It’s late November. Although I do keep my south window open to air out the smoke from the cigarettes I smoke in my nonsmoking apartment unit, there’s otherwise no reason for flys’ presence in my apartment. Perhaps it’s the rotting ramen scum splattered on the dirty dishes in my sink that they’re attracted to. Yesterday, two small flies buzzed around my apartment. I gradually weakened them with bursts of Febreze – weakening the unclean with sterility, like casting healing spells on the undead. They either flew out my window or died somewhere inside, their corpses missing or stepped on, rubbed into my apartment’s thick, brown carpeting. Maybe the fat fly that 9/11ed into side of my head was their mother, and she was furious. Or maybe it was the reanimated corpse of my good friend Eric, who ODed on New Year’s Eve, 2004, and he was telling me something. Telling me that it’s not okay to have logged 35 hours into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after having owned it for a mere week.

I paused the game and stood up and reached for Edward P. Jones’ story collection, Lost in the City, but immediately felt guilty about using books to kill a fly, and left it on my bookshelf.  I chose, instead, a Spokane Values coupon brochure, settling on the practical newspaper-or-expendable-print-material-as-fly-bludgeon cliché. I chased the fly around my apartment, wearing my Oxford sweatpants, and the button-up shirt I’d worn the night before in an effort to “dress up” for a friend’s birthday, which she didn’t show up to, the shirt I slept in. The fly was sluggish and easy to whap, but without a surface, my swipes did very little, except cast the fly farther from my reach. When the fly buzzed over to my bookshelf and settled on In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien, I remembered the interview some fellow Barkers and I conducted last spring, the interview I’m supposed to be shaping, the interview I was so excited about having landed, the interview my Vietnam war historian father was so proud about my having landed. I remembered that I used to be in school, that I used to work hard, or at least was under the impression that I was working hard, when really my two years of grad school were little more than me hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock of life. I took a swipe and the coupon brochure slapped Alice Munro, Henry James, John McPhee, and Tim O’Brien, but it barely touched the fly, who buzzed away, and off into a corner.

What the hell am I doing with my life, I thought. I then pulled out my laptop and started writing.

In the meantime, here’s a video by Gary Wilson, one of my fellow music snoot Luis’s recent discoveries; expect a blog post about him soon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRd-Jr9RHBc

Yesterday, my friend/co-worker Danielle and I were talking about fucking and relationships like we usually do during work breaks. “I like the chaos,” she said, in reference to why she always dates disastrously alcoholic douchebags, who play in bands, thrive on narcissism, and probably have Xeroxed copies of their younger selves Scotch-taped to their bedroom ceilings, so they’ll have something to masturbate to while they’re lying in their own vomit the morning after maxing out their sixth credit card on their steady decline.

I know where she’s coming from. After all, you wouldn’t read a book devoid of conflict, right? You can’t grow a flower without a little rain, yeah? What’s the point of carrying on if you’re perfectly content, am I wrong?

Well, The War on Drugs doesn’t give a shit about ever getting anywhere, much like me and the women I love, and that’s one of many reasons why Slave Ambient is the best album I’ve heard all year. Owing equal parts’ debt to Bob Dylan, Sonic Youth, Neu!, My Bloody Valentine, and Bruce Springsteen, in terms of influence, the album is all about storytelling and escape, about simultaneously chasing and running away from something, only to never find anything, but realize that there was never really anything to run away from in the first place. Says Stuart Berman over at Pitchfork:

…as much as the War on Drugs make music to accompany an escape to something better, they’re the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination. The songs on Slave Ambient don’t necessarily end in a place very different from where they began, but through subtle sonic manipulations and layering– like in the last two minutes of opener “Best Night”, where the guitars, piano, and melodica start to blur into the same blissful wavelength– they give the impression that a great distance has been traveled.

The War on Drugs’ songs don’t have choruses; they find a hook and ride it out. For example SA‘s third track, “I Was There,”‘s hook lasts exactly five seconds and repeats for the entirety, but it’s beautiful, catchy, wistful, and absolutely sufficient for the song’s bluesy, puppy dog-eyed 3:49 minute lifespan, before fizzling into its tiny grave of synths and reverb. Sings lead singer/songwriter Adam Granduciel: “And I was there to catch a man, I thought I had him by the hand, but only had him by the glove.” While words such as these would sound dismal and foreboding on, say, a Black Heart Procession or Elliot Smith song, “I Was There,” and its steady, consistent drums, piano, guitar, bass, and steamy effects built through harmonica and synthesizer, create a safe fire that warms, rather than a devastating flare that burns.

The War on Drugs create music for road trips to nowhere; for people who miss childhood, but are tough enough not to be weepy little bitches about it; for the jaded, who are paradoxically lazy and hard-working, who pay their energy expenditure no mind, but believe that repetition and consistency lead to evolution, rather than mechanization; for those who believe that repetition and consistency breeds solidarity and boot-strap-pulling-up pride that propels brother- and sisterhood, that illustrates that we’re all in this together. The War on Drugs write anthems for those who hate anthems, for those who never want to meet their soul mate, because then what?; for those who keep touching themselves and staring at their younger selves on the ceiling, knowing that the trajectory of their ejaculation will never be as startling as Alexander Portnoy’s; for those of us who find comfort in chaos, but need a steady, yet colorful metronome to conduct the chaos which, we know all-too-well, cannot be conducted; for those of us who not just love, but need to be treated like shit, lied to, and know that there’s always a challenge to overcome.

