CW37
Today’s lyrics were a request from my friend Matt Pike (not the metal guitarist into David Icke—the real Matt Pike plays an Ashbory bass and is curious about the lyrics to “spacin out”). “spacin out,” like “mystical ringo,” is from Maya Properties (2012).
“spacin out” With my math on a masterpiece I am sometimes fine I consider the movies, Consider them mine I got the sunmade shout I feel like spacin out! spacin out spacin out spacin out spacin out I was born in Wisconsin But I say: no more lines To be smothered/covered in ice cream And loved like all the time I got the nightshade shout I feel like spacin out! spacin out spacin out spacin out spacin out
These harder rock songs of mine without drums are always funny. (This one doesn’t even have bass.) They remind me of a middle school kid trying to act like a big tough high school kid and not pulling it off. Or maybe they’re sort of making fun of the older tough kid?
This precise tone of irony definitely has to do with the early 90s, when I started recording. Me and my grade-above-me friend Ben made 4-track albums, under the name Clov, in high school. In 1992, a friend informed us that we’d been scooped: there was a band exactly like us. He’d heard Ween’s “Push th’ Little Daisies” on WUNH. They were half a decade older, and they took drugs (we were always just pretending to be on drugs, or at least “already tripping”—our moral code forbade the real thing), but there proved to be, indeed, a striking resemblance. Duo (white guys*), 4-track, funny then sweet, pitch-controlled vocals, some jazz chords thrown in—yes. But the tone was the business end. We didn’t know the word “irony,” but I distinctly remember trying to describe, without it, what Ben and I were up to. “It’s like we’re doing the thing, but up on another level…”
*Not that that grabbed our attention then, but it seems wrong to pass over it in silence now.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” came out in the fall of 1991. The first time I heard it I had just parked my parents’ gray Subaru wagon in our driveway, at night. The radio deejay, a woman, was saying the song I was about to hear was charting higher in Ireland than U2 was. Now I know that this must mean it blew up in Ireland before (barely) it did in the U.S., but then I thought it meant Nirvana was Irish. Things were cleared up for me a few days later, if not the very next, but not before that first encounter. (And not before a comical argument with my friend Mike.)
Yes, I loved it. Yes, I was conscious it was a riposte to the virtuoso-guitarist status quo. (Not that that was technically new, but it was new here: at the top.) When I taught myself the song from memory, I accidentally transposed it down a half-step from F to E, so I thought the ringing (then droning) high notes were just the open strings—the perfect encapsulation of the new fuck you. (The fact that Cobain was barring the first fret of the top two strings with his index finger is just as good.)
I could write a book about the Gen X times, so I’ll tap the brakes. But I do want to say a couple more things.
Irony gets a bad rap. But this particular Teen Spirit (I remember those deodorant commercials)/Ween/Clov irony—I remember that feeling exactly. It wasn’t just mockery or “Oh wait, you’re not serious.” It wasn’t the smirking fear of sincerity, or lack of commitment, “irony” (still) evokes for many. It was a more complete sincerity. It was an alchemy of knowing something was flawed and funny and, yet, loving it. And while we didn’t quite love everything, it seemed obvious, when you paid attention, that everything was flawed and funny.
Kurt Cobain was making fun of a big rock song like “More Than a Feeling,” and it became a big rock song. The irony didn’t diminish the thrill; it amplified it. Same for me and Ben’s provincial experiments, same for Ween.
The craziest thing about that 1992 Ween moment was the shock of being face to face with a legitimate zeitgeist, of accidentally being part of something. You know we didn’t have the internet, but you know I’m going to tell you we didn’t have the internet (we didn’t have the internet). That made it easier to see that something uncanny, even quasi-paranormal, was occurring. Maybe what I’m trying to say is something like this: when there’s no internet, everything is still interconnected. Delicately and precisely interconnected in ways hard to explain. (Me and Ben didn’t even have cable television.) It’s like the internet is a shit version of something that is already there, that science has mostly yet to explain. The same things were arising independently at the same time in different places. TV and major labels and magazines would catch up and spread the ideas further, but first the shit was just happening. It was weird. It was weird to realize that what we were doing, who we were, was less an individual choice than we thought it was.
“spacin out,” though it’s from 2012, still bears the mark of that time—I suppose all of my music does. It revels in its flaws, its lack of legitimacy, lack of financial power (as expressed by drums, a “proper studio,” label support, whatever). It knows it is weak, but because it knows that—knows something true, ultimately, of all of us, but many struggle to admit—it can cut loose, transcend, cackle, fly.
The pitched-up, right-panned voice was recorded first. (Except for where I punched in to match the unhinged left-panned voice where it veered sharp.) Right-panned me sings the correct lyric, “smothered in ice cream,” while left-panned me messes up and sings “covered.” Having left this mistake, though, both are correct, hence the slash. 💕
My favorite Kate Bush song is the first song on The Sensual World, the title track. You can hear me imitate its erotic refrain before the second verse begins (in which I tell you where I was actually born, despite what you’ll see online).