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.

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