Oh, and Kurt Vile used to be in The War on Drugs, so if you love him, you’ll love this.

The War on Drugs play Thursday, October 27th (tomorrow), at the A-Club; here’s the flyer. Below is “I Was There,” the song I keep referring to a few paragraphs back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ux6y-06Npg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSfnu2sm9go

As tempted as I am to name this, “I’ve listened to this goddamned song like 26 times today, pt. 3,” such posts are usually fast-food posts – quick and efficient ways for me to fill my weekly cup of blogging with lukewarm soft serve that goes nowhere, but does enough. But I think I’m onto something here after repeated listens of Das Racist’s, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” the majority of which, in case you haven’t heard the song before, or haven’t listened to the YouTube link above (which you should), consists of the following repetition of lyrics, swapping a few articles and pronouns, and taking a few twists here and there: “I’m at the Pizza Hut (whut?)/I’m at the Taco Bell (huh?)/I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” over a treble-y, somewhat irritating beat. Essentially, the two members of Das Racist trade off vocal duties, as though they’re trying to figure out where they are, even though it’s obvious. Or is it? It’s a completely stupid song – except that it’s not. Beneath all the seemingly-sophomoric absurdity lies a subtle but intelligent indictment of the shambles that is the contemporary human condition.

Fellow Barker Tim Greenup, also known as the most awesome person on the face of the Earth, and I were texting back and forth the other night. I was telling him about the gulf the song has created between the employees at my job, between those of us who love it, and those who change it the second it hits the speakers. We both decided we stand by the song, talked about why, and most importantly, how the song is so great. Says Tim, “There’s a lot being explored in the negative space of that song. So Dadaist.” Anybody who knows Tim, in real life or through Bark, knows that his tongue is usually in cheek 85% of the time; but there’s always truth to what he says. I don’t know much about Dada, except that smart and artistically-inclined folks like to name drop him, that he’s minimal and subversive (I realize I could Google all the necessary info on Dada, but I’m trying to break that habit), but Tim’s mention of Dada was the catalyst for the thinking that brought me to my thesis statement, if it may so be called. We’ll start with the negative space.

A lot of bands and artists I listen to choose to dismiss the predictable verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus formula, such as The War on Drugs and Wire, but neither of those bands write songs as forthrightly repetitious as “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” The song is essentially a drone, and while I’m reluctant to compare it to, say, Ambient Works-era Aphex Twin, The Fall (“These are the three R’s, the three R’s – repetition, repetition, repetition”), or avant garde soundsmith Alva Noto, the metronomic trudge of the song forces the listener’s brain into uncharted territories in the same way these artists’ music does. It’s paradoxically predictable, yet surprising, like a recurring fever dream, in which the ailed listener cannot discern between dream and reality, but when he/she finally awakens to brush the night-sweaty residue off his/her forehead, he/she realizes that his/her life is nothing but perpetually coming back to the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, and trying to find his/her friends, who are also lost in the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. The sense of isolation and abysmal routine permeates throughout.

Oversaturation is the key vehicle of the song, not just in the repetition that I’ve already gone over, or the choice to use the bloated hybrid of chain restaurants as the “setting,” so to speak, but in the isolated promiscuity of communication, that the more we communicate, the more ways in which we communicate, the more alone and confused we are. Das Racist have a tendency to not take themselves particularly seriously, and given the goofball, adolescent picture they paint of themselves, one is under the assumption that they are exactly the types of people who would frequent Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bells, celebrate their global dissemination, and spend a grotesque amount of time on their cell phones, discussing “where they at,” which, of course, is the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But at the same time, surely they know how fucked up it is that fast food corporations are teaming up, dumbing down their food even more than it could possibly be dumbed down, making more money off it, guffawing, and peeing in each others’ mouths.

In an interview with Gang of Four bandleader Andy Gill I read awhile back, which I sadly don’t have access to, and will have to paraphrase, he essentially said, of the super-left, socialist-leaning band’s watershed debut album, Entertainment!, that the album’s title is meant to be ironic, that the band is trapped in an unfortunate catch 22, in that they are spreading their message and their politics through the very source of distribution that they’re opposed to, that they have to join their capitalist enemies if they want to have a fan base. Das Racist may be more subtle about their hyper-awareness, but the implication cannot be ignored that they know they’re burying themselves alive in irony and know how sad, scary, and disgusting the human condition is. But what makes the song so appealing is just how much fun they’re having – more fun than Andy Gill and Co. ever had. Or, perhaps, as Tim Greenup might put it, the boys in Das Racist are merely “Children laughing while the world burns.”

Whatever the case, the other day, when we played the song for Brad, one of the owners of the Elk, he pulled the plug on the iPod and told us he never wanted to hear it playing in the Elk Public House ever again during the hours in which we’re open. A few hours later, though, my boss Kevin tracked me down at El Que, the taco bar attached to the Elk, and informed me of the following: “We at the Public House/We at the Taco Bar/We at the Combination Public House and Taco Bar.” So even if the world doesn’t want to hear it, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” isn’t gonna stop playing anytime soon, nor are we going to find our way to it, or out of it.