Astronautalis and the Authentic Whiteness

Photo by the incomparable Annie Ray.

Every mile I drive, further down this road,

Tears a little more off my bones

And you could never guess, you could never guess

You could never guess where I come from, no

--Astronautalis, Thomas Jefferson

It's redundant to make the argument music "x" is not color "y", but beneath this cursory observation is a lot of difficult to unlearn expectation. I mean...Rap grew up in our collective view. From the music's humble street corner youth to today's cash soaked mega-genre, we've learned the sound with black men at the vanguard. Historically speaking, Rap is one of the few commercial genres with deep African American root that hasn't been stripped of its blackness and sold back to white audiences with white faces. Most telling of all? I've never heard anyone referred to as a "black rapper", while Riff Raff, The Beastie Boys, Slug, Aesop Rock, Eminem, and Astronautalis have all been described as "white rappers".

A huge part of Rap's identity--and most any genre--is based on connotation and ritual. We grow attached to what first moves us. We mimicking the behaviors gleaned from songs and music videos. We sublimate these ideas into our persona. After awhile, the most marketable conventions emerge, and a genre begins to cannibalize itself. It's easier to play to our expectations then dare to upset the apple cart. As much as this does to diminish the sincerity of the sound, it does even more to cement our idea of what rap "is" and "should be". Rap has more facets than you can dream up stupid sub-genre names, but even indie rap and intellectual hip-hop suffer genre-fication (Oh, you're weird and you rap in a surreal, non sequitur style? Whoever heard of such a thing...). This burden is then passed on to anyone who dares to filter a familiar genre through a lens formed outside these expected tropes.

This falls twofold to white rappers: travel the well worn paths of the music whose influence lead you to this moment--don't be derivative--don't be a novelty--but be sure and put enough ice'n'hoes on so we can sell it to the kiddos. To that end, part of disservice white rappers have done themselves is too often resting on Rap's most trite conventions. I have no doubt Paul Wall grew up in the struggle, but he does little to expose his experience in a new light. At one point, the Beastie Boys bought in to a lot of macho posturing. Eminem kowtowed to an unproductive culture of ultra-violence. Even the more high minded MCs regularly fall back on political discourse, but politics exist at arms length--a broad stroke version of our discontent. This is where I feel Astronautalis has done so much to throw his shoulder into the genre's entrenched walls. He raps about, you know...stuff.

For those who don't know, Astronautalis is a thing that exists. Astronautalis is a musician. He was born in Jacksonville, relocated to Minneapolis (the most sneaky cool town in America), and makes the rap-talk music. Well, he makes music music, but he boasts an undeniable gift for rhymes. He is not the first white rapper, nor is he the standard bearer for the rap game's pigmented anomalies, but Astronautalis is more important than that, he's Astronautalis.

He raps about his stuff. It's not just an aversion to the pitfalls of point-at-the-camera-count-my-stacks-call-a-bitch-a-bitch-then-twist-one-up content, it's the greater sense that this is not the story he's made to tell. A page torn from a history book. Light and fog draped across an ethereal grove of trees. A lost photograph of something so ugly, it stunk with beauty. The way her hair fell just so (which, seriously, some chick must've ruined this cat. That, or he runs through creamy skinned hipsters like I do their unrequited affections). This is the world tattooed to his fingers and then wrapped around a mic. It feels like the truth, but at the very least, it's a factual account of a world where there is no incentive to lie to yourself.

As simple as it seems to convey, art is a vacuum where truth dies infinite, horrific deaths. It's hard to be honest. It's frightening to lay yourself naked for the world to see. It's a complicated journey to know one's self, and even more difficult to articulate this experience through an artistic medium. But with this weight on your back, and a determination to distill it into corporeal form, honesty becomes a phenomenon bigger than genre. This is not a trait limited to color, or ethnic identity, but with enough perspective on life's absurdities and ebullience alike, anyone's feet can hit the ground.

Astronautalis embodies this, and what I've tried to clutch at from word one: music is indifferent, but truth only knows its own master. Bix Beiderbecke new it then, and EL-P knows it now. Twelve bar blues can't know the color of your skin, jazz chord progressions are incapable of prejudice, fat beats hold all men alike, but their power is not unlocked through technical excellence alone. Something sincere is meant to filter through their porous strains. When an artist has the audacity to combine the two, a powerful catalyst is born. Astronautalis has not redefined the genre, he has just been bold enough to squeeze the scope of his authentic experience into the craft.

Astronautalis emerged from the lab with the shade of his world cupped in his hands. Drums spill out in columns of black clouds. Graveled intonations echo around Sisyphus. The lilt of electric piano fills battle worn muskets. Love like empty whiskey glasses stained with lipstick weaves through delicate washes of feedback. A flesh and blood breadcrumb curls through topography of howling refrains. Collect the raw bits. Arrange them in a way that makes sense. Delineate your memories as you trace the lines of his own, and something larger then the creation is revealed: the form of the realness. A sentient truth whose gravity holds the universe together. It's not the whole truth, or perfect truth, but flensed of race, genre, back track, and language, it is his truth, and it's potent enough to resonate in even the most anemic human core.

