthem.

Like M83 before them, Deastro sounds like a throwback to the best parts of late 80s synth-pop, but this nostalgia is edgier; informed by the layered simple melody approach to music indie rock was championing a few years ago (see: Bright Eyes’ Lover I don’t Have to Love).  It’s fun and invigorating, especially for an office dweller.

Some Deastro samples can be found at My Old Kentucky Blog.  Keeper’s, the newest album, is available only through eMusic.

I was sad when Muxtape was shot down.  It was a glowing star arcing across the night sky, a great, simple service whose brilliance made its demise inevitable.  Of course, the goons at the RIAA killed it instead of trying to work with it.  I’m surprised it took them as long as it did.  They don’t believe in innovation, even when it draws more attention to their (and non-RIAA) bands.  You couldn’t download any of the songs in a mix, but any user could build their own mixes to share with people.  It very effectively updated the old practice of trading mixtapes for the digital age.  Moreover, it was quickly being upgraded for band use - so they could quickly and easily offer a selection of songs on their website in a more attractive interface than myspace’s clunky UI.

But Muxtape’s existence was a waltz with illegality.  The act of storing songs on a server that are not owned by the server’s owner brought down MP3.com almost a decade ago, and this wasn’t too much different.  Limited a bit, but only in that just 12 songs could be uploaded at any time.

8tracks.com, a Muxtape competitor, claims their service is a bit more legal, at least under the DMCA, because they believe they are a webcaster, not… whatever Muxtape was.  I took it for a spin today, and was generally impressed.  It’s not as slick as Muxtape; the interface is pointlessly disjointed, with the main focus of the site (the mix) shoved off to the right for some reason.  Once you get past that, though, it’s fairly straightforward - upload your mp3s, reorder them as needed, and edit the title or author tag if it’s not recognized.  It even allows you to embed the mix (see below) which was one of the shortcomings of Muxtape, and add cover art (I’m too lazy right now).  You’re limited to just 8 tracks, in keeping with the site name, which can be kind of a drag.  But arbitrary limits have to be set somewhere, right?

In other news, Google released their new web browser, Chrome, today.  It’s got a lot of great features, including better memory management than Firefox, a privacy mode, and overall snappiness.  I’m still playing with it, and not sure that it will replace Firefox as my browser of choice (especially since it’s not available for Macs yet), but it’s definitely running lighter than Firefox ever has.  Check out this webcomic for more details.

Now for the mix:

Listing:

1. The Real Tuesday Weld - It’s a Wonderful Li(f)e: What a terribly pretentious name for a great song.
2. The Week That Was - The Airport Line:Sounds like Village Green Preservation Society era Kinks.
3. Devotchka - Comrade Z :I’m really digging this Eastern European sound.
4. The Race - Feathers
5. Kyle Andrews - Tennessee Torture Dream:Andrews wishes he was old school Pete Yorn. We can forgive him for this, but only because new Pete Yorn is so terrible.
6. Takka Takka - Silence:Check out the video.
7. Good Old War - I’m Not For You:My friend Mike found this band, and he’s almost always right when he points me to his discoveries.
8. Billie the Vision and the Dancers - Lily from the Middleway Street:A strange Swedish collective, all of their albums are available for free on their website. This is from the newest one, I Used to Wander These Streets.

High school Honors English often seemed at times like an endless stream of pointless, difficult, and hated books (ugh, Wuthering Heights) interspersed with a few that glowed with genius, originality and talent.  Those are the ones that stick with you: Gatsby’s empty opulence informs your perception of the rich you encounter everyday; the swinging lightbulb in Wright’s Native Son reminds you of the beacon of hope you have to find in the darkest moments.

But no text stimulated me quite as much as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.  Sinclair’s description of the everyday horrors of the meat processing plant, and the efforts to unionize them, sparked the first inklings of political awareness - the first concrete idea that people can be exploited and abused.  I can’t even recall much of the second half of the book except that the main character was adrift, trying to deal with the station of his life.

I bring this up because today is Labor Day, and like Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day, we as a society have forgotten the reason we celebrate it.  Instead of merely a day of barbeques, beaches, and baseball, and lamentations about the crisis of having to return to work the following day, those are supposed to be a means of actively celebrating the value of the American workforce, and the sacrifices that generations before us made in order to protect an honest day’s work.  It’s a time to recognize the power of people-powered movements - to exploit an already overused phrase - to solicit change.

