A Year of Blind Spots: Suicide

First of all... don't listen to this album. Suicide isn't music. It's some try-hard proto-edgelord bullshit that no one should have to go through. I spent one single day with it—a couple hours, really—and that was more than enough. (To put this specific point in PoYB context: Back in September 2019, it was confirmed to me that all-caps BAD music is much easier to write about when I received FOUR T-Pain reviews less than 24 hours after posting the AoTW for RC.)

I get that some people get their rocks off by being contrarian. I get it! Some people like to pretend that unlistenable bullshit is actually so listenable that normies don't even GET IT. These people are the worst, and you should stay away from them. I'm telling you now that I know that anyone who is needy enough to pretend to like something for the so-called "cred" is unequivocally NOT the type of person who is gonna be crawling on Puke on Your Birthday on a Saturday morning looking for some asshole's take on some fucking "classic" album. I.e., if you are reading this, then I fucking know with every fiber of my being that you will dislike the album Suicide by the duo Suicide.

Why am I even listening to this in the first place, you ask? Oh, that's simple. I'm a simpy little bitch who takes Rolling Stone Magazine's word regarding things like this. I can't help it—it's built in to the very foundation of my music listening habits. The 2020 RS500 named this album, Suicide, the 498th best album of all time. The number itself should've tipped the hand (I mean, if RS is saying that this is one of the best albums of all time but it's also worse than goddamn Harry Styles' goddamn latest album, then, like, c'mon). Here's the blurb that got me:

These New York synth-punks evoke everything from the Velvet Underground to rockabilly. Martin Rev’s low-budget electronics are violent and hypnotic; Alan Vega screams as a rhythmic device. Late-night listening to "Frankie Teardrop," a ten-minute-plus tale of a multiple murder, is not recommended. A droning voice in the wilderness when they appeared in the seventies, the duo would influence bands from Arcade Fire and the National to Bruce Springsteen, who covered Suicide live in 2016.

Two points. One, to get to #498 on such a list probably requires one asshole max to give you a high vote. So some fucking music journalist is coked out of his mind and is, during that high, asked to list his favorite albums of all time. Sure, I get it, this loon is gonna rank Suicide high because it might seem like it makes any sense to someone bonkered out of their skulls. But so then: two, regardless of the reason that it ranks on Rolling Stone's Top 500, it did, and so it must inevitably be printed with a blurb, and so some other asshole must write said blurb. He's gotta fill space. It's necessary in this world that we (myself especially) have created, the world in which we must write something for an album on any goddamn list, or else it's just a list devoid of meaning. Someone on the RS staff is tasked with giving Suicide meaning. He (or she?) is getting a paycheck. Get paid to write kind words about the band Suicide.

The irony of such a list, a list that features 500 albums, is that the lower rungs of the list are inevitably going to be overrated. Suicide, based on the two hours I spent with the supposedly 498th-best album of all time, is motherfucking incredibly overrated. It was akin to torture to listen to this (all apologies to PJ Harvey, by the way—I should've saved my harsh AYoBS criticism for this one). The further irony is that someone—potentially someone who is grounded enough to realize that this album is stupid—is getting paid to write about Suicide, and so what is produced amounts to bullshit.

Arcade Fire? The National? Bruce Springsteen?!?! Get the fuck out of here, man. These are some top-tier artists in terms of the Joe K*** pantheon of rock 'n' roll. If I were to place myself in the rankings of the general populace, I would fathom that I'm in the top 5% of Arcade Fire fans, the top 1% of National fans, and the top 10% of Bruce Springsteen fans (as compared to the general populace of America, I'm saying). So don't fucking take me lightly when I tell you that Suicide sounds absolutely goddamn nothing like any of these three artists.

First: fuck the RS staff member who wrote this blurb. Congrats, you tricked me into listening to something you knew I wouldn't want to listen to. Second, well... I guess I should admit that this exercise was at least interesting, if not enjoyable in any goddamn sense.

After like 20 minutes of being baffled by an album that I instantly hated, I turned to Wikipedia, which can sometimes provide some very basic and necessary context to an art form that I don't like. According to Suicide's Wikipedia page, this duo has "provided the blueprints for..." and then it names a bunch of musical genres. Post-punk, synth-pop, industrial rock—there are plenty of hours of music that I've found within these genres that I like a lot, and, with some of it, love unabashedly.

