Heartache With Hard Work

I was tempted to limit this to a top 30 songs of the year, but in the past couple weeks I’ve discovered quite a few new tracks that have convinced me this year was a bit stronger than I had initially expected.

I would still say that the list this year is weaker than past ones. Not because there wasn’t enough good music this year. It’s just that there were a lot fewer peaks. There were a TON (as many or more than ever before) good to very-good songs and albums out this year, but very few transcendentally good ones. I’ve got ‘best of the decade’ lists coming and you’ll notice that 2009 makes very few appearances there. Don’t get me wrong. I love every single track here – just maybe a little bit less than a corollary number from a previous year.

As always, it’s limited to one song per artist. And I’m continuing my tradition of not really talking about the whole song, but instead focusing in and highlighting the single best moment.

40. The Mayor (ft. Ghostface Killah, Scarface, The Cool Kids and DJ AM) (youtube link) – NASA
I’m not gonna lie. I couldn’t pick any of the folks on here out of a crowd, and don’t even know who is responsible for which verse or anything. But this bit from the Detroit one hits me the hardest.

39. When Brakes Get Wet – Julie Doiron
1:28 – I’ve always loved Julie Doiron’s voice but never found myself too excited about her songs. Here, the counterpoint is spot-on. The gentle syncopation and strummed guitar provides some uplift that blends with her world-weary tone, offering some comfort against the pressing of a heavy fog.

38. The Ocean (youtube link) – Tegan and Sara
0:46 – My main complaint about the whole Tegan and Sara record is that there are very few distinguishable moments. So, weirdly enough, my favorite moment is right here – in the interlude between verse and chorus, when the basic riff that drives the song gets a little chance to breath.

37. Boy 1904 – Jonsi and Alex
Just a lovely, lovely song. It’s pointless to try and pick a single moment from a song this ethereal and encompassing. So I’ll just have to recommend the entire thing.

36. Watercolor Ghost Town – The Blueflowers
0:30 – Nothing complicated. Just a very nice folksy riff and a little movement in the vocals. Sometimes you get a whole lot more when you aren’t pressing too hard.

35. Central Standard – Banner Pilot
1:18 – Love the guitars here. They move up just a bit – but are still struggling against the frontloaded vocals. And then you get the bass way up high in the mix. The result is an awesome piece of grungy pop-punk.

34. Bang (ft. M.I.A.) – Rye Rye
1:25 – The percussion on this song is completely out of this world. It’s spastic and aggressive and insanely catchy. It’s almost impossible to hear this track without starting to move like crazy.

33. Boy Lilikoi – Jonsi
2:52 – Not breaking my rule on two songs from the same artist. The first Jonsi track was part of his solo project with his partner. Hence, Jonsi and Alex. This one (album due out next year) is a true ‘solo’ work. Though, honestly, I’m not sure how it’s really any different from a regular Sigur Ros record. Anyways, he’s singing in English now which is cool and all, but I still think he’s at his best in the wordless chorus, like this one. No pesky structured to get in the way of the real point. Which, in this case, is the transcendence of both space and time.

32. Dancing In A Minefield – Plushgun
2:27 – Sure it’s overwrought. But give up your ironic distance, really give it a listen, and return to the place where you truly believed in endless possibility. Where a silly song about dancing really did seem like it meant something.

31. Sam Rudich – Snowing
0:52 – All shouts, frenetic drumming, and that guitar that makes you feel like you’re getting punched repeatedly underwater. In a good way, of course.

30. Bones – Foam Castles
2:37 – The folk beginnings transform themselves into a cavalcade of sound and energy. It’s big and glorious, and is the finest summer mixtape song you probably never heard this year.

29. Beach – Mew
1:01 – It does seem magical.

28. Happy Banjo – Dark Mean
1:19 – “And I woke up here alone…and I feel so happy” – so pretty, so pure. And then you get the little bit of pedal steel. It’s enough to melt the coldest of hearts.

27. Summers – Loney Dear
2:50 – He’s the modern master of the slow buildup and glorious release – and while this one doesn’t match “I Am John” it’s still mighty impressive. There’s the initial burst at 1:40, but for me the best moment is here when the pace has been set and the only thing left is the na na na’s.

26. Wrecking Ball (youtube link) – Bruce Springsteen
2:30 – The one, two, ONE TWO THREE FOUR! bit is classic Springsteen – and about a million times better than the album he put out at the beginning of the year. Sure the metaphor is a bit clunky, but who cares? Stand tall and face that wrecking ball!

25. Much More Than That – Sharon Van Etten
2:19 – Everything that ever needed to be said, stripped entirely of the accouterments.

24. Another City, Another Sorry – The Answering Machine
1:10 – A drum-burst that catapults you forward. Fast, furious, messy guitar lines. Explosions, fireworks, and a bunch of sweaty kids on a London dancefloor.

23. Quiet Dog – Mos Def
1:16 – He lays deep grooves but manages to skip and dance among them with total freedom and clarity. It’s both infinitely smooth and totally intense

22. March 4, 1831 – Balmorhea
0:45 – This song is so short and so complete that it’s hard to pick any particular moment. None can really be experienced without the rest. Still, I absolutely adore these final few seconds before the main theme emerges. The little cello movements in the background and the gentle guitar – they fit together so perfectly.

