In summer 2016 National Review Online cancelled most of its hosted blogs, including Postmodern Conservative. (The blog’s leader Peter Lawler was soon putting much of his energy into new editorial duties for the journal Modern Age, but alas, he passed away in his sleep, totally unexpectedly, on May 23 of 2017. More on him and his legacy as we approach that lamented anniversary.)
Now in 2021, under Titus Techera’s leadership, a few of us are giving the brand another go. That also means I’m returning to the Carl’s Rock Songbook series that I wrote for the original blog.
Well, a few things have happened since 2016! Looking back, we can see that the biggest trends, the ones that in my judgment culminated in the social disaster year of 2020, got underway around 2013—that was the year of smart-phone driven behaviors really taking off, and also of the Trayvon Martin story and the IRS Scandal. The same year, incidentally, when I had a nightmare of an angry mob gathered outside my door, resulting in a little prophecy-piece titled “Tremors, Forebodings, Hauntings.” Now, sure, just the other day I noticed a black millennial woman, in an interview either with Coleman Hughes or Bret Weinstein, pinpointing 2016 as the time when “everyone kinda went crazy.” But however it got underway, today’s era sure feels like a different one from when I was last writing the Songbook.
The Songbook’s original 119 posts, most of them penned in 2011-2015, were a way for yours truly, a Gen-X music obsessive and yet budding social conservative intellectual also, to come to terms with the story of Rock and its place in the related Culture Revolution; and to a large degree, I had said the things I had most wanted to about that story by the time we were cut off. In a certain sense, my Songbook was always looking back to a dialogue, often critical, with the ideas of the bohemian Boomers. What had I inherited? What, from the dreams of those earlier 60s-shaped times, had in some ways worked, and what really hadn’t? And what insight did landmark rock songs have about that? But by 2014, my Songbook was starting to drift from such questions, and more towards the music of the Millennials, and the dialogues needed with that generation.
Music-wise, as in all the times of popular music “recyclement,” times which I hold have been underway since at least the mid-1990s (see Nos. 36 and 52), nothing terribly new happened during my Songbook’s 2016-to-2021 break. The big wave of millennial rock creativity of 2009-2015 began to recede, and in terms of what hit my tastes, a Soul revival (e.g., Durand Jones, Joey Quinones…), connected to a funk/disco one (e.g., Vulfpeck, Parcels….) also, became as important as the psychedelic/folk recyclements (e.g., Fleet Foxes, Ty Segal, Woods, The Oh-Sees, Allah-Las, the Growlers, Cate Le Bon, Kevin Morby, La Luz, King Gizzard…).
One of the bigger events, however, was the release of Weyes Blood’s Titantic Rising in 2019. Probably the most widely-acclaimed album of that year. I’m not that familiar with the music of the Carpenters or Kate Bush, but a 101 critics say the band combines their styles, so that’s probably right-enough. My impression is the album takes 70s soft-rock in it sturdiest singer-songwriter mode, complete with strings, and adds a certain 80s-synthy art-school dissonance, often in the background. As background this is used to evoke the coldness, futurism, and wonder we associate with outer-space; that is especially noticeable at the end of the upbeat “Everyday” –(listen from about 4 minutes on). Weyes Blood means to suggest, I think, that a kind of impersonal music of the spheres is always at work, regardless of whatever is happening with the busy human music.
All in all, it’s a very effective and natural-feeling musical recipe, but of course, what makes it take flight are the sweeping melodies and fascinating lyrics devised by the leader and songwriter Natalie Mering. Rushes of beauty and sadness, and yet, a recognized need to push beyond the sadness; i.e., to hope that sunken things may rise.
We cannot say that “Wild Time” is the album’s standout song, but that’s because so many of its songs, “Andromeda,” “Movies,” “Everyday,” and “Something to Believe” are equally strong, and the album’s opening and closing songs, “A Lot’s Gonna Change” and “Picture Me Better,” are absolute classics. But it feels as if it might be the lyrical center of the work. Here’s a live studio version:
In a number of ways “Wild Time” is the companion to “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” Both deal with a sense that everything has changed, and in a way that overwhelms one. “A Lot’s Gonna Change” does this by means of a coming-of-age song pattern, a bit like the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” in which a young person enters into disillusionment:
If I could go back to a time before now
Before I ever fell down
Go back to a time when I was just a girl
When I had the whole world
Gently wrapped around meAnd no good thing could be taken away…
What makes this so touching, and not a self-pity party like “Yesterday,” is the way a second voice, that of a motherly comforter, enters in, and offers various reassurances, and adult counsels. The assurances are sincere-if-clichéd ones—e.g., you’re going to be just fine—and yet, are quickly followed by but, babe… and then, the chorus:
A lot's gonna change
In your life…time
Try to leave it all behind
In your life…time.
