guilty pleasures
This ended up being longer and heavier than I thought, and also has a lot of talk about abuse and abusers, so, uh, I promise the next newsletter will be happier.
I feel guilty when I like things that I think are somehow immoral, not when I like something popular or poppy, so the term “guilty pleasure” as widely used confuses me a bit. There are the obvious immoralities: the song “Pretty Lush” by Glassjaw is great, and I love the bridge in particular (you hear the singer gasp for breath after a long run of screaming, it’s so raw), but when I looked up the lyrics I found out it was nakedly misogynistic, whence guilt. It’s tricky though, since I feel like I’m setting myself up for a hypocrisy charge. “Oh that song is too misogynistic for you, but not this one?” (I have a lot of imaginary arguments.) Or at least a charge that I should worry more that a song is racist, or homophobic, etc, etc. Guilt about guilt!
Of course there are other varieties of guilty pleasure. The frequently present “art vs. artist” conflicts can make me feel guilty, which I think is common enough. It’s what made me write this newsletter. Upstream Color is one of my favorite films, and I often listen to its score, a compelling piece of drone. And recently Shane Carruth — the man who directed the movie, wrote it, starred in it, and wrote the score — posted a seemingly innocuous picture on Twitter that contained in its corner the restraining order his now ex-fiancee (and Upstream Color co-star) Amy Seimetz filed against him. The week before her new movie came out. Like he was being clever. That score, that movie, which portrays a relationship between the two of them: it’s obviously fiction, and a piece of art, but it is absolutely bound up with him, with their relationship. How could it not be tainted by that association? What does it mean that I responded to it so strongly, that I returned to the score over the course of years? Perhaps something in me is tainted too?
The only celebrity death I’ve taken particularly hard was David Foster Wallace. I love his writing. The footnoted style felt so natural to me, like someone whose brain worked like mine. He studied math as an undergrad like me, and even wrote a popular account of certain ideas from set theory, my research area. (I read it the summer before I started grad school, which is probably good, because he makes a few mathematical errors that would bug me now.) I found out later that he abused at least one of his girlfriends.
I suppose the charitable thing to tell myself is that this sort of thing is all too common, that it’s bad but not unbelievable luck that I’d respond so strongly to the work of abusers like this. It almost feels too precious to feel guilty about it; Lord knows there are plenty of shitty people that have made plenty of great art, that’s why there’s this constant discussion of whether you can make the separation. I had guessed based on the fact that he had only gotten 2 movies made in 20 years that Shane Carruth was difficult to work with, I just figured it was in a “Billy Corgan re-recording his bandmates’ parts during the Siamese Dream sessions” sort of way, and not anything darker. But maybe I should feel guilty about liking the Smashing Pumpkins too if this is how I’m going to be, right? Guilt about guilt.
There is at least one other way liking music has made me feel guilty, but I need to set up a little context. Battle of Mice was a band consisting mainly of Julie Christmas (mostly from Made Out of Babies, and one of my favorite vocalists) and Aaron Turner (mostly from ISIS (the band, yes they came first)) making more-or-less the music you would expect from that pairing if you knew them both already. That is to say it was post-metal with a lot of quiet-loud dynamics in the instrumentation and vocals, Christmas cooing and roaring, dissonant chords bursting forth unexpectedly, and occasionally Aaron Turner does that thing with his guitar where he leans on a single high note that cuts through everything. Promotional material for their only album, A Day of Nights, hinted at a recording process that took place during a tumultuous breakup between the two, and one of the songs opens with Christmas singing “Every time I think about pushing you down the stairs/I lick my lips”. That’s not the part I feel guilty about. I think of most of this sort of thing in metal as being performative; it’d be like feeling guilty about liking the evil witch in a horror movie.
Lisa Germano was a singer-songwriter active in the early 90’s whose work I found out about much later, in 2015 or so. I heard a song from her album Geek the Girl called “Cry Wolf” which I found compelling. The album as a whole is very 90’s in a way that didn’t really make it out of the decade. I wanted to say it was like a less-electronic Poe, but then I put my finger on it: it sounds like an Eels record. I went to look up who came first and found out that Lisa Germano was in the Eels later in the 90’s. How about that? Geek the Girl covers a lot of weighty topics; for example, “Cry Wolf” is about rape in an elliptical way. There’s one song in particular that is almost unbearably heavy emotionally, and the element that makes it so is something it shares with a Battle of Mice song.