21. Drowning in Amsterdam – Vanessa Peters
2:14 – I’m such a sucker for transitions. This one, where the slow and gentle bridge emerges back into the glorious sunlight of the verse is a particularly fine version of the genre.

20. The Fear (youtube link) – Lily Allen
0:15 – So many great lines in this song – including “I am a weapon of massive consumption” and “But it doesn’t matter cause I’m packing plastic, and that’s what makes my life so fucking fantastic” – but none are better than this one. She perfectly captures the sort of reckless self-indulgence that is so tantalizing about our society’s pop culture obsession.

19. Dying Day – Brandi Carlile
1:19 – One of the finest moments of the year. Her voice is just…beyond it all.

18. Just A Silhouette – Ex Lovers
1:34 – It just makes me so damn happy to hear that guitar line emerging out of the most carefree and earnest little interlude you’ve ever heard.

17. History Sticks To Your Feet – Modest Mouse
3:16 – The guitar tears everything apart – just like the staccato blade they used to wield back in the day.

16. Belated Promise Ring – Iron and Wine
1:06 – “Time may give you more than your poor bones could ever take” – It really can. I’ve been an Iron and Wine skeptic over the years, but this track is good enough to convince me that there’s something seriously good going on here.

15. Potemkin City Limits – Propagandhi
2:11 – The most strident musical defense of veganism this year. It rocks like the Propagandhi of old. I just love that guitar.

14. Daniel – Bat for Lashes
1:54 – Ethereal, gentle, with the beauty of a fog rolling in over the hills in the steely light of dusk. It’s the sort of song that settles over you like a diaphanous veil, almost ghostly in its weightlessness.

13. A Down and Dusky Blonde (youtube link) – God Help the Girl
1:29 – Stuart Murdoch at his very best. I’m tempted to put the final chorus, when all the singers get in on the action and you get a real crescendo. And while that’s probably the most *satisfying* part of the song, I somehow find this to be the purest part. There’s just something about the innocence in her voice.

12. Optimist Vs. The Silent Alarm (When The Saints Go Marching In) – Casiotone for the Painfully Alone
0:57 – Escape: the thrill of the adrenaline, and the nostalgia for a simple life that you can’t help but realize you’ve left behind.

11. Bad Romance (youtube link) – Lady Gaga
1:15 – This song has no right to be this good. This part in particular ought to be terrible. And yet, here we are, with one of the best pop hooks of the year layered right in with all the ga-ga ooh-la-las and everything else.

10. The Devil And Maggie Chascarillo – Lucero
1:58 – Ben Nichols can really belt it out, and that’s never been more obvious than here. It hits you so hard that you never even have time to notice that all this tension is over a girl from a comic book.

9. Me and Mary – Asobi Seksu
2:13 – Okay, so I ranked this last year, too. But I’m including it again because my opinion of it has gone up dramatically. It’s big and glorious and magical and the best moment is any time she’s singing, or any time the guitars are cascading around you. Which is to say: pretty much the whole song.

8. Dear Corinne – Ferraby Lionheart
3:15 – “If the wind rushes into my bones, picks me up and delivers me home.” I’m an absolute sucker for the thing he does with his voice when he says home. That little descending ripple…oh man, it gets me every time.

7. Oslo Novelist – Grand Archives
1:25 – I love love love the way the pedal steel sings along in the background. It makes an already beautiful harmony absolutely perfect.

6. Suicide – The Raveonettes
0:29 – Potentially, the best thirty seconds of the whole year. What a chorus! Absolutely stunning.

5. Gimme Sympathy – Metric
0:45- If the chorus for “Suicide” isn’t the best of the year, then it has to be this one. Oh, and obviously I’d rather be The Beatles. Duh.

4. Moth’s Wings – Passion Pit
1:11 – Aaaaaaaaaaah. What else can you say? Just play it loud, and play it over and over again.

3. Hindsight – Built to Spill
2:40 – ‘What about Canada?’ A question I’ve been asking myself all year.

2. Sad Birthday – Bombadil
2:09 – I just love how they emerge from that little drum bit. It makes me smile. A lot.

1. People Got A Lotta Nerve – Neko Case
1:25 – So, so good. The silvery voice, the jangly guitar. The buildup and release. Good god this is a great song. It was also my contribution the Contrast Podcast year-end list.

Fairytale of New York – The Pogues

It’s become a bit of a tradition for the blog that I post about this song on Christmas. I had some technical difficulties yesterday, so it’s happening today instead.

It’s not only the single best Christmas song of all time, it’s also one of the best songs of all time, full stop. It’s heartbreaking and lovely, full of vitriol and anger, broken dreams and perpetual renewal. It’s a song that reminds me of just how hard it is to be alive – and just how much reason we have to value what little time we have.

It’s a song for Christmas, but it’s really a song for any day that’s ever meant anything to anyone. A song about how hard people love each other and how painful that love can be. A song to remind us that in some basic and essential ways, we all share something deep and pure: a basic fragility and longing for what always lies just beyond us.

I can’t listen to it without my heart rising to my throat. And I hope that never changes, because there’s something wonderful about knowing that I can be moved by dreams.

Merry Happy, everyone.

