Friday, October 24, 2003
(4:39 AM) | Anonymous:
Control
This is dang long, and I apologize. I even edited a bunch of stuff out..but, I figure I had some length stored up from my absence. Hopefully some of you might read it.
I have been asked by Stephen Case to discuss Pedro The Lion's seminal work "Control." He asked me to do this over e-mail, but I figure if I'm going to take the time to flesh this out, I might as well get my name back up on the page here, since I have been scroll barred to death.
So, to start, I must declare all biases. I consider Control to be one of the greatest albums I own, and I own a ridiculous amount of CDs. I have a list if you want to pity me, just email me. It's easily in my top 5, probably in my top 3, and on good days (rather, on days where I feel like slow, plodding, dark and somewhat depressing music..so..probably on bad days..) it manages to somehow beat out Pavement's Terror Twilight and Dandy Warhol's 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia for 1st.
It's a concept album involving the simple and oft-told tale of a feigned ideal marriage where the husband cheats and the wife gets revenge through killing him. However, David Bazan, who is Pedro, doesn't need to tell this story. I mean, we just have to turn on Oxygen at any time of the day, other than when the Sunday Night Sex Show is on, and we can see it told through some badly acted drama. If you mistakenly turn when The Sunday Night Sex Show is on, don't fret - I think Pedro's next album is reportedly all about old women discussing sex toys, so he'll soon have you covered there too. It's a story that's been repeated a million times, but the message is about much more than When Good Marriages Go Bad!.
The brilliance of the album is that the all-too-commonly used situation is only focused on here to show the destructive power that the desire for control can have on life. It starts with "Options" The seeds of what is to come are planted in this turn on the picturesque honeymoon when the husband character speaks the chorus:
"I could never divorce you without a good reason, and though I may never have to, it's good to have options."
Even here, at the outset of a new marriage, a time when everything should be filled with happiness, love, and the voluntary giving up of all control in the hope of gaining actual relation to another human being, the husband keeps it all at bay because the allure of having enough control to end it if it goes bad is prevalent on his mind.
It reminds me of an episode of Extra I was watching the other night because I am a horribly sad and lonely man. The piece was on Leah Remini's somewhat impromptu engagement and marriage to some Italian looking tan dude. And she started feeling nervous and what not, as one is want to do while filling out a wedding license to someone she hardly knows. She asked "What's the worst that could happen?" and he said "Well, we'd get a divorce." and she said "Right..no big deal.." Leah is amazingly lovely, and I've been a big fan ever since those beach house episodes of Saved By The Bell, but this is not the way to enter a marriage.
Marriage is the ultimate human relationship. It should be centered on love. Love allows for no control, because control demands to set the terms, and there can be no terms for love. It must be unconditional, uncontrollable, if it is to be love at all. The idea planted by the husband here early on in Bazan's masterpiece is one that says "Okay, I'm entering this relationship, and I can have love, and if it starts to go places I don't want it to, I'm still in control with this out-clause." Any relationship which starts with this idea in mind is doomed to failure before it has a chance.
This seed grows more and more as the album goes on. In the very next song we see the husband again taking control at any cost. He apparently can't find satisfaction in his wife, so he finds another woman where he can gain the same feeling.
How the heck did the husband get this way? Again, Bazan locates this problem in the environment he works under with the third song, "Penetration." With it's memorable chorus
"If it isn't making dollars then it isn't making sense, if you aren't moving units then you're not worth the expense, if you really want to make it, you had best remember this: If it isn't penetration, then it isn't worth a kiss."
This attitude can be seen in the corporate world everywhere, and is yet another way to enforce the word I've said about 150 times already in this article - Control. This world we've set-up is brutally cold in that it isn't anger that causes it to ruin lives and people, but merely indifference to anything but getting what it wants. To ensure it can get that, it uses the opposite of love: fear. We've set up hierarchies to the sky with the express purpose of scaring the living be-what's it out of everyone involved. The lower jobs are threatened from fear of losing their job, the management is fearful of the lower jobs telling their boss something bad about them and getting them fired, as well as fearful of those above them. At the very top, the shareholders are fearful of losing their shirt. Fear controls all, because fear is seen as the best way to control an outcome.
We see this all the time, and what's worse is we teach it to our kids. Bazan deals with that in his song "Indian Summer" which delivers another memorable line -
"All the experts say you ought to start them young, that way they'll naturally love the taste of coporate cum. God bless the Indian Summer." Being in Oklahoma, I've come to understand why people so like their indian summers, (it's the time in late autumn when it starts to get warm again and you get that one last glimpse of good weather before the winter..for instance, this week here it's been back in the 90's after dipping down as low as the 50's and 60's 3 weeks ago..) It's perfect weather, it's as warm as it has been all summer, but with the cool breeze of autumn. In this same way, there's that time in life when kids are still innocent enough to believe everything they are told, yet experienced enough to start putting it into practice their own way.
