A Guided Tour of Lightning Bolt: Infallible

[tragabigzanda]

pearl jam sucks now

[epilogue]

I hope to have MFS up tomorrow, work permitting. There's going to be a longer lag than usual between my posts for this thing

Looking forward to it.

[tragabigzanda]

pearl jam sucks now

[epilogue]

This has nothing to do with this thread really but I saw this quote from a commencement speech Toni Morrison gave and it reminded me of the conversation earlier regarding the word 'artful.' So I'm gonna post it:

"But then, I am a teller of stories and therefore an optimist, a believer in the ethical bend of the human heart, a believer in the mind’s disgust with fraud and its appetite for truth, a believer in the ferocity of beauty. So, from my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art." - Toni Morrison

It's well-written, and I'll admit that she is a truly gifted writer, but this quote reeks of self-important BS to me. She assumes that storytellers are innately optimistic? What about the pessimists, like Cormac McCarthy and Albert Camus? Or the absurdists, like Kurt Vonnegut and John Kennedy Toole? "The ethical bend of the human heart" is pretty debatable, too...

Sorry, thanks for sharing. I am just in a mood today.

No worries, friend. I just didn't want to derail the thread again with a big debate about it. I'm in agreement with Ms. Morrison and I'd probably argue that McCarthey, Camus, Vonnegut and Toole are/were all optimists regardless of their respective styles.

The part I liked, that I thought meshed with the thread was this idea that something can be already artful and waiting to be made art. That seems to tie into what we were all talking about earlier with Riot Act. *shrugs*

Hopefully, Stip will get MFS up soon. I'm excited to talk about that guy.

[stip]

My Father’s Son

It took some time for me to appreciate My Father’s Son. My daughter really liked Lightning Bolt but despised this song, and would pitch a fit every time it came on. So it rarely got a listen. And though there are some nice moments throughout, overall MFS features some of Eddie’s worst writing. Add these two things together and you’re left with a song whose virtues had largely escaped me until I started preparing for this thread. There’s something pretty interesting happening here, and it helps forgive some of the clunkier lyrical moments.

The real power of the song is in the music and performance, rather than the lyrics. My Father’s Son is miserable and haunted, full of anxiety, self-loathing, and ghosts. In a weird sort of way it is pearl jam’s equivalent of Cats in the Cradle. The purpose is not to take shots at an absentee or sub par father. After a certain point in your adult life this would be more pathetic than moving. Fine for Ten, not for a record made 20+ years later. Instead both songs are about the fear and tragedy of reproducing those same destructive relationships with your own children, an appropriate topic for a record that grapples with the idea of legacy.

Since I’m not particularly in love with the lyrics I’m not going to spend a lot of time with them, suffice it to say that the most important line is probably ‘Now father you're dead and gone and I'm finally free to be me.’ What happens if me turns out to be the next generation of you. What if the past is something you can’t escape, something that prevents us from becoming the person we want or need to be for the people that depend on us (a personalized version of the same social/political point made in the first two songs that will recur throughout the record).? What if we can’t escape this cycle and perpetuate it with our children? That’s one of the reason why the lyrics fixate on genetics. What can be more path dependent and inescapable than our genes—the one thing we cannot change?

The lyrical presentation is somewhat whiny and overwrought (and by somewhat I mean completely) but this may be by design—the singer disgusted by the attitude, and the way in which self-pity and blame serve to absolve the subject of any responsibility for their lives, actions, the person they are and the people they are creating (it’s a song about parenting, but depending on how elastic you want the idea to be you can stretch this into a soft political statement as well). Overwrought, but still real—we are always reproducing the worst elements of our past, in our individual and collective lives. Every parent has had that horrifying moment where you see yourself adopting the things you hated about your parent and, even worse, see that behavior mirrored in your children. And the larger political examples are so obvious they’re not worth commenting on.

The music, as usual, helps develop the larger theme. The music is nasty and insecure, the bass line angry and self-recriminating, like the morning after the repeat of a terrible mistake that was never supposed to happen again. The guitar hovers just behind—a shiver up the spine, a stalking memory, intimations of broken promises, past failures, and the ghosts of the people we’ve disappointed. The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.

It would be nice if we could just let all that go (the volunteer amputee lyric—cut off our past) and start over. But we can’t run from it. There is no getaway. We have to confront our past and learn from it. The stakes are too high for us to fail. That lesson isn’t learned in My Father’s Son, but the song is half cautionary tale/half nightmare, one we are about to wake up from

[evenslow]

The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.

[Strat]

The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.

Dude. Where have you been?

[chewm]

I wasn't a fan of this song until I listened to it in a car where only one speaker worked and it was the one with all the bass and without the lead guitars. Now I do think these guitars work fine in the song but having only the bass there kinda increased the menacing atmosphere for me.
Easily my favorite song from Lightning Bolt for me now.

[stip]

The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.

Welcome back

[evenslow]

The bridge is one of the more interesting ones on the record, a twisted carnival celebrating a tainted, poisoned future—with a fresh start consistently in view but permanently out of reach.

Dude. Where have you been?

Oh, lurking. Walking the earth. Leave it to that crazy stip and his bridge descriptions to lure me out of early retirement.

