Music to do your taxes to
No fiction this time. I've been listening to a fair bit of music recently, and I had some thoughts.
Happy new year Day Trippers.
Hope you’re smashing it!
Like everybody and their shoulder-parrot, I’ve spent the last week listening to nothing but sea shanties. From the TikTok mix that sparked it all, (Scottish singer Nathan Evans and whoever decided to duet with him and their version of Wellerman), to classics like What Do We Do With the Drunken Sailor and Leave Her Johnny, Leave Her. My claustrophobic home office has become an open deck, regularly dashed with salty sea-spray. The view out of my window is not a scaffolded care home but the rolling open water, and maybe one day a glimpse of land in the distance.
Lots has already been written about why these old working songs are so beguiling. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that simple songs designed for people in desolate, isolating conditions have some resonance to our current, deeply lonely selves, toiling away and reaching out in any way we can. But to me, it’s just as much about the fantasy that I’m not hunched in front of Outlook push notifications, but doing something rugged and heroic, or at the very least - outside. Sure, many of the sailors who made up the merchant navy were pressed into service, waking up aboard a ship after a sesh gone wrong in Portsmouth or Liverpool. But who doesn’t miss a good night out?
Typically, as with everything, the shanty trend was wrecked as soon as it started when the theatre kids got involved. Suddenly the modesty vanished and the preening vacuousness of the Pitch Perfect brigade began their inevitable, smirking glissandos. And, as the sure as the turning of the tide, there came the British “jolly fuck-trumpet swears” version about Jacob Rees Mogg, happily retweeted away by the most boring people you will ever work in a quango with. Still, thanks for the moment Nathan.
Where sea shanties are heroic fantasy, my other listening taste this lockdown has been all nostalgia. Or rather, a repositioning of nostalgia into a form where it arguably makes more sense. What I’m talking about here, is emo.
“Any given day, I’m a 6 of 10/Bed to desk to bar eyes on the floor”
The first song of Spanish Love Songs’ album, “Routine Pain” (the record is called Brave Faces Everyone) has the same chunky guitar riffs and soaring choruses that characterised an entire teenage subculture’s mid-noughties existence. Eyeliner, tight jeans, home-made tees and groups of loser boys and girls dancing in suburban rock pubs.
The losers are back, but this time they’re in their 30s. Now they’ve something to really moan about. The angst of “I’m Not OK” has given way to car loans, dismally average careers and those twinges in the back and knees that, if you think on them for too long bring with them the deep wallowing dread of senescence. Spanish Love Songs’ parents told them to buck up or they’d have something to really cry about. Life has proved them right. For all their teeny misery, the soaring choruses of MCR and co were hopeful calls of young things looking to their future. They dreamed of leaving that town, going to art college, meeting a girl or boy, doing something interesting in graphic design, perhaps creating a whole identity for themselves away from their parents who didn’t understand them, from the dickheads in their town and the grey lives they refused to lead.
The choruses are still there. But this time however high they go they can never properly escape. All they have is melancholia. The losers reminisce on their teenage selves. They see them dancing, pulling, holding onto each other with scuffed shoes and ribbed shirts dreaming of their futures. If only they could go back and tell them not to wish it away. That, right there, was as good as it got.
For all the fashion that surrounded it, you really can never undersell the earnestness of a teenage feeling. In 2020, when so much of waning millennial musical culture is an endless dirge of Calum Scott covers played in reclaimed wood furnished cafés, it is good to see earnestness return. Spanish Love Songs, The Hotelier and others might be rehashing the past, but with it comes the melancholy of a generation who’s future never really began and who’s time is passing on. The album finishes “We don't have to fix everything at once/ We were never broken/ Life's just very long”.
A little hope then, as the days pass.
Have a lovely week.
Another mail-out next week with some THOUGHTS and then maybe a little fiction before the month is out.
Ciao
Jacob