Songmeanings net Bob Mould Again and Again

Photo by David Walter Banks (via Rolling Rock)

Information technology happened on a snowy night in February. Valentine'south Day 2012, to be more precise. I was 20 years old.

The day had worn down to goose egg. I was a brawl of nerves in my dorm room, sitting in front of a cheap laptop screen and tingling with artificial free energy. An audio-visual guitar sat perched on my leg, my fingers mindlessly searching its fretboard for unlearned, unformed chords that sounded pretty.

A year to the day had passed since I concluded my first relationship (something I had taken the full yr to bury deep, deep, deep within until the sight of her brokenhearted gaze had dried into an inert crust on my heart) and I had spontaneously traveled to a cafe up north to find some sort of connection with some stranger, whatever stranger. Three hours and ninety ounces of blackness coffee after, I had returned without a single homo interaction, and on the cusp of a panic attack. I struggled to breathe. My head felt leaden. My face up tingled and my legs threatened to give manner. Zombified, I had thrown open my laptop and did what I thought might make me feel better, as I opened iTunes and pressed play on the record that still buzzed in my eardrums from the walk over.

Halcyon Digest opens with a dream. In a mist-swallowed cul-de-sac, through a bout of post-blackout amnesia, Bradford Cox paints a scene scant on detail but heavy on mood. Its guitars, peaking and dipping, brainstorm to stretch out formlessly equally the runway's heavenward chorus blankets his vocals similar the dewy air of a warm Georgia morning time. I knew every line from months of playback and, in a vocalism equally loud as I could muster without worrying my neighbors, sung the lower harmony to Cox'southward guttural reminiscence as I tried to play forth on the guitar. I needed the air to leave my chest, to bail the waves of nervous free energy out of my lungs as if I was a sinking ship.

The song's 2d half, when it blooms open up, finds Cox'due south words shifting from the pictorial to the personal. Similar a love letter of the alphabet, everything is either "y'all" or "me." The words subtly turn: lewd, prospective, hopeful, discreet. That cardinal couplet repeated at its end ("how long was he/how long with estrus?") is clumsily worded – fifty-fifty equally it pulls off the same mush-mouthed trick as their previous hit single – and withal that awkwardness makes it more honest. It's sexual but not sexy, its opinion green but not naïve. It's like somebody learning language for the first time, parsing out want in a series of crude images.

I spent the whole night drowning in music. With my roommate mysteriously gone for the dark, I was gratis to indulge in ane logical transition to some other: Halcyon led to 2008's Microcastle, which then led to Atlas Sound's Logos, which then of course led to Stereolab'due south Dots and Loops because of Laetitia Sadler's feature on "Quick Culvert," and so to the myriad video game OSTs that aligned with the breakneck tempo of "Parsec." Music back then wasn't just a creature comfort; it was a way to arroyo lucidity without the strength required to live life honestly.

As the sun threatened to get in and my pulse has finally quieted, I made the conclusion correct then that I was done wasting my life chasing something I knew couldn't e'er be captured. I would come up out as gay to a close friend ii months later on.

All my energy during that time went to breaking down the internal barriers I spent nearly half my life erecting, and in that prison of shame and regret, Cox'due south words started to click together like puzzle pieces. I felt my Catholic background haunt me in "Revival," the yr I spent "Sailing" in isolation, the "Memory Boy" I deigned to trounce on as a teen, the tragedy of "Helicopter" rendered mythic. Late at night in the first-flooring bath of Tobin Hall, the door locked for privacy, I would drunkenly stare at myself in the mirror like a jury would a convict on trial, and Cox would be the stenographer verbalizing the energy between us.

What was I shamed for? What was I regretting? The more I sank into the music, the less it mattered. Cox asks not what nosotros recall, but if nosotros remember, and more than chiefly what it would mean if nosotros didn't. And because he posited that the alternative was a viable option, I could go the boy in "Earthquake" living some ruttish arcadian freedom, the sense of take chances and possibility as vast and nebulous equally its cavernous guitar waves, equally the fog that swirled across the lawn.

If this is a lot to share with you out of nowhere, I repent for that. I feel extremely hesitant sharing anything about my past with people I don't know, and I especially blanche at sharing such details, proper noun signed and everything, on a place like the internet. Or, to put it another way, I'yard not at all like Bradford Cox, a man who spent the early years of his band'southward rise in total blogger mode documenting everything from his band's tour shits to his disability to cum on antidepressants. Perchance that'due south why I've always felt a distanced kinship with him, the same way you'd feel towards an artist when their work touches you on a personal level.

