Removed Excuses

For a while I wanted to write about 2 songs: Bleeding Love and No Air, pop mega hits initially brought to my attention by Valentine, and our own dear, dear Henry. What I wanted to say was simple enough—just something about straight forward metaphors in love songs, ones that break a bit out of literal conveyance, yet stay in the realm of cliché, thus tapping into something universalized and general, but still resonant. It’s a quality I have convinced myself is easier to find in love/pop/dance songs of yore than those of the present – though my notion is in no way grounded in fact – and it's why these two 21st century hits seemed so….important?

Both songs, like so many of their type, scream love—or rather, love-pain – bleeding, suffocating, stained and stifled. Like the rush of a heat wave, or the pulse of an open wound – caged in, walled off, always desperate, always on the verge of losing it.

“My heart’s crippled by the vein that I keep on closing”

Each perfectly exemplify just one function of words belted and booming – the application of “known” sensations (admittedly I’ve never drowned, and I’ve only bled a little, but my heart’s been broke, and so I too feel I share these sentiments) to dramas so essential, that almost anyone can perform quick personal translation – and the act of deciphering, or just listening, can become as simple as nodding along to a friend’s confessional monologue: yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I don’t know. Seems as though thoughts, and songs, that end in questions are almost always more interesting than those that satisfyingly tie up all the loose ends – it’s true in essays, in erratic conversation, true most everywhere. And songs like these don’t allow for that sort of world-widening extension, just a piercing recollection provoked - providing that immediate quenching of relation, but not much else. So, I want to talk about something else. The opposite or inverse of what I’ve tried to describe so far, something virtually indescribable, encapsulated by two vocal utterances (re)encountered over the last four months:

Here it gets confusing, because the verbal fragments I (plan to, can’t quite seem to,) speak about are in and of themselves declarations of ambiguity—it’s what I appreciate about them so much, and at the same time, what makes them so impossible to write about.

Here we go. First: I Don’t know where, but she sends me there.

It’s a line from Good Vibrations, a song I first listened to with new ears one day while working in Bard’s Student Accounts office. Out of an old irrationality, I have always tuned the Beach Boys out, crediting them rarely, only melodically and never lyrically, if at all. But this particular day, my boss, Viki, came to stand besides me as the song began to play. “I love that” she muttered under her breath, hand raised to indicate that certain spot in the song where Wilson sings the line. I went home and looked up the song. The video I found was all about the Beach Boys, them and their world. Hitting the drums, birthday cake lit, friends and scene and color— a visual daisy chain of some sort of (real/unreal) life.



In the song Wilson uses no metaphor at all - just that vagued-out, spaced-out vocabulary of his day dreams and love dreams and drug dreams. Sensation, not comparison. The song is about transport and ecstasy and rapture, and as the organ slows, and the haze comes closer – it’s like a hard day’s night in color video, they’re trompin' through the weeds, visions of some California girl spiraling in, the beat pounds, becomes diluted, and then finds itself at the forefront once more. Heart beats! The song is so familiar; you can’t think of it objectively. And that’s why its noise-scape remains so important. Clicking sounds, faster, and faster - and then the space age sounds powering through, the wavering calls at the end.

“Gotta keep those lovin good vibrations/A happenin’ with her.” The song is about sustaining the good, the unknown good, whether or not any known reality is attached. Because that doesn’t matter.

Why is this important to me? I can’t quite say. But, months later, another instance reiterated the strong, inexplicable pull — On a family vacation my dad told this “story” he often tells. After he, and his brothers, were grown my grandparents built a cabin in West Virginia. The place had no electricity or running water, and was far from any major roads. It was here that my grandmother asked my mom and dad, who had trekked from NYC to visit with her for a few days during some 1970s summer weekend, if she could try smoking a joint with them. It wasn’t her first time, but it was her second, and she was eager to try again -- to find out what "all the fuss" was really about.

As the story goes, she got really high. As my dad tells, and re tells, this account he never fails to describe my grandmother in detail -dyed orange hair, high waisted wranglers, sitting cross legged and staring at the floor, frozen in a moment of rare silence. “Well, I’d like to go there, if I only knew where there was,” she muttered – somehow loud enough, heard over the stifled chuckles of my young, somewhat ashamed, parents.

In the song Brian Wilson doesn’t know where, but he’s there, when he’s with and around her, whoever she may be. My grandma was stuck, despite the spliff, and it makes me sad. She deserved better. Maybe he (Wilson) deserved less. Either way, I respect both of their sincerity, their twin verbal submission to disorientation - be it lonely or love-drugged, “out of it” or in it head first – old or young.


I don’t know where, but I’d like to go there, too.