Desiring Machine

I just recently became aware of the Dallas alt-country band, The Old 97s. Been listing to their 1999 album Fight Songs. Every so often I comes across a band much later in their career and wonder why I have never really heard of them before. Was I just not really paying that close attention? Were they just not famous enough to reach me? Do I not listen to enough radio? Am I not actively engaged in the music offerings that come out everyday? Am I just too stuck in my old routine of songs and musical tastes?

Well, listening to the Old 97s I wonder how I could be so deprived up until this point. Great songs, and and almost perfect blend of country and pop rock sensibilities. I am always in awe of the exquisitely crafted pop song. The perfect mood. It is an extraordinary gift to be able to craft one of these moment of mood. There is one particular song that grabs me and commands my respect. The song is called Busted Afternoon. It evokes such a simple but delightfully powerful and melancholic mood. A melancholy as pleasure. Self soothing experience of joy and pain simultaneously experienced. The very embodiment of bittersweet.

There was a fine rain
There was a red wine
There was a long whistle
and it was a good sign

There was a band playin’
Somewhere off-screen
There was a girl sayin’
“Come clean.”

There was a sad truth
There was a punchline
and there was a long whistle
and it was a good sign

And there was a long goodbye

The lyric don’t convey it exactly but the combination of the music, the singer’s voice and the lyrics convey “it” the moment, the mood, a particular moment we have all felt, a particularly bitter sweet moment of recognition, and liminal emotional awareness of the dual truths of a particular fact. I know this is not making things any more clear in my description of it. It were to point to something tangible I would say it has something to do with the tone in the singers voice when he sings “There was a sad truth…”, it carries the sad sympathy of the lyrics. The utterance conveys emotionally what the fact there is in fact a sad truth. The singer’s voice at this particular moment carries an empathy and seems to reveal emotionally whatever sad truth he is referring to in the song. What this is we don’t know, we just know it emotionally. Was it a break up? Just a temporary saying of goodbyes. A moment of self realization. Perhaps simply the mood of a particular and concrete afternoon in the singer’s concrete life and memory. What makes a great pop song is that the particulars don’t really matter. The mood, and feeling is part and parcel delivered in a complete package. Something tangible is experienced by the listener. It is all very real even if the details are not.

In Plato’s Ion, Socrates responds to Ion with his critique of the poets:

Do you know that the spectator is the last of the rings which, as I am saying, receive the power of the original magnet from one another? The rhapsode like yourself and the actor are intermediate links, and the poet himself is the first of them. Through all these the God sways the souls of men in any direction which he pleases, and makes one man hang down from another. Thus there is a vast chain of dancers and masters and undermasters of choruses, who are suspended, as if from the stone, at the side of the rings which hang down from the Muse. And every poet has some Muse from whom he is suspended, and by whom he is said to be possessed, which is nearly the same thing; for he is taken hold of. And from these first rings, which are the poets, depend others, some deriving their inspiration from Orpheus, others from Musaeus; but the greater number are possessed and held by Homer. Of whom, Ion, you are one, and are possessed by Homer; and when any one repeats the words of another poet you go to sleep, and know not what to say; but when any one recites a strain of Homer you wake up in a moment, and your soul leaps within you, and you have plenty to say; for not by art or knowledge about Homer do you say what you say, but by divine inspiration and by possession; just as the Corybantian revellers too have a quick perception of that strain only which is appropriated to the God by whom they are possessed, and have plenty of dances and words for that, but take no heed of any other. And you, Ion, when the name of Homer is mentioned have plenty to say, and have nothing to say of others. You ask, “Why is this?” The answer is that you praise Homer not by art but by divine inspiration.

In Plato’s critique there is the problem of possession and divine inspiration. The power of the poet and by extension music and rhetoric is the ability to sweep people away into “unreal” states. The experience and knowledge of the poets does not come from “art” (greek Techne) which is a materially manifested and embodied experience that enables someone to know what they know. The bricklayer or the baker knows by doing and so can really “know what they are talking about”. But what about the musician or the port who gives us an evocation? The perfect pop song that crafts a moment, a mood, and recalls an emotional states that we can feel and know inside without pointing to anything real or specific. I think what Socrates’ critique leaves out is the very notion of an emotional knowledge. We learn and come to understand through feeling and occupying an emotional state. This is why I am so in awe of someone who can craft a powerful pop song. They have the ability to transport us away. Plato would consider these folks dangerous, I consider them important to reminding us of our emotional potentialities. And the Old 97s have this capacity in spades.

And speaking of rhetoricians, the Old 97s have a great song crafted around the experience of embodying a specific kind of grammar. Their song “Indefinitely” is superb.

And the car was Japanese perhaps or Hungarian and blue
And it followed you down highway one, kept almost out of view
And it symbolizes something although you don’t know what it is
Like loneliness and longing for a future perfect kiss

I don’t mean no, I don’t mean maybe, I’m indefinitely, I’m indefinitely

Any rhetorician or poet should envy the cleverness of that line “Like loneliness and longing for a future perfect kiss”. What a great line. I wish I had thought of that one. The Future Perfect expresses the idea that something will occur before another action in the future. It can also show that something will happen before a specific time in the future. Its as if the very existence of the lonely heart hinges on the anticipation of a future that must happen before anything else can continue. And who can’t relate to being in an indefinite state. I don’t mean no, I don’t mean maybe, I’m indefinitely. I feel like that all the time.