Unlike me, Cox has never been agape to exist himself, warts and all. And but like me, he was a kid lost in a hall of mirrors, the weight of death hanging over his caput similar a sword of Damocles, safe but within the confines of a mental construct of fantasies that could nurture and betray in kind: able just to reverberate that dynamic in a collage of unlearned, unformed chords that sounded pretty.

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When Halcyon Digest dropped in the fall of 2010, chat centered almost exclusively on its adjacency to the explosion of "indie" bands that all of a sudden dominated the alternative market. (I use "indie" in quotes considering the whole thing was a term invented past industry execs to market bands with various sounds under 1 umbrella term, the same style their predecessors used "new moving ridge" to define a slew of similarly-indefinable punk bands – Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52'due south, etc. – in the 80s.) In America it marked the band's shift to a heavy-hitting indie label, London's 4AD, who in two brusque years had signed hereafter "indie" darlings like The National and St. Vincent. Its producer, trendy engineer Ben H. Allen, lent a new bass-heavy, high-fidelity sheen that further invited the comparing. Lockett Pundt's meek presence certainly didn't injure, as did the massive and enduring centerpiece he penned for the tape, "Want Lines."

Over a decade after, those who hash out Halcyon Digest do and so with the knowledge that its rumination on nostalgia meant more than just the trend of the year. It started in earnest with Jamieson Cox'southward summary of the album on Pitchfork'due south half-decade best-of list, on which he declares that Digest pushed the band'southward underlying queerness (here and onward referring specifically to non-normative sexuality) to the forefront. Always since, I've noticed manufactures in mainstream magazines specifically highlighting that atypical attribute. A recent Washington Postal service article noted the ambiguity of "Revival's" object of worship. Reflections on its songs in places similar Vulture and NME now point out the obvious link to Dennis Cooper in "Helicopter" and the slanted, elegiac romance embedded in "He Would Have Laughed."

Frankly I find this contempo appending a little odd because how the overwhelming majority of mainstream critics failed to identify information technology properly in 2010. Never heed the fact that Pitchfork'southward original review contains not a hint or mention of the "queerness" that their decade listing so blatantly capitalized on. Technically every Deerhunter record in a way is distinctly queer, because they're Cox'south records at the core and Cox strives to be all of himself at every betoken. Fifty-fifty a record similar Cryptograms, the nigh opaque album in Deerhunter's discography, cannot exist extricated from its preoccupation with male adolescence. Cox said as much when he explained each song's meaning on his weblog back in 2007 (I'll give you 3 guesses what "White Ink" is supposed to exist).

What I do believe is that Assimilate tackles queerness in the aforementioned fashion equally something like Cryptograms, appealing to those outside its boundaries past positioning itself within the one-half-blind labyrinth of adolescent memory. It survives because it resonates with a much larger group of people than the one it's supposedly designed for; the specificity, the stuff I would come to relate to, is actress. Only Cox has e'er been boldly, unapologetically queer. His ring's weblog and his earliest-recorded interviews find him every bit condescending about the inner workings of his sexuality (and, to a lesser extent, his gender) as he is at present. What's changed is the way it's represented in the piece: where sometime blogs and city mags would throw his queerness in as office of the sideshow element that he potentially encouraged, today's VICE and Rolling Stone articles care for it with the respect that a new, more agreement audience demands.

Because Cox writes from a position of unfiltered consciousness, that which courses through his lyrics can't be ignored one time you discern it. That rings true for every queer-fronted circumferential rock band that Deerhunter shares a lineage with, from Michael Stipe's cryptic lechery in R.E.Thou.'s "Bang and Blame" to Bob Mould'southward pointed omission of gendered pronouns in Hüsker Dü songs to Morrissey'due south constant deployment of the "handsome" trope. It may have been significantly easier to speak virtually queerness in the era of Deerhunter's rising, simply where it pertained to his music Cox remained destructive, every bit careful as his influences to keep that aspect of his identity hidden between the lines.

