catapult magazine

Poor Beck. Saw him last night here in Chicago and he seemed lost. He definitely knew what he was doing with the music, but a main theme was his loss. And there was no attempt by him to find anything, only to express himself as lost in a fog, fighting for lostness as a cause etc. He covered the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize” and really made it his own, mostly because I think it really speaks to his current condition.

The Flaming Lips’ defeatist perspective on life, which preaches the reign of death over reality, seems similar to that of Beck on this leg of the “Sea Change” tour. Not a good thing at all. Beck has become pretty sober after “Midnite Vultures”, for whatever reason—several perceived failures in professional ventures and personal relationships perhaps. I hope he can pull out of this funk.

Please don’t tell him I said any of this, though. I have a feeling he’d want to brush my concerns aside with a joke or a corner-of-the-mouth smile meant to deflect any attempts to take him too seriously. How very postmodern.

I guess I’ve gots ta ask you about this one. I can hear Beck’s desolation in Sea Change, but I don’t quite get the Flaming Lips parallel. I think Do You Realize is a really simple, hopeful song: “Do you realize/ that everyone you know someday will die?/ And instead of saying all of your goodbyes/ let them know you realize that life goes fast/ it’s hard to make the good things last/ you realize the sun doesn’t go down,/ it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinnin’ round.” To me it sounds more like a confrontation of fear, saying, “Hey, okay. Death might not be the end after all.” It might not be very Evangelical, but I don’t think it’s hopeless.

Songs like “It’s Summertime” seem to echo this simple theme. As for a song like “In the Morning of the Magicians,” where he sings, “What is love and what is hate/ and why does it matter?” IN CONTEXT the line just sounds to me like a simple question without a simple answer, no matter who you are.

A defeatist perspective that preaches the reign of death over REALITY? That’s just a weird, ungrounded assertion. I’ll grant you that he’s not exactly preaching cherubs and golden streets, but simply because he’s contemplating death in a serious manner without mentioning an afterlife, doesn’t mean it’s not a valid line of thought. Personally I was refreshed by his readiness to be a frail, brittle human being—something I think Evangelical thinkers often insulate themselves from.

I think some of your comments refer to the article I wrote (“Fighting for a Lost Cause” in the phys. ed. 2 issue). The attempt of my article was to present a Christian view of some of the best music out right now (just as a Marxist or Feminist would have their own take on Snoop Dog or Eminem).

As a Christian, I’m not interested merely in artists promoting the idea of life after death, but I disagree with the idea that life is just a giving in to death (i.e. our limitations). I don’t know what further lyrics I’d choose in order to display what I perceive to be a defeatist attitude when it comes to death—the ones you chose seem clear enough evidence of the point I’m trying to make. The lyrics of “Do You Realize??”, when taken in the context of the music, are very much sentimentalized. It’s like the Lips needed to find some kind of moral to the story, a comforting feeling to offset the fact that their friend is losing the battle to cancer, and then decided to just say, “It’s all right. This horror is all just an illusion.” How unhealthy.

Contrast the end of “Yoshimi Battles the Robots” to Nick Cave’s final track on “Murder Ballads”, an album full of songs written from the perspective of murderers and their murdered victims. When Nick Cave sings, “Just remember that death is not the end” to conclude the album, his words have a gravity to them that says he isn’t ignoring the reality of death, but he has hope that death does not have the last say.

I should add that, even though I lumped Beck and Radiohead together with The Lips in my article, there are different things going on in each. I think Beck’s focus on self-expression makes him more likely to attach himself with The Flaming Lips’ perspective at this time in his life, but perhaps not at a later stage. And Radiohead is really in a whole ‘nother camp. Though “Hail to the Thief” is a gloomy (gloaming) view of the end times, it definitely does not sentimentalize the struggle. It asks you to turn the tape off and get off your chair. The more I listen to it, the more I find Radiohead’s album to be one of the most positive they’ve ever released. This is most evident in their single, “There there”. That song is a genuine comfort in times of trouble (you get that comforting feeling of being spoken to by a watchful God above, the same feeling as “Where I End and You Begin”). But the emotional subject matter, the “the end is near” motif is very similar to the works of The Lips and Beck.