Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

It’s almost the end of the year, and the end of the decade. (Which I won’t bother trying to name. Seek other commentators for that discussion.) I wouldn’t be a worthwhile blog-writing guy if I didn’t take a stab at an end-of-the-decade list, and since I write about (or at least pass along) music quite a bit, well, here we are. This wouldn’t be Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, though, if there weren’t an introductory essay.

This is not a comprehensive list, which will become clear as the days go by. I’m sure Kid A and whatever drivel the Arcade Fire have put out in the past ten years are fine albums. I wouldn’t know; I never listened to them! So I’m not going to pull your leg and pretend that you’re about to read an authoritative list of the ten best albums of the decade. Rolling Stone or Pitchfork are doing that kind of thing. I’m only writing about what I’m qualified to write about.

As I was going through my music, though, I realized that I don’t actually own a ton of albums that I regularly listen to. Or, at least, listen to enough to say “this one is better than that one.” I pretty easily came up with around 25 albums to choose from. (There were still a lot that didn’t make even the first cut. I have like, every Modest Mouse album, and I’ve listened to exactly zero of those songs. Thanks, MyTunes!) This makes sense, though, right? I don’t steal a lot of music these days, so if I’m going to own an entire album, odds are it’s going to be by an artist that I know I already like. It’s a recession, after all. If I find an individual song I like, I’ll splurge, but for the most part, I’m not rolling the dice on unproven albums.

The big question is, is the record industry going to roll the dice on albums? I’m not going to make any dire predictions about the fate of the record industry: like I said, it’s a recession, and a lot of industries are in decline. However, the thrust of this Financial Times article looks not so good:

Only one album released after 2002 has made it in to the decade’s top 10 in the US, according to research that highlights the record industry’s decline since piracy and single-track digital downloads began to erode the once lucrative format.

Again, I’m not a business expert, or a record executive, or an artist, or anything like that, but it makes intuitive sense that in a world where you can easily buy any individual track you want, or steal it, or listen to it on-demand over the Internet, the market for full albums, collections of songs meant to convey a singular artistic message, would decline, on both the creative and the business side. All of this is to say, this could be the last Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Decennial Album Retrospective you ever read!

A quick note on methodology: I limited myself to one album per band on this list. Otherwise, it would come to be dominated by what the Official Washington Correspondent of DD&U refers to as LIEWS. That is, Long Island Emo With Screaming. I’d like to appear a little more broad than that. In that spirit, here’s my tenth favorite album of the decade, a little New Jersey Emo With Screaming.

War All the Time

10) Thursday, War All the Time (2003)
Ok, so “emo with screaming” isn’t the most apt description. Thursday counts as a post-hardcore band, if that sort of label means anything to you. (It doesn’t mean much to me.) War All the Time is Thursday’s second full-length studio album, and it’s a doozy: loud, intense, and grim. You know I’m a stickler for starting a record out right, and the first track, “For the Workforce, Drowning,” does the trick: I’d argue it’s the most potent commentary on the existential terror of the rat race in the last 25 years. (Now we lie wide awake in our parents beds / tossing and turning. / Tomorrow we’ll get up, / drive to work, / single file. / With everyday, /it’s like the last. / Waiting for the life to start, / is it always just always ahead of the curve?) Right on those heels, we’re confronted with what passes for a ballad on a Thursday album, “Between Rupture and Rapture,” dread-inspiring imagery and all. (Without a second opinion / The chemicals saturate to counteract the code. / Through the double helix we are twisting / Too scared to let this go. / Someone call the head nurse. / She’s coming to the capitol / To wrap us up and throw us in the dirt / With a dream that’s turning off.) It’s a ferocious-sounding album from front to back, but the endearing quality of Thursday is the heart and feeling that goes into their lyrics. I don’t want to blow all my material before I get into the signature track, though.

Signature track: “War All the Time”

Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly is on record as saying that the album’s title and theme were inspired by a Charles Bukowski poem called “Pace Is the Essence,” which I’ll go ahead and reproduce here in full, probably in violation of all manner of copyright laws. Sorry. It’s a good poem!

as the mailman walked up the hill
he laughed
when he saw me.
I laughed too.
“yeah, Harry, I know:
just an old man with a hose
watering the parkway.
you got me…”

those guys think it’s got to be
war
all the time.
I’m just taking a
rest.
when I finally press that red
button
they’ll wish I was
back watering the
gladiolas.

“It’s about love, this record is really about love,” Rickly said about War All the Time. “I’ve never written a song about love before, the whole record is about love lost and faith lost.” Which, you know, we have to take the man at his word, to an extent. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun will recognize, however, comma, that I’m a pretty enthusiastic proponent of the reader-response school of criticism. The band has said, in a number of venues, that the title track of their album isn’t actually about September 11th. But it’s very hard not to complete the meaning of the text through interpretation, so to speak. And when I hear lyrics like “War all of the time / In the shadow of the New York skyline. / We grew up too fast, / Falling apart / Like the ashes of American flags” and “We don’t know where to land / So we kiss like little kids. / We used to be very tall buildings. / We’ve been falling for so long,” it’s hard not to imagine an allegory for what happened that day. I won’t bullshit you, dear reader: six years later, I listen to this song, and I get a couple pieces of dust in my eye.

Rickly and his bandmates have an interest in removing their tune from the collection of songs that can be categorized as “About 9/11,” since so many of them, especially those written in the most immediate aftermath, come from a place of fear, hatred, and irrational groupthink. They have an even greater interest if, in fact, they didn’t mean for the song to be even remotely considered for that category in the first place. What I’m trying to say is that even if you inadvertently create a piece of art that can, in a meaningful and artful way, take people back to a place that they would rather forget, but are better off not forgetting, and think critically about it, that’s probably something to be proud of.

Tags: "War All the Time", DD&UFAOTD:AMIMIFE, lists, the record industry, Thursday, what's this decade called

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 12:36 am and is filed under Culture, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.