Well, by and large subconscious: besides the caustic championship of Deerhunter's disowned first record, Cox finally endeavored to bring his sexuality to the forefront of the conversation in 2013's Monomania. But before that, what cemented me to Deerhunter'south music was how that queerness weaves itself naturally into music that is so apparently powered past the alchemy of the inner vocalism. Deerhunter and Atlas Sound records take been described by many as psychedelia – a term that Cox actively rejects in regards to his own music – and I find the label sticks non considering of any association with the genre's hammy origins but considering of its invocation of the developmentally-arrested psyche. Or, to be more specific, its portrait of the damaged feedback-befuddled psyche, of which a thoroughly-repressed individual could innately understand.

Deerhunter caught flak early on for their reliance on delay and reverb pedals, 2 sets of mechanical crook codes that can artificially endow mediocre music with a heightened sense of mystery and depth. Information technology's piece of cake to be skeptical about fresh music you don't know front end to back, especially when information technology's pushed by blogs with an ulterior motive and a sense of self-importance. Only in Cryptograms' formless brume, in Microcastle's spiraling middle section and Weird Era Continued's impressionistic appendix, I found myself consistently stunned at the familiarity of their spaces. Fresh out of the closet, my heed was still a storm that needed fourth dimension to settle, and the tumult of those records helped me realize what was raging in me, and what had still to be released.

Have Microcastle, a record rarely associated with the queerness so manifestly breathy in a record like Halcyon Digest. I remember visiting a Newbury Comics on wintertime break from college and finding a CD copy, upon which rested a sticker with a quote from SPIN magazine. The quote read: "A agonizing plea for erotic asphyxiation."

That quote refers to a clarification to "Agoraphobia," a frequent mainstay on Spotify "indie" playlists. While Kranky may have picked the quote out of context for its shock appeal, SPIN had a point, admitting 1 made in a tossed-off fashion. The juxtaposition of death and sex is at the heart of Deerhunter'southward macabre schtick; Cox's obsession with Dennis Cooper'south piece of work, combined with his experiences in children's hospitals and the lurking shadow of the AIDS crisis, all take a hand in it. In the vocal though, death takes the place of sex, as Cox entertains the notion of beingness sealed abroad for good, with nothing left to say. It could realistically be a response to the backlash his early on blogging days received, simply the double entredres of its repeated opening imply something boosted, its "four walls made of concrete" resembling a closet as much as a grave.

It edges farther, just but just. "Calvary Scars" crosses gruesome Catholic iconography with a perverted voyeurism, its reprise on Weird Era Cont. filling in the notion with "finest wood and ropes and then thick." Otherwise, the record contends with the fallout from suppression, in the winter that settles in the heart on "Never Stops" to the coping mechanisms on "Saved past Sometime Times" to the melodramatic kiss of monoxide on "Twilight at Carbon Lake."

Reading these lyrics for the first time, I felt a giddiness at the prospect of finally relating to songs in means that weren't only ideologically or aesthetically congruous to my interests. Depending on who you lot identify as (and what you identify with) it can be hard to notice your story told in music. My involvement in popular music naturally waned as a child equally my interests grew darker. I couldn't get into pop-punk into my teens considering the people that bullied me in middle school listened to information technology. The nü-metal that should accept appealed to me later didn't, considering the guys that bullied me in high school listened to it.

In that location's something more to it, though. Every bit part of my Catholic upbringing, I endeavored to forcibly eradicate my sexual urges entirely. Every bit a result of that process, I'chiliad almost unable to process music in a sexual context, and whatsoever apparent sexuality in performance I instinctually remove from the picture (this is a nagging problem that plagues me today). It did a number on my ability and my willingness to chronicle to art that could accept actually helped me growing upwards.

I discovered Deerhunter'due south music right every bit I crossed the threshold into cocky-acceptance, and it felt incredible non only to find a band of similarly-cast weirdos, merely fronted by a weirdo who had lived through circumstances that, minus the medical crises, rang extremely true to my own. His weirdness was my weirdness, but his heroicness came from his refusal to hide whatever of it, despite the negative attention he and his band collected from passersby. Some would say that makes Cox a problematic graphic symbol, especially when y'all consider the behavior he exhibited on that Cryptograms bout and the occasional grossness of his blog'due south content. I would concord, just only to the extent that Cox might gauge a role model among his more impressionable fans. If anything, I could respect the artist for what I could never do: not giving a shit for the sake of transparency, or as if there were really no other choice.