The strikes and beatings of the late 19th and early 20th century taught people that they didn’t have to be exploited; that, working together they could change the system.  This, of course, culminated in events like the protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where protestors and police went to war with each other.  Now, though, mass grassroots political events seem to barely elicit notice; only in something like a speech given to 75,000 people can we see glimmers of something similar - though of course it’s directed from the top-down.  And just a week later, as police raid the homes of protesters and arrest journalists on the streets of St. Paul surrounding the Republican convention, scant attention is paid in the media as a whole - just as their counterparts were ignored last week in Denver (note: I’m not endorsing any of them or their actions, just noting the lack of oxygen in stories about them).

So protests do almost nothing anymore, but they once did; and people bled and died to force better working conditions, shorter work weeks, and health and safety protections.  That we live in a country where that could ever happen is reason enough to celebrate.

The Jungle opens with a traditional wedding - a night of dancing, of a community celebrating.  The air carries hope and optimism, the sound of chattering fiddles and the warm aroma of ovens of food.  It’s a truly ordinary event, replicated countless times any given weekend, but for the people involved, it’s momentous, connecting their future with the storied past of their families.

DeVotchKa evokes much of this spirit, bridging the past and the future with the exuberance of a classic wedding band.  Their live shows, according to their bio, can feature sousaphone, accordion, piano, violin, bouzouki, trumpets, and theremin in addition to the standard rock instruments.  The drummer was raised by Lithuanian polka musicians; the violinist is classically trained.  Their most recent album, A Mad and Faithful Telling, which was released earlier this year, dips its toe into several classical styles.

The song below, Transliterator, is available for free on rcrdlbl.com.

Woo, it’s been a while.   The past few weeks have been fairly stressful and busy for a variety of reasons.  Most notably, though, the past week has found me fighting my dsl at every turn.  Pages would load halfway and stop, or they wouldn’t load at all (”What do you mean you can’t find the server google.com?!?!?!).  I finally beat it last night by switching from Verizon’s DNS servers to OpenDNS.  That minor change was like switching from a 14.4 modem to regular DSL.  It was such a relief that I watched a series of Kermit and Elliott Smith videos on Youtube before passing out, neglecting the various other tasks I’d been planning the past week.

After the tumult of that kind of night, there’s nothing more refreshing than some of the chamber pop of Bill Ricchini.  I remember purchasing this cd out of a used bin on a lark, because a little bell went off in my head that I’d read about it somewhere.  Usually, I can’t tell the difference between the warning bell and the excitement one, but this time I lucked out.  Ricchini’s songs are finely polished pop gems in the vein of Dear Catastrophe Waitress era Belle & Sebastian.  It’s a great, uplifting start to a day of traffic, powerpoint, and excel.  Yay!
Bill Ricchini - When the Morning Comes

(Image used under Creative Commons from Flickr user ydnar)

For Black Kids‘ new album Partie Traumatic.  The album ended up with a whopping 3.3 / 10 rating.  Compare that to the 8.4 / 10 rating the band’s debut EP, Wizard of Ahhhs, received last October.  In so doing, they helped propel the Black Kids to fame, building the buzz that contributed to their major label record contract and review.  In fact, Spinner calls them “blog favorites.”  So, in essence, Pitchfork seems to be apologizing for their part in the band’s catapult to fame.

What went wrong?  Wizard of Ahhhs, while not perfect, was definitely refreshing in its spontaneity.  In fact, the lead single, “I’m not going to teach your boyfriend how to dance with you” was so instantly catchy that one listen was all it needed to get caught inside your head, beating around your ears like a songbird suddenly trapped in a cage.  Sure, the rest of the EP didn’t quite live up to that song, but even so, “Dance with you” showed such promise that the other songs seemed like just practice runs.

I’m currently reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which my girlfriend stole from my roommate and which I summarily stole from her.  In one memorable scene, the Marquis de Carabas happens upon a street performer whose tip jar shows little but its glass bottom.  In exchange for a favor, the Marquis plays for him a few bars of an irresistable tune, one which will guarantee him the attention of passersby.  But he warns the performer to use the melody sparingly.  Of course, he doesn’t listen, and when the Marquis passes again later, people are clawing the performer like animals in an attempt to hear more of the song.

