plumbing

derek as tentative to inititiate words

phrases linked to half-known friends derek

clearly gazing awry a watercolour the foil

derek hurdling the gap with silence & a

facial contortion a pretense of thought

derek awaits the green turn right arrow

by mustering plans & physical changes to

combat contrived jealousy derek the fool

pronouncing to the glasses in rearview

if the poems can’t fix me what good was any

effort at me derek is obnoxious cutting

people who don’t deserve it there’s that

casual sneer to undermine placid

confidence derek seeking answers

by plumbing today the day-to-day

not the blanketing art

establishing connection

i began the morning writing a tract – a brief history of the way authors have used the pre-title ‘a brief history of…’ but who could really be bothered reading all of those books? instead, we invented a new way candles might sputter when reaching the death-end of the wick, especially at 11pm, especially on westerly wind days, blowing smoke out a locked window. i tried to think of all the things that have happened. i lost myself blowsily in the undertone of american rap, the way illogical way we ‘pass our bitches along’. corduroy & nylon blends. 4 hours of soaked oranges reduced to jaffa mud & chocolate. we’re hoping to explode the cliches though i don’t hold out much hope & won’t tell you that. new ways of exploring our own bodies. plurality suggested to be overuse of ’s’. never ‘z’.

stuffed toy

your link to the life size pony

& supporting wall of attachment theory

brandished gloom. sunday afternoons

in a suburb house, trees abut

the hasty rabbit gravestone.

 

being the contestant doing cleverly

tasks, else act as input calculations, composing

on the spot feelings. but fell a temperature drop

in the wide street 3 oclock & voila.

 

slump out of work & survival instincts seem

boring. casual. ephemera / journal the tags to

cloud happening. i have been feeling nostalgic sadness.

irrational pictures of me akin to panic. men smash up

the bathroom without this reading.

 

don’t play on my career. oh,

why do you say that when she’s in the room?

go & get ready.

I wouldn’t write about Silverchair; or, Self-Loathing (only to wake up & realise you weren’t the star of the video-clip); or, how the Poetic Line works in tandem with a Diction of Pain.

We one & all must first propose it as problematic to utter these three lines ‘I’m not to sure / How I’m supposed to feel / Or what I’m supposed to say’. Especially right at the start of a song. To this the querulous punter might respond in an offhand manner ‘Say anything but that!’ Stopping listening then seems a reasonable option to said punter. Sure it goes toward something greater. Daniel Johns is, or once was, depressed; he wants us to get that. He’s simply ‘not too sure how it feels / to handle every day’. He craves normalcy. Here’s a boy that became a star in high-school and then couldn’t walk down the street anymore. We remember countless interviews where he would whinge – in his as-yet unworldly aus accent – about still having to go to school in Newcastle after his band made it big. Local heavies would follow him, pick him up & throw him in their van, call him a faggot & other eccentric tags & then beat the crap out of him. A pretty up & down existence that possibly encouraged a certain  lack of emotional certainty. Big shot millionaires on the one hand; petty ‘emotional’ teenagers on the other. What to do? Throw it all away? Or write realistic songs about your peculiar sort of mental sickness perhaps, even keep doing it well into adulthood.

& yet despite the superficial lyrics, ‘Miss You Love’ does have its redeeming qualities. The building of levels via the arrangement of instruments creates relative flux. The first verse features guitar / piano / vocals, & it stays this way through to a pre-chorus. Then the drums come in to add a second level. Then – though it’s a slight change – we notice the affecting quality of a constant beat on the open hi-hat. This regular aggression creates the chorus. There’s a melody etched out on distorted guitar, then the song proper comes back with this heavier guitar underpinning it, then, for a final additional level, we hear the staccato distortion of ‘the teenage angst brigade section’. After that the song recapitulates on the earlier sections to head toward en ending. There is a lot of uncertain ascending here, not quite an emotional rollercoaster, but maybe just one part of the trip, the steep ride up the slope and then a plateau of choral ‘miss you love’. The plateau of a drugged normalcy.