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There were limits, of course. Cox's eagerness to indulge in his darkest, messiest instincts caused a not bad bargain of trouble for the band early on on, including a ton of tabloid-like coverage from music blogs and the consequent momentary departure of a bandmate. I can imagine the backlash affecting his willingness to communicate openly through his music. I can also imagine Cox beingness a nightmare to work with: mercurial, cagey, prickly, and far too particular of an aesthete, it makes sense that each of the ring's seminal records were challenging to produce fifty-fifty notwithstanding label and tour pressures.

Monomania has e'er felt similar a response to that limiting effect to me. It's the band's noisest record, but not necessarily their loudest. Instead, it's the moment when Cox saw an opening and leapt at information technology, aiming one time and for all to brand a proper name for himself as a queer rock icon. It was a good fourth dimension for it; tons of cultural factors (globalization and growing secularism most apparent, only not the to the lowest degree of which included the rollout for Frank Bounding main's Channel Orange) had caused a majority of the American general public to gradually get-go accepting the LGBT identity as a natural occurrence rather than a social aberration.

Whether he understood that or not, the timing was kismet. Monomania'south release coincided with his film debut as Jared Leto'due south lover in the critically-adored Dallas Buyers Club. Before and so, he had attempted to reinvent himself again in the warped singer-songwriter tunes of 2011'due south Parallax. Its encompass displayed a shadowy yet groomed Cox playing the office of the sexually-charged club crooner, and a significant number of its songs detailed – for the first time in his oeuvre – the inner workings of romance. Later years of relegating his queerness to the cerebral margins of his records, Cox was set to exploit it for the sake of art and profit.

In April of 2013 I stayed up late to watch the episode of Jimmy Fallon where Deerhunter performed "Monomania" for the showtime time live. In the space between that fateful trip to the coffee shop then, I had go the "Earthquake" male child: falling comatose drunk, waking up on dirty couches, indulging in all the substances and experiences I dutifully avoided as a teen. My beginning love was a human being from Western Massachusetts who was a few years my senior; nosotros had a really proficient fourth dimension for a handful of months, so equally if in divine karmic retribution he broke my heart exactly a twelvemonth to the day of my revelation, on Valentine'due south Twenty-four hour period 2013. Information technology was a messy closure, and by the spring I was still recovering.

I'll never forget the band's performance, though I wonder if Cox has, or ever wanted to. Dragged up in a leopard-impress push-downward and a nasty black wig, two fingers on his left hand sloppily bandaged as if they were amputated, Cox delivers a functioning that rivals his best as the band plays behind him. The song is about a life of unrequited love and the damage it does to your psyche, and Cox sings information technology with a conviction that feels drawn from personal circumstances. He spits every line out as if releasing pressure from a valve, the words bubbling through teeth stained from imitation blood.

Though the song ends with a bout of pre-planned theatricality that'due south far less effective in retrospect (the FCC'southward grip on alive TV remains evergreen) the ability of the show rearranged me. Information technology wasn't just the possibility that Deerhunter were the kind of band to leap into different styles similar professionals; it was that a band I had associated with my own personal growth were interim out my own struggles in existent time, which was something I had never experienced before. Information technology was a rare moment where I felt like I was a part of the world at big, where my experiences could be part of life's swell tapestry instead of just fringe on its outside. To this day it reminds me of the life-affirming power of existence represented in the culture you take part in.

Monomania functioned similarly, boasting vocal after vocal about craving same-sex connection so badly that you'd be willing to push yourself by your healthy limits for it. "Leather Jacket II" takes the Cooperesque fantasy of Cryptograms' "Lake Somerset" and reframes it every bit garage punk in the shape of a tetanus-infested junkyard, its pathetic speaker begging for the familiarity of being turned inside out ("Mayhap I'd scream…I was a goldmine"). "Pensacola" sees the band soundtracking an older man's romantic frustrations as he sips cheap beer in a deafening dive bar. "Dream Captain" is gay sexual practice in media res, its refrain referencing both Queen's "Maverick Rhapsody" and writer Jean Genet's homoerotic Querelle. And "Back to the Heart" is the resulting fallout, a track that bears just plenty specificity to be a honest-to-god gay breakup rock vocal ("Take me to your cabin/Like you promised then many times").

