You're Very Special
What do Bach, Pink Floyd & Billie Eilish have in common? Failure to communicate!
(To avoid yet another failure to communicate, here’s a Spotify playlist of songs and artists mentioned in this essay.)
A friend once told me how much the Pink Floyd song Comfortably Loved meant to him, and I was like, “Dude, it’s Comfortably Numb”. And he said “What are you talking about, it’s Comfortably Loved”. After some terribly empirical back and forth, we played the track… I can still hear the disappointment in his voice when he cried “You’ve ruined it for me!”.
I want to take you on a journey of misunderstood music giants failing to get their message across — a journey way more treacherous than this silly anecdote suggests. It ends with me attempting to ruin one my own songs for you, You’re Very Special, by explaining what I really meant.
Trent Reznor aka Nine Inch Nails, avoids explaining the meaning of his songs. Trent, wearing the same rose coloured glasses as my friend, said he felt let down when he finally found out what some of his favourite artists really meant in their songs. And this is Mr. Razor Blades himself. Merely let down? BETRAYED.
Aphex Twin claimed electronic music is so abstract that discussing it is futile and only cheapens it; a point he can’t really argue without undermining the very point he’s making. Doubly ironic as his music is in no small part kept alive with the endless, mythological discussion around it. Nonetheless, I agree that translating the language of music, of feelings, into the language of words is a clunky, lossy, fraught process. Hasn’t stopped me dating.
It’s also good to leave some things unsaid. Music, like poetry, often works best with a healthy dose of ambiguity. There’s a sweet spot. It feels great when a song has a message that lands. But the listener is involved in the landing, with the interpretive process integral to the satisfaction. Music needs to seduce us, and overly obvious intent can kill the vibe. To engage in music is to tie fragments of the song to your own internal experiences, connecting dots across the space of your mind to form your own constellations.
But it’s not pretty when our interpretations totally untether from the artist’s intent. Like an unrequited lover or conspiracy theorist believing that some fact they’ve stumbled upon actually supports their own crazy narrative. Eminem’s Stan the perfect nightmare of metastasized imagination.
And like Trent Reznor, I’d often rather not know an artist’s intent. Which is why I often ignore lyrics. Much in the same way I’ve learnt to switch off the part of my brain that analyses movies for plot consistency, like pretty much every time travel movie. The more I unpack, the less perfect it gets. Like dating someone and you spot a MAGA cap poking out their closet. Might need a time travel machine to win back any Trump supporters in my audience I lost with that remark. Should’ve left it unsaid. Like when you meet someone, and you notice they have some physical deformity, and you can feel words popping into your head, but you’ve trained yourself to shut such thoughts down. If you didn’t like that example… see what I mean?
Less is often more. It’s too easy to trigger bad associations, or lead people to assume intent that isn’t there. Are we impatiently superficial? When was the last time you made an effort to understand something you dislike? Art and music act as a giant safe space where we can all just let go and fully indulge our prejudices. I hate Taylor Swift!? Which makes specificity in art a double-edged sword. If we like an artist’s specifics, the art is even better, but if we don’t, the art is compromised.
Like singing along with a love song where if they just removed that one pronoun, you could totally enjoy the song, but now… I can’t sing that line properly… do I switch him to her? Argh it ruins the rhyme… So I have to sort of mentally skip over this emotional pothole. I’ll be getting lost in Fiona Apple’s smoked velvet voice, and then she gets too specific… “Jonathon?! Wait. I thought you loved ME!”. It short circuits the suspension of disbelief, the parasocial relationship I’m indulging in, the feeling of being validated and understood.
Creating the illusion of being specific can touch more people. Lyricists, astrologers and politicians are all magicians with words. And that’s an advantage of dispensing with words altogether, as I do in most of my songs. You can project whatever you want onto them. Float down a river of feelings, conjure up images, make your own story along the way. The ups and downs of our journey can even transcend things we find sacred, like our identity and morality. This fits with why we resonate with songs written by chequered people born out of radically different eras and cultures like Wagner (antisemite who wrote Here Comes The Bride), Roger Waters (genius in 1973 for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, useful idiot in 2023 for Putin), and of course Kanye.
