33 rebellions per minute
1999
Blur, 13
If Winifred Gallagher's book the Power Of Place ever becomes important, I suppose it will be, deservingly enough, for her opinions on architecture. Her opinions, based on extensive research and real-word trial, are devoted to the idea that a good home or office building isn't one that looks snazzy from the outside, but one which is pleasant and cheering to inhabit-- and all sorts of unexpected notions flow from this, for people are affected by physical cues in thousands of unconscious ways. The most surprising aspect of the book, on another hand, is probably her persuasive description of how an intelligent American could come to falsely believe s/he had been abducted and probed by aliens. All that said, though, if I were in charge of government policy (which I've long since noticed I'm not), the book's most immediate impact would be on how drug rehabilitation programs are conducted. I'd already had my criticisms of drug rehab: most notably, I think the programs are appallingly wimpy in their willingness to let people sign themselves out, when it would surely be more effective to lock enrollees in air-conditioned padded dungeons until the withdrawal symptoms play themselves out. But what's clear from Gallagher's discussion is that drug users, once rehabilitated, could strongly benefit from a relocation program.
The condition we know as "addiction", it turns out, is a subtle and deliberate program of the body's. As anyone might learn in chapter one of a decent Introduction To Psychology text, the brain devotes itself to finding stasis. Loud, blaring noises are slowly faded into the mental background, unnoticed, and if you re-enter a familiar place where loud noise is expected (a recycling plant, a disco), the brain starts tuning out at once. Devastating insults delivered by the same person every day become harmless chatter. Straining, repetitive exercise causes the brain to fire "endorphins" to counter pain with a mild high. The use of drugs to disrupt the body's chemistry causes the body to try to disrupt itself in opposite, offsetting ways. But more to the point, if the disruption is repeated, the body soon expects the disruption, and anticipates as best it can-- it's easier, after all, for the body to prevent the extremes of a cocaine high if it's already counteracting before the drug is taken. Since people tend to take drugs under specific conditions (with certain friends, in certain places, at certain times), the body starts readying its "Oh shit, not this again" defense upon recognizing those people, places, times. And since the user, alas, wants the drug effect, and emphatically does not want the effect's antidote, it becomes necessary to have more drugs, even if s/he hadn't been planning to, just to shut the antidote up. Rehab can flush the drugs themselves from the body; but as Gallagher's book establishes, the brain won't forget the cues that signal danger. Often, it is only by moving the ex-user hundreds of miles away from her physiological cues that relapse can be avoided.
It's easy to identify addictions to deliberately mind-altering drugs. It's also easy to condemn the sellers who encourage and profit from the addictions. Easy and fair; I have only procedural, not moral, objections to shooting every executive and lawyer and creative advertiser who aids the tobacco industry, since they know perfectly well that their industry's projected body count in one day would have been beyond Ted Bundy's powers to match had he been let free to strangle women throughout his natural lifespan. But addiction is a slippery concept. Psychology and physiology are a lot easier to separate in theory than in cellular-level practice. I know people who get horribly nervous and unhappy if, for a prolonged period of time such as two days, they cannot access box scores, or shower, or watch their soap operas, or have their dishes cleaned for them. These are created needs. I don't blame the needy. I don't blame major league baseball, the water company, the TV studios, or the maids, either. Instead I wonder what kind of stupid trick evolution was playing on us anyway. Why can't pleasures remain totally pleasurable? Why must they have a dark side, dependence? I'm sure it must make some huge contribution towards our having lots of healthy grandchildren-- after all, traits are reproduced and spread through the populace precisely according to how well they aid their possessors in reproduction. Addiction, in this lesser but still damnably distracting sense, is universal, so it must be useful. But I don't really see how.
As I write this column, 7/13/99, I've recently gone to my native Iowa for the rest of summer after a six-week vacation in San Francisco (briefly) and Walla Walla, Washington (at length). The trip west turned into an experiment in finding out what my own little addictions are. E-mail, certainly, is one of them; the fierceness of my demands on my friend Allison's brother Austin, to please let me use his computer long enough to at least delete my junk mail, was, in the context of my usual mildness, something to behold. But I expected that. I mean, without my 15 or so regular e-friends I'm that much lonelier, and even the pleasant busyness of my real life wouldn't erase that. What was surprising were the hints that my addiction to buying new music might be easily faded. "Addiction" isn't a casual term; I spent $1095 on music in 1997, $1825 on music in 1998. It was worth it at the time, mind you; make that clear. This was my primary entertainment budget. Good music makes me wildly happy. Three of my friends have come to rely on my frequent mixtapes as their #1 source of musical info, while several other friends enjoy the tapes well enough too. My 1998 discoveries of Jane Siberry and Yes and Veda Hille, plus enough new Loud Family and Carter USM purchases to redefine them into national treasures, were alone probably worth $5 a day to my well-being. Plus, I created this website in part to publicize all those new obscurities, and I'm glad I did. Still: $1825 is a lot of moolah. Whether it was worth it was a non-issue as long as I had easy access to Disc Diggers, CD Spins, Nuggets, Planet Records, Mystery Train, In Your Ear, Turn It Up!, www.ubl.com, and enough music review columns and Loud-fan posts to remind me of twenty interesting new albums every month. All this great music is being made! Someone must listen to it, to justify the creative effort! Better make sure that someone is me, so I know it's being done properly! It took six weeks of not reading (not being able to read) any music reviews, five weeks of hardly discussing music with friends, six weeks of knowing that any album I bought would be extra luggage until July, to break the cycle of need. The break gives me the perspective-- as I resume a little, but only a little, of my review reading, as I no longer need delete, but still just skim, the Loud-fan postings-- to ask "What with me owning 1800 albums already, many of which I haven't listened to in years, do I really need to check out Anja Garbarek, the Bonaduces, the Sisterhood Of Convoluted Thinkers?" And I think maybe I don't. Granting that in those three cases I can't find any of them for under $20-- and if you can, I still want you to tell me. Please?