“…A Psychopath”, by Lisa Germano, is about a stalker. The first verse is
A baseball bat, a baseball bat beside my bed
I'll wait around and wait around, and wait
I hear a noise, I hear a noise,
Well I hear something
This sort of thing would make for a tough listen all by itself, but what puts the song into actively disturbing territory is the 911 call you hear snippets of throughout. You can hear the dispatcher, asking for a panicked woman’s address, trying to get her help, but her heavy breathing and distracted description of a stranger at the door eventually turns into her screaming “Why are you here!?” over and over again without an address ever being given.
“At the Base of the Giant’s Throat”, by Battle Of Mice, is the second-to-last-song on A Day of Nights. By this point, the atmosphere is thoroughly oppressive. Julie Christmas is coming unhinged, going from screaming to singing to baby-voiced crooning faster than usual. Things go quiet and then explode again. When the song seems like it’s over and the noise fades away, a 911 call comes in. It’s remarkably similar to the one from “…A Psychopath”. The dispatcher asking for an address, “why are you here!?”; it’s at a higher emotional pitch from the start, and you can hear someone banging on a door, but it’s the same elements. In the end it just fades into static.
Here is the thing I can’t fully work through. “…A Psychopath” is harrowing, but I don’t feel that guilty about what I’m hearing. The call from “A Psychopath” was real, featured in several documentaries, and Germano got permission from a sexual violence help center to use it, so its use feels earned, like she is making a point through music that sober documentaries would never get across the same way. I suppose I wouldn’t classify it as a “pleasure” either, though I think it works at what it’s going for. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel guilty about it; maybe without the pleasure there is no guilt. If I furrow my brow and nod my head about how serious this song is and how important its topic is and how respectful Germano was, then I don’t have to feel bad about what I’m hearing.
Meanwhile, I’ve long liked A Day of Nights, even as “At the Base of the Giant’s Throat” has always made me feel vaguely guilty, as though I’m getting a voyeuristic thrill out of what must have been a terrifying experience. It seems possible that the call was staged, something I thought was a possibility even before I learned how similar it was to an existing call, something Christmas has been cagey about (though frankly I haven’t dug into it too much), and I can’t decide if that would be worse. I’m inclined to think it’s real though; for years the song was the only one on the album that was not available on Spotify, which seems to speak to some hesitation to make it widely accessible, or maybe something boring like rights issues with real 911 calls requiring sign off from the relevant police department, but in any event doesn’t seem like it would happen for just another product of the recording sessions.
If the call from “At the Base of the Giant’s Throat” is real, then I’m likely listening to Aaron Turner doing his best to threaten Julie Christmas. The whole album is presented as a document of their breakup, and this could be seen as lending verisimilitude, but also takes things to a place I don’t think the word “breakup” fully describes. Should I feel good about liking something made under those circumstances? That seems even worse than Upstream Color, where at least the bad times occurred years later (the two got engaged, I have to think there were good times initially). Should I feel good about liking any Aaron Turner project? (Most recently that I know of he was on a few tracks of Hiss Spun by Chelsea Wolfe, which were great.)
If the call is not real, then it makes you feel that trauma was appropriated to be the backdrop of a song to make the album heavier and strengthen a marketing hook, which is gross but at least means you’re not listening to one of the worst nights of someone’s life, and nobody involved is an abusive menace. Or maybe it is fake, but it was included to highlight these things similar to how Germano’s song did, not for cynical reasons, and I’m just being a genre snob, respecting metal enough to enjoy the music but not enough to think it might consciously try to say something about abuse. Or maybe it’s not genre snobbery so much as a conviction that I couldn’t or shouldn’t enjoy a song seriously treating that topic, only admire it intellectually.
A fake call included to highlight real issues: that would be the best of both worlds, right? Everyone involved had good intentions, and nobody was hurt. As I said though, I think it’s more likely the call was real, and I still like and listen to the album. That is a guilty pleasure.