We connect with artists who believe in all sorts of crazy shit. Is this an indictment of the depth of such connections? Horseshoe theory is a nice visual metaphor for the observation that the far left and right resemble each other. Perhaps what makes it work, is at a deeper level the stories we resonate with capture the human condition, which is simple, universal, and childlike. Pink Floyd’s Us and Them lyric, “With, without, and who’ll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about?” reduces two warring nations to two 5 year olds arguing over a toy truck. True, if you allow the words “all about” to do so much heavy lifting that mountains bury Roger’s poor toy truck. Art paints with such broad brushstrokes. Can you tell if a journey is that of the hero or the villain merely by the contour of its ups and downs?
And what if the ups are downs and downs are ups to someone else? When the evil emperor in Star Wars says “Gooood!” as he turns the innocent but troubled kid to the dark side, I assume the director George Lucas wasn’t trying to appeal to the mirror-neuronally challenged psychopaths in his audience who could really resonate with the emperor. We spontaneously feel an artist’s intent, and trust our feelings are right, but are we really good judges of character? Imagine who Michael Jackson was actually referring to in his love songs?! And who’d be comfortable defending their love of his songs by appealing to the simple, universal, …childlike nature of the human condition? AARRGH. Retrospectively he’s compelled us to mentally separate him from his art, adding a cognitive dissonance that taints his otherwise harmonious music.
There’s nothing like a real connection. The bridge of ambiguity crossed with good guesses, pregnant sentences completing each other like the penultimate scene in a romcom. One of my songs, Take Me To Hell, I played to this artist and on first listen they were like: “I hear a fight in the chorus”. Nailed it. Which segues nicely into my narcissistic fantasy. Because the song is about war. I imagine two people, on opposite sides of a war, who both believe they fundamentally hate each other, yet both love the song. Naturally upon discovering the mutuality of their admiration, the political horseshoe welds into a circle of love. World peace. The crying sky from upside down smiles a big fucking rainbow.
But inspiration for the saddest songs never dries up. After marinating for centuries in great art we still have wars. Wars would be impossible without lies, and art is supposed to make us more connected to truth, in the most appealing possible way. Why has art failed? Art, even literature, has a mysterious impotence when it comes to contributing to human enlightenment. But then again, so has Wikipedia. Suffice its value that I’d be dumber without it. Dictators know this. I feel a perverse solace in the banning of books; it’s proof of their potency. Chechnya banned music outside of 80 to 114 beats per minute. Though this makes a mockery of the discussion, as if the legitimacy of music hinges upon a capricious butcher giddily wielding a tribal sledgehammer.
What truth can music deliver us, which dictators might be scared of? The sincerity of the feelings expressed? About what? Some angsty message? It’s tricky. Angsty music defies the bad experiences that inspire it. It feels good, perhaps too good. We enjoy the satisfying resolutions within a song, perhaps forgetting that their absence was the message. Metallica’s One reacts with sensory overload to the experience of existing without senses. Billy Eilish’s When The Party’s Over feels like getting ASMR’d by an angel, an afterparty outshining the party itself. Chris Isaac’s Wicked Game fails if you don’t wanna fall in love with the bad girl. We enjoy music as a superstimulus, a rose coloured world defying the unjust, messy universe we want to escape from. Artists become politicians painting pretty pictures of a better world to believe in.
Bach was inspired by religious beliefs. For those who believe music should be apolitical, it’s a curious case for the separation of church and state. As an atheist, I wonder whether there’s an imaginary element to his music that’s inaccessible to me. Like a very interesting room, some inner sanctum, that you can only enter after passing a lie detector test, asking whether you believe in this imaginary thing. Or can his music be fully appreciated without any belief in God, like an atheist attending an AA meeting? If we can be so untethered from his intent, did Bach fail? His music dedicated to a discarded deity, every song an unrequited love letter, his life’s work metastasized imagination. But it’s really pretty so does anyone really care?
Anyone can appreciate the heavenly, platonic quality of Bach’s music. But that’s the problem: anyone. I can imagine some dictator vibing to it: “Beautiful… such a pure world… without Jews”. I wanted to write a song that dictators would hate, and even if they liked it, would hate if they found out what I really meant. Dedicated to everyday people. To learn from Beethoven’s mistake of dedicating a symphony to the fraudulent liberator of the French people, Napoleon. And to learn from John Lennon’s mistake of Imagine.
My album tells stories, and the best stories have bad guys in them. The bad guy in You’re Very Special, one of my few songs with words, says how stupid people are. Some people assume I’m endorsing this sentiment, confusing me with the bad guy. Of course I have the instinct to clear things up right away. An instinct flaccid in those interviewing the winner of the 2024 World Dunning-Kruger award aka Biggest Idiot, Terrence Howard, who actually believes 1*1=2.
