This post, however, is not about songs like “Hornless Unicorn Anthem”, songs I can hold. It’s about songs that inspire in me an awe-filled silence. Old songs (which should raise suspicion in any canon-haters out there). Songs about love and change and all the things that bad songs are about except they’re actually about them. And though they may weigh on my heart, I will not name them. At least, not now. Instead I will practice the fanatical obscurantism of the age and delve back into my fetishized, hand-packaged, limited-edition numbered copy of whatever and proceed to distract myself by pouring over the little ticks and spasms of the unremarkable guitar parts and the vocal hooks between two bits of silence. At times I sense that these little pop songs (that I love, as one loves old photographs) are bad music… and that I have chosen them for the same reasons young me chose books over sports, navy blue over red: because of a handful of pre-existing environmental factors, genetic predispositions, and random events. My sense in these moments is that the little pop songs are not good but good for me. In the age of individualism they are simply mine.

If every so often I get what may be a glimpse beyond this horizon, I sense that the resulting experience is beyond my critical practice (such as it is) and my everyday listening. Usually I cannot write or judge or do the dishes but only sit and think, or cry. I am overcome by a force that seeks to reorder my life in pursuit of a goal higher than daily comfort or pleasure–that holds the day-to-day in disdain and works me into a frenzy of regret over a life wasted in doldrum. But for all the overstimulated inspirational hogwash that swells in my breast I find myself, mere hours later, craving pepperoni and an evening on the couch, as always. And when I reach for my headphones I’m back to whatever’s on my iPod Shuffle, most likely something I’m head-boppingly into or reviewing, something I’m putting onto mixes, something that’s a minute on the lips, forever on the hips. Something that’s basically no big deal.

The Mathletes are gracing my iPod these days, so to speak… but don’t take that as a slag: in this lonely, disappointing life, maybe just getting you from the streetcar to your front door is good enough.

Hornless Unicorn Anthem - The Mathletes

p.s. This is the first track from this month’s Cokemachineglow podcast. I assembled and sequenced it myself, and I’m pretty psyched about it. Have a listen here.

1. Cold cuts and other cured meats contain nitrates which, when combined with artificial sweetners such as those found in diet sodas and chewing gum (of which aspartame is the most common), create a type of carcinogen only two short chemical hops from that found in the tar of cigarettes. That Quizno’s sandwich you’re pointing at your face may as well be a phaser set to Slow, Painful Death Measured in Chemotherapy Sessions.

2. The odds of winning the lottery jackpot are one in just under fourteen million. You are as likely to see ‘heads’ come up twenty four times in a row while flipping a coin. But, much more interestingly, you are twice as likely to be attacked by a shark; four times as likely to be struck my lightening; over two-and-a-half thousand times more likely to die horribly in a snowy highway car accident.

3. If you were alive just one hundred years ago, the odds that you’d survive this winter would fall dramatically. One surmises, then, that your continued existence has largely to do with being born during, what we consider today, ‘the right time,’ and little to do with any natural guile or ability to survive you may presume you possess. That is until one thinks of how our lives will be viewed one hundred years from now, when they’ve discovered both the cure for cancer and car crashes, and that the trick to infinite longevity is to combine aspartame with cigarette tar. We are but footnotes in the history of life’s futility.

4. For the reasons of whatever cultural inadequacies, the manner in which you die, if not your death as the marked lack of you itself, can only be viewed as either humorous or boring.

Overture II - Katamari Damacy Soundtrack

Not only do dope boys have a monopoly on manliness. They can also completely kill me with a gun. A lot. And they are siiiiick with the ladies.

Now, it turns out they also party the hardest and understand what jamz are the most fly?

Man. Young men who make a living by labouring in the urban crime environment are so lucky.

Go Crazy (Remix) - Young Jeezy ft. Jay-Z and Fat Joe

“The nerve impulses in your spine are like cars on a highway. When there’s a traffic jam, nothing moves.”

“Johnny was a paperboy who was, in his own tiny yet honorable way, saving money to contribute to the recovery of his ailing father’s lumber mill. That was before he suffered multifocal osteomyelitis.”