...as Fuck

Of all the turns of phrase the English language lends itself to, the ones where adjectives are modified with profanity represent our heights. The leggy brunette with her stupid tattoos who is, "hot as balls." The tasty pork buns from the one place that are, "tasty as shit." The 'unmixed' demo of your boss's band that "literally sounds like ass...like I rubbed my asshole on a bunch of guitars and microphones." There is a certain magic these humble adjectives entwined in lewd congress with curse words weave. Cuss words, in all of their base glory, are so adaptable. The right swear word with the right adjective, and the crumminess of shit--you know, feces--illuminates like a prism shot with a beam of white light.

I love swears. I can still remember the summer of '93 when my oldest brother rented  a copy of Reservoir Dogs. It was like the f-word had been snuck out of Olympus inside a giant fennel stalk, and delivered to me as a life saving gift. Oh, so much cussing that summer. There was no f'able stone left un-f'd. It was a dangerous tryst, but what began so hot heavy solidified into probably the third or fourth most meaningful relationship I have in my life.

The f-word, crown prince of bad words, can be custom fit into any part of speech. The nice hard "f" sound at the top can be meted out like a burning fuse. The "u", so guttural, echoes inside your chest as the heart of the word spills out into a world that can just go f itself. Completed with the "ck",  the word clips, like a gunshot, to punctuate the many moods of f-dom.

The f-word--of such lofty status in the swear word cannon--hardly needs someone to champion her merits. But after some intense introspection, I think the f-word (scientifically speaking) is the perfected catalyst in the "something as cuss word" formula.

At its core, fuck is one thing: sex. It's technically a subset, as there is a keen difference between "we had sex," and "I got my fuck on," but it remains the oldest and purest human act. And by pure, not "nice", but it's the centerpiece of our existence. It's the act, in the thick of coitus, which transcends niceties/barriers/gender/cultural identities humans have spent thousands of years erecting (heh...). Sex is pure humanity, and within this wide spectrum of all human-ness, the similes are damn near grunted out during the act itself.

I agree, "...as shit," "...as ass," "...as hell," can pinpoint specific moments with a finer accuracy, but the f-word is malleable beyond these other words limited practicality. Look, I'm a man of swampy grundle, but even mid-July, my balls might belie the hotness of our aforementioned brunette (really...stupidest tattoos you've ever seen). Shit is not tasty. I mean, poop may be your bag, but I'm hard pressed to believe it's a flavor thing as much as it is a joy of debasement thing. Sounding like ass works, but aren't toots really doing all the work? Ass cheeks do flutter, but internal chemistry and the embouchure of your winker have a lot to say in the matter. And so we're clear, this demo was terrible. Unlistenable.

So we're left with old man "...as fuck." So simple, so elegant, and so far reaching. Because if a person has had a slate of sexual experience worth its salt, the line between gettin' carnal and every other feeling you've ever had ever is gossamer thin.

Furious as...
Charming as...
Slippery as...
Hilarious as...
Early as...
Nasty as...
Hateful as...
(This one time, I had this employee, and she was the brattiest, most entitled, malingerer you've ever met. I swear, if I heard her mention her year abroad one more time, I was gonna call my girls cousins to come beat her up. Anyway, she got fired, and like a week later she sent me a text that read" Hey, wanna play 'boss and employee' later?" To which I responded "It'll give you a whole new definition of being held down by the man.")
Stinky as...
Weird as...
Pathetic as...
Humid as...
Yummy as...
Painful as...
(I used to sell shoes with this old hippie, and he told me this story about how he was smashing on some little thick girl back in the day. She's on top, right, and her undulations were so intense, he slipped out and she broke his dong on the down thrust. He had to get an inflatable penal implant. To this day, guy still has to get worked over like a pair of Reebok Pumps.)
Hungry as...
Obnoxious as...
Scary as...
Dumb as...
Sweaty as...
Noisy as...
Tired as...

The end, as...

@DadBoner

As many times as the phrase @DadBoner has come out of my mouth in the last six months, it's still no easy task to articulate what exactly old Cap'n Karl Welzein is, or does. I guess it's a "fake" Twitter feed helmed by an unknown writer guised as a man-child. His life is little more than derelict alcoholism, absentee fatherhood, and more radio rock from the past five decades than a man should be allowed to digest unless he owns at least one pair of Maui Jims. He lives in Grand Blanc, Michigan. His tastes are that of a sophisticate with a simple palate. He finds some way to be the worst employee--who can somehow teeter on the brink of staying employed--you've ever seen.