But when it comes to complex human questions, confusion can’t be cleared so quickly, and I don’t want to pedal toxic certainty, the lifeblood of gurus and cult leaders. Talking points laser guided by algorithms to bypass your bullshit detectors and burrow into your brain, mind viruses replicating via spewing their poisonous lies out your mouth for the rest of your life, cut short because you didn’t take a vaccine. A viral battle between memes and genes. How am I doing? I’m aiming for a tangent that has the melodramatic flourish of Jordan Peterson, metaphors masquerading as facts, political porn masquerading as insight, without going so far as to dice these floral sentences into a Russell word Brand salad.
So let’s dispense with the poetry, and surgically deconstruct the sentiment that people are stupid. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people say this. I’ve even said it. And the conceited assumption is, I’m really smart, or that my norm is calibrated to the elites I hang out with, minus the occasional reality check I get watching a funny Youtube video inviting ordinary people to bomb embarrassingly basic questions. Laughing along with the audience hmm. Thing is, by definition, people are on average, averagely smart. So to say people are generally stupid is itself a stupid statement, ironically.
But thinking poorly of others is so ingrained in the way we think, a fact demagogues exploit. Who doesn’t think that overall, their opinion on life, politics, etc. isn’t probably a bit better than the average person’s? Surveys say 90% of us think we’re better than average drivers, better than average in bed etc. I’m not saying there are no humble people out there (I’m terrible in bed I’m not even in the ~50% of men who know where a woman’s nubis is), but we tend to believe we’re kind of on the right track, and others have got it wrong.
And politically, this “people are stupid” sentiment comprises half of the attacks on the other side. They’re either stupid or bad people: now we’re close to 100%. Most democrats think this of Trump supporters, and vice versa. How else can we reconcile our total disbelief in the other side’s total belief in their unbelievable opinions? At a meta level we’re weirdly unified. “I hate you!” “Aww I hate you too!” And until the consequences of our beliefs go beyond virtue signalling and actually knock on our door, we’re OK. It’s just entertainment; the more shameless the outrage, the more twisted the horseshoe, the better. Can’t lie it can be entertaining, the more shameless the outrage, the more twisted the horseshoe, the better. Let’s hear “both sides”, spread by Russian bots. Pierce Morgan debates pregnant man who thinks swallowing a morning after pill is murder!
On that murderous note, let me finally kill the song for you. On January 6th, the rioters’ hunt for their Vice President had failed (they chanted “Hang Mike Pence” — should Pence have taken them seriously not literally?). Trump finally told his supporters that it’s time to go home now, after 3 hours of doing nothing but crossing his fingers and swiping his bloody thumb. Letting them know that “You’re very special”.
The very last vocal line in the song is a deconstructed quote from Russell Brand. He was promoting his Messiah Complex stand up tour (the one where he got misty eyed salivating about how leaderly Che Guevara looked), where he tried to woo his audience by telling them how “very very intelligent” he thought they were.
You’re very special. You’re very intelligent. Narcissists like to butter you up. What do they really think?
Well now we’ve arrived at the main quote in the song. It’s read by an anti-abortionist in a congressional hearing, who was trying to support her point by quoting Hitler. Yeah, the main quote in the song about how stupid people are comes from a passage in Mein Kampf (My Struggle in German). I told you stories need bad guys. Especially ones who say the quiet part out loud, and you don’t even care. The ones who get under your skin, seduce you by stirring up your simple, universal, childlike sentiments. Evil propagates insidiously when it’s not a caricature of itself, but turns you into a caricature of yourself. Like a fetus yet to develop a brain is a caricature of an evangelical voter. Political porn.
That’s why the verse and chorus in the song feel uplifting, like how charismatic leaders can make us feel. A feeling that climaxes then sinks as it crosses the bridge into pain. Pain that these sociopaths exacerbate with their confident promises that they can fix it. The pain of realizing that the uplifting feeling was a lie. The painful feeling when reality knocks on your door and your slogans and silly arguments unglue into a collage of words; viral fragments. What reflection do you see in the rose coloured glasses cracked and twisted on the floor? A squeezed tube of ivermectin? Choose your own imagery. Your fear completes the story. You’re not comfortable. You’re not loved. Banished by Bach’s church. Your stars gone. You’ve been