How to spend nine minutes on a Saturday morning.
Showing posts with label Folk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Folk. Show all posts
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Top 13 Songs of 2012: #10 (The Mountain Goats, "Harlem Roulette")
John Darnielle, a.k.a. The Mountain Goats, is often called a poet. While he deserves the compliment implied by that label, his talents have more in common with those of a short-story writer.
Consider "Harlem Roulette." Here we have a wisp of a narrative about Frankie Lymon, who died in 1968 of an overdose, just after recording a melancholy tune about "a little town / Where the stars shine bright / And the moon never drowns." Smartly, though, Darnielle never quite tells the story - never shows us Lymon shutting himself in his grandmother's bathroom and plunging a needle into his arm. Instead, Darnielle circles around the tragedy, touching on a few pungent, suggestive images. Engines beneath the city. A New York summer night. Armies in the distance.
As if trying and failing to grasp the meaning of his own song, Darnielle perseverates on an enigmatic declaration: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world / Are the ones you're never going to see again." Who's lonelier: the people observed, or the observer?
And then, in an unexpected middle eight, he flips to the present with shattering specificity: "Four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on, / And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone." Denis Johnson could hardly have done better.
"Every dream's a good dream, / Even awful dreams are good dreams, / If you're doing it right."
Consider "Harlem Roulette." Here we have a wisp of a narrative about Frankie Lymon, who died in 1968 of an overdose, just after recording a melancholy tune about "a little town / Where the stars shine bright / And the moon never drowns." Smartly, though, Darnielle never quite tells the story - never shows us Lymon shutting himself in his grandmother's bathroom and plunging a needle into his arm. Instead, Darnielle circles around the tragedy, touching on a few pungent, suggestive images. Engines beneath the city. A New York summer night. Armies in the distance.
As if trying and failing to grasp the meaning of his own song, Darnielle perseverates on an enigmatic declaration: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world / Are the ones you're never going to see again." Who's lonelier: the people observed, or the observer?
And then, in an unexpected middle eight, he flips to the present with shattering specificity: "Four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on, / And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone." Denis Johnson could hardly have done better.
"Every dream's a good dream, / Even awful dreams are good dreams, / If you're doing it right."
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