I have had a weird relationship with the whole Lady Gaga hype machine. I listened to The Fame back in January and thought it was a moderately enjoyable Madonna-esque bit of dancy pop. I listened to it on and off for the next eight months or so and then was stunned to realize that it was the biggest thing in pop music for the year this side of Taylor Swift. All of which is to say: I am REALLY not tapped into popular culture.

I’d like to think that gives me some unique insight into the music, as opposed to just the story of Lady Gaga. And maybe it does. But all I can really say is that I think she is the Madonna for the 21st century. Which, on its face, sounds like the least insightful thing anyone has ever said. But hear me out…

What a lot of people fail to remember is that Madonna was shocking to people in the eighties. Shocking because of what she said, and how she acted. But also shocking because of how much genuinely powerful stuff she manage to extract from what was (let’s face facts) pretty standard musical fare. The thing about Madonna is that by all rights she ought to have been a flash in the pan, but was so capable of re-vitalizing, re-inventing, and re-positioning herself that she became a massive phenomenon.

Based purely on The Fame, it’s easy to read Lady Gaga as an imitator. It’s a nice enough record, and “Poker Face” is legitimately an awesome song, but it doesn’t seem to contain the depth or the hidden layers that made Madonna bigger than herself.

However, on The Fame Monster, Gaga reveals herself to be far more than a simple copycat. She doesn’t just exist in the wake of Madonna; she is post-Madonna. This isn’t a simulation, it’s the real thing. It’s a record from someone who is fully aware of her place within the litany of pop starlets, who is using that fact to propel herself beyond it. It’s not an imitation, it’s a genuine re-enactment of the form that Madonna pursued.

It’s dark and ugly and more than a little bit disturbing. It’s also an almost perfectly pure slice of pop sugar. And somewhere in between those two lies a confusing and impossible set of songs.

I’m normally not one for the argument that bad music is actually clever music because it’s intentionally bad. The sentiment of “no, see, it’s clever because it’s a commentary about how bad most popular music is!” is the mark of someone who isn’t interested in art but is enormously satisfied with crap culture.

However, I think Lady Gaga is doing something far more sophisticated. Because the point is not that her songs are bad. It’s that they’re very good, but wholly characteristic (almost archetypal), essays on the culture that makes them possible. What you’re supposed to read into them, I think, isn’t the obnoxious faux-pomo sense of “gee, isn’t our culture vapid?”

It’s really the opposite. She doesn’t want to make the thoroughly obvious point that most of what passes for popular culture is bereft of depth or meaning. That’s true, of course, but by it’s very nature is a totally banal commentary. Any clown can accuse bland culture of being bland. It’s far more interesting to jump headfirst into it and, in so doing, reveal just how much horror and weirdness it actually contains.

And that’s what makes a song like “Bad Romance” so fascinating. It Madonna-esque not because it sounds like her (although it does) but because it demands that we look at ourselves in this moment, rather than tracing our lives backward into an infinite depth of pop culture without depth. It’s weird and strange and so perfectly immanent. And it manages to be all that while also simultaneously giving you a transcendent chorus. It lifts you even while it drags you down. It’s a recognition that the heaviest weights we burden ourselves with are the ones we don’t have to carry. It’s also a brilliantly constructed pop song – as it would have to be for any of the rest of this to work.

Similarly, there’s “Alejandro” which could almost come from Abba and “Speechless,” a pleasant but seemingly pretty straightforward – almost insipidly so – pop ballad. But in their midst is “Monster” which puts each one into a different context. Where those two perform the role, “Monster” calls attention back to the scars and bruises that we’ve all trained ourselves to ignore.

I’m about to do that annoying thing where I characterize a wide set of people, without offering any particular examples of the phenomenon. I understand that this is problematic. But this feels right – as an aggregate sense of my reading of many, many people. So it’s quite possible that it doesn’t perfectly apply to any single person in a perfect fashion, but I think it’s true nonetheless.

(Edit: It occurs to me that this Frank Rich column is actually a pretty great example of the problem)

The people who are really angry about Obama right now seem to be making a lot of accusations about those who support him – calling us members of a cult of personality, etc.

But here’s the thing. For me, at least, it has never been about expecting the world from this guy. I thought the ‘hope’ message was a good one, and I believed in the power of ‘change’ but I didn’t think that meant moving the world by himself. Nor did I think it meant a move to the extreme left wing.

Change, for me, meant a return to thinking seriously about real issues. About being willing to make tough decisions and stick to them. About genuinely caring about things enough to value real, material progress over optics. Part of what was so toxic about the Bush era was the extent to which politics became more and more ideological. Of course, all politics is ideology to some extent. The difference with Obama, I hoped, was that he would have some sense of his own limitations. That’s what he promised, and it’s precisely what he’s given.

He’s not the guy who’s going to go out guns-blazing for the public option because he fears losing health care entirely a lot more than he fears losing the public option. And he’s going to play the game in a lot of annoying ways. And I’ll disagree with him on a lot of the details. But one thing I remain fairly confident about is that the moral backbone which underlies these decisions is one that is focused on the achievement of real, practical social good.

That may not sound like a lot, but I do think that represents ‘change’ in a pretty important way.

The people who claim total disillusionment, that they’ve been abandoned, etc. on the other hand seem to have been expecting a lot more. They’re the ones who read into what Obama was saying a lot of things that THEY wanted. And now that they’re getting roughly what he promised they’re really upset.