Black Kids had that kind of a tune in “Dance with you,” and Pitchfork, the much-aligned but still trendsetting mob leader, attacked them with effusive praise in order to hear more.  But often those kinds of tunes are just mere luck, a flash of genius in the dull light of mediocrity (see the plethora of one hit wonders in pop music).  And, to their credit, Pitchfork called it right on Partie Traumatic: it’s simply garbage.  Even the exciting edge of “Dance with you” has been rounded over by the cheap gloss of the record’s overproduction, and other songs, and cuts like “I Wanna be your Limousine” are simply unlistenable Banarama-era New Wave garbage (and I like synths!).

But some are upset by Pitchfork’s review nonetheless, claiming that, as arbitrers of the band’s original fortune, they owe more (or, at least, shouldn’t be lazy).  While it is a bit remininiscent of a non-closure breakup, I think their review is just fine simply because it is as much a dig at themselves as at the band.  It is (in part) Pitchfork’s fault that the band received so much attention, and Pitchfork’s fault that they wouldn’t shut up about the band.  It’s a result of the search for the next big thing, for the sacred musical bliss that will stoke the endorphin coals again and again.  Hype is fun for us, but nothing but pressure for the musicians.  Some can take it smoothly in stride, but others are too young, too inexperienced, or simply too mundane. But in the end, it’s just empty excitement, with little to back it but noise.  Like Pitchfork’s review.

Black Kids may have a bright future, and from the reviews of the more mainstream press (77 on Metacritic), they’ll do fine with this album.  And maybe then they’ll get a chance to look back and learn from their mistakes, figuring out for themselves what they did wrong and come roaring back in an album or two. But it will be time spent out of the spotlight, where they can fumble around for their own answers.

So the review can be seen as much as an apology to the Black Kids as it is to the blogmedia and the indie kids.  Unfortunately, it won’t change anything: a week, or a month from now they’ll latch on to some other band that’s shown a glimmer of promise, and start promoting them relentlessly with hyperbolic claims of greatness.  Ah well.

More edible than their namesake, at least.  Denver-based Hearts of Palm was apparently once known as Nathan and Stephen, but then they added a few members… and then a few more… and now there’s something like 10 or 12 people in the band. Seriously, the members keep going on and on into the background, 3 or 4 rows of musicians looking giddy, or perplexed, or sleepy.

Luckily, they unify the mood for their music, producing a bouncy, energy-filled blast that doesn’t relent throughout their 4-song EP (available for free on their website). It’s an interesting song; although a bit repetitive (in a sing-along way), it jumps around lamenting empty houses and people who never had a chance to make it. Alas, even the most exciting of our songs can’t escape the doldrums of our times.

Hearts of Palm - No Water

Fortune is reporting that eMusic is adding social networking features to its site next week:

Let’s say you are a fan of Arcade Fire. You can already read quite a bit about the critically-acclaimed Canadian cult band on its eMusic album pages. Now eMusic will add a wealth of content from the Web 2.0 universe: the band’s Wikipedia entry, pictures from Flickr, and videos of Arcade Fire concerts from YouTube. None of this is available on iTunes or the Amazon digital music store.

eMusic will also allow members to share these pages with friends on popular social media sites like Facebook, Digg, Del.icio.us and Twitter. “These are the things that we know our customers are already doing with the music they love,” says eMusic CEO David Pakman.

Great!  Music lovers can discover new music via serendipity, which can lead to success, but more often results in you just missing stuff.  Social networking tools, where you can discover who you like based on what people with shared interests like, can be really beneficial if implemented correctly.

On a different note, I hope they don’t become like IMeem, despite what the article claims:

points out that iMeem, which describes itself as a social networking site with a heavy music component, is already doing some of the things eMusic is putting into place.

iMeem is a sprawling, poorly implemented promise that fell flat.  This may, in part, have been a result of the major label buy-in, which (excuse my elitism) resulted in mainstream music rocketing to prominence.  I love that eMusic’s charts are, for the most part, filled with bands I like or who are trying to make it.  It makes guided serendipity much easier.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user Brooklyn Vegan)

The big music story this week, at least in Indie Rock circles, is the new Hold Steady album.  Released as a digital download a few weeks ago to counteract a leak, it was finally spun out to stores on CD this week with 3 bonus tracks (more on that later).  And as with any rock stars with a larger than life sound, they’ve received plenty of attention.  The new album was given attention by 27 reviewers according to Metacritic, putting them in the same league as Beck, who warranted 26 reviews with his latest, Modern Guilt.