These videos will make it to chiropractors’ offices, where they’ll sit, smelling of the sweet hint of burning associated with plastic and evoking the torrential hyperbole of similar sensations absorbed in the moments after which you pass through the sliding doors of a Best Buy. And its sentiment will be exactly as calculated as those machine arms, those industrial remnants now best left to China and India, which labor with unknowing precision while we congratulate ourselves on an ascension to a more enlightened digital age during which it’s software that is assembled rather than cheap rocking chairs, condoms or Chevy Tundras.

And yet, in the small control centre in the center of your big ol’ brain, most of which, like mine, is being used to store Contra cheats, there’s a memory that ensures that you will respond to these platitudes: when else were you talked to like this?

The house I grew up in had two ways to get to its backyard: the long way around the back and through a gate, and the short way by jumping through the hedge. When I was little I once opted, as I often did, for the jump. A stick was embedded in my thigh. I broke it off, wrenching the stem with my hands, and a small piece of wood remained under the skin. Fearing my mother’s disapproval, I hid the injury. She saw it days later when I was bathing, now-infected and looking like a Christmas bulb of angry greens and reds. When they cut it out of my leg at the hospital they didn’t let me keep the shard. Because, after all, it’s not the pain that’s real; there is no injury. There is only the way we normalize it, and that’s by likening it to something, by telling a story. When asked to explain how that stick felt as it entered my leg, or how it felt to see my leg gush forth liquid evidence of infection in response to the scalpel’s touch, I’m tempted to tell you that it was “like an interruption in the normal flow of traffic.”

Born To Lose - The Heartbreakers

But the nature of this hook is such that it makes up for all of the song’s myriad deficiencies, times infinity. The hook is giving it a million and ten percent. And that makes the song more useful than most.

I’ll explain. Most people, including me, are largely passive listeners — they listen to music while doing something else. We have music for dancing, music for dinner parties, music to distract us from the monotonies of bus rides and work. Music in this paradigm is functional rather than artistic, and the number of times we listen to a song is as likely to be determined by its practical usefulness rather than its merit.

The usefulness of Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel is as the backdrop for the drudgery in my life. Having it on in the background makes things like dishwashing, laundry-folding, and bill-paying bearable. When you come into my apartment and find that it is well-kept, know that this song has made it so. See? Music really can change the world.

Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel - Tavares

And then the flattened horizontal 8, looped in the Mobius fashion, against a vertiginous starchart backdrop, drifts in from deepspace and threatens to flay without mercy the fragile ego of our young psychonaut…

Until an avuncular David Byrne, like some guardian angel or animal spirit guide (a fox), flanked by a quartet of strings, appears and begins to gently unravel the mobius with his limpid logic and vulpine voice. Deus ex machina.

Finite=Alright - David Byrne

He speaks wholly in platitudes and clichés.

Me: Hello.

Him: Hello, hello, hello. How are you? Beautiful day outside isn’t it? Another day another dollar, thank god it’s Friday huh?

Me: …

Him: Well, a penny saved is a penny earned, my mother’d say. Still here and kicking after all, can’t deny that.

Me: …

Him: And it’s not like you can teach a dog new tricks, can you? No sir, I’ll stick with it. At least it’s not raining.

Me: (looking outside, nodding). You are correct. It is not raining. Here is my garbage can.

Him: Thank you! The pleasure’s all mine, I live to give yes sir-eee, it’s a pleasure to serve. Working hard today?

Me: I’m writing music blog entries.

Him: Oh wow, computers are difficult. Just not very personal, you know? I like to look a man in the eye, you know? So I can talk to him.

Me: (Silently, in my head) “But this man hasn’t said a thing in his life…”

Him: Well, gotta go. Lot’s of mouths to feed, bills to be paid. Hate that taxman.

The Closest Experience To That Of Being With You Is The Experience Of Taking Drugs - Monster Bobby

And yet, on paper, it is far less weird. Very little cut/paste modular pop. Evidence of theramins or harpsichords feels forced. Hard psychadelic drugs have been replaced by hard pharmaceuticals. Mostly what we get are simple, singy songs. Paired with a producer or a massive band, Brian’s weirdness feels simultaneously hemmed in and completely uncontainable. The “normal” tracks sound like a circus nightmare, and the occasional attempt to access Brian’s “experimental side” fails in all its intended ways, and yet remains strange in all the ways it didn’t mean to be.