Karl is a master abbreviator--second only to "Jon" from Delocated (which, as an actual skill, lends itself to wide speculation Jon Glaser himself might be Dad Boner)--and has offered up tasty breves like "celebraish", "D'reets Locs", "BL 'Nums", and countless other syllabically managed nuggets. He's also rife with catch phrases. His signature "Really looking forward to the weekend, you guys," surfaces like a lighthouse on the craggy weekend shore every Thursday afternoon. When it comes to "flavors" or "power moves", bold is the only way the Cap'n knows how to live. And nothing signifies a Karl in full like, "I feel like I could drink a thousand beers right now, you guys." Through this idiot savant like command of the english, he's blossomed into a one man insight/quote generation oracle.

This gem--or what I call 'Monday through Thursday, and then Friday though Sunday'--is one of many aphorisms Karl dispenses like some new millennia, lush Mark Twain.

Karl has opinions on health...

...social issues...

... and the complexities of inter-sex relations.

It's funny. It's silly. Stripped of context, it's lowbrow humor for a generation of dudes devolved into bros, but all of this is the simple answer. Free of conjecture, all subjectivity removed, @DadBoner is genius, and dare I say...important.

This is a pure, and daring creative effort fully realized in every facet of the creation. There is a body of work here that has blossomed into the epic poem of the common man blasted into web space one tweet at a time. Twitter, as a medium, is stupid, but writers go where the venue lends itself to their creative intent. This writer is in the perpetual act of creation. A real time novel--delivered in bits of disjointed narrative, irrational self-aggrandizement, and crude sagacity-- about the self inflicted plight of the lowest common denominator American male.

Over time, the voice has taken on profound depth. The characters who populate this universe cast a shadow with almost no physical description. Even Peanut (RIP Peanut!) had his erotic fiction posted to Craigslist in a tone so very Peanut, it bordered on upsetting. Rich story arcs have risen and subsided, while other plot points grind on into perpetuity. Yes, you're not mistaken, this is a "fake" Twitter character, but Karl has more humanity than an AMC's worth of scripted dramas.

Everyone I know has a fake Twitter account. In this anonymous, yet overexposed, medium the person behind the keyboard has the license to fashion themselves in whatever way they see fit. If a friend was to follow you around for a week and use your feed to share their impressions of your existence, the shift in tone would be stark to say the least. To that end, the list of people I adore in real life whose social media persona needs to be swung on with impunity is insufferable innumerable. This is part of what makes @DadBoner so exceptional. The author uses Twitter to be the mouthpiece of the myth Karl has fashioned around his existence, while the subtext is dense with a far more tragic reality.

Everything Karl touches turns to shit. He has destroyed his marriage. He's alienated almost everyone around him. The homeless man, Peanut, he took off the street in a misguided attempt to help him died in his Sebring. He's been kicked out of every chain restaurant in the Grand Blanc area. The only coworker who takes an interest in him as a person, he has demonized as Nosey Lady. Karl is like Midas, but instead of gold, it's a wake of destruction and disaster.

Folded in the spaces between the words, the six magrs and trunk liquor, and the slurred, "Not supposed to drink," uttered far too late is a one act tragedy.  A recovering alcoholic collapsed under the weight of Karl's self delusion. A fantasy with gravity so dense, it crushes this man's pity, his abhorrence, and leaves only his exposed frailties to be sucked into the @DadBoner vortex.  Meanwhile, Karl can only see a man he has done a favor. Each drink an affirmation of friendship. The mention of his near termination interpreted as some hint he's about to be fast tracked up the corporate ladder. The grand illusion where he is both illusionist and audience rolled into one gluttonous drunk who roots for the Detroit Tigers. Everyone else is merely and incidental passerby expected to marvel in all that is Karl.

But all this overwrought analysis just ruins the joke. At this moment, I'm the guy who has spelled out the obvious punchline, and trying to shoehorn Karl into all of this psuedo-intellectual ass-hattery would reduce me to a mere corncob in the Cap'n's eyes. Despite, or perhaps in spite of the nuanced subtext, the aptly formed universe (I mean...just look at the list of people he follows on Twitter, it's brilliant), the easy laughs I get from Karl's transmissions from the satellite booze, @DadBoner represents the highest form of art. Karl is my mirror.

Karl is happy. He's a drunk, and a malingerer, and a morass of selfishness, but goddman if he isn't happy. He rides the highs of being ready for the weekend and the lows of being really steamed, you guys, but so is the human condition. Karl is very mortal, but overall, Karl is pleased with his place in the world. Where this project could be seen as an attempt to ridicule someone who thinks it makes sense to refer to Bud Light Platinum as BL'Nums, or a person who really thinks Guy Fieri is the best chef in America, it's as much a psalm to the uncluttered existence. There is a Chauncey Gardner like truth and optimism to Karl. I admire his cock-eyed patriotism for this idyllic USA that is all Seger and cold ones. I wish I could solve the worst of my problems by listening to Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" on repeat. I long for a day when I fit in my skin as comfortably as Karl fits in his XXL frame. Perhaps he is unconscious behind his liquor colored glasses, but sometimes the struggle for self-awareness nets more reasons to distrust yourself than the other way around. It's all solipsism, but the Karl's of the world seem to squeeze more irrational joy out of living than the set who writes self-effacing missives that accomplish little more than worrying their sister very much.

