Couple weeks ago, just trucked at work, main assignment in nigh-omnishambles, bummed and exhausted, no obvious joy to be sensed or found, and leery of retreating to any known founts of less-bad for fear of tainting the good thing with bummer vibes, I collapsed onto the mattress, tiny glowing misery rectangle in hand, Bluetooth enabled, thereunto to mash the OH CRIMONY JUST STREAM ME ... SOMETHING button.
What came up was, perhaps predictably, Operators, Radiant Dawn. Maybe my endorsement will be found to be compromised, because Dan and Devojka are friends of mine, but if you try to enforce a position that a critic can't like the stuff a friend makes ... that's just actually sad, man. I mean, like: what do you stand for? How do you live?
Those are, maybe not coincidentally, some of the questions the record asks.
Wrote a song about how things feel static to the point of hallucination here under late capitalismhttps://t.co/VBel7VEuzn
— Boeck N9ne (@DanBoeckner) April 5, 2019
Anyway, the record was good from the moment I heard a note of it, and fantastic the night they played it for me (and, uh, I guess a couple hundred other people in SF or whatever), but that night, pummeled and scraped empty and just tired ... it was exactly right. The insanely good motorik beats of Faithless and Low Life, or the extremely precise sentiments of my state listening that night in Terminal Beach and Come and See or the basically perfect textures and flourishes everywhere (if I don't cop out like this I'm just going to name something great about every song, which may bore you) (and this is, after all, for you), all of it was just ... the word is perfect.
Maybe "this is very good if you're depressed" isn't the recommendation you want to hear. Certainly it isn't the one I want to give! So let's talk instead about the world we've found ourselves in, the one we inherited and tacitly, quiescently allow, daily. My state's on fire, my work besieged, my home threatened, my brothers and sisters caged, my every value rejected and punished. Nearly all of the good things that matter and that we might care about seem to be in ruins.
And yet: we're alive, and we can't just give up / succumb to despair—if we do, there's no point to any of this—hence ... dancing:
(Stick around for the chorus: it's worth it.)
You—we, I—gotta find bright spots. Some of them will be people who understand you. Others will be people who make you feel better. This record does both, and it's hard to ask for more than that. You're gonna be tired tomorrow anyway, and it'll be hard to do what needs doing, always: you might as well dance all night tonight, and give yourself something to smile about.
—Fat, kinda tired
Note one: As Marx said, and as I suspect Operators would agree:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways;
the point is to change it.
Note two: we're not fucking dead yet. And we're not giving up.
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