And those reviews were generally gyrating with praise (as one would guess from the 87 score on Metacritic).  My favorite is this ridiculousness:

They turn critics into gibbering wrecks unable to write proper reviews and leave us forced to just string together our favourite lyrics like a damn teenage girl scribbles Tokio Hotel choruses onto her bed headboard.

But I don’t think I’m ready to re-carve Craig Finn’s likeness into my arm just yet.  A Hold Steady album is like a good character novel turned into a mediocre movie: the movie simply cannot, with its barely sustained glances, offer the character development and insight of the source text.  However, the movie can still be fun to watch, grabbing the viewer’s emotions and hurtling them off cliffs as it pleases.  This can prompt a deeper exploration: a rewatch, perhaps, or a dive into the book itself.

So right now I’m still at the movie stage of Stay Positive.  It’s just ra-ra shout out loud from behind a beer fun, but I haven’t yet discovered the layers buried underneath the requisite Springsteenian bombast.  This morning, on the way to work, I had time to slowly open the novel, and I can see the characters start to develop.  Finn’s lyrics, half-spoken, half-sung, started to tumble out of the song to dance to the music, nodding to the beat.  Soon we’ll sit down and have a conversation, the lyrics and I, and I’ll see that they’re slightly off-rhythm shuffles may be a bit awkward, and lacking shine.  They’ll make up for it in color, though, and I’ll find a new Holly or Charlemagne, an old friend I didn’t remember who seems, at times, like a composite of all the downtrodden I’ve ever encountered.

The process is almost as enjoyable as the result.

Incidentally, the only drawback of the album is that the three bonus tracks were all tossed together on a single track.  So now I have to find some mp3 editing software and split them up.  Annoying.

Stay Positive can be streamed for free at Spinner for the rest of the week.

Time Magazine is currently running a series of articles on the meaning of patriotism to different peoples and perspectives, including John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s view. The most intriguing, though is Peter Beinart’s essay on patriotism, which usefully dichotimizes the Liberal / Conservative split on the question. This is, of course, an issue when 27% of the nation doesn’t believe that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president is patriotic.

Conservatives, according to the article, see patriotism in terms of unquestioned loyalty and fealty to the values of the Fathers. It is an idyllic interpretation of the past, and a hope that the values of that world are not thrown out with the dishwater (and last year’s gadgets). It sees America as strong, with that strength best expressed in the liquid power of the military. Any questioning of these values, or of their strength, is little more than a personal affront indicative of a subversive. Moreover, the values are mixed in with cultural customs and traditions (i.e. not diversity or new traditions).

Liberal patriotism, on the other hand, focuses as much on the future as conservatives focus on the past. Liberals have an idealistic view of what they want the country to be, and it’s generally grounded in a belief that we can do better. It is formed on a rejection of the worst parts of the past, as well as a troubling glance around the present. So they’re constantly trying to change things; to create a utopia based on the ideals of democracy, freedom and equality.

It’s no wonder that a conflict results. Liberals are seeking a better world based on problems they find in this one, particularly in the errors and horrors of civil rights in from the past that still haunt us. In the view of the conservative, liberals are looking for the faults in the past and explicitly rejecting the nation’s storied virtues. When they wave the flag, or wear the lapel pin, it’s a natural display of their kinship with what they represent. Liberals have difficulty understanding this celebration.

As much as they despise collectivism, conservatives feel like they are an intrinsic part of the nation, and any attack on its character, as it has traditionally been represented, is a direct attack on them, their parents, and everything they stand for. In many cases, it’s nationalism masquerading as patriotism. Liberals think that their ancestors had some great ideas, but that they need constant refinement and revisiting to retain relevance. But liberals often are too caught up in their historical psycho-analysis to recognize the virtuous institutions that can be built with a pinch of patriotism, caught up as they often are in their revulsion at its display. Obviously, all these are stereotypes; very few people fall succinctly into one category.

It’s difficult for me to write fairly about both sides, because I vaguely fall on one side rather than the other. Yes, I’m a coastal liberal; in fact, I’m currently floating above the clouds over some flyover state (the map in the seat back in front of me says I’m somewhere on the Kansas/Oklahoma border) en route from coast to coast. Yes, I could be viewed as an elitist without the truth objecting too much to any unnatural elongation. I like music and movies and books that offer more than the vacancy of the resulting stare. I have a master’s degree. And I think my writing’s better than it probably is.
But that doesn’t make me any less patriotic. My pride in my country was actually forged outside of it; seeing the contrast between our freedom and the conditions our fellow human beings live with around the world made me homesick. That homesickness eventually developed into pride – of who I was, where I came from, and the role I could play to sustain it. (Of course, moving to the East Coast developed my sense of superiority about the West Coast, and California in particular.) It allowed me to see past the contradictions between our values and reality and instead celebrate our success in trying to resolve them.