Paul Krugman (a pretty hardcore Hillary supporter, if you’ll remember) makes this point quite well:

There’s a lot of dismay/rage on the left over Obama, a number of cries that he isn’t the man progressives thought they were voting for.
But that says more about the complainers than it does about Obama himself. If you actually paid attention to the substance of what he was saying during the primary, you realized that
(a) There wasn’t a lot of difference among the major Democratic contenders
(b) To the extent that there was a difference, Obama was the least progressive
…
But back to Obama: the important thing to bear in mind is that this isn’t about him; and, equally important, it isn’t about you. If you’ve fallen out of love with a politician, well, so what? You should just keep working for the things you believe in.

It’s certainly not unreasonable to think that the left could have gotten more out of this moment. I do think that it is unreasonable to accuse Obama, or those who support him, of some fundamental betrayal. As Krugman says, I don’t really see how it’s Obama’s fault that people insisted on mis-reading him.

Or, even if it is his fault insofar as he built a campaign that made him sort of a Rorschach test designed to appeal to lots of people, then the people who made him into some sort of magical Changeasaurus are the ones who were reading everything through personality. Those of us who saw a left-wing, but fairly pragmatic guy are getting what we voted for.

Whether you think that constitutes meaningful change, well…

I’m reminded of a great quote, from one of my favorite books: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. It’s by Barbara Smith, and she’s talking about lesbian separatism, but I think the general idea is important to a lot of contexts – and maybe this one.

A solution to tokenism is not racial separatism. There are definitely separatist aspects emerging among the Black and Third World feminist community and that is fine. But, ultimately, any kind of separatism is a dead end. It’s good for forging identity and gathering strength, but I do feel that the strongest politics are coalition politics that cover a broad base of issues. There is no way that one oppressed group is going to topple a system by itself. Forming principled coalitions around specific issues is very important. You don’t necessarily have to like or love the people you’re in coalition with. This brings me back to the issue of lesbian separatism. I read in a women’s newspaper an article by a woman speaking on behalf of lesbian separatists. She claimed that separatists are more radical than other feminists. What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you. I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before. And it really pisses me off that they think of themselves as radical. I think there is a difference between being extreme and being radical. This is why Third World women are forming the leadership in the feminist movement because we are not one dimensional, one-issued in our political understanding. Just by virtue of our identities we certainly define race and usually define class as being fundamental issues that we have to address. The more wide-ranged your politics, the more potentially profound and transformative they are.

I posted about Iceland’s Hildur Gudnadottir a few months back. My comments at the time:

Iridescence

It’s over 11 minutes, but feel like it goes by in a flash. The overlay of that droning sound on top of these thick cello movements is breathtaking. It evokes the deep winter of Iceland, a single streetlight casting long shadows in the snow… She’s got an album called Without Sinking that came out a couple months ago which I haven’t picked up yet, but am really looking forward to.

I’ve now listened to Without Sinking quite a bit, and while no single track comes close to matching “Iridescence” the entire work together is both simple and stunning.

Opening track “Elevation” is perfectly titled – it conjures a sense of moving breathlessly across a wide expanse of snow-covered ridges and valleys. It surrounds you and lifts you up high until the world down below is barely a dream.

This is an album that places you among the clouds – sometimes dark, heavy, full of rain and thunder, ready to muffle your thoughts and wipe away all memory – sometimes bright and weightless, shining like crystals in the light of a noon sun – always pulsing with some kind of self-contained life. You can see their beauty and maybe catch a glimpse of their place in the grander scheme, but they remain forever distant. Even as Gudnadottir’s cello takes you gliding through them, they fall to the side, forever beyond your grasp. Their seeming solidity revealed to be an illusion wrought by your own imagination.

Without Sinking is dark, gloomy even, but it is not sad. The somber tone does not imply a sense of futility or purposelessness – it simply reflects the deep incongruity of the sensational world.

Perhaps the best example of this can be found in “Ascent” – the middle point of the record, where you begin to sense that this album is an invitation to blur the lines between wakefulness and sleep. If you let yourself be drawn in, you see that the difference between consciousness and dreams is not that one is real and the other illusion. They are both illusion, but the dream is perhaps more liberating because it knows itself to be unreal. Freed from the restrictions of causality and clarity, you recognize something deeper–not truth or meaning, but the freedom that comes from within rather than without. “Ascent” is not an ascent into the heavens. After all, the whole album already exists among the high reaches of the clouds. It’s about the movement within which accepts the world of clouds as unique and incommensurable – that ceases trying to understand or know it, and simply experiences it.

With that move complete you’re free to hear the second half of the album, the dream world made real. Not to dip too far into cliche, but the real genius of the second album isn’t found in the notes she plays but in the spaces between the notes. Not just the temporal gaps, but also the spatial ones. The cello bends and bows and its notes occupy your field of vision but always, somewhere on the edges, you see the clouds that lie beyond…stretching out in undulating waves and impossibly complex patterns.

If there’s a flaw in this record, it’s in the payoff. The last two tracks “Into Warmer Air” and “Unveiled” aren’t bad, but they also break up the mood which had been so perfectly established. Where the first eight tracks guide you so effortlessly that you feel no sense of pressure or even movement, “Into Warmer Air” pulses with far more insistence. It’s a beautiful song – to be sure – but even that small reminder of materiality disturbs the flow. On the opposite side, “Unveiled” is a fine closer, just not to this album. It is the sound of a terrestrial darkness, of caves and caverns, of cool rocks and deep lakes.

