  | ||||
 |
One Track Mind
I Am The Cosmos – Chris Bell (I Am The Cosmos)
“Every
night I tell myself I am the cosmos/ I am the wind.” Feelings grabbing words
trying to place themselves somewhere, to fit. To find a meaning. Any meaning.
Is this something big or just the biggest thing in my life? The song is a
spectral voice lost amid washes of watery, reverb laden guitar chords throwing
shadows around the inside of your skull. The song, so close to falling apart
and flying of into space. Or underground. Up or down. Just anywhere but here.
When
I first heard this song, I played it on repeat in my headphones, all day
walking, then in the living room at nite. Bell is talking to himself, telling
himself a story. He knows the gist of it. Everything except the beginning and
ending. He doesn’t understand the plot. He’s hearing voices. The mindset is
schizophrenic. Resigned? Not exactly. Hopeful? Maybe. This is love song. The
kind of love song coming in cloudy on some late night a.m. radio breaking up in
the rain and fighting the sound of the wiper blades pushing and pulling, back
and forth. A bench seat, an empty jacket riding shotgun. “Never wanna be
alone.” Tragically, fittingly Chris Bell died in a car.
“My
feelings always happening.” Isn’t that it? Playing the same song over and over
again. A dark haired girl (gurl?), vacuous eyes that grabbed onto your hand and
pulled you somewhere. Soft. It’s something you thought fit. Something (someone)
warm, and something about the street lights mixed with moon and pouring pale yellow
through the window? How’s that song go again? “I’d really like to see you
again.” “I never wanna see you again.”
Chris Bell (and
well, maybe all the members of Big Star…at least Chilton) stands slumped over
in the long list of rock n’ roll’s beautiful losers. Like the Replacements
after him, Bell seems to have dared to “snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory.” “Just when I was starting to feel o.k. / you’re on the phone” “I hate
to have to take you home / want you too much to say no.” Almost thought I almost
had it this time. “Don’t know what’s goin on inside.” Thought I’d write this
song. For you, for me.
I am in Pittsburgh, and it’s raining. But. I know that somewhere (maybe Memphis?) in some cardboard box, record bin is a copy of this single. The first step on a new start and a swan song. Chris Bell’s masterpiece. Car Records release 1/1/78. The single. The small harvest Bell would see in the brief period between his life after Big Star and his life before death. And yes, “I really wanna see you again.”
Jarrod DeArmitt is the Music editor at The New Yinzer.
Kangaroo – Big Star (Third/Sister Lovers)
Sometimes circumstances conspire to make of a
simple, some might even say superficial, love song something so scary it
renders the common black vinyl, the toothy grooves of which contain these sighing
adolescent passions like death caught in a bell jar, a nightmare so irrevocably
knee-knockingly frightening you can no longer crawl into your bed without the
comfort of some little light still burning nearby.
First there is a sound here that must have crawled up from out of some wet hole in
the earth, a forgotten indefinable reverberation from a collective past long
before supermarkets and master’s degrees. Or maybe it’s some rocketized screech
from our far, far years to come when space travel, red shift, and rhizome
manipulation are all a humdrum part of our yawn-worthy kindergartening.
But listen: this terrible screeching miasma of
keening noise, this metal ripping and rending; someone has soundtracked your
broken body cut from the crash, the bloody extraction from the smoking wreck of
your father’s car.
A connection is made in these first moments of Kangaroo with tragic teenage
melodramas from Leader of the Pack to Bat Out of Hell to There Is a Light that Never Goes Out; a
proud lineage of smashed motorcycles and shattered hearts, girl groups and the
theater of the absurd. A claim is staked right here. Alex Chilton has planted
his flag dead center of all things Pop. Elegantly and sans fuss that first
unsheathing of feedback, that sharp weapon drawn from a ragged scabbard cuts to
the quick exposing the moist heart from which Pop music leaps. There is blood
on this blade.
As Kangaroo sits at the center of all things Pop so it is also the centerpiece of Big
Star’s Third/Sister Lovers bridging
the total spiritual desolation of Holocaust to the rickety love-hope, the please-just-give-me-a-sign desire to believe in
something that is Stroke It Noel. Kangaroo is a necessary death, the only
available path to rebirth.
Ostensibly the tale of callow kids and their
house party courtship: I saw you once, I saw you twice, I hooked up with you;
Chilton’s shaky choirboy-caught-smoking vocals imbue the vacant proceedings
with an almost heavenly grace suggesting that maybe small-town teens desperate
for a bit of touch are all just fallen angels lost among the hard, sharp things
of the world.
The music, however, is a collection of
leftover jigsaw puzzle pieces none of which fit socket to socket but when
smashed together in the hands of someone who doesn’t care if the edges get bent
and indeed prefers that the final image is more suggestive of something
entirely elusive rather than an easily identified real-world representation it
becomes a mirror of the confusion and inner turmoil of everybody’s high school
years; stabs of acoustic guitar, fine shavings of feedback, the swirling
mellotron; the intrusive percussion like a parent walking in while you’re in
flagrante delicto. This music that cannot connect to itself is the texture of
everybody’s youth.
And our hormonal adolescence in the context of
a Pop song is traditionally best represented by the violent confusion and
overwrought morbidity of the car crash. Those parting images: We looked very
fine/’Cause we were leaving/Like Saint Joan/Doing a cool jerk, the beautiful young
bodies twitching and burning in a kind of saintly acceptance that they will
never have to grow old; their souls leaving for the next plane.
But Chilton doesn’t leave it at that. He’s got
one more card to play. The final nonsensical image of the kangaroo is one last
synapse firing, one last image, an illogical gem of ambiguity. It could almost
be a Zen koan.
But make no mistake Kangaroo is a nightmare because it never pulls itself together much
in the way of those dark dreams wherein you cannot scream to ward off some
murderous attacker. It never resolves and therefore traps you inside of it
forever feeling this failure of trying to hold your life together and never
succeeding but also never completely failing either. Always you are stuck
between opposing forces incapable of escaping the pull of their awful paired
gravity.
This is hell; a torturous prison of your own
shortcomings the like of which are constantly on display, an infernal endless
montage of your every sad human failure. And against all sense and reason this
sonic slice of horror is also one of the most beautiful things you are ever
likely to hear.
|
|
||