So I thought that the best way for me to show my patriotism, besides eating lots of chili at a down home chili cookoff, was to make a mix of songs I find patriotic and inspiring, or that I would play for Lady Liberty. Many show the difficulties that patriotism cultivates; the layers of complexity that go into a liberal’s pride in the nation. And most are, of course, not at all about love of country, but about some kind of ideal. As a whole, it’s a tour through the development of this liberal’s national pride.

Delgados – The Light Before We Land
In the opener to their 2002 Hate album, Delgados capture the hopefulness of the new beginning. Analogous to the hopefulness of a few farmers and merchants writing daring documents, singer Emma Pollock is troubled by the present, but optimistic and hopeful for the future.

Desaparecidos – The Happiest Place on Earth
I want to be proud. I want to see all the good in our system. But it’s difficult to see past the failing schools, the needless wars, the environmental decline; the total vapidity of the system. If the last song was about hopefulness, this is the lover scorned.

Sonic Youth – Kill Yr. Idols
One day, you realize that even the people that seem to be saying and doing the right things are actually just human, awash with fallibility and humanity’s degenerate nature. I’m not sure when this first happened for me; probably about the time of Monica and Bill’s tryst. In reality, though, this keeps happening; we keep creating prophets out of our leaders, and abandoning them and their beliefs when we find their failings.

Violent Femmes – America Is
And then you’re just upset. The ‘throw the bums out’ mentality extends throughout the system. No one knows the facts, but they’re walking around like they do, repeating the party line until they’re blue in the face. And the people are eventually battered down into belief.

The Cure – Killing an Arab
Finally, you’re the protagonist in Camus’ The Stranger (this song is based on a famous scene in the book wherein the main character murders an Arab on the beach in an attempt to feel something), wallowing in the philosophical mud of nihilism. You’ve been broken down completely; all that’s left is to rebuild.

They Might Be Giants – The Statue Got Me High
Sometimes it takes a gravitous figure to rekindle your fascination with and acceptance of the beauty in the ideals of freedom and equality that the nation was founded upon. For me, that figure was Thomas Jefferson. Just how much I accepted him for his ideas instead of his actions showed my maturity; that I had grown beyond the idolization of thinkers and developed an ability to separate man from idea.

R.E.M. – So. Central Rain
The defining characteristic of this song is the chorus, which features Michael Stipe crooning “I’m Sorry” repeatedly. And, really, the first development of liberal patriotism, of the idea that we can do better, is that itch known as liberal guilt. Guilt over slavery, inequality, environmental degradation. It is only from guilt that we can realize a coherent vision of the future; from this we can map the route America needs to take. That America has the strength to take.

The Hold Steady – How A Resurrection Really Feels
Born again patriotism is rough. Sometimes you can go too far, but then you’ve you find yourself in a diner late at night pretending that the things Dennis Miller says are a) funny, b) politically practical, and c) not based on BS. It’s a wrenching experience, because the veracity of your beliefs is continuously under question – especially if you can still criticize, and want to move things forward. It’s even worse when you don’t wear the flag on your sleeve; when your bloody shirt is waving out of fear of the worst rather than a provocation.

The Veils – House Where We All Live
It’s a gorgeous place, this myth that we’ve created. Reality is a pale and shadowed reflection, but the form is still there. It’s strengthened by our diversity and the different roles we all play. Each of our dissents builds upon the foundation, regarding the cement of its structure with each inspection. And if you just step back for a moment, you’ll see all the holes, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.

Radiohead – Everything In Its Right Place
But it’s also fragile. And chaotic. And ready to spin out of control.

The Weakerthans – Pamphleteer
How can we keep it safe? How can freedom survive all the iniquities in the system, all the myriad holes in the foundation? Someone’s going to have to defend it when it needs defending, and show everyone its virtues. It can still be criticized, but constructively.
I’ll be a pamphleteer for America.

Elliott Smith – Independence Day
Smith is singing about independence from abuse, but the song works despite this – perhaps because it lacks the jingoistic failings of Toby Keith.