Karl's is not the only answer, or necessarily the correct one, but it is a meditation on life as a state of mind. The journey of drinking 1000 beers begins with the first cold one, but if anything, Karl has impressed upon me it's not the 1000th beer, it's the 999 before it that make the journey worth taking.

This Month in Token Gestures: A Tribute to Internet Tributes

I imagine by now you have seen "make Kony famous" or "Kony 2012" or some such derivation floating around whatever Internet feed you call your own. It's a campaign started by someone? the Invisible Children charity to shed light on Joseph Kony, who is, undoubtedly, an authentic piece of shit. The guy is a Ugandan Warlord infamous for abductions, murders, conscripting child soldiers--the full compliment of the nouveau chic African heavy. Yeah, I agree, this man, and this sort of thing, is terrible, and despite the potential ...ahem... inconsistencies in Invisible Children's facts/use of funds/point-of-view, my lingering questions have a lot more to do with the viralization of our noblest endeavors than this newly minted, Internet ready campaign.

I hadn't heard of Kony yesterday, but as of today, I can't even tally the number of shares, retweets, @, and via's which have sashayed across my eye-line. Recently it was the Susan G Komen fracas. A few weeks earlier it was SOPA and PIPA. A few weeks before that, it was Occupy this or that. All along, with every scroll, every "open in new tab", every cutting graphic, every online petition bellowed through the Internet megaphone, there was one empty, dull question on loop in my brain, "what is this accomplishing?"

Knowledge is power, and nothing quit turns up the pressure on a cause or individual quite like a meme bounced from every media outpost. But somewhere, this incessant memeing has been confused for action. Posting a video on your Facebook page is a token gesture. Tagging yourself in a photo someone took on their iPhone the afternoon you spent at you local occupy protest holding a "JOIN US" sign is an act devoid of any real meaning. These things are so much more using a cause as a magnifying glass on yourself, than an examination of the cause itself. After the video is posted, what do you do then? What is your contribution or commitment? What real devotion does this act of showing take, and the more pertinent question, how do you measure the impact of your minimal effort? In likes, or shares, or comments? A rather narrow life for such a good deed.

In Ken Kesey's "Tools from My Chest," originally published in "Last supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog," he makes a brief reference to young protesters throwing bricks through the front window of the Berkeley Bank of America as "kids playing with barbie dolls." I read this when occupy was at fever pitch, and the few words hummed in my brain like a tuning fork. In a child's imagination, these play things can be imbued with such narrative and sincere feeling, the self indulgence tied up in the act becomes lost on the participant. Today, at the rate information travels, these barbie dolls are picked up and put down at a feverish rate in a very public way. This is, to me, one of the most damning downsides of these rapidly spread and as quickly forgotten viral causes and beliefs. Each creation so meaningful, yet each creation so impotent, each proceeding bandwagon effort is in danger of being cheaper and cheaper to the people in your Internet periphery your are trying to inform in the first place. Since we're trading in cliches today, there is the well tread old saying, "If you don't stand for anything, you'll fall for everything," to which I would posit "But if you stand for everything, do you really stand for anything?"

Another consideration is how selective these outbursts can be, and the real people left behind in their wake. A few months ago there was a horrible crime committed in the community I live in. A woman's life was taken from her by a predator, and the outpouring was tremendous. So many in my immediacy took this tragedy and refashioned it as their pet cause. Instantaneously, this tragedy was taken away from the people it belonged to--her, her actual family and her friends--and transformed into a trend. Stickers and t-shirts were made, benefits were put on, strangers went and visited a stranger's graffiti mural in her honor. The suspect's poorly sketched picture was run up the flag pole. In the maelstrom, the actual human being was lost. Everyone else's "me" and "I" took her place. It all became so inverted, so self involved, it was as though this human life was reduced to the ephemera generated in the flashpoint as opposed to the spark of life it was intended to celebrate.

Less than a week after this woman's death, an older woman, a sex worker, was pulled out of a dumpster, her remains in a suitcase. No one knew her name. She got no trend on Twitter. She went overlooked. Perhaps her life choices made her seem closer to that demise, but it was still a human life thrown away in senseless and brutal sex crime. But of all the people vested in this other tragedy, all of the hammered out posts about "No more violence against women," this person was so far beneath the view of these thinking and feeling masses, so unworthy of concern, she was just another dead prostitute.

The viralization of SOPA and PIPA got those in congress to back off, and the pat-on-the-backing ensued. NDAA sneaks through unnoticed, and there was hardly a sigh of indifference. Susan G Komen rethinks its cuts in planned parenthood funding, and women's health care gets obliterated on the state level. Joseph Kony gets his slick looking 30 minute film, and the masses weep and wail and gnash their teeth, yet the people of Syria are falling in scores in a fight with their own government without as much as a half-assed demotivational poster. It's not that one issue is more or less important than the other, it's that the ideas become codified. The big picture becomes about who has the best interface and most intriguing hashtag. What's important about these issues shifts out of the realm of cause for concern, and slides into the morass of media curb appeal. It becomes a battle of who can control the story, the enemy of meaningful change, and just becomes more marketing.

