All of a sudden, the thought came to me, from somewhere blue, a small revelation about myself, right there on the fucking train platform. I hadn't been praised enough as a child. The majority of the attention I received came from when I acted out. This is where the problems with authority, the mischievous attitude, the smirking argumentative style, the faux rebel bullshit all stem from. It's one of those observations that's obvious to anyone looking from the outside in, like this is basic Jungian shit that you'd find in any Psych 101 class. But it's so hard to look at yourself that way. That's why normal people pay therapists, and don't wait for the lightning to strike while waiting for a 45-minute-late train and listening to passable mid-'10s electropop.
The secondary revelation was that I didn't have to blame my parents for this. They themselves had been raised with tough love and so their own style of parenting seemed very fair and just and extremely kind in comparison. Complaining about not being praised enough is whiny little baby behavior, relegated to round men with yoghurt-splattered beards in warm rooms clutching teddy bears. They loved me. I knew this then and I know it now. There was an imbalance, but had the imbalance leaned in the other direction, we'd be saying: coddled. They didn't teach boomers how to handle early-gifted-future-burnouts. They didn't know that the early high achievements would start to feel normal and the praise less warranted over time. They didn't understand that the slip-ups and boundary-crossings might start to feel like a perverse thrill, and that that part of the personality would be given plenty of space to flourish, while the lack of praise allowed the goody-goody shit to wither and die. How could they? I'm only just understanding it now.
It's not their fault because there was praise. That's the thing. It's just that I was perceptive enough to know that it was perfunctory. Again, there's no blame here. I'm just a little more perceptive of other people than most. I understood that the praise was the truth but also that it was being said because of some sense of fairness, and not because they were inspired to say it by my actions. "It might be necessary to express pride right now, because he did another thing that would make a parent proud" was the thought that I could read behind the eyes. Ask either parent now about this and they would never admit it, never back down, because they are completely committed to fairness and equality among family members, and to admit that equality was sometimes impossible in certain situations would be to admit that their singular tenet about familial structures is wrong.
It's taking a lot of sweat and grease to get to where we are trying to go with this, but here we are: I can read people. When I interact with someone, I can see their decision tree unfurl before me. I know what's up. I know why they are the way they are, or can make some pretty good guesses. Call it an intuition. Not saying I am able to use it, not saying there isn't the occasional individual who I can't read and who pulls me in closer with intrigue because of it, not saying that I'm perfect, not even saying that I'm all that good at reading myself like that. But I can see it sometimes. The human mystery, unraveled, right there in an interaction. Even in the music.
What I'm reading in When the Night is that this is the work of someone who is consciously choosing to make art that sounds a certain way because that is how that art is supposed to sound. I don't hear heart in it. I've made this argument before, and I will continue to do so, because there is so much music out there, we listen to so much shit, both in Record Club and outside of it, and to my ears, the difference is pretty clear, and if it isn't for you, well then, here is my album review in which I attempt to warn you about what I hear and see and feel. This is good music, but it comes from a crass place.
My favorite album of the year (so far) is 1000 Variations on the Same Song by Frog, and I read a description of it that went: "Pinegrove trying to make a Modest Mouse album." Terribly, terribly accurate. The whole "___ trying to make a ___ album" really fucking burned a hole into my psyche, and I'm pressing that template onto everything now. When the Night is an easy one: this is Local Natives trying to make an M83 album. I like (but don't love) Locals Natives and I like (and only occasionally love) M83, so this is a compliment toward St. Lucia, not a criticism. It also means that St. Lucia isn't necessarily doing anything new. I've heard this and I've heard that and now here it is in another combination. Any excitement I feel when listening is from recognition, not the experience of something new.
And something deep within me says that St. Lucia is okay with that, which devalues the art, slightly.
I think it comes down to the difference between these two pursuits: 1) the dogged pursuit of attempting to turn what you feel within you into meaningful art, and 2) the dogged pursuit of feeling something, anything. The first means that you are trying to be a good artist, the second means that you are trying to be a good human. But the second one doesn't necessarily mean you are creating meaningful art, because so much of your time is spent searching for something that you feel is missing, and so much of the art is filtered through that search, which renders it kind of cheap.
This dude goes continent-hopping in young adulthood in search of meaning because his life is devoid of it, he gets married and everything is hunky dory and his wife even joins his band, and now he's just out there making sounds that are going to carry well on the algorithm, get to the ears that need to hear it so that he can generate a profit. The art itself doesn't mean anything beyond the idea that it was crafted to sound good. This is why he spends so much time talking about his influences, Phil Collins and the like, because he's consciously trying to create a story where there is none.
I recognize this impulse within myself, is the thing. I empathize with the idea of growing up privileged and feeling this need to create art but there's not much conflict or pain there, and so you purposefully go searching for something to inspire you, and end up creating art that speaks to that search, and never find the meaning, and the art eventually folds in on itself, and feels vacuous, and you start writing album reviews about how you allegedly didn't receive enough praise in your childhood. The art becomes a way to retroactively seek that praise, I guess, maybe.
Or it could really just be an attention-seeking thing, depending on how pessimistic you wanna be. Bottle up all this background noise and you have a sleek album that sounds real good. Start thinking about what it all means and why humans act the way they do and why this response and why that counter-response and so on and so on, and it starts to seem a little small, a little vapid, a little meaningless.
But that's not what I was thinking about on the train platform, in the seconds before the lightning bolt struck. I was just grooving along.
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
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