Sean Michaels received the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Us Conductors. He is the editor of the music blog Said the Gramophone.
Chilliwack – Fly at Night (1977)
Driving through Ontario’s Prince Edward County, the sun-dazed afternoon after a wedding, and D puts on Chilliwack. They were singing it last night, he says, on the way home. All of them singing along with the tape deck, mouthing words through open windows. Now it’s bright and 2 p.m. and the falsetto feels out of place, the starry guitar solos; but I get it, I get it, this is music for when you’re moving, some kind of flying, plunging down a dirt road away from a place that’s happy and still aglow.
Micachu & the Shapes – Oh Baby (2015)
My only answer to the ongoing Greek debt crisis is this song. Oh Baby is a nauseated ballad, a blighted bailout.
Micachu’s Mica Levi is among the most original, important pop musicians working today. From London she makes weird, difficult tunes. Whereas Björk works from skittering pebbles, gossamer synths, Levi’s palette is woolly-mammoth groans, vacuum-cleaner drones, keyboards with dying batteries. These days she’s best known for her creepy soundtrack to the sci-fi thriller Under the Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson.
“If your lifeforce is being distilled by an alien, it’s not necessarily going to sound very nice,” Levi wrote in The Guardian. “It’s [going] to be physical, alarming, hot.” But even Levi’s catchiest tracks have that sense of physicality and temperature.
Oh Baby is boiling midsummer, it’s July. It’s a bruised body. It’s the sound of a tin drum calling tired people into the street, of a German banker on her 7:15 a.m. elliptical machine. “Oh baby / it’s not right,” Levi sings, “you want bare knuckles / but a clean fight.” The economists stir their cauldrons; Micachu sings love songs to the victims as they’re led to the stocks.
The Weakerthans – Aside (2000)
The Weakerthans were one of the greatest bands in the history of Canadian rock ’n’ roll, and their drummer announced this week they’re “done.” I don’t want to be sad. Time passes, things change, all the members are on to other (good) things. And yet here I am, like the narrator in this song, caught “between past and present tense.” Here I am getting blue.
Sometimes nostalgia is a dumb waste: spilling feelings for the recent past, for any rock band in this age of comeback gigs. But the Weakerthans already released an album called Reunion Tour; maybe they’ll never come back; maybe they hate each other; maybe Jason Tait, Stephen Carroll, Greg Smith and John K. Samson spent Canada Day weekend burning Left and Leaving’s master tapes.
I doubt it. Really my sadness is just the sadness of any ending. Some things are part of your present and some are part of your past; your heart feels a jerk whenever something important slips from one category to another. Good songs last forever – almost nothing else ever does. “I’m losing all those stupid games that I swore I’d never play,” sings Samson in his poet’s glad shout. “But it almost feels okay.”