In between lay moments of sobriety where Cox seems to assess the darker implications of the record'southward debauchery. There'due south the enigmatic "T.H.Yard" and the tale information technology tells of a suicide victim who "came out a picayune tardily." "Sleepwalking" is similarly cautionary but less emblematic, as if Cox were warning his past self of the dangers of seeking love in the incorrect places. "Nitebike," the confessional climax of the record, sees Cox edging toward an epiphany but unable to achieve information technology, helpless to the sight of his bug swirling around him similar ghosts on a starlit highway. The imagery is just equally suggestive every bit what came before ("On the cusp of a quantum/when they took it out and stuck information technology in/It went so deep, man") but in that location's no noise other than the slapback filibuster coating Cox's vocalisation, as if his motorcycle were silently gliding on air.

In that location'south a running motif through all of Deerhunter'south records virtually reclaiming the by through amalgamative fantasy. I don't think that's by pattern; it's simply a facet of how Cox'southward own life turned out, and past extension the way a lot of young queer individuals find their lives progressing. On Monomania, that procedure is spelled out in its opening runway, where Cox explains a raison d'etre of sorts ("Neon rust is coloring the blood/Calling on the words to speak"). In its brittle garage-based noise, Cox could alive out his aspirational punk fantasy, painting a world where all the guitars are fittingly phallic and the disrespect of living out and proud mixes perilously with the vulnerability of an exposed bone.

Monomania is not my favorite Deerhunter record, but it'southward the one that I find best captures why I love the ring. At the height of their career, Cox and his compatriots chose to zig where they should have zagged, meaningfully leaning into messy garage rock when any savvy label executive could have cajoled them into writing "Desire Lines" and "Helicopter" over and over again. It's a deeply, visibly queer record that for in one case chooses non to embed that queerness so cerebrally.

More importantly, it marked the final fourth dimension I think falling head over heels for their work. Though Cox would argue otherwise, I found Fading Borderland to exist a massive disappointment considering it felt similar the band had capitulated to the formless, toothless "indie" that had quickly lost steam in the wake of hip-hop'south newly-reacquired zeitgeist and R&B's creative, inclusive renaissance. The record is pleasant but safe, and that may accept to do with how it's produced similar a typical hi-fi indie record, just the songs themselves don't contradict that feeling. "Breaker's" shimmering reverb and California sunlight, "Have Care's" soft swing (and its titular similarity to a song by another acclaimed "indie" artist), "Advertizing Astra'southward" palpable adjacency with Washed Out's brand of chillwave, the sheer commercial accessibility of "Living My Life": bands can do what they want, and Cox has never written anything from a place he wasn't currently experiencing, but I felt the lack of danger fabricated the music far less compelling.

It's possible that Monomania proved an exorcism of sorts, allowing Cox to play-act his inner torment in both freeing and mortifying ways, kind of like how a night of heavy drinking leaves a sickening hangover in the forenoon. It'south also possible that he and the band simply grew too old to want to engage in that blazon of energy. Age kills ambition for nearly every living creative person, and Fading Frontier could very well have been the product of a band softening their edges out of that necessity.

I have a nagging feeling, however, that the problem lay more with me.

In the summer of 2015, I was a year out of college and had spent that time tumultuously, living in a musty basement and defenseless up in old unrequited feelings for a friend I was sharing the place with. Later I had plant a human (or in more true words, he establish me) and after getting acclimated to his particular brand of emotional coercion, he and I decided to move to Washington land. I tried making music and failed miserably. In our single-bedroom apartment in s King County I was suffering. I think I needed a ring similar Deerhunter, fronted by someone who had understood my pain before, to be there for me. I constitute no such solace in a domestically-conceited record like Fading Frontier.

I'k not naïve. I empathise these people owe nothing to me. If anything, it made me realize even more than lucidly how much that music had meant to my personal development. Equally my tastes inverse, I would turn to Perfume Genius and Frank Ocean and Janelle Monae and, at concluding, all of the iconic popular artists I told myself I would never appreciate. Their commonage power eventually helped me flesh out a stronger, more than confident version of my developed self.

But I won't always forget the role that Deerhunter's music played in my life. As a musical act, they widened my boundaries for what could exist expressed aesthetically. But in Bradford Cox's cocky-witting unconscious, I also found a kindred spirit who helped me identify what was rotting within me. He couldn't honestly tell me information technology would go better, but he made me comfortable to the idea that it would be okay if it got worse.

Lives in Seattle, terrible diet, loves music, has hope for people

garnettinces1984.blogspot.com

Source: https://tapedeckpodcast.com/deerhunter-were-my-first-queer-salve/

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