the car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
I’ve been thinking about Godspeed You! Black Emperor a lot lately.
…
That’s not quite right.
…
A lot of things have reminded me of Godspeed You! Black Emperor lately.
I don’t remember where I first heard about GYBE, but I suspect it was on everything2, though there’s a chance it was Pitchfork. This was back when music was difficult to hear if it wasn’t on the radio, and GYBE certainly was not. Something in what I read about them sounded interesting to me, and I went out and bought Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven without having heard a single note. The title was compelling, and the packaging was like nothing I’d seen before, a barebones cardboard sleeve with a simple line drawing on the front and only the band’s name, struck through, on the back. It was a double album, but only cost a dollar or two more than most regular albums. If nothing else, I’d have gotten a deal.
I must have heard that GYBE had a string section; as an orchestra kid and long-time violin player that would have meant a lot to me. Violins didn’t really feature in most of the music I liked, and when they did it was often in a one-off way. (“Disarm”, by The Smashing Pumpkins, was a favorite of mine for a while, probably at least in part because of the violins.) So to hear strings from the very beginning of the album building to a climactic, triumphant explosion of sound only a 9+-member band could create made a big impression.
Other things made an impression as well. The interior album art depicts a figure with Benjamin Franklin’s face from the $100 bill covered by a death’s head, cutting the hands off of an artist after signing a contract, the hands looking exactly like the disembodied ones on the front cover.
There were all of these field recordings that I didn’t know how to parse, couldn’t even understand half of the time. Staticky religious broadcasts, gas station announcements, children’s songs, and most notably a sad monologue from an older man about the days when you could sleep on the beach at Coney Island. “They don’t sleep on the beach anymore,” he says as lonely guitar strumming starts up, a catch in his throat audible.
It’s a striking recording. Warren Ellis lifted the monologue and put it into Tony Stark’s mouth shortly thereafter, in an Iron Man comic that about 15 years later would form the basis for part of Iron Man 3. More recently we have a prominent older man from Brooklyn and a website that runs on pithy observations, references, and mashups, so we get:
I’m not sure how I feel about this. I chuckled, I smiled to think that GYBE is still alive to other people, but on reflection it also seems kind of glib. Not everything has to be deep; I doubt very much the author of the tweet was aiming for a trenchant observation. But I have a deep relationship with the material and so it sits strangely in my brain.
I went and saw GYBE in high school, which took some doing. They were playing Omaha, which was only two hours away, but the venue was 18+ and I was 17, so that wasn’t going to work. After convincing my mom that they were not performing some sort of “adult content” that necessitated the age limit, it was just at a venue that had one, I got her to drive me to Minneapolis, four hours away, to see them perform at First Avenue, a storied venue I associate most strongly with Prince, though I didn’t know that at the time.
It was a great show. Bardo Pond opened and I loved it. I stood close to the stage in front of a giant amp, with no ear plugs in; it wasn’t smart, and it was one of the bigger contributors to my minor tinnitus, but I felt totally engulfed in the sound. I picked up their other albums at the merch table along with the first A Silver Mt. Zion album. ASMZ was a side project on the same label, and shared similarly spare packaging. I think this was the start of my paying attention to record labels, as I learned that Constellation Records existed, had an aesthetic and an ethos, and I liked them both.
GYBE started the show playing “Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls”, from Yanqui U.X.O., while a short video loop was projected behind the stage, the band filtering in one at a time to pick up their instruments. (The album Yanqui U.X.O. is partly known for the scrawled diagram tying the major record labels to the military-industrial complex:
It’s probably the first time I heard of Raytheon.) I hadn’t heard the song before, didn’t know its name, but it was apt: the show was on the night we started bombing Iraq. I remember because before the encore, one of the band members came out to announce it, inveigh against it, and implore us to come out to a protest the next day. It was heavy, but the band was also famously tight-lipped on stage, so I found it a little thrilling as well. I still feel guilty about that. The war, of course, continues, and as of late threatens to expand.
GYBE took a break for awhile after Yanqui U.X.O. ASMZ kept on, and made slight variations to their name over the course of several albums. Band members kept busy. But GYBE as a collective returned in 2012 with the album Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! It was as close to joyful as they get, without the end-of-the-world overtones of just about all of their earlier work. I got the album more out of nostalgia than anything else, but the songs are good, it just seemed like my feelings for GYBE belonged in a different time. These days 2012 feels like a different time too.
One of my favorite songs of all time is bbf3, from the Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada EP, which is possibly a perfect half-hour of music. On Spotify they have the title as Blaise Bailey Finnegan III, and indeed, this is who the song is named after, but that’s not how I remember it on the packaging. BBF3 refers to the person interviewed on the track, whose responses make up the backbone of the song, but also appears to be a sly wink, as at one point the man recites “his poem”, which is mostly Iron Maiden lyrics, Iron Maiden being fronted at that time by…Blaze Bayley.
(Never let it be said that GYBE are humorless. Heck, when they curated All Tomorrow’s Parties they booked “Weird” Al for his first ever European show.)
The man in the interview is…a “character” I think is what I’ll say. He opens by talking about his distrust of the American government, followed by telling a story about going to traffic court and yelling at a judge.
And the judge says "Yeah, you have a point," He goes "You don't need to get loud," I said "Don't get loud?" I says "I've got every right to get loud." I says "You can't do a god damn thing about it, because I'm expressing myself in your court, and there is nothing you can do about it. You think you're god because you have a robe and you can put people up the goddamn river for 20 years? Well you're not." And I left it at that.