And the next verse reveals that the changes are those of our modern times:
Born in a century lost to memories.
Falling trees, get off your knees,
no one can keep you down.
So, environmental disaster, inoperative cultural memory (or over-nostalgic use of it), and an increased submissiveness are some of the bad changes. Another line adds the issue of isolation, i.e., the likelihood of friends and family not sticking around. We notice again the use of a clichéd reassurance—no one can keep you down--, which seems unlikely to prove adequate against the larger situation.
“Wild Time” (here is the studio version) tells us more about the changes afoot--i.e., in this song, we are not mainly dealing with the timeless matter of disillusionment after youth, but are focused on the specifically 21st-century situation. It begins with this:
Look around,
there's nothing left to keep.
By the bottles that broke you
from the solace you seek.
So it might seem another personal-crisis song, but then it shifts to the larger situation:
Didn't know you were one in a million,
stuck inside the wall.
I'm wonderin’ how we ever got here
With no fear, we'd fall.
Clever lyrical work: again the clichéd positivity, being told you’re one in a million, but with this line then turned around to reveal that the individual is in fact not at all special, but just one more bit of material in a massive wall. That’s likely also an allusion to the (god-awful) Pink Floyd hit “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,” and if so, another turn-around: the boomer songster presented his bullying teacher as another barrier to, another villain against, his freedom, whereas the millennial songster knows that the “wall” that now blocks us most of all consists of…us, of each individual pursuing her special-ness. In the typical ways of doing that today, the individual helps builds up the monolith of social-media authority. (Cc. paragraphs 12-14 of Tocqueville’s “restlessness chapter,” Democracy in America, II, 2.13: “they destroyed the annoying privileges of a few…they encounter the competition of all. …it is very difficult…to cut through the uniform crowd that surrounds and crushes…”)
From this point, the lyrics become a little more difficult to interpret, but I believe the next stanza refers to the internet—that, I think, is the main part of the wall that is blocking and anonymizing individuals:
Taking up all of our eyes,
beauty, a machine that’s working,
running on a million people tryin’…
Don’t cry, it’s a wild time to be alive.
It’s hard to associate beauty with the internet, but maybe Mering is saying that’s what we’re really after when we surf and post? Or that that’s what we’ve reduced our search for beauty to? In any case, the reasons I’m thinking internet are the line about a machine that runs on a million people tryin’ and the one about it how its taking up all of our eyes. Of course, the times themselves suggest it.
Now, I’m tempted to regard the central it’s a wild time to be alive line as just one more positive cliché, but Mering appears particularly serious about this one—really crazy times are potentially ones which open us up to healthy change. Again, the song’s very first lines set us against the instinct to keep hold of the old, and then there’s this:
Turn around, it's time for you to slowly
let these changes, make you more holy, and true.
Otherwise, you just made it complicated, for nothin’.One and all, a place for us to fall.
Those are powerfully healing words, and they remind us that falling can be a good thing—maybe a true “place of rest” is a place where we can do that.
At this point, let’s look at some of Mering’s own comment on “Wild Time”:
This song is about yearning for wildness and Mother Nature in a time of chaos. It’s for sensitive people who worry about the fate of humanity and feel powerless to do anything about it.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking apocalyptic thoughts and realizing that won’t get you anywhere. What if the world has always been ending? What if the sprawl of our cities are just as wild as the forests? What if climate change and the destruction of our natural habitat is a reflection of the nature within us, however sublimely horrifying and hard to understand? We’re animals, we play out a very precarious drama of life, and we grasp for what’s left of the protective womb - but maybe the notion that we’re somehow separated from her is an illusion. Maybe it is, truly, a wild time to be alive.
Some wise ideas there, but certain moves of deflection also. As I believe I notice a number of millennial songwriters doing in an interview situation, when speaking of a song that suggests a broader cultural decline, Mering nudges journalists and readers towards adopting the politically safer label of “a song about environmental decline.” True, a later stanza begins with the line living in the rising tide, and then speaks of a million people burnin’, which means global warming is as much on the song’s radar as the harm of internet dynamics.