Elevation – Hildur Gudnadottir
Ascent – Hildur Gudnadottir

I’ve been hoping for a breakthrough album from The Raveonettes for quite a while now. The bad news is that In And Out Of Control is not that album. The good news is that it’s a damn fine record anyways.

It’s a bit darker, more driven, than their mid-decade forays into a purer form of doo-wop. Most of the songs here buzz along at a fast clip and while the instrumentation certainly continues with the ‘wall of sound’ approach, it’s all far more self-contained. Which does not mean its restrained – when done well, the centrifugal force of containment holds everything together, compacts it, and produces a neutron star of buzzing pressure.

Album opener “Bang!” is about as good a song as they’ve ever made. And it conclusively proves once and for all where the true genius in this band lies: in their choruses. The rest of the song is nice enough, but the chorus, oh my the chorus. It hits you with all the force and glory of a hundred perfect summers, of a million songs about youthful abandon and true love.

The second track, “Gone Forever” doesn’t break new ground, but it offers a nice counterpoint to the exuberance of “Bang!” It’s a delightfully dark and stormy variation on their normal gauzy motif.

The third song in the opening trio is “Last Dance,” the lead single, which dials things down quite a bit. It owes quite a bit more to a classic 60s tune not just for inspiration but in style as well – though for once the highlight is not the chorus (as beautiful as the chorus is) but instead is that moment when they go all Mates of State about two and a half minutes in and let the keyboards take over.

Those three songs probably constitute the strongest portion of the record. They hit most of the crucial bases, and offer some moments of pure magic.

However, the single most powerful track on the record is undoubtably “Suicide” – which is easily the best work they’ve done to date. It’s dark and vicious but also a paean to the possibility of transcendence and beauty. It’s the moment of hope and belief that’s only possible in the midst of chaos and collapse. And, once again, it all comes to a head in a chorus that brings together all of that latent energy and releases it in one enormous burst: “Lick your lips and fuck suicide.” It’s one of the finest moments in music not just this year but any year.

Apart from those four tracks, they never quite manage to get the chemistry right. “Break Up Girls!” is too relentlessly linear and dark, and the same goes for “Heart of Stone.” On the other side “Wine” takes forever to get going and never manages to reach escape velocity, and “Oh, I Buried You Today” has the makings of something special but at only 1:22 is more a snippet than a full piece of work.

Finally, you can’t review this record without talking about two tracks. One is the rather obviously titled “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” – which polarizes opinion for reasons that should be not difficult to grasp. Namely, the juxtaposition of an almost saccharine sound – replete with bubbly harmonies – and lines like “They rip you to shreds / Make you feel useless / You’ll never forget / Those fuckers stay in your head.” For me, it’s all a bit much. I think they could pull it off if they stuck to just the verses, but the constant repetition of “boys who rape should all be destroyed” makes the whole thing sound just a little bit too self-consciously precious for them to pull it off.

The other polarizing track is “D.R.U.G.S.” which dabbles in dance-rock, bringing almost a disco beat to bear. I can see people applauding the effort to branch out, but for me, it’s a major drag on the album, a notable and frustrating departure from the flow of the record. It also is one of the few moments when the general themes of the album (pain, suffering, drugs, and the seedy underworld) lose any of their depth. It’s a cliche (here’s our song about drugs!) without any substance to back it up – and thus detracts from other parts of the album that offer far more compelling shades of gray.

Still, even with a few songs that don’t quite work, and a second half that trails off quite a bit (“Suicide” notwithstanding), the energy and passion they bring to bear on the successful tracks suggest that The Raveonettes still may yet have that breakthrough album in the works.

Suicide – The Raveonettes
Bang! – The Raveonettes

I find this perspective from a TPM reader to be pretty much the most compelling argument about why people are so angry about the health care “compromise.”

I know there’s been a lot of game theory from people about how that would never work, etc. But the fact is that you can show leadership for big ideas and there’s always still room to compromise at the end. At least then it would be clear that there was no other way, that you put up the good fight, better luck next time.
Instead they feel like the people they voted for and trusted to lead them failed. And it’s hard to imagine making that same emotional commitment again in the future. Self defeating, yes. Temporary, maybe. But we’re talking primal stuff here – people don’t like wimps, not matter what party.

I’m completely on board with the understanding that this kind of nitty-gritty political negotiation is not fun, it’s not encouraging, and it doesn’t energize the base. I’m not happy about the health care bill right now either.

And so if people just want to vent, to express that anger, I can’t really fault them for it.

But (and it’s a big ‘but’), that only goes so far. There isn’t an easy dichotomy between thinking with your heart and thinking with your head. That’s not the divide here.

Because the reason why people who are saying “it’s not great, but it needs to get passed” think that is because they VALUE health care reform a lot. And the reasons that they value it vary a lot. For some people, it’s simply about cost – and is a slightly abstract principle of long-term governance. For some people it’s a very personal relationship to cost. For some people it’s a ‘selfish’ desire to, well, get health care. And for some people it’s some combination of those things – but also a deep sense of empathy.