Can I, as the listener, connect the dots between Suicide and something like Parquet Courts? Or Chrvches? Or Nine Inch Nails? Sure, fine, yes. But that line that I drew is so goddamn long and twisty and convoluted, that you almost wonder why you're even drawing the line in the first place. It's like saying that I'm thankful for my '91 Camry and enjoy the fact that some caveman accidentally hit a piece of stone with a big wooden club and made the stone look somewhat like a wheel.

No, here's a better example: Suicide is like The Cosby Show.

Back in the day, when I was training for my then-new city job, our training class to a "class trip" to West Philly. The point of the exercise was that we would spend a half-day walking around the neighborhoods we'd be servicing through our jobs (with the assumption being, unfortunately, that if you got this job, that there might be a good chance you were not already familiar with the aforementioned neighborhoods—and you can extrapolate from there). So my group took an El ride to like 46th and Walnut (I think). We're walking down the exit steps, and I see a mural of Bill Cosby, and happen to make some snarky comment about the (very true) allegations that were just entering the general consciousness at the time.

The guy supervising the trip took offense to this, and eventually made me apologize in front of the group later on. I go back and forth on my feelings about this memory. On one hand, it was pretty fucked up that, in my lifelong quest to keep my head down at my city job and not make waves and shut the fuck up and etc., that I was made to apologize for talking shit about a verifiable rapist. On the other hand, I kind of get Mr. *****'s point, in that these neighborhoods are not privy to the information that I am, and West Philadelphians just see a portrait of a man who, at the time, represented a part of the black community that, up until that time, the entertainment industry had refused to portray.

My point—other than telling this very short and still perplexing anecdote—is that Bill Cosby, regardless of everything that has come to light in the past decade, was certifiably essential to the entertainment industry in general. Prior to The Cosby Show, black characters were caricatures. Cosby's show smashed apart that racism.

And yet, at the same time, we are allowed to have our opinions about Bill Cosby here in 2021. It is totally acceptable to say that Bill Cosby is a fucking monstrous criminal who deserves to die in jail. It is also acceptable to say that, now that we know that Cosby is a noxious life form, that The Cosby Show suffers because of that. I personally don't want to watch a show in which a rapist pretends to be wholesome. Do you?!

 

That's the same type of dichotomy I feel when I'm listening to and reading about Suicide. On the one hand, I absolutely acknowledge that, from an artist's perspective, Suicide quite possibly could have been essential in the overall creation of music as we know it today. On the other hand, I hate it. I hate it so, so much, and no browbeating supervisor or wackadoo RS journalist spouting out bullshit about Suicide's "importance" is going to convince me otherwise. I know what I know, and I feel what I feel, and importance ain't got nothing to do with it anymore.

I guess that's the fatal flaw in these types of lists, right? It's all a matter of who is creating it. Like we said in our reflection on The Raincoats, there exists somewhat of a disconnect between which artists you like and what those artists themselves like. So if Rolling Stone is going to have a list of the quote-unquote best albums of all time, then there are going to be some albums on there that only a musician could like, as opposed to fans of those musicians that like them.

So this is me throwing in the towel. I'm giving up. I don't like Suicide (and for real, there's a ten-minute horror song about shooting a baby in a crib, who could seriously like this?!?!?!). I am also here acknowledging that I can see why other artists might appreciate it. We can say that if Suicide didn't exist, then maybe artist X, Y, or Z wouldn't exist. Fine! I buy that! But I can also say that it is possible for me to love artists X, Y, and Z, and also viscerally hate Suicide.

 

The ultimate irony is this: it's taken me over an hour to write this blog post, and in the meantime, I've listen to Suicide at least twice more. In that small time, I've actually achieved some type of stasis on the whole matter. I've actually reached a point where I can almost see, from a very extreme angle, why someone might like this. Will I get to the end of my Year of Blind Spots and delete Suicide from my iPod? Almost fucking assuredly. But after typing 1000 words about how much I hate this album, I have, against all odds, grown to not hate it. Take that as you will.

But in the meantime, don't listen to this album.