Language is an instrument the voice whips about. A line is sung, then shouted, then it disappears into the surprise of the next one—or into silence, into the churn of guitar and drums. Frances Quinlan’s voice tears the air with words. It is impossible to describe. Watching them sing is like watching someone possessed and yet totally in command, a wild interplay of tension and release.
Hop Along played at Brooklyn Steel on Saturday night. They started with “Kids On the Boardwalk” and the energy never waned. They couldn’t have sounded better. They seemed in great spirits. They covered Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” The crowd was ecstatic. A couple times between songs—with a measured determination not to take song requests—Quinlan kept saying “I just want it to be perfect.” It came pretty close.
Quinlan’s lyrics whipsaw between the poetic and the petty, the insightful and the insignificant. (And again, you really have to hear it.) Small scenes are offered up for reflection at the same time as they are dismantled or curtailed. In “Waitress,” the second song they played, the narrator watches someone they once wronged walk into the bar where they work. The song tilts toward insight before swerving back to earth:
By the time it’s old
My face will have been seen
And I’ll share a very common poverty
It’s a very common kind
Common kind, common kind
It’s a very common kind
It’s not that I am worried
I just wish you and your friends would leave
Significance springs from ordinary, if odd, events: watching a cartoon, walking into Waffle House, observing a greedy bluejay at the birdfeeder. But hardly any conclusions are made; instead, interaction and observation wind around each other. Phrases are repeated again and again. The songs burst and crackle like passing thoughts, like moments carefully but obliquely rearranged.
It is no surprise that Quinlan is a lifelong keeper of journals. There is a solitary and writerly quality to their lyrics. Quinlan has said that “Even if there is a response in the song, that response is frozen and can’t be dug into any more than a particular phrase. The song is doomed, it can’t be a dialogue — it’s one person singing.”
“The witness just wants to talk to you,” sang Quinlan during the encore, in the refrain of “The Knock.” In the song, the narrator finds themself strangely moved by a Jehovah’s Witness who comes to the door, and enters a dialogue with a skeptical friend or partner: “You said, ‘Why did you get so sentimental over them?’ / I wasn't, it's just, it's been a long time since I was moved to crying.” A frozen dialogue, perhaps. One person’s telling, one person’s song. And yet, played large and loud, the song becomes something else.
In an interview last year, Quinlan remarked that
For a lot of people, there is this desire that existence is not just limited to their body or mind and that’s all: that there is this force or existence, this outer witness. And some of us just want it to be other people, that can prove we were here, the memories of others and the love of others as proof of our having been here.
For that outer witness, the church; for other people, the concert hall. I may not have been moved to crying but I thought the show was moving as hell. I thought it was a relief.
Sometimes I think we write in order to ennoble our lives with something they do not, will not, will never have. That the writer crouches between his life and the telling of it. I do not think this is true of music. For where was that space on Saturday? One person singing was five people playing was hundreds of people moving their bodies while a voice pitched and coiled around a phrase: The witness just wants to talk to you. Spectacle breaks open the solitude of any song.
—
After the show, hungover in the morning, the cool feels good. There is scattered rain on the walk to coffee. My friend Henry says he wishes it were colder. I run home from the subway station in a downpour, past the men who wait for the bus or for nothing.
The afternoon rain makes things in the City seem quieter and farther apart. But my head is the opposite, still stuck in the concert hall, in the witnessing. It roars with the closeness between things.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the bookshelf
Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth is more than a record of failure. His book deftly documents the scuttling of climate change action in the 1980s, when the science was basically the same as today and the consensus—among political, scientific, and industry leaders—much stronger. The failure is tragic not only because of the consequences—“More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since November 7, 1989 […] than in the entire history of civilization preceding it”—but because of the sensation that we are still going backwards.
Reading about climate change is often numbing and frightening. I find that it can even siphon away my confidence in the act of reading itself, turning page after page as AC units thrum outside. But Losing Earth is an important record of the past, a careful delineation of specific actors—people, corporations, nations—in a crisis that is often (sometimes in bad faith) described as existential and impersonal, as if it is no one’s fault. Rich’s recent history provides a better sense of where to place the blame.
on the screen
Squid Game is The Hunger Games meets Parasite (2020) meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1971). It’s crazy! It’s corny! It’s YA-fiction-adjacent! It’s Netflix!
Watch it if the memes are making you feel left out or if you have nine hours to spare. It’s more interesting than the chess one and at least it isn’t another origin-story IP reboot, I guess.
from my incoming texts
“that’s so funny you say that i ALSO got caught up on the implausibility of the cop’s whole thing”
“It’s kind of uncanny, but I think that’s it, I cracked my lexical mystery”
“taco salad ground turkey style”
“I do hope we are given this gift”
weekly wiki
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