[Kevin Davis]

Great write-up, Stip -- I especially like your interpretation of the minimalist, ambient guitars echoing out during the verses, which do possess an actively "haunting" quality in the way you describe. And I agree that the lyrics aren't very strong; I'm a big fan of the opening line ("I come from a genius, and I am my father's son"), but following it with "too bad he was a psychopath, and now I'm the next in line" is one of the biggest aesthetic lyrical blunders of Eddie's whole writing career. Not to get too precious about it, but the structure of the song is really set up for that line to have rhymed -- it's not like "Alive" or some of the other early songs where the rambling, free-verse lyrical style told part of the story. Every other lyric in that "place," throughout the song, rhymes with the line before it, as the constraints of its form dictate. It instantly sets the writing up to feel sloppy and amateurish, particularly in conjunction with the use of the word "psychopath," which -- regardless of whether or not the technical medical definition applies to whoever Ed is singing about -- just can't help but feel like one of those words like "fascist" or "Nazi" that people misuse too often to be effective in this context. It sounds like something teen boys say to sound dangerous and intense. "Now I'm the next in line" -- next in line for what? To be a psychopath? This line either makes it sound like Eddie hasn't been born yet, or like being a psychopath is something that magically happens to members of his family when they reach a certain age -- it's not a stretch to understand what Ed means, but the execution doesn't feel right.

Awkward phrasing like that abounds in this song. "Your fucked up gifts for which I got no sympathy" -- how can you have (or not have) sympathy for a gift? And hearing Eddie sing the word "insemination" in earnest is second only to "Soon Forget"'s "horny" on the Pearl Jam Lyric Yuck-O-Meter in my book. At least "a warmth alive and lingering" was kind of funny.

That said, this is one of my favorite songs on "Lightning Bolt." The performance and arrangement so overshadow anything the lyrics could have done -- positive or negative -- that they almost become irrelevant. Eddie's vocal performance during the first verses feels highly affected, almost like he's singing in character, a farce which he can't maintain, resulting in that wonderful moment Stip describes ("now father, you're dead and gone..."). I'm tempted to call Eddie's performance "unhinged" but it's really the opposite -- it's very focused, very deliberate fury, pitched perfectly to the music of the words (I especially like what he does with "fucked up gifts"), their meanings and respective syntaxes be damned. The bass (two of them, I think) is menacing and sinister -- maybe the only Pearl Jam song I can think of that uses the bass as a thematically motivating instrument this way (unless you count "Sweet Lew," which I suppose you have to).

It's no surprise that this song found favor with the folks around here who prefer their PJ touched with a little darkness and a little strangeness -- it does a great job fusing that part of the band's sound pallet with the more out-front vibe of their recent records.

[Leatherhead]

And hearing Eddie sing the word "insemination" in earnest is second only to "Soon Forget"'s "horny" on the Pearl Jam Lyric Yuck-O-Meter in my book. At least "a warmth alive and lingering" was kind of funny.

I never seem to have a problem with any "yucky" lyrics. Guess I don't mind yucky. In fact, I quite like both these lyrics.

[Kevin Davis]

I think it's less the words and more that Eddie is the one singing them. PJ's music just feels so unsexy in every possible way, hearing Eddie use even the most scientific of terms feels kind of like hearing your parents describe the night you were conceived.

[Leatherhead]

If he was trying to be sexy, I'd agree, but I'm sure he's definitely not.

[McParadigm]

From the moment I fell
I called on DNA,
Why such betrayal?
Oh I gotta set sail.

[96583UP]

imo,this song is significantly held back by two things:1) the calypso bridge, not because it is an island of weirdness in a sea of rock conventionalism; but because it doesn't go far enough to be calypso-ey enough. the addition of a parrot sound or parakeet, and a pirate growl, would significantly enhance the Caribbean flare of this out of place respite from a return to rock decency; 2) there needs to be a guitar solo. there is a need for guitar soloing, and/or drum soloing, in jamming. you shouldn't be allowed to call yourself a band with the name 'jam' in it if all you do is talk over songs all day, even if the 'jam' is a reference to food, as opposed to a method of music playing. how can you never stop jamming, if you never start jamming? start jamming, and then never stop. never, stop, jamming.

[McParadigm]

For being two of the worst, most "I feel embarrassed for you right now" moments in the Pearl Jam catalog, I do like how they paired My Father's Son and Sirens on the record. The one-two punch of a bitter song aimed towards an absent father and a fearful, tender song where a father laments the constant uncertainty that is his ability to 'be there,' and to protect, is a smart combination.

[evenslow]

I so rarely pay close attention to lyrics but Kevin Davis' dissection made me realize just how dumb Ed's contribution is to this song. Definitely worth a laugh. Good thing Ament's contribution outweighs most of it.

Except for 'I called on DNA.'

[96583UP]

the lack of parrot sounds in either MFS or Sirens makes this album entirely untenable

how can a person take a band in their 50s seriously when they don't include the layering-in of parrot sounds as a component of their album post-production process?

"shiver me timbers" says I, when me first heard this

[Kevin Davis]

From the moment I fell
I called on DNA,
Why such betrayal?
Oh I gotta set sail.