We need to wonder though at just how much pretence is going on. How much does the poetic line here work to encourage the teenage angst, the indecision and otherness, in conjunction with the instrumentation? Because as you might interpret, there are the characteristics of a set pose. & it’s a pose Johns doesn’t even believe in. It’s a kind of ‘How to win fans & influence social misfits’ stance. In the video clip (yes, as we saw in the Chisel analysis, it makes just as much sense to analyse a song in conjunction with the cultural product attached to it, regardless of who had a directorial role in such product (or at least it makes sense to argue this position while embarking on the course)) all we see is the band entering a movie theatre, & then a large crowd watching a movie. It’s a love story, we suppose, & the audience all perhaps miss the sensation that the movie presents in a nicely packaged form. Is it the fault of the movie though, for doing such a thing? The idea of ‘love’ as presented by a movie (or a song for that matter) is hardly ever going to appear as complex and various as the real thing. So when Johns laments that he misses love, it might be more correct to assume that he has been fed the wrong ideas. If it is just a fad, something he’ll move through (he has implied such a thing in other interviews) why does he play into it so exactly. Look at his slouch and gaze coming out over downcast eye-sockets; even his folded arms. This is teen-angst boy, raging against being teen-angst boy. A slight surge of anger during the angst-brigade lyric, but then back comes the sadness of spiritual isolation. The self-knowledge of the predicament is slightly hollow.    

I love the way you adore product. The way you attach your fleeting self to a song, to a movie, because, it’s so wickedly romantic. But no actor can deal with being expected to return the adoration. ‘Yo: I love you Newcastle! This songs for you!’

Therefore (but not in this light) we must admit that by writing nimbly about your times & interests you attach yourself to those very times & strange mendicant proclivities of the personality. You effectively alienate yourself from others. It’s an example that relies on antithesis: in this track Johns writes about nothing but his own sense of alterity – there’s no specifics here other than what we can intuit biographically (quite reliably though of course…) & / or by making some speculative leaps (love = the idea of love). & this is how Johns forges links between himself & the generically uninspired teens of his time. & also how we mark out exact lines between ourselves & our poetic-internet contemporaries, by writing something about a band such as Silverchair, which is very specific, as any band with a name will tend to be.

God how we hate our predicament. We do it so collectively to boot. We just want to understand how to handle things as one amongst many, like a day ‘that just passed / through the crowds of all the people’, like sands through the hourglass – don’t you? But we can’t. We hate ourselves before coming to realise we’re not really that abstract figure on the bigscreen. As high-school English teachers would say (but prefixed with ‘Do not end your composition with:’) it was all a dream.

& so it comes to pass – you will no doubt have now come to this faux-conclusion yourself – that the diction of pain is not understandable unless rendered in song form, unless made real with a combination of line-endings (never breaks) & tonal rollercoastering. Getting yourself a band will help to un-generificate (sic, fully sic) yourself, even if you can’t write very well. It’s why this song is pleasant & sad to listen too; it’s also why no-one will understand us in making such a specific statement of intent: because they are all so strange to me & I don’t understand them. They all seem to cope with things with such ease, as if this were just some formulaic romantic comedy.  

An analysis of Cold Chisel’s ‘Saturday Night’; or, Understanding the Emotional-Range of a Bogan; or, Harmony; or, Writing Inflammatory Drivel Quickly.

We must first of all dispute the Wikipedia entry on bogans though, which claims the term is ‘usually pejorative or self-deprecating’ and indicates ‘a person who is, or is perceived to be, of a lower-class background.’ Boganism is an attitude not dependant upon your income. It is also celebrated as a positive description, often.

Wiki goes on to say ‘According to the stereotype, the speech and mannerisms of “bogans” indicate poor education, cheap clothing and uncultured upbringing. ‘Bogans’ usually reside in economically disadvantaged suburbs (often outer metropolitan) or rural areas.’ We should note though that later this website does admit to the celebration of bogan culture just indicated, finishing by acknowledging the site bogan.com.au has been archived by Pandora (it is of lasting cultural importance).

