Prompt: "A song featuring a lyric that you totally used for your AIM away message at one point"
Selected by Nate
"Presidential Welcome"
Couch Slut
You Could Do It Tonight, 2024
The most reliable way to understand if a song has bones—if its charms are surface and fleeing or marrow-emboldened reflections of an artist or a scientist at work—is to listen to the song in question on repeat, over and over again, and chart how long it takes before its charms turn to ugliness, until its smile turns into a rictus mask, a kabuki reflection, a mockery of the very idea of beauty.
"Grey Ghost" by Mike Doughty. It's a lovely drop-tuned number. It's enhanced by a billowing part-time bass, by a barely-there snare drum that might just be someone hitting a newspaper against a filing cabinet. It's a perfect canvas for Doughty's brand of baritone emotional deflection; few are as good as making nothing sound like something, or maybe masking the real shit in a pile of leaves. A perfect song after one listen. By its fifth run, Doughty has completely run out of gas and the listener has run out of the room.
In contrast, "Go to Jail" by Chief Keef feels a little tossed-off on a single pass. A surface pass, or a pass by someone not interested in modern hip hop, or with engaging with the ongoing movement in the genre away from lyrical density and toward melody and textural performance, would reveal only a warbling, herky-jerky hazed-out track of muttered thug talk. Go back for seconds, thirds, fifths, 30ths, and the song only blossoms more deeply. The thug talk gains texture, layer, double-and-triple-meaning. The pain is obvious, as is the malice, as is the hatred, as is the fear, and they all tumble together into something more human and more real than words can convey, because the whole of humanity cannot be expressed in text, because even if you're pretty good with words, words won't save your life, and they certainly won't keep you out of jail.
I am thankful for "Go to Jail." I am thankful for "Restarter" by Torche. I am thankful for "Good Drank" by 2Chainz and friends. I am thankful for "The Story of Yo La Tengo" by Yo La Tengo. I am thankful for "Staying Alive" by Cursive. I am thankful for "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" by Wilco. I am thankful for "in the knees" by long odds. I am thankful for "Presidential Welcome" by Couch Slut, whose lyrics "I wasn't always president of the B-side" would have been a preeminent fixture in my AIM away message if the timing had worked out. I'm thankful for all of it.
To at least try and complete the assignment, here is an unordered summary of shit that I know, for a fact, made its way into my AIM away messages over the hormonal years. They're all an undignified embarrassment in their own way, but please feel free to select whichever one makes me look the worst.
4 comments:
The Stereogum comment section talk about Couch Slut all the time, and I was gonna ask you in this comment whether they were worth checking out. Then I heard the "song" that you posted.
This is not a representative song, but broadly speaking: I cannot see this being something you'd want to spend time with.
Format deep cuts
happy to see several very familiar lyrics on this embarrassing end list
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