Her statement also seems to be emphasizing the most positive spins that might be given the song’s lyrics, with an even playful level of counter-intuitive thinking, perhaps the better to tie it to the hippie-life vibe of the 2020 video that this prose accompanied. Whereas, in the context of the album, which closes with a song about suicide, and also features the dystopian “Movies,” which imagines people who live in a world where there’s no books anymore, “Wild Time” seems a song evenly perched between hope and despair, and more directly pointing to ours as “a time of chaos,” even of collapse.
Consider these lyrics, which are musically presented as a rush of confusion, followed by halting breakdown:
It already happened--
nothing you want to change more--
heaven found that lies went down, and
everyone's broken now and no one knows just how
we could have all gotten so far…, from…truth.
So however much Mering plays in her statement with the idea that our sprawling internet-ridden life is as wild as actual wilderness, and thus might involve changes of positive possibility, her bottom line is that quite a bit of what we’ve been doing has taken us far from truth, and in a crazily blind way, far out onto a limb.
There’s more, of course, to explore, and the story is still developing, about how Natalie Mering and the group Weyes Blood, named after a Flannery O’Connor book, approach the topics of truth and holiness. She’s given some interesting interviews about her evangelical background, and where she is now with respect to religious issues; moreover, one of Titantic Rising’s songs yearningly pleads for “Something to Believe.”
As I tried to convey in different song-focused piece (for IM-1776), 2020 was shockingly bad times, a season of open betrayal and of outright resignation to propogandists keeping us locked-up, marching in line, and down on our knees. But even prior to 2020, a sense had grown up among many that things were arriving at a disastrous place. Nor was this confined to conservatives, nor for those feeling it on the left, to issues linked to Trump’s victory—I noticed, for example, a 2014 song by Woods that clearly wanted to celebrate the millennial turn to the left, but couldn’t quite bring itself to. Because pre-Trump, I think, they were plagued with a sense that things had gone significantly askew, and even when they expected the victory of their preferred party and of leftists generally. I also think of these lyrics—which I think speak to an epidemic of corruption, mendacity, cruelty, and well, sin, from a 2015 song by the British folkies This Is the Kit:
So won’t you hoist up the bucket now, Charlie?
Hoosh it all over the dead.
Cause we’ve been getting most mightily filthy,
Mud-marks up to our necks.
I don’t know about you, but in my wider social circles, by the mid-10s there was a definite uptick of personal disaster stories, including suicides, often involving drug addictions or various kinds of internet-assisted vices or frauds. The pornification of everything was one of the factors at work, or more broadly, what Woods in another song sang about as the desire just to see, just to know, just to bend beyond the light. Actual rewiring of our brains and habits by our devices was another factor, and there were more and more days where you asked yourself: “has everyone gone insane?” and in a few honest instances, “and me also?”
How did we get to such a place? And, was there a way to fall, or to admit we already had, that might allow us to rise?
Some answers might be found in a 2017 book by a postmodern conservative sort of fellow, James Poulos, The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves. He has the cheek to open it this way:
This is a weird book for people who feel like they might be a little crazy. Maybe more than a little.
…instead of proposing to resolve the strange situation of democracy, as that book [Democracy in America] does, this book proposes that our situation can only be ameliorated. Ours is a crazy predicament that can’t be hoped, prayed, distracted, worked, or played out of existence. It’s so maddening because it can’t be solved. But what if that was okay? Maybe, just maybe, our predicament won’t break us if we choose—in an unexpected way—to give ourselves a break.
Poulos has gotten more political—i.e., less culture-focused—since this came out, and for good reasons. But I think that like me, he would smile approvingly to hear Mering assert (in “Everyday,” at 2:02) that true love is making a comeback. I can imagine him saying, “We don’t know that, Natalie, but you’re right to just put that out there, and see who might come to rally around it!” That is, while I’m sure Poulos and I have many political disagreements with Mering and the average Weyes Blood fan, we are perhaps united in sensing the peril and the possibility in these “Wild Times.” We are all postmodern conservatives and postmodern liberals in the (Lawler-suggested) sense of knowing, more obviously now than ever, that modernity failed us, and thus, that it’s time for new beginnings amid it. So without trying to describe the crazy riches of Poulos’s book, or how they stem from Tocqueville’s and Lawler’s thought, I will close by suggesting that for the atypical kind of “break” Poulos wants us all to give ourselves, which would seem to involve both rigorous self-analysis and a wider forgiveness, the sad yet expectant songs of Titanic Rising would serve as a fitting soundtrack.