The society takes over right then to start enforcing this structure of fear on our kids. You can easily see it in grade school. I mean..imagine a relay race in grade school. Imagine the kid who is out in front slows down and beckons for his friends to catch up so that he can run with them, laughing and actually enjoying the race not as competition, but as a shared experience. I don't think it's too far fetched to imagine a kid who did that being scolded and sent to the principal's office for not trying his hardest, for not "giving his all." We offer prizes to whoever finishes the race first, second best is never good enough. We perfectly prepare our children to enter into this corporate structure of fear and loathing.
Pedro refuses to let the wife be above reproach as well though. He shows in the next two songs, "Progress" and "Magazine" that fear dominates the home just as much as the work place. The opening lines of Magazine may state this clearest:
"This line is metaphysical, and on the one side, on the one side the bad half live in wickednesss, and on the other side, on the other side, the good half live in arrogance, and there's a steep slope with a short rope, this line is metaphysical, and there's a steady flow moving to and fro."
Speaking as the wife, Bazan shows how her response to her husband's infidelity is equally an attempt to enforce control. By "taking the moral high road" and looking down upon her husband, and also in her attempts to portray and force her children to look like perfect angels, the wife and mother also takes control by setting the terms of the relationship. Her attempts to cram her moral superiority down her husband's throat lead to what normally happens when something is crammed down a throat - the husband spews them back up, and feels more sick and more lost.
Finding that her attempt to impose order upon her children and husband through these means doesn't work, the wife eventually seeks the comfort of the ultimate symbol of control - the gun. Seeking to force her own happiness with a warm gun (ma ma..bang bang shoot shoot..) the wife takes control again by killing her husband.
In the second to last song, "Priests and Paramedics", we see the first response to the destruction caused by Control. Both professions have seen too much of this to still believe that the system works. The Paramedics response to the husband's question of "Am I gonna die?" is a lie, a lie they've been trained to tell in situations like this. Even though they know there's no possibility of his survival, they keep a straight face and tell him he'll be fine. This response is to look into the face of the terror of control, the terror which is the bare fact that all of it, every last thing we've been told we can get through control, is a lie.
They have seen this unbearable truth which caused Kertz in The Heart of Darkness to give that terrible whisper - "The horror!, the horror!" yet, they make the same decision that Marlow does within that novel - when confronted with the terrible truth, Marlow still tells Kertz's wife that his last words were of her. Similarly, the paramedics see the horror, and know the unbearable end, yet tell the husband here "Buddy just calm down you'll be all right."
The priest at the funeral gives another response. Like the paramedics he has seen too much of this horror to deny it any longer, however, the Priest has simply given up. His depressing eulogy is simple, and terrible. He merely says:
"You're gonna die, we're all gonna die, could be twenty years, could be tonight. Lately I have been wondering why we go to so much trouble to postpone the unavoidable and prolong the pain of being alive."
In the final song, "Rejoice", which many consider to be the opus of cynicism, Bazan proposes another answer. Unlike the many Amazon reviewers and otherwise who point to this as the pinnacle of depression on a depressing album, I see this simply finale to be the point of hope. The lyrics are short and simple, and merely say:
"Wouldn't it be so wonderful if everything were meaningless, but everything is so meaningful and most everything turns to shit. Rejoice."
If we could take the answer of the paramedic or the priest, life would be a lot easier, a lot simpler. If we merely could lie to appease ourselves and ignore the truth, or give up all hope for meaning, the problem of Control suddenly becomes a lot simpler. But we can't. As a self-proclaimed follower of Christ, this option is not available to Bazan, because Christ takes this terrible structure, dies and rises again to show that there is meaning inside it. Christ submits himself under fear to the point of death in an ultimate confrontation with "the horror! the horrror!" If Christ had been the paramedic, when confronted with crucifixion, he could have lied to Himself about whether his death made any difference, and merely gone on living. Had Christ been the priest, his death would have been a relief, and the ressurection would have been a torturous extension of meaninglessness.
However, because Christ is Christ, in the death and ressurection he stares unblinkingly at Fear itself, and proclaims love at any cost. He refuses to accept control, even though he could have called down angels, even though had he but spoken a word in his defense he could have ended the trial, even though the people tried endlessly to declare him as King, he refused to establish any control over his life, and instead ceaselessly pursued love in whatever form it may take. He refused to set love under his own terms, to define whom He could love and whom He would not. This pursuance of love in whatever form it takes is the only answer Christians have to the fear which so dominates our world today. To properly relate to other people, it's the only thing that can work.
Pedro shows this with a simple album about a marriage gone terribly bad. Yet, it's easy to see this same thing in any situation. If we are to relate to other people, like Christ we must embrace the unknown meaning of life, which is love. We must embrace the fact that most everything turns to shit, and instead of ignoring this, or giving up hope, or passing on the blow of fear to establish control, we must remain vulnerable, and the ultimate symbol of vulnerability is love.
That love is possible, even in the midst of all the crap of the world, is reason to rejoice. That there is meaning within what seems so meaningless is reason to rejoice. That Christ came in order to say that in spite of everything that is the horror of this world, love is still possible at the cost of giving up all control, is reason to rejoice. This radical response, this refusal to take control of His situation lead to Christ's crucifixion, and certainly won't necessarily lead to any better for those who follow his path, but in it is all meaning.
Rejoice.
