mp3:
(from Stay Positive, out 14 July)
Maybe the record label will ask me to remove this (or maybe my blog isn't famous enough for them to notice...) but if it's available, download it, and above all, please buy the album and go see them live. I'm posting this song because it's brilliant, and so as to pique your collective interest in a band that really deserve it. That's one disclaimer. Here's another: if I sound unbearably pretentious when talking about this song, or if I sound just plain wrong - well, whatever dude... I'm not saying that this is what Craig Finn is thinking, these are just my thoughts. I kinda admire the belief that once a piece of 'art' - song, poem, movie, play, novel, painting, whatever - is in the public domain, it's unavoidably a part of the world and anyone is free to assign it any (subjective) 'meaning' they want.
There's a whole line of theatrical imagery throughout the song, which they associate with their own profession, and a little bit of the old religious language too ("They're holding their hands out / For the body and blood now" - 'they' seemingly being the fans...eek). The first two stanzas ("Don't tell...") convey some kind of shame about the truth. In the chorus though, they seem to embrace their roles as performers, players, providers of artifice: "We are the actors". On the other hand though, sometimes artifice goes wrong: although "Some nights it's just entertainment", at other times "fake fights turn out bad". In the end, I read the final lyric - "Man, we make our own movies" - as an acceptance of artifice - good, bad or neutral - as an unavoidable part of life. Maybe that's too neat and simplistic, but again - whatever dude...
“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way and recklessness is what makes experimental art so beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing…I feel this in the work of great modern painters such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Everyone acknowledges them now as being major artists, and yet, does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t, although I believe in it and want it to exist. But I think that part of the strength of their art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether it may be there at all.”
(discovered on this ceaselessly brilliant blog)
Well, that was rambling, pretentious, and at times probably nonsensical - but interesting?? maybe. Regardless, awesome tune :)
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