I understand it's impossible to hold out for a movement or belief that is free of flaws and hypocrisies. There is no way to follow every dollar of every charitable donation. One would break their brain if they tried to keep abreast of every injustice. All altruism is, in part, an act of selfishness, but if these acts ceased, the void left would cripple an already cruel world. Instead, mine is more of a hopeful nod to reflection. I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a concerned person. I can admit it, and my indifferences are not to be commended, but I can acknowledge the smallness of my contribution. I don't need this act of showing to take place for an actual commitment to a cause or belief. Instead, I would implore people who believe they care to think of the minute power of a click versus the dividends of an act. Think about the larger issue of which an immediacy might be a mere symptom. To reassess the magnitude of a real--hands in the dirt, I dug a fucking well in Africa, I informed and empowered myself--devotion to the things which make you feel anything.

The Internet has become a beat up Chevy truck where everyone can slap the most vacuous, digestible, bumper sticker ready version of whatever they believe--that week anyway--and cruise down the information super highway a visible and concerned citizen. This is a vacuum where ideas are gutted of their value and transformed into parodies of themselves, and if you really believe in something, it deserves better. I understand some human being more principled than myself has every right to sneer at me and crow, "Oh, so I guess we should do nothing!"

But I would respond, free of cynicism, eyes set on theirs, "No. You should actually do something."

Near Perfect Albums: Spiderland -- Slint

Note: I would put 'editors note', but this is clearly a one man outfit. And as many grammatical and syntactic errors make it to the show room floor, this person would clearly be the worst editor ever. All that said, "Near Perfect Albums" is an ongoing series I'll be doing. The only criteria is an album has to be at least ten years old. Music is my first, and only deepest love...plus, these write-ups make great filler. 

xoxo - S&D

Spiderland, Slint's 1991 masterpiece, is the quintessential--oft overlooked, frequently invoked, over praised for the wrong reasons, wrongly criticized for misguided reasons, thousand band launch pad--album.

Part of the trouble with this album's legacy is too many are dead set on listening to the record for what it's supposed to be as opposed to what it is. Over the years, so many well coiffed, black clad, music types--so desperate to give things a name--have piled terms like "post-rock" and "math rock" and "proto-space rock" and "shoe-gaze-core" on this album. These monikers, equal parts character assassination and obfuscation, plague the stand alone marvel Spiderland represents in rock and roll's rich genealogy. Also, these terms don't sound like anything anyone would want to listen to ever, which doesn't help. A band can't determine who springs up in their wake. Just as the decade of ritualized genre music which stands between the inception of this album and Slint's current acolytes is no fair condemnation of the work offered up in these five tracks.

What astounds, and concurrently confounds, me about this record: where did it come from? These are four kids from Louisville, Kentucky in the early 90's. Louisville is by no stretch a yokel town where talking music discs were some sort of witchery, but, you know...it's goddamn Kentucky. In the 90's! This is some pre-Internet shit. Even if they were underground music devotees, an era when that was an Odyssean task, it's still hard to compile the roster that could fuel an album like Spiderland.

Originality isn't really a thing, but this feels like a group of like-minded individuals who set out to forge a fiercely original moment. Influences always exist, but these are fully digested influences instead of the millstone so many other bands tote around their necks. And perhaps perceived originality is little more than influences so well understood, so absorbed, so deeply sublimated, they are anonymous.

Maybe they had Sonic Youth's "Evol", CAN's "Monster Movie", and Gang of Four's "Entertainment!" and twenty other albums I can't name all playing at the same time in their headphones while doing takes in the studio...

Or maybe, just maybe, they are four dudes from Kentucky who owned one transistor radio that only got a lousy AM signal, unaware of their secret Alien-God-King lineage. Alien-God-Kings sent to put the weird-bad-gross on us something real good.

As the story goes, the album was recorded in a live style over a furious four day stretch. Rumors abound about the nature of the session being so serious and intense, at least one member of the band had to be institutionalized for psychiatric care. Whether there was anything so traumatic as described in the mystery that helps prop up this album, there is something very sinister that lives beneath this record.

The cover of this album speaks so much to this content; nameless, stark, and submerged in black water. A churning, chaotic mass of fragile guitar parts, squalls of distorted fuzz, and spoken-screamed-sung lyrics. The tracks build with such deliberate contemplation and then blow apart in seismic gusts of cymbal crashes and dense crunch. The album, both in tone and structure, feels like some macabre world a child infuses in his simple playthings. A scene, grim and violent, built with tedious attention to detail. Well arranged action figures and wooden block built up only to be smashed apart by its own creator. An unpredictable vengeance rained down with fury. When the moment recedes, his creation underfoot, breathless, the child surveys the moment and begins to quietly rebuild.