Anyway, that’s all just introductory small-talk. What we are interested in here is how the emotional range of the bogan is composed and articulated. Are they prone to experience greater pleasures and pains than that of the normal (we conflate sophisticated and normal here, for our own inscrutable purposes) person? Is it because of the cultural product attached to their prevalent fashions and attitudes? Should they be allowed greater community tolerance because of this? As a Socratic interlocutor might say in answer to all of these question, Yes indeed. It is to be our first and only three-part-hypothesis.

In the beginning of ‘Saturday Night’ we hear the title repeated by a number of voices a number a times. Four notes ascend to finish on a crisply shortened ‘Night’; then to this is added the famous whistling riff. The feeling is of hushed expectation, if of anything, tinged with joy (we can say this almost certainly inheres in the whistling). They got this right. For many of us – bloggers included – going out on a Saturday night, or Friday night is usual, and despite the usualness of it all, it tends to bring on the usual sense of anticipation. This is associated with many things.

But the petulant Don Walker then launches into the verse proper, which is a descending lament in a minor key. Apparently Chisel aren’t going to dally in Saturday night for too long. He sings ‘Saturday night’s already old / Walking into Sunday, and I find / All desires are cold’. What’s that about? We were just getting ready to go and have a few beers at the local, to get a nice relaxed buzz about us and to slip into that old sentimental anecdotal vein. It’s far too early for the regrets, isn’t it? We may have thought so originally, but what needs to be understood is that bogan-life gives one a special capacity for feeling, an extended emotional range, and therefore (perhaps lamentably) an ability to dwell in a state of premonition. And so what is said need to be put below what is felt. This is the way we need to read the song. Literary allegory doesn’t come into the bogan aesthetic because it’s too much about the words. Boganism is all about predicting the future in a manner haphazard.

Don Walker then tells us that the light of your company (you? girl ambiguous?) helps to show him the path on which he’s bound, the other benefit being a blurring of what he’s leaving behind. But as said, the lyrics, the apparent grasp at metaphor, must be cast aside in favour of context. He’s drunk, thinking of a girl he once loved (picture a beautiful girl from a town somewhat smaller than Sydney. Or an outer suburb – indeed this would fit the Wiki entry better, and sits well with the video clip that has a camera pulling back over the Harbour Bridge at the end of the song…) and he just can’t remember what he did earlier in the evening. All he knows is he’s walking. Walking into this Sunday morning which suddenly doesn’t look so good (unless he superimposes a past image of a girl).

Then, strangely, the triumphant chorus announces itself. Barnes begins to scream on about having ‘the keys to the city’, some ‘luck’, ‘two days money’. This is punch your fist in the air kind of triumph. This is the feeling when it’s great to be out in the city – nicely addled, having a great time. And yet. The light comes back. ‘If you light me up / this heart will shine’. Poor bogans. They are cast adrift in this sea of chasing love on Saturday nights. There is no good time for a good time’s sake, unless it involves scoring with a hot chick. It’s risky because often that won’t happen. And then you start dreaming of the one you don’t have, perhaps even quoting French lines about being a slave to love in a song that never really needs or wants such a thing.

It is all an up and down journey for the bogan and it just can’t be easy on their emotional well-being. But we must put it to you that this song at least helps us (remember, us: sophisticated / normal) understand the plight. Imagine if you were forced to experience the highs and lows such as are in this song in such quick succession. Then, imagine if the succession wasn’t linear (like when the intro’s hushed expectation comes back in sax-form combined with the bombastic guitar of Barnes’ chorus). You too would reject the more measured approach to analysis. You too would reject approaches to fashion that demonstrate work, hours spent in focussed craft. All you know is the circular upheaval of work, lust, recreation, sadness, nostalgia, violence. Only the random admixture of these forces makes sense. With just a little understanding – and promulgation of this understanding we must think of as being the major achievement of the Cold Chisel song – harmony can be attained.