Cloud Nothings, "Wasted Days"
I liked the first track anyone started playing from Cloud Nothings' new album, Attack On Memory, the Radiohead-esque "No Future/No Past" well enough; in fact, I thought for a moment or so that it was a new Radiohead cut and the boys were getting back to the basics. But as much as I liked it, I don't know it would have sold me on the album.
"Wasted Days" absolutely did, however. I hesitated about embedding it as a taste because it's a long taste, a nearly nine-minute song, which is a short forever in Internet terms. But this is just... this is just an amazing cut, starting out as it does with a kind of Green Day-ish sound (circa sometime) before morphing into a Pink Floyd-esque frenetic space jam (circa 1968; think "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" post-scream) and then winding back to something a little '90s-ish, Radiohead again, maybe (Pablo Honey era). The cliché "tour de force" comes unfortunately to mind, but there it is: it's just an utterly epic cut.
Although I also have to admit that there may be a personal echo that has me playing the track over and over again, and not just that it's a quality tune; this is another reason I was just a little hesitant about building a post around it, especially on a Friday. "I thought / I would / Be more / Than this" has felt like a sad summary, especially this week, of recently turning forty.
I don't know how much of this is a generational thing or not. Does everybody think they were going to be special or were Gen Xers unduly encouraged. There was also something very resonant in David Fincher's and Jim Uhls' adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club to the screen: "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake," Tyler Durden rants at one point; the protagonist has a soul-killing job he just stumbled into and (briefly) a condo full of Ikea furniture and absolutely no reason to do anything; he certainly isn't anybody awesome, and it turns out the only way for him to feel anything at all is to actually, really, non-metaphorically get himself punched in the face a lot. He absolutely isn't anybody important (setting aside the implications of the movie's ending, assuming, for the sake of convenience, the ending of Fight Club is even happening).1
Part of the premise of Fight Club is that there's a generation of men who were brought up to feel like each and every one of us was supposed to be special and unique and wonderful in our own way, when the bitter truth is we're almost all chumps. And maybe the Millenials share that and feel much the same way about it: Cloud Nothings' main dude, Dylan Baldi, must be fifteen years younger than I am. I suppose I wonder how Boomers feel about themselves, and before them, did the Greatest Generation feel full of themselves only to find themselves let down--"Let down and hanging around / Crushed like a bug in the ground", as Radiohead once put it. (Typing that question, it almost seemed to answer itself: were the Greatest Generation full of themselves? Gee, d'ya think?)
Sorry. I'm not sure I wanted to get into a melodramatic, hair-yanking, clothes-rending, rolling around in the sackcloth and ashes and baring my breast, Job-like, to the universe kind of rant. Least of all on a Friday. I think the point was to share a song I'm really loving, while conceding that only part of the love comes from the inherent awesomeness of the song and a fair bit probably comes from feeling like I'm in a shadowy part of the vale right now, and with the buzzards circling to add a nice bit of color to the locale, to boot. I... hope you're having a nice day and hope you have a great weekend?
1By the way, if you've seen Fight Club and are a fan of one of the greatest newspaper comics of all time, you might want to take a look at the single greatest exegesis of Fight Club ever committed to the Internet (if you haven't seen Fight Club, I have to warn you that the entire article riffs on the film's central spoiler). I wholeheartedly endorse Galvin P. Chow's theory: it makes perfect sense and explains everything.
"Wasted Days" absolutely did, however. I hesitated about embedding it as a taste because it's a long taste, a nearly nine-minute song, which is a short forever in Internet terms. But this is just... this is just an amazing cut, starting out as it does with a kind of Green Day-ish sound (circa sometime) before morphing into a Pink Floyd-esque frenetic space jam (circa 1968; think "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" post-scream) and then winding back to something a little '90s-ish, Radiohead again, maybe (Pablo Honey era). The cliché "tour de force" comes unfortunately to mind, but there it is: it's just an utterly epic cut.
Although I also have to admit that there may be a personal echo that has me playing the track over and over again, and not just that it's a quality tune; this is another reason I was just a little hesitant about building a post around it, especially on a Friday. "I thought / I would / Be more / Than this" has felt like a sad summary, especially this week, of recently turning forty.
I don't know how much of this is a generational thing or not. Does everybody think they were going to be special or were Gen Xers unduly encouraged. There was also something very resonant in David Fincher's and Jim Uhls' adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club to the screen: "You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake," Tyler Durden rants at one point; the protagonist has a soul-killing job he just stumbled into and (briefly) a condo full of Ikea furniture and absolutely no reason to do anything; he certainly isn't anybody awesome, and it turns out the only way for him to feel anything at all is to actually, really, non-metaphorically get himself punched in the face a lot. He absolutely isn't anybody important (setting aside the implications of the movie's ending, assuming, for the sake of convenience, the ending of Fight Club is even happening).1
Part of the premise of Fight Club is that there's a generation of men who were brought up to feel like each and every one of us was supposed to be special and unique and wonderful in our own way, when the bitter truth is we're almost all chumps. And maybe the Millenials share that and feel much the same way about it: Cloud Nothings' main dude, Dylan Baldi, must be fifteen years younger than I am. I suppose I wonder how Boomers feel about themselves, and before them, did the Greatest Generation feel full of themselves only to find themselves let down--"Let down and hanging around / Crushed like a bug in the ground", as Radiohead once put it. (Typing that question, it almost seemed to answer itself: were the Greatest Generation full of themselves? Gee, d'ya think?)
Sorry. I'm not sure I wanted to get into a melodramatic, hair-yanking, clothes-rending, rolling around in the sackcloth and ashes and baring my breast, Job-like, to the universe kind of rant. Least of all on a Friday. I think the point was to share a song I'm really loving, while conceding that only part of the love comes from the inherent awesomeness of the song and a fair bit probably comes from feeling like I'm in a shadowy part of the vale right now, and with the buzzards circling to add a nice bit of color to the locale, to boot. I... hope you're having a nice day and hope you have a great weekend?
1By the way, if you've seen Fight Club and are a fan of one of the greatest newspaper comics of all time, you might want to take a look at the single greatest exegesis of Fight Club ever committed to the Internet (if you haven't seen Fight Club, I have to warn you that the entire article riffs on the film's central spoiler). I wholeheartedly endorse Galvin P. Chow's theory: it makes perfect sense and explains everything.
Comments
But seriously: thank you for the sense of perspective, John.