Humanity's original addiction, I am guessing, is not nicotine or LSD, but love. I don't mean this in the vapid good cheer sense of Roxy Music's "Love Is The Drug", Huey Lewis's "I Want A New Drug", and Robert Palmer's "Addicted To Love". I mean, quite seriously, that almost all romances, including ultimately successful ones, proceed fairly quickly from ecstasy to a rapidly accumulating set of expectations, such that the kindnesses that once made a partner happy become the kindnesses that had better arrive as scheduled or else, in their absence, cause hurt. Physical cues, again, operate. It's my distinct recollection from this spring that I'm in love; but having not been within a thousand miles my girlfriend since then, and being now surrounded by the best-friends and possessions (and Mom) that mattered to me when I was 16, I don't miss her much, through zero fault of hers. My sense of loss ("Urgent! Nerve center! Prepare to nullify excess good humor!"), though it waves hi at me on the frequent-enough occasions when I phone her, will only be fully re-triggered when I next re-enter Amherst city limits. But if you stop seeing someone and don't switch cities.... well. Rock music has a few sad songs about being unable to get a date, because that hurts a little. But rock has thousands of entire miserable albums by songwriters who got a few dozen, or a few hundred, dates with the same girl (or boy) and then, wham, watched the relationship end.
Sometimes the hurt displayed is rather surprising. Damon Albarn of Blur, for example, dated Justine Frischmann (Elastica's singer) for eight years, during which he wrote love songs as often as the average hater of the Designated Hitter rule had written, prior to 1973, paeans to the joys of watching pitchers batting ninth and hitting .125 with no power. Once the DH existed, though, they suddenly decided that these exciting at bats were a crucial part of what had made the game fun for them. Once Justine dumped Damon, meanwhile, he suddenly abandoned the eclectic cute-pop social satire he'd made his band an Oasis-level British superstar with. He'd discovered, as 13's lead song "Tender" has it, that "Love is the greatest thing that we have/ I'm waiting for this feeling to come". I have to give him this, though: aided however heavily by shred-guitarist Graham Coxon and producer William Orbit, he sounds quite truly bummed. 13 is Radiohead's OK COMPUTER without the frivolity, Pink Floyd's WISH YOU WERE HERE without the rushed pace, Olivia Tremor Control's BLACK FOLIAGE without the discipline. It is, I mean to say, a bummed-out, bad-trip shambles. Oh yes, it's also brilliant. The human brain, in another part of its pursuit of stasis, functions as a "reducing valve"-filtering out 99+% of what our nerves might help us sense, so we can focus on the most immediately useful signals. 13 sounds, to me, as if Damon has decoded just exactly the existing atmospheric sounds that our brains would be most devastated by if they ever faltered and took notice.
"Tender" itself is a fake-out: a processional-paced sing-along set to acoustic guitar and a hired gospel choir. "Coffee and TV", two songs later, is a jaunty Kinks-like tune that seems like there ought to be finger-snapping supporting the cleanly textured pacing of the rhythm guitar; Coxon's lyrics for it even show Blur's traditional subversiveness with its optimistically backward suggestion "Take me away from this big black world and agree to marry me, so we can start over again". Everything else on the album, however, babbles mantras until it disintegrates. "Bugman" unravels from a 5-chord rocker into random noise that warps and resurfaces as Moog tomfoolery and a distorted cry of "Space is the place". "Swamp Song" is three slow, stomping chords and a barely coherent howl ("Give me insane! Give me space brain! Give me music and rhythm! Give me the panacea, love!") where the backup cries of "I want/ to be/ with you!" combine the techno-munchkin feel of Babylon Zoo's "Spaceman" with the demanding devotion John Hinckley once showed for Jodie Foster. "1992" I first heard on a busride, and it took me a minute to realize "Yes, that is the headphones, not subway noise, I'm not on the subway, remember?". "B.L.U.R.E.M.I." is fast-paced, like panicky robots screaming commands at each other as they attack you on all sides with their drumkits. "Battle" would blare ominously and unavoidably for blocks from a car's speakers, if humans could hear maybe 15 decibels lower; as is, you feel the bass and let the human-level percussion buffet you (the treble range is virtually lounge music, the waitroom lounge perhaps of a dentist who also spikes the anesthetic with LSD). "Mellow Song" is as relaxing as a warm, quiet cave full of pastel blue vampire bats. "Trailerpark", decorated spookily by the Optigon brand keyboard, desolately chants "I lost my girl to the Rolling Stones". "Caramel", rhythmic and abstract even by 13's standards, repeats "I gotta get over this", but the softly pulsating disorder of "Trimm Trabb" and "No Distance Left To Run" ignore the advice. Not that they say anything especially miserable; sometimes, words are not the issue.
Blur's previous albums, especially PARKLIFE('94) and THE GREAT ESCAPE('95), were obviously the work of people with large record collections, effortlessly slipping from one pop idiom to the next; their American breakthrough BLUR('97), by their own admission, was a homage to Pavement and Sonic Youth, albeit an album that still came out sounding, according to most listeners, like Blur. 13, aside from everything else, could be the creation of a stunned man suddenly doubting that his music collection can still bring him happiness. But I think he'll decide it can. Too many people, under whatever desperation, make too many sounds that have never been heard before. Someone's gotta listen, to justify the creative effort. Might as well be Damon, so he can be sure it's done right.
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