Encounterculture

There is always the temptation to just say fuck it and start getting high. When one can’t figure out a way to speak about something, pot makes you hypersensitive to yourself; if you know how to write and you like to smoke weed, your internal monologue will suddenly become the richest, saddest, most profound string of words ever sewn together by man, to the point where the fact that you get to hear it more than makes up for the fact that nobody else does. Some people will of course offhandedly characterize this as self-pity, to which my only response is that they’re absolutely fuckin’ right, and that that’s the whole point. You get high when you feel like nobody gives a shit about what you think or want because it’s easy and satisfying and seemingly bears no consequences if you have no interest in seeing the northern side of thirty.

Today was one of those sad, pathetic days that only seems to lead to bad poetry. In between all manner of shit, I almost wish I’d just done what I normally do and said Fuck It, Let’s Drown Our Sorrows In An Acrid Blue Cloud Hanging Between Me And Love Actually For The Eight Billionth Time, but for some reason I can’t seem to do it, because simply put I want very much to write about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece Surf’s Up and I cannot for the life of me settle on an approach that feels like anything other than saying smart shit to show off how smart I am. (I am confident, for instance, that you don’t care about the Beach Boys’ use of declarative statements as the hinges on which their songs turn, and I’ve got three false starts to prove it.)

But the facts of the matter, or the matter of Surf’s Up at least, are as follows: holy hell, that album just couldn’t sound sadder. If there’s a pair of words delivered more poignantly in the canon of music made by man than the titular words in the titular track, I wanna fuckin’ hear ‘em, because that shrugging little sigh of a “Surf’s up” just wrecks me, every time; it sounds like surrender in the same way that Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” sounds like death, in that it finds the profound beauty in the neutrality of release and stays on it like a shark that’s smelled blood. And I want to know if it’s even possible to sing a song like “Disney Girls” while looking someone dead in the face, or if, as I suspect, you have to look up and over them, staring out into empty-ass nothingness. I want to know how angry you have to be in order to be in the Motherfucking Beach Boys and open your album with a few seconds of off-key piano noodling before sliding out the line “Don’t go near the water”. I want to know whose brilliant idea it was to have a synth that’s aged shamefully poorly by this point carry the burden of exuberance for the hypnotically beautiful “Feel Flows”. I want, in short, to write about Surf’s Up because neither the fact that it’s an otherworldly piece of work nor the fact that the world I live in can really kiss my ass sometimes can keep me from connecting with it, and as previously outlined, when you are a miserable motherfucker you want a connection and any port in a storm etc.

Is great music great simply because we can connect to it? And if so, isn’t that an awfully limited definition of greatness? When I was in late middle/early high school, my favorite album ever was You’d Prefer An Astronaut by Hum, but listening to it now it seems depressingly apparent that most of what made it so great to me back then was its capacity to overwhelm me with sonic textures in a rock context; to say that the same exact stuff barely manages to whelm me now would be a gross overstatement. And yet that doesn’t diminish my confidence in the album’s greatness for a moment, even if it’s just in the clinical and abstract. When an album shakes you to the core like that one did, you tend to get the hint.

I’ve been listening to Surf’s Up a whole lot recently, probably in part because I’m a sad, predictable bastard and it’s stuffed with great, profound songs about loss and aging and regret and death, and dammit that sounds about right by now. And yet oddly, what I personally take away from the album has less to do with the album’s content itself than with my own personal interactions with the content. Would I give a shit about the “Surf’s Up” in “Surf’s Up” if I didn’t have a wide field of unworthy challengers for the emotional chord it strikes? It’s possible – music comes from life, and life is always a context – but it’s highly unlikely at the ass-best that I’d give the kind of shit I give about it now. Right now I’m fully willing to bray like a jackass about how Surf’s Up is making me platoon my absolute favorite albums so that I don’t have to choose between them like I’ve settled in to doing with movies (since it would take the collapse of heaven and earth to make me decide which is the best movie between The Passion of Joan of Arc, Playtime, and Sullivan’s Travels), and as much as we’d like to think otherwise, the truth is that that kind of motivation rarely comes out of nowhere.

Of course, none of that has anything to do with why I can’t write about it: simply put, my most honest critical evaluation of this album would be me yelling like a Zeppelin fan, complete with humorously labored syllable accentuation patterns (“NO MAennnnnnnnnnnh, just LISsen to the FUHcking MYOOsick, MAAAAAAAAaaaan! It’s INN there! Really! Stairway!”). There comes a point when a man has to face up to his limitations, so here’s me giving it a shot: I don’t know shit about music. I took piano lessons for a few months, guitar for a few lessons, never played in a band, never worked with a band, never even had a band that I followed religiously (although I’ve had more than my share of bands for whom I reveled in the sense of cool satisfaction of knowing I was getting exactly what I wanted from their music). What I get from music is unfettered connection, and I am unable to muster up a sufficient Boner of Personal Pride to convince other people to follow in my footsteps, which, at the end of the day, is pretty much how I would describe the field of criticism which I love and loathe equally and simultaneously. I have nothing to say about the music of Surf’s Up beyond various GodDamnThat’sGoodities; only that it exists and I get a giant spiritual kick from it, a kick with at least enough force to trigger my aspirant writer. Whether that means something to you – well, that’s your hill to climb.

But I will say this: as long as I’ve been reading music criticism, I’ve noticed the trend that whenever people start to talk about the music that they think is truly great (and, to be fair, truly shitty too), they inevitably slip over into self-analysis, either subconsciously or not. Call me a poststructuralist assface if you must, but I stand by it: language is so heavily coded that the simple act of using it absolutely constitutes political action. Therefore it does mean something when, for instance, so many reviews of the Scissor Sisters debut tour de force revolve around describing the album’s dual poles of humor and modern decadent culture, as if it’s impossible to reconcile being gay with being funny. People like to think that simply because they have so much access to music (and movies, and books, and you know the drill by now), they’re smarter than the music, but the cold truth is that that’s very, very rarely true. The fact that Brent DiCrescenzo is more creatively obtuse at hiding his victimization doesn’t make him any less of one.

I think, then, that I’ll be tempted to write about musical experiences stroke albums like Surf’s Up for the rest of my life simply because they cut through all the bullshit. When I listen to Surf’s Up, it’s in control – yes, not the same steady measure of control the whole time, and no, the center won’t necessarily hold forever and eventually I’ll get bored and move on to something else, but what the hell. Sure, I may well end up taking it back in a few years like I did with hum, but truth be told, if I’d died in some pathetically comical fashion in the ninth grade (“Local Long-Haired Oaf Literally Crushed Under Weight Of Self-Importance (Pictures, p. G19)”) with You’d Prefer An Astronaut as my favorite album, that probably would have been the least of my worries. If you’re not a musician, you’re a music consumer, so own the fuck up to it when you talk about stuff, I guess.

Aargh. Whatever. Long story short: Surf’s Up is one hell of an album.

And I’m off to the races.