It’s an interesting story. He bookends it by talking about how the government can’t be trusted, they’re liars, they’re cheats, but any principled objection it seems like he wants to make is undercut by the basic selfishness he’s actually displaying, apoplectic over a speeding ticket, any anger he has arising from the basic petulance of someone who thinks they’re above punishment confusing minor consequences with state oppression.
You might think GYBE is holding this man up for ridicule. Later he talks about his guns, he says (in 1999) when asked what things will be like in 2003: “Y'know, I'll tell you the truth - nothing against you guys, but I don't wanna answer that question because... I haven't even got a mind that's that...that inhumane”, it’s all very libertarian prepper rhetoric. But the music they’re playing as this interview goes on is the most urgent, most determined, most hopeful in their entire catalog. It can’t be ridicule, the music makes it impossible.
I used to take this as a statement about fundamental human dignity, about finding commonality in struggle. GYBE were and are a very lefty band, unambiguously so, and here they were showcasing someone with opposed politics. It was a challenge, I thought. These days I’m not so sure. I’m not sure it’s right to build bridges to men with arsenals that threaten judges, no matter how ludicrous they seem, passing off metal lyrics as their own poems, mentioning “an old saying that goes back generations” which turns out to include the phrase “don’t take no shit from anybody at any time”. I’m troubled by people like that. I’m troubled by the possibility that this was an example of horseshoe theory come to life, the anarcho-socialists seeing in such a man a political kindred spirit with whom they shared a goal of ending the state as constituted at the time, rather than a dangerous man with dangerous goals for what would come after the existing state fell.
I don’t know what they intended at the time, and it’s possible they’ve changed their opinion since anyway. I don’t read artist interviews very often, don’t generally care to, and so I’ll never know, nor will it affect how I feel about the song. What I do know is that this is one of the works I think of when people talk about their relationship with a piece of art changing over time. I still love the song, and I still grapple with it. I suspect I will for some time to come.
As much as I love GYBE, I love A Silver Mt. Zion’s first album more than any of theirs. It’s mostly piano, violin, more staticky radio transmissions, and bass, with drums only present on a couple of tracks. (I want to write a whole newsletter about how garbled sermons heard from a fading radio signal evoke a powerful emotion in me for reasons I don’t fully understand, but that’s for another time.)
In the middle of the album there is one song with vocals. It’s another one I was reminded of a lot, specifically back in 2011 or so, as we were bombing Libya and Occupy Wall Street was in full swing. It’s a dark poem, mournful until fiery, then mournful again. My mind would come back to this, does even today:
Let’s kill first the banker/with his professional demeanor
Let’s televise and broadcast/the raping of kings
Let our crowds be fed on/tear gas/and plate glass
‘Cause a people united/is a wonderful thing
I find the sentiment expressed here ambiguous. There is a marked increase in tempo from earlier in the song as the bass is plucked quickly, hard enough to rattle the strings, making the first few lines more anxious than committed, worried about what might unfold, worried about the demanded violence. But it calms down and resolves when talking about the people united, and I don’t think that’s ironic. It suggests that maybe a communal riot is better than an isolated peace.
More recently, for more personal reasons, I’d think about the final couplet of the song. It’s nobler to never get paid/than to bank on shit and dismay. It’s true, and I knew that, and I would sit there, confronted with the fact that my life was not a noble one.
The day Trump was inaugurated it was raining in Pasadena. I remember because I posted the song “It’s Coming Down” by Cake in a work Slack channel, solely as commentary on the weather, but someone took it as political and came back with “Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls”. I told them if they were going for apocalyptic Godspeed, they should go full bore. Accept no substitutes for “The Dead Flag Blues”, the first track from their first album, F♯ A♯ ∞.
The song opens with a bass drone so low that it’s felt more than heard, and it pulses. Something massive menaces the listener wordlessly, and the unease builds. Then a gravel-voiced man begins to speak. The car is on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel. And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides. And a dark wind blows.
It continues in the fashion for a minute and a half or so. We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death. Writing this, I think this may have been the lyric I saw somewhere on the internet that caught my attention and led me to GYBE. What an image. It’s hard to convey the gravity with which this is all spoken. I think perhaps in black and white it can come off as overwrought, but with that drone and that voice, you feel every utterance in your bones.
Perversely, the music lightens as the words lose their metaphorical nature and become concrete and devastating. The drone stops as a violin and cello start in. It went like this: The buildings tumbled in on themselves. Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair. The strings swell, but they are playing a dirge. I said, "Kiss me, you are beautiful, these are truly the last days". You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream, or a fever. I always found that lovely in its way. Unvarnished emotion as a defense against the end times, but not naively so. Not a dream, but a fight against sickness.
Some guitars join in for a longer instrumental portion before the man comes in one last time. We woke up one morning and fell a little further down. For sure it's the valley of death. I open up my wallet and it's full of blood.
I would listen to this as I got ready for high school in the mornings, it was the perfect length as I got dressed after my shower. That probably explains a lot about me.
GYBE has not abandoned us. Their most recent album, released in 2017, is called Luciferian Towers, and has the songs “Undoing a Luciferian Towers”, “Bosses Hang”, “Fam/Famine”, and “Anthem for No State”. Their artist’s statement for it concludes with the following:
the “luciferian towers” L.P. was informed by the following grand demands:
+ an end to foreign invasions
+ an end to borders
+ the total dismantling of the prison-industrial complex
+ healthcare, housing, food and water acknowledged as an inalienable human right
+ the expert fuckers who broke this world never get to speak again
much love to all the other lost and wondering ones,
xoxoxox god’s pee / montréal / 4 juillet, 2017
They’re back in apocalyptic mode, and the times seem to call for it. But I read the above and take some comfort in it. So much happens that makes me think of their music. It’s good that they’re still here, thinking about it, and making more art.