33 rebellions per minute
"The clocks are all exhausted from the weight of being watched"
1999
Bonaduces, THE DEMOCRACY OF SLEEP
Here it is, August 11, and I'm ready to give my Best Lyrics award for the year. It's odd; I've never thought "Hey, I need more songs about death in my music collection". I don't think much about death, haven't had to think about death, don't think I _should_ think about death. For all the poetic appeal of the phrase "democracy of sleep", I can't associate death's, or indeed literal sleep's, form of equal opportunity with any politics other than perfect tyranny (if my friend Kristian's current efforts to replace his daily eight hours of sleep with two hours of meditation work better than his dabblings in witchcraft, I'll certainly let you know (come to think, if his witchcraft takes off I'll mention that too (unless of course he casts a spell silencing me (but he wouldn't do that)))). The Bonaduces sing about this tyranny: dying in the hospital, having a dear friend commit suicide, standing at a deathbed, bombing a high school. Some of it is almost certainly autobiographical, which helps me care, although the songs from the perspective of the dying are empathy, putting the self into the story. But the quality of observations… well, I half want to turn this review into a poetry reading. Opening lines of the album:
Here's the hard part, where there's no plugs to pull.Which, if I wind up dying, is a better plan than any I had in mind to pass the time (I especially like divvying up the "get well"s, one delegated job per blessing); if I use the method someday, the song would go beyond sharing a human life for the life's own sake, and into the realm of teaching. It's not an unusually good passage on this album. I also like how his dying spoils a party because he was supposed to be one of the ones who did _not_ complain on his turn to talk, and leaves him wondering "Do we read aloud from Sivvie Plath? Pin the tail on Diane Arbus photgraphs?". "Sara made her first attempt to go out since the incident, and all of our vigilance had been relaxed by time" is a powerfully scene-setting opening line. The bomb threat song's final line, "they're talking about writing about films about books" is not just a wonderfully glib dismissal of a class my friend Sarah blew off last semester, but an evocation of the way small, dubiously accurate details can be grabbed by the desperate as proof of an entire system's corruption; whereas love can translate equivalent inconveniences and oddities into "We've kept the things we'd want: the stupid songs that she would sing all wrong, her short cuts that took twice as long ... and her eyes reflecting back in the morning". "The Second Annual National Depression Awareness Day Sleepover Party", "Understudy To Abby Gray", and "I Nominate My Kitten For The King Of The Dead" all fully justify their titles -- and since I still never forgave the band Dis- for completely wasting song titles like "Here's To Evil, Clink" and "Stop Blaming All Of Your Personal Problems On Films", I'm impressed.
Visitors are ushered back to their vehicles
and an endless crescendo of unvoiced cries
manipulate the silence of the hospitals at night.
And indistinct wishes, made on my behalf
get rationed and assigned to specific tasks
like staving off of nightmares, or dismissing random pains
or petitioning disaster to increase its pace.
CHORUS:
I've found a space between consciousness and dream to invent a life inside
The album's final line urges "Whisper things to remind me of the way you'd whisper things to me" -- it is, I suspect, inevitable that only a wordsmith would so accurately romanticize the small role of word choice in communication. The absurdly overquantified statistic I've heard is that words carry 12% of the message in face-to-face spoken communication, which, however meaningless that number may sound (cf. "Baseball is 75% pitching"), can still be loosely justified even when you think it can't; compare hearing "go three blocks down, take a left on Locust, go down almost to the river and turn right after the 7-11 there" from a concerned man sketching a map, versus a sneering guy who keeps glancing mid-directions at his buddy while they both cackle evilly.
The "12%" is supplemented, overwhelmed perhaps, by gesture and tone of voice. In songs on CD's, of course, the words are aided by music. What music could accompany such words as the Bonaduces', you ask? Something like the Cure's DISINTEGRATION, you might guess? No (as would have been obvious if I'd previously said the name of the album's distributor, Twee Kitten Records). DEMOCRACY is a festival of revved-up, densely harmonic guitar pop. Singer Doug McLean sings Billy Joe Armstrong (Green Day) barking too loudly to whine properly, or like Tim Quirk (Too Much Joy) without the graveliness. The music races by like Too Much Joy's FINALLY (only with more angular, ambitious melodies); like early Soul Asylum (if they'd already developed the harmonics of "Cartoon", "Sometime To Return", and "Easy Street"); like Menthol (but more hyper); like David Garza (but the drums are louder); like Tripmaster Monkey (but without the hazy experiments); like Husker Du (but more crisply defined). It's not, honestly, my favorite kind of music: the speed and density and restriction to three instruments overloads my ability to understand what's going on, so if I don't pay close attention, it becomes hard for me to tell the songs apart. Nonetheless, DEMOCRACY is catchy, and the songs _are_ different, and there's plenty of musical craftsmanship going in within the songs' construction. With normal lyrics, it would be a good album, regardless of whether I chose to play it. As is, it looks at love and life from a perspective I was quite happy to ignore for the next fifty years -- and makes me glad.
Links to other sites on the Web
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
Get your own Free Home Page