Confusing, isn’t it? Brian’s recordings seem much more normal than they were in the 60s, and yet, they are far more strange. Furthermore, any producer’s strident attempt to channel Brian into regular songwriting paths only highlights how futile the process is.

With Sweet Insanity, an unreleased follow-up to his self-titled solo debut, we are hearing this dynamic in full force. Concert Tonight/Someone To Love (originally two separate songs) is this record’s most normal tune, a mid-tempo pop song about love with, you know, harmonies and junk. The lead+back-up-doo-wop vocal parts are regular enough, sure, but the bits of melody sung by 6 or 8 or 50 million Brian Wilsons are, in kind of a subtle way, unqualifiedly whacked-out. Brian penchant for harmony remains up front, just like in the old days, but now it is warped beyond recognition. His truly uncanny lyrical sense, coupled with the robotic delivery, is encapsulated right off the bat: Con-cert. Concert to-ni-ght is Brian concentrate, a powerful argument for his being the most singular musician alive. Producer Eugene Landy is either the puppet master, or is just letting the tape roll (who knows). Either way, the result is songs oddly comfortable with their own madness.

Indeed, for those of us who have been paying attention, much of Brian’s recent releases are not primarily a “return to form” but the spectacle songs fight against their own fucked-up-ness. As of late, rumours are that Brian is fairly tightly controlled; in the worst reports, he hates being on the road and is wheeled out like a circus performer by wife Melinda and a group of various supporters/opportunists. I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that, but the result has been Getting’ In Over My Head, a bunch of crappy, conflicted songs, and SMiLE, a revival that succeeds only through its obsessive recreation of the original, speaking more to the talents of diligent fanboy Darian Sahanaja than his hero.

Word is that Brian is working on an album-length (SMiLE-like?) song cycle for his next record. To whoever’s in charge of this pirate’s warlock of a recording project: don’t worry about sales or shaping the sound or reputation or the fans or whatever you are wont to worry about. Just let Brian be Brian.

Concert Tonight/Someone To Love - Brian Wilson

We could talk about fare hikes. We could talk about suburbanites with cars for whom property taxes are their ‘thing,’ who make up a powerful block of municipal votes. We could talk about access for rural dwellers, or ramps that descend on demand for the differently abled. And to do so would be valid, and relevant – but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the disconnect; the bubble, the iPod-enabled divide that makes chasms of millimeters, that imposes narrative on underarm smells and renders moving mouths wordless.

This morning I collected the body of Isadora Duncan; stuck between the wars, it was boredom beyond measure; I had amplifiers; she strapped her arms ‘cross my engines. And all as we chugged up steep Smyth hill, past the nth Tim Horton’s like an episodic, wallpaper nightmare. Sometimes I think the volume knob is dictatorially tyrannical in its insistence on an upper limit.

Young Offenders - The Constantines

For smart and culturally literate girls, offering clever insights on the songs would earn you an A, as long as you kept the tone properly appreciative. For unhip or less educated girls, saying something along the lines of “wow! all of this is amazing! you know so much about music!” would be enough as well. Whatever your station, you knew that if you wanted to keep him around, the correct response was one that reinforced his self-image as a cool guy with good taste, and that also positioned yourself as an appropriate girlfriend (or at least someone who could be molded into one).

If you were a girl with her own tastes, maybe you tried making a mix tape/CD/iTunes playlist for him in turn, in order to get some of that approval back for yourself. Probably he didn’t listen to it, or only listened to it once, or made some generic and unsatisfying comment like “yeah, I liked it” before relegating it to the bottom of the pile.

It hurt you a little but you didn’t say anything, blaming your lousy taste instead; and as your relationship wore on your iTunes library filled up with his favourite songs and your bookshelves with his favourite books. When you broke up and didn’t want to listen to or read that stuff anymore, you had to really go digging for the things you used to like.

Or maybe that was just me.

For three whole weeks I pretended to like this song. He broke up with me anyway. If I’d known he’d do that, I wouldn’t have bothered.

Country House - Blur