I spent five years with no health care and, thankfully, never got sick. It was scary, but I was also in my early 20s and it’s easy to just kind of ignore the need for health care when you’re young and healthy.

Now I’ve got coverage – not great coverage, but something – so I the need for reform is a bit less of a personal matter. But it hasn’t changed my desire one bit. Because for me, the need for health care reform has always been about what we owe to each other as a society. It a question of basic values–how do we value each other, what kind of support should be able to take for granted?

Just because I’m proposing a more ‘rational’ approach to the mechanics of getting a bill done, it doesn’t mean anything about my goals. I want health care reform because it’s a travesty for people to go sick and society to not have a means of helping them get well. I think a lot of other people are in the same boat.

At the risk of painting too broadly, what I’d suggest is that the situation right now is a debate between people who are looking inward and those looking outward. That comment I linked to above is powerful, but notice who it’s about: the progressive, activist class. It’s about their expectations, what they thought they were getting out of Obama. You promised change, hope, etc.

That’s a perfectly valid response, obviously. But what’s left out is the broader set of people for whom half a loaf really is going to be a big deal. Because the subtext here is that people would be more willing to accept precisely the same compromise if the optics of it had been different. If it had been a tough fight from the administration. I know that a lot of people really think that a tougher negotiating stance would have moved things substantively, but I’m pretty much with Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Nate Silver here: I just don’t see that this stuff really has much influence on the underlying dynamics. It’s tempting to BELIEVE that it does, but there just isn’t much evidence for it.

It’s similar to elections, which the media loves to sell as full of ‘decisive’ moments, twists and turns, and so on – despite the fact that the underlying conditions are MASSIVELY more important than such things. Ultimately, crazy Joe Lieberman and very conservative Ben Nelson were always going to be the 59th and 60th votes. Which means they were going to set the terms.

Because, once again, they don’t particularly care if a bill passes. If they had their druthers it wouldn’t pass, most likely. The fact that they’re being backed into a corner and being forced to sign onto a massively progressive piece of legislation IS the victory for the left.

So anyways, I get why people are upset and feel betrayed. I think that’s a reasonable response, but I will also submit that it’s more than a little selfish. It’s important to demonstrate that the positions of the left matter, and are part of the debate. But we’ve been doing health care for a year (or three years, or 15 years, of 100 years) and the time for symbolism is past.

Another TPM reader compares this to 2000 – and wonders at how quickly people seem to have forgotton what happens when we demand the whole cake or nothing at all. It turns out that Nader is a lunatic, Gore IS tremendously different from Bush, and that difference plays out in the real lives (and deaths) of a lot of real people:

But, but, but, Obama is so disappointing! Sure. I get it. And we should let him know it. But withdrawing support from Obama? When he has to deal with birthers, and tea partiers, and beckites, and the assorted nuts du jour? It’s bound to backfire. There is absolutely no upside to vitriol against Obama, and there is so much downside. Think of how much better off this country would be if we had a centrist, semi-corporate-friendly Democratic president from 2000 to 2008. Not ideal by a long shot, sure. But we lost so much in those years.

Pretty much.

When things are bad, you fight to make them better. You don’t give up entirely and hope that some kind of grand symoblic act will re-build the system from the bottom up. In short, you try to remember that change is a matter of a million small steps, not one grand one.

On the broader questions of ‘betrayal,’ ‘change,’ the advocacy of issues, and so on, Ed Kilgore has a really nice (and I think fair to all sides) piece here. It’s well-worth reading.

It seems like I’ve been listening to Built to Spill for ever. I remember rocking out to “Center of the Universe” back in high school. And I remember getting to college and discovering just how ridiculously good their two previous albums were. I still think there are few songs out there that can match the grandeur, the beauty, or the sheer presence of “Untrustable” (I mean, I can probably list on my fingers the number of songs that can boast a line as succinct and brilliant as “God is whoever you’re performing for” – and then you combine that with 9 minutes of swirling guitar virtuosity). And to think that the same band that gave us Perfect From Now On was also responsible for There’s Nothing Wrong With Love…well, wow.

For me, those two records are the peak. I enjoyed Keep It Like a Secret a lot, but it felt like a slightly less sharp re-tread of what they had already offered.

This decade, they released a couple more albums, each with some fine moments (“The Weather” in particular may be their prettiest composition) but on the whole feeling rather drab and uninspired. Doug Martsch also had a nice but not spectacular solo record that featured a few nicely countrified little melodies but didn’t leave much of a mark. Based on that work, you could only assume that they had reached a comfortable middle age: spinning out a new disc every three years, not concerned about deviating too much from the treads they had established.