The immediate dynamic of tension and release, or, in gross and oversimplified terms, loud-soft-loud-soft belies the thoughtful progression of this record. The album opens with delicate harmonics plucked from the ether like the first unshuttered frame of an over-saturated silent film. From there the album growls, jerks, weeps, snarls, stumbles, soars, and falters all the way to the final wash of feedback that floats you back out to the silent sea.

This is a beginning to end record. These songs out of context, ushered on deck by shuffle, or the singular track selected to woo a new listener, lose their potency. It's like bringing a friend a woman's severed leg, all exposed sinew and six inch pump, and being like, "this chick is crazy hot, am I right?" Not to say there is some meat-mouthed narrative clutched in this album's tendrils, but it is the clutching of the tendrils that matters.   

Spiderland is meant to posses you. It drops like ink into milk. This album is a phase. This album is boarded windows and locked doors. This album is an unshakable feeling of dread. The emotional gravity--the scope of so many dangerous feelings--distilled into 39 minutes and 30 seconds is a remarkable power, and this is why when needle hits groove, none of the ancillary shit matters. The lore, the stupid genre names, the bands who assumed the mantle without a hint of the vivacity or dirty ingenuity Slint did it with, none of it. Because what shines thorough, what transcends even the notes themselves, that thing which moves me every time: the these young men gave all of themselves to this beautiful and hideous thing. And it aches. 

Mean Black Cat Blues

Mean Black Cat Blues -- Charlie Patton, 1929

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, clawin' on my door.

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, clawin' on my door.

I'm going to Louisiana, where I won't hear it whine no more.

It's been persistent lately. Sometimes, it's the image of me in crumpled work clothes, sheets pulled up to my neck as darkness takes hold like a tipped ink well. Someone who loved me weeps into the other end of the phone, calls out to me, but I lay unmoved . Even with so little to give, no one has wept so for me before. They could have been on the other end of the line, or it could have been some mournful dirge carved into a phonographic cylinder one thousand years before. I'm certain it's mine, but it's for someone else. He can't tell the difference.

At other moments, it is happy clamor filling my lungs like noxious gas. The jubilation seems little more than a shoddy overcoat those around me, like cowards, use to rebuff the cruel and correct winds. What I'm sure I know, what little they seem to know, punches through my guts like white hot coals. To proud to succumb to the incessant pawing, I vomit this venom as some pointless diatribe. I pound my fists on the table and scream about other hollow things--'Best picture in 2004 was a goddamn joke!!'--as it's the only way I know to keep him outside the door. 

A friend, concerned, puts his arm around me and says, "You know I love you, man." And I growl, "That just makes me sad for you."

In recent months I've made a point to double what I save from each paycheck. When the figures look right, I've decided I'll roam the earth in solitude. Because the obvious answer is where he can't find me. 

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, all around my bed.

It's a mean black cat, Lordy, all around my bed.

I'm gonna get up some mornin', kill that black cat dead.

I wake, and a terrible coldness falls in my chest. 

The floor is cluttered. Art pulled from the walls. A shattered cocktail glass. An anonymous fast food bag emptied of its contents with rapacious gluttony. The earring kept, a tenuous link with some imagined happy memory, pulled out somewhere during the course of the night. Nearby, the half shut laptop accompanied by a pathetic soiled rag. Sheets rent from their notebook with "FUCK YOU" scrawled in manic script across the pages.

This is the week. No vices. Gym five times. I'm bigger than he is. I'm stronger than he is. It will never be this way again. Never. This is the week.  

It's a mean black, Lordy. Lord it's wearin' my clothes.

It's a mean black cat, Lordy. I mean it's wearin' my clothes.

Just you put him on my levee, let that black cat go.

I'll sit in the back of my mind and watch him. My grey hood edges my periphery and my black satin jacket shimmers in the thin glow of streetlights. He moves through the night, an extension of the darkness, impervious to whatever rolls around in his belly. He whispers antagonisms to those around. Slow poison to pit them against themselves leaked in vicious glances and cruel advice. He'll start a fire to argue someone down until they believe they were holding the matches all along. He belittles and demeans and twists words until they fit in innocents mouths they way he wants them to. Drunk on malevolence, claws sharp, the shadows swallow him whole.

But somewhere in an invisible alley, the rabble of shoves and punches shatter the night. Cause black cats always find other black cats, and all that badness has to be put somewhere.

Detatched, but ever present like human theatre watched through his eyes, other people are the best players. He feeds them whatever persona they've decided on as his true self. An innocent game, he plies them with spoonful on gentle spoonful until they are intoxicated with their own fibs. Once sated, he'll look them right in the face, dab their mouth clean, and chirp through a bible salesman's smile, "You know...99% of what you believe about a person you make up yourself."

In a small way his take could be boiled down to peer admiration or an undone zipper, but his only thirst is for the thing he can't give back.

But when I'm spit out on the New Jersey Turnpike, wide awake and steeped in the ripples of remorse, I want to cry out for understanding. Forgiveness. Absolution. Punishment. I want to yell, "I mean...it's wearing my clothes!"

