September 20, 2005
Tuesday's Random 10: Failing Beautifully
1) "How Beautiful You Are" -- The Cure
2) "The Deal (No Deal)" -- Chess Original London Cast Recording
3) "Clocks" -- Coldplay
4) "Valley" -- Doves
5) "Will I?" (Dee Dee Radio Edit) -- Ian Van Dahl
6) "Are We the Waiting" -- Green Day
7) "Save a Prayer" -- Duran Duran
8) "Punk Love" -- Magnetic Fields
9) "I'm Dying" -- Vast
10) "Wild" -- Poe
"Wild" ends with the following spoken-word passaqe:
Father : Communication is more than just words, communication is architecture, because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without that will, that desire to communicate, would not look the way your house looks today.
Today's Random 10 leads me to think about the ways we communicate. In Poe's album, Haunted, which includes "Wild," she intersperses her own songs and lyrics with passages and moments from her brother's kick-ass novel, House of Leaves, and audio recordings made by their father. Now that the father is dead, his disembodied voice continues to haunt Poe, as do the narrative structures composed by her brother, Mark Z. Danielewski.
What structure do these songs communicate to me? Failures of different sorts. Failures of caring, failures of loving, failures of societies, failures of bravery, and failures of -- ultimately -- communication.
It simply isn't possible, most of the time, to express the strength of the commingled (and inseparable?) beauty and disgust in "How Beautiful You Are." Neither is it possible to communicate the moment when fear turns to anger, and the hunted becomes the hunter. All that's visible are the actions arising from these failures.
As Poe sings:
I go wild, 'cause you break me open
Wild, 'cause you left me here
I go wild, 'cause your promises are broken
Wild, don't you get it dear
You're not the only one who lives on instincts
No I've got instincts of my own
You've got alot of nerve to come back
Plan your attack yeah I am still waiting
You wrote the rules to try and contain me
You broke 'em
Now you have untamed me
I go wild
Posted by reparent at September 20, 2005 7:34 PM
Comments
I like Haunted quite a bit as well.
I haven't thought of Poe in a while. I did a phone interview with her for a (now defunct) music zine in the mid '90's. She's got some really interesting ideas about the way that music and technology interact. She muses on this quite a bit on her first album (Hello).
Posted by: Coco at September 20, 2005 11:08 PM