So I wasn’t expecting too much when I first put on There Is No Enemy. But that’s what you get for making assumptions. It works over the same terrain, to be sure, but for the first time in a decade you can really sense the scope of it all. Gone are the senseless meanderings. In their place: a bite in the guitar and a pointedness in the lyrics that play off each other to produce something sharp and beautiful

Just a few examples:

“Finally decided, and by decide I mean accept / I don’t need all those, other chances I won’t get” (Life’s a Dream)

“We’ve all seen enough now it’s time to decide, the meekness of love or the power of pride / It doesn’t matter if you’re good or smart, goddamn it, things fall apart” (Things Fall Apart)

“The first place my mind goes is where I never want it to / like where it hurts the most or all the stupid shit I say and do / You can make it if you try / And if you don’t it’s gonna still be alright” (Planting Seeds)

Try and imagine any of those on a previous Built to Spill record. They betray a deep sense of loss that offers a purpose to the instrumentation. Which is to say: the guitar work is as clever and well-constructed as usual, but this time around it carries more significance. The percussion is far more insistent, driving than in their past work. It’s not as sparse and thumping as in their 3-minute pop days, remaining far more subtle, but it’s a force of nature that demands movement. The guitars don’t float on the surface anymore; now they’re caught in the midst of the current struggling to breathe.

The result is a record that cuts in a way that feels more like 90s era Modest Mouse than it does Built to Spill. It’s beautiful, and if you’re not paying attention you pull it close, only to realize how deeply you’ve been scored.

Opener “Aisle 13” hints at all of this, but without revealing all. In some ways, it could fit into ANY Built to Spill record. It’s got the pace and energy for their early stuff. It would also nicely fit in the midst of “Sidewalk” or “The Plan.” And it exercises the sense of restraint of their later stuff. And in some sense, that’s the new element that it heralds. Here, in one three-minute song, lies the essence of the band. For me at least, about two minutes in I finally am able to wrap my mind around the guitar riff that drives the song – discovering that it perfectly matches my own internal rhythm. Or is it that I’ve put myself in tune with the song?

That question is answered, resoundingly, by the following track. “Hindsight” may well be my favorite Built to Spill song – and that’s saying something. It doesn’t have the stateliness of “Untrustable,” or its gentle forcefulness, but it does have an almost preternatural capacity to MOVE me. And it’s all in that guitar. These guys have always been wizards with the instrument, but this record is the first time they’ve been able to communicate empathy, pathos, the passion of a living soul. It’s visceral.

Tracks three and four provide two further angles. “Nowhere Lullaby” dials things down, offering almost a pure ballad, perhaps as a respite to the sense conveyed in those first two tracks that something was at risk of going off the rails. “Good ‘Ol Boredom” is probably the most clear throwback to the late 90s version of the band. It chugs along, reminding you that while things may change, they’re still really the same.

With those four tracks, they set out the terms of the record. But it’s with the fifth one that they reveal just how far in they want to take us. “Life’s a Dream” is every bit as pure as “Nowhere Lullaby” but it also shares a sort of passionate luminosity with “Hindsight.” The guitar interlude is a slow burn, and it sets the stage for the lines referenced above (“finally decided, and by decide I mean accept”), which ache with a deep weariness. They reveal a soul battered by time, carrying on without a sense of purpose, and yet still carrying on.

Things drop off a bit after that, with “Oh Yeah” and “Done” failing to progress much beyond the loose jam attitude that characterizes their weaker work. However, they bookend “Pat” which, once again, tears apart your assumptions. It’s fast, ragged, and absolutely heartrending. It’s completely opposite in tone, style, and just about everything else – but the only song I can think to compare it to is “Twin Falls,” just because of the sense of presence that it offers. If the biggest weakness of all previous BTS records was the ever-present gap that couldn’t be erased between singer and song, the line is once and for all torn apart on “Pat.” There is no ironic distance here, no vague ruminations on the world as such. This time there’s only the here and now, and a deep pain about the fact that we can’t ever go back.

If the opening five tracks established the framework for the record and “Pat” is in some sense the culmination, then the final three tracks constitute the reprise and denouement. “Planting Seeds” kicks things off by returning to the resolute percussion of the opening two tracks, building a beautiful pop song out of the very simple relation between those drums and some of their more subtle guitar work. It’s then followed by “Things Fall Apart” which reminds us of the depths that we discovered in “Life’s a Dream.” The power of the song is not in what it tells us, but in what it leaves unanswered. Is there a reason for all of this? Do we believe in things because they’re right, or just because we’d go mad if we didn’t latch onto something? Are we doomed to endlessly wander through the hallways of our own minds or is there some kind of connection, a true one, not mere seeming?

And finally, there’s “Tomorrow.” It’s a fitting capstone to a record that’s bleak but powerful. It sweeps and glides with the very best of their jams, driven by a steadfast will that will not be dissuaded, even if the power of entropy itself be aligned against it. It’s humble, unsure, incapable of offering anything solid to ground us, and yet the one thing you can be sure of is that it will not succumb to hopelessness. He sings: “I try to forget but my memory won’t fail me now” and the guitars wash over you. Like the whole record, it’s a fundamentally fragile structure of pain and loss that somehow sustains itself through the simple fact of its own existence.

Hindsight – Built to Spill
Life’s a Dream – Built to Spill

Sick of This Place – Slapstick

You’re going to hear a lot in the upcoming days/weeks from folks on both sides about the poll numbers on health care reform. The Republican spin obviously is that the public doesn’t want ‘government takeover’ of health care, etc. etc. There’s a bigger point I want to make in a second, but at least on this talking point it’s also important to simply remind everyone that a lot of the “anti-health care reform” people are those who don’t like the current bill because it’s not radical enough. That doesn’t make them supporters of the bill of course, but it does offer some texture that the GOP spinners don’t want to address.