I don't though. Because they won't believe me. Because I don't believe me.     

First time I met you, I said you was a crook.

First time I met you, said you was a crook.

You got a new way of lovin' where ain't in no book.

It's a far off memory. Soft focus edges and authentic patina accentuate the age of these 8 millimeter memories. Spring's air was still cool in my mouth. A pungent density of mesquite and wildflowers was infused in every gulp of oxygen. Red dirt and sand ground under my tiny feet as I contemplated the diamond chain link pattern stretched across the playground backstop's pipe frame. You could feel the sun on your skin, but it wasn't warm. 

The line of children led up to the batters box where a life time of athletic and genetic superiority was to be decided with one swing of the bat.

John Garcia was a boy I knew. I can recall at least one instance of playing wall ball on the side of his brick house, or refusing to look at his father's copies of "Easy Rider Magazine"...because I was a good boy. John had the brownest arms you've ever seen come out of a pink Ocean Pacific sleeveless tee. He sauntered in from no where, and it's likely because I was next to Derek, the conduit between us, he decided to cut right in front of me.

And it was an insult to my dignity I would not abide. 

I choked on my furious blood. A coal furnace ignited behind my cheeks. I would spend a lifetime collecting adjectives to hang a meaning or identity on this feeling, and they have all fallen short. My muscles ticked beneath my little boy arms. And as I felt my fingers tighten into my palm, the reel jumps, and the next frame, clumsily spliced in, reads: "SCENE MISSING".

A crimson rivulet trickled from John's nose. His eyes wide, fearful, he shrieked. I whipped around and disassociated myself from the wailing boy behind me. Made him feel so far away, it was as though he didn't exist at all.    

As the consequences fell in around me, I was certain this was the worst thing I'd ever done. I wanted to hate this thing in me. I needed to condemn this reaction as some transient, violent specter passed through me. I manufactured all the guilt I was meant to produce.

But no matter the outward display, no matter the reassuring internal dialogue, I looked down at my right hand and saw a new hideous and powerful thing. I could close my eyes and see the blood I drew with my hand from John's stupid, cutter face. It shone so red, as red as the Roman Legion's standard,  and a sensation expanded in my chest like vulture's wings: He would never do that again.

Next time I met you, you know I made a hit.

Next time I met you, you know I made a hit.

But you got a new way of lovin', where it just won't quit.

I nudge him off the porch with my foot. I smile at him while he sunbathes on the garbage cans by the back fence. I open the car door and see him, conjured from nowhere, gaze fixed on me, and I yell at him to go away. When he gets underfoot of the pizza delivery guy and almost sends him in a pile down the steps, I feel a sense of pride. When the front door yawns for too long, and he bolts inside, I grab him under his front legs and gently coo, "You know you can't come in here." When I unload groceries, and on return trip number three find him inside my trunk hidden amongst the handles of white plastic bags, I admire how much of each other we are. 

He disappears for weeks on end. Just when I feel a pang, part hope, part regret, that he might be gone forever, he peeks his little black head through the askew slats hung on the sliding glass door and winces his petulant little cat sounds. I feed him often enough for him to come around, but not so often that he thinks he belongs here. I'm not fool enough to think I control him. No one owns a cat. Yet I'm grown enough to understand he is more dangerous caged than set to roam free. 

So together we sit on the cold cement stoop. Curled up in my lap, I scratch behind the ears until his purr  reverberates in my bones. I tell him I'll have him neutered, or put to sleep, and he looks up at me for a moment, unmoved, with his big yellow eyes. Behind two heavy lids, he returns to his prone state of improbable blackness. 

Me and my mean black cat--that ugly, essential bastard--sit and watch the world go by.

The First Christmas and The Black Rider

Monochrome expanse stretched out in every direction. Horizons were imperceptible. Sky and earth fused together in muddy gradients of gainsboro, mortar, and shady lady. Save the occasional naked tree, or green sign designated to announce the presence of West Texas highway towns long enough for them to disappear behind you, winter hung about in its solemn grey cloak. 

One defiant yellow seam ran up the belly of the fragile scene as long haul trucks and anonymous sedans slid past each other on their appropriate side. Our car was white. A four door midsize whispering through the murk toward the place where our beds and clothes were, but home was a sentiment hollowed out over the last few, tumultuous months.

My sister, Mia, was the driver. A slight figure who to a passerby might seem little more than a permanent and a suede leather jacket operating a vehicle at 63.75 miles per hour. My brother Samuel was genetically predisposed to co-pilot, so I spared both of us the one-sided debate for front seat. Besides, I liked the the view of my soon-to-be-misspent youth from the back seat of cars. I was scoops of cookie dough packed in a magenta sweater, stone washed jeans, and all orthodonture from the neck up. Me and the back seat belonged together. And Sam looked so at home--his inky hair combed tight against his head, his obsidian eyes planted in his flush cherubic cheeks--staring down the miles of well rehearsed highway from shotgun. Master of his limited control panel, the volume on the stereo was adjusted just so, and the pigtail plug for the bag phone at his feet stayed out of the way, but the heater was his slave.  

