Mar 25 2008
You’re Pink You’re Young You’re Middle Class
One time you were a glowing young ruffian
Oh my God it was a million years ago…
- The National, “Racing Like a Pro”
I guess I’m like a super fanboy of The National now that I’m posting a third video of the band. This morning, I looked up their page to see if they were playing any shows in Chicago. Oh, there’s one. I was hoping for a smaller club or maybe even a bar, something smallish that would really suit the music. There it is. They’re playing here June 6. At the United fuckin’ Center. Opening for R.E. fuckin’ M. There’s a lot of stuff I’ll swallow at this stage in my life, but packing into the 300-level of the United Center to see an opening act for $200 bucks a ticket is most definitely not one of them. Sitting through Michael Stipe’s new religious antics gets a ditto ixnay. So I guess I’m out of luck.
It seems all wrong for the music anyway, though I’m sure it’s a satisfying coup for the band, and that’s good, I guess. I’ve got Boxer on a perpetual loop while I work; I’m totally hooked into that record like nothing since I played Strangeways Here We Come so many years ago. I think it just nails a version of late-20′s/early 30′s urban masculinity – all its self-indulgence, and self-pity, and wrecklessness, and foolishness, and yes, even some good things, I guess – it’s like a weird update of A Catcher in the Rye for that new moment of disorientation, or as “Mistaken for Strangers” puts is “another uninnocent elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults.” It’s not just that men get to play at being teenage boys long after women have been forced to abandon all that. Or it is that, but that comes with it’s own set of problems. Patriarchy fucks everybody, though certainly some more than others. But taken on its own, that experience – and I have to think it’s more or less generalizable – is complex and gritty and in some ways maddening. I think Boxer as a whole just gets the fucked-upedness of it, the good and the bad and the indifferent. Especially the indifferent. Here’s from “Slow Show,” presumably a love song, though it takes back everything it gives in that vortex of selfishness that characterizes The National’s characters:
Looking for somewhere to stand and stay
I leaned on the wall and the wall leaned away
Can I get a minute of not being nervous
and not thinking of my dick
My leg is sparkles, my leg is pins
I better get my shit together, better gather my shit in
You could drive a car through my head in five minutes
from one side of it to the other
I want to say, yes, that’s right, that’s exactly it. If I’m sitting on the El reading a book (right now, David Liss’ A Conspiracy of Paper, on BoogaFace’s recommendation, and it’s excellent), and I turn away for a minute and look like I’m staring out into space, that’s exactly what’s going on. I’m not big on “identifying” with works of art, and other such nonsense, but that’s just about a perfect description of this consciousness. You’re pink, you’re young, you’re middle class. You could drive a car through my head in five minutes. That’s exactly what it feels like. From one side of it to the other. And then:
I wanna hurry home to you
put on a slow, dumb show for you
and crack you up
And this is sweet, and also exactly right, caught on that strobic wheel that cycles through, but always comes back:
so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
God I’m very, very frightening
I’ll overdo it
If there’s a moment of reflexivity, of consciousness recognizing itself, that’s it: God I’m very, very frightening. Even when I care for the other, there’s something in it for me, symbolically. And I recognize how fucked that is, but still. This isn’t music for the United Center. Like I said, fanboy.
About four years ago, I went to see one of my favorite bands from my college days — Yo La Tengo — at a larger venue. Not much larger, probably 1000 people could fit in the place, but that’s a significantly different scene than the 100 or 500 person clubs where I used to see them in the early 90s. And Yo La Tengo might be a band that could do a larger venue, since they alternate noisy, feedback with folksy pop, but it didn’t work for me — I was just bored.
I’d probably be bored at an R.E.M. concert too, even though when their songs come on the radio I crank up the volume and sing along. But in defence of R.E.M., they have inspired and actively supported a lot of the indie scene, which is why the indie scene did a tribute album to them.