Which brings me to the other side. The left-wing folks who seem insistent on killing the bill now that it’s been Liebermanized. Those folks, in fact, themselves make up a pretty big percentage of the numbers that have switched from pro to con in the last few weeks.

The risk, of course, is that this ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are angry right now, but if they were left in a media vacuum for a few days I think a lot (not all, of course, but a lot) would back down a bit, recognize that this bill is more than would have fit into the wildest hopes for Democrats five years ago, and support it. But if they start to see polling which ‘confirms’ that the country at large is opposed, suddenly the impulse to swallow the compromise feels a lot less urgent.

However, this is a classic Keyser Soze move right here (“the biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist”). It’s not a coincidence that the far left is going to latch onto an argument that the right will also be trying to push.

I’ve insisted all along that health care reform is not going to look popular when it finally comes to a vote. This is an inevitable function of the legislative process. As I wrote two months ago:

There are just structural elements of this process (a deeply ingrained status quo bias being the most powerful) which mean that the side proposing change is going to do worse and worse in the polls the closer it comes to actually passing something.

People love ‘change’ when it’s abstract, but the more particular it gets, the scarier it becomes. This is to be expected. The job of legislators is not to freak out too much about public opinion in the short-term. If you drill down to just a single moment, you’ll get a far less useful understanding of the situation than if you recognize the rolling and fundamentally temporal nature of social attitudes.

There’s every chance that ‘health care reform’ will be polling under 50% when this thing finally comes to the floor. What Democratic legislators need to understand is that a few years down the road people will have become accustomed to their new levels of health coverage and things will be well on their way to turning the 2009 health care bill into another third rail.

It’s very easy to start thinking that the current downturn in support for health care reform represents some unique and meaningful event. That it demonstrates how right it would be to kill this version and demand something more. But, it’s important to remember that this is not an unexpected turn of events. Even more, it’s important to remember that this is precisely what those who are allied against Health Care Reform As Such want us to think.

If health care dies because the left latched onto this argument as a reason to give up, then I will truly begin to buy into the idea that our side is fundamentally incapable of governing itself.

Dan Savage is a great sex columnist, but the guy is not going to win any awards as a political analyst.

Witness two recent posts. First, this one, saying that “Bush Had 55 Republican Senators and Got Everything He Wanted … And Barack Obama has 60 Senators and can’t seem to get shit out of the Senate.”

Strangely, he does not seem aware of what was pretty common knowledge to everyone just a short year ago: George Bush was an abject failure of a president. That’s true on a number of levels.

For one thing, he seems unaware of the fact that, well, Bush didn’t actually get very much through Congress. Tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare. The Patriot Act. A few other bits and pieces. A couple free trade deals. His major second term agenda item, Social Security reform, crashed and burned. He went nowhere on immigration reform. He got his tax cuts but couldn’t make them permanent. He never got the money he wanted for lots of things (AIDS, NASA, etc.).

His victories were characterized by either A) total irresponsibility (all tax cuts all the time!) B) pissing off his base in order to get some Democrats (No Child Left Behind, for example) or C) Noun-verb-9/11. Category A is a big part of why his presidency was such an unsustainable policy disaster. It’s certainly not the sort of thing progressives ought to be aspiring to. Category B is what is making people so angry right now. And remember that the conservative base was REALLY frustrated with Bush about his domestic agenda. They thought he was a complete sell-out who just mouthed the right things but put no effort behind it. And of course, Category C is both historically unique and really just a variant on the first category.

So that’s one problem with this analysis. But another pretty significant one is that, well, George Bush was horrible. Remember how we used to be really angry about how he framed things in crazy polarizing terms (“with us or against us”) and acted like a jackass cowboy (“I’m the Decider”)? Remember that?

Not to oversimplify, but there is a bit of truth to the caricatures of conservatives and progressives. The former have a distinct authoritarian tinge while the latter can be seen as impossibly chaotic and disorganized. You can lament that, and hope for a progressive leader to go all Green Lantern on the issues. But when you adopt the tactics in order to fight the tactics, you rarely end up on the right side of things. The analogy isn’t perfect here, but to some extent progressives need to remember the arguments they make about torture. Namely, the fact that we don’t do that is precisely what distinguishes us.

The second bizarrely mis-directed Dan Savage post is here:

Here’s the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans: the leaders of GOP are terrified of their party’s base. And they should be: the GOP’s base is terrifying. The Democrat base—all those reasonable liberals and progressives and labor groups and queers—isn’t going to get anything it wants until we learn how to be just as scary.

Everything I just said applies here, too. But the thing I really wanted to emphasize is this:

The Democrats have MASSIVE majorities in the House, Senate, and won a presidential election about a year ago by seven million votes.

So, remind me again what about the conservative strategy we’re supposed to be admiring.

There’s this weird disconnect when progressive folks talk about how much the far right controls the Republican Party. One the one hand, they insist that this proves how wacky and irrelevant the Republicans have become, how far detached they are from the majority of the country, etc. It’s a sign of the fundamental irrelevance of them and their opinions. On the other hand, they seem incredibly jealous: if only we could exercise so much influence. What’s often left out, of course, is that the one might in some way be linked to the other.

Of course it’s frustrating. Of course we can demand that the Democratic Party in DC do a better job. Of course the left ought to continue pushing its goals. But let’s not lose our perspective here.