Hot breath poured from the ugly, slotted mouth until the car brimmed with morbid heat. I choked as my puny lungs saturated with stale, scorched air. I longed to be of the cold natured set as my captain and her co-pilot, but instead, my belly was swollen with hundred ten degree blood. My only respite was the laminated porthole set next to my head. I pressed my exposed skin against the cold window. My forearms  quivered against the glass. My engorged ears drank the icy sweetness. I would kiss the frigid casement, because I was a young man who wanted to kiss. Greasy smudges marked where my forehead would roll back and forth until my skin had stolen the chill. Then, I would sit back as the wind fell away from the car's aerodynamic design until my fingertip cast a ghost of heat on to the glass.

No one had said anything for miles. It would be easy to implicate the Christmas left miles behind us. This "Brenda" set up to be some ready made mother, the tension filled rooms more than one person left with the entrails of tears strewn on their face, the stink of sublimated rage thick on the phone call with my mother, but these things were for the grown-ups table. These things were for show. The road simply swallows conversation after so many miles. Music, and road noise, and the heater's throaty belch aggregate into a tonal morass that's more asphyxia than silence.  

But  over the next rise, the highway held a terrible secret.

The final act of a tragedy sealed with a fatal kiss; a black motorcycle and the steel blue front end of a Buick locked in wanton embrace. A moment paralyzed in time. A white sedan crawled to a stop. An old couple staged on their marks. A black rider face down on the highway.

The asphalt was cold and bloodless, and we were the only ones who knew, the old couple and ourselves. The man in black didn't know anything. His arms were at perfect 90-degree angles, his legs crossed at the ankles, and his head laid tenderly to side. The ominous black clad reflection bent around the contours of the window as my pitiless eight-year-old face looked down on his remains laid on the blacktop cooling board. His head was shrouded in black tint, but I knew there was nothing in there. He was a prop. This was what had been left behind.  

Sam rolled down the window and the car inhaled a gelid breath...

"Oh my God! We have a phone!"

"Go! Go Away!" the old man yelled. He was perched over the black rider on hands and knees. One arm was outstretched toward us, palm open.  The old woman wore a white sweater flocked with glittered paint and plastic beads. It's stood out against the ashen winter day like an obscenity. She shielded her face with both hands. Our car limped past.

We sat motionless, rapt with stoned silence. My sister put her foot back on the gas pedal and somewhere around 30-45 MPH, she shuddered and loosed a heavy sob. Sam reached in to comfort her. Mia waved him off, shook herself free of the moment, and never broke stride back up to the speed limit.  

When we arrived home, the house was unlit. Inside, there was no Christmas tree and the porcelain manger scene had stayed boxed up in the attic. Those were the vestiges of the old regime culled from public display by our father. We didn't turn on any lights. We placed our modest luggage on the living room floor, fell into the couch, and turned on the television. The comfort of ritual, the warm flicker danced across our content faces.

After what was collectively deemed far too long, the other car arrived with a clamor of doors and muffled voices. The back door flew open. 

"Goddamnit. Mia, who put all those smudges on the back window of your car?" Dad asked one foot inside the door. Mia shrugged. Dad huffed and placed his hanging bag on the old blue recliner. Our family was home. 

Soon our house buzzed with the sort of activity seven people pump into a four bedroom single family dwelling. The din of children freed from a four hour car ride and the murmur of some terrible accident on the road bounced off the walls until my father's stentorian voice reconvened order.

"All right, everybody gather round."

Dad collected his horde of five children around the wooden table in the kitchen. We sat anxious and uncertain as Dad and Brenda disappeared into their bedroom. They returned with an oversized pink sack as stuffed with innuendo as it was holiday bounty. Brenda strapped a vague smile across her face. Dad stuck his hand in the bag and said, "Merry Christmas guys…Oh, and thank your stepmom. I wasn’t going to do presents this year."

He plucked the first unwrapped gift from the bag. He turned it toward him, looked at it befuddled, then displayed it to his children and said, "Okay...whose is this?"

The presents were issued one by one without a modicum of ceremony. Brenda, still just a vassal to my father and not yet a mother, stood on. Already the outsider, so anxious to please, a look of shame and disgust took her face as the paperless Christmas was doled out.

I didn't care at all. My gift--the piece of plastic pulled from it's cardboard packaging that would complete me--was in my covetous hands. It was a mechanized mouse set on two feet, part of a larger collection of toys.  He had a peg stuck out from his side used to wind him up. On a full turn, he would march and clomp his grey plastic jaw open and shut. He couldn't stay upright on the carpet, so I used his box as a flat plane. Even still, the weave in the carpet would tilt the surface too far this way or that, so I used the piano bench in the living room instead.

I would twist the peg at least a half-turn past the point it wouldn't go any further. I wound it six times, and on the seventh it broke.

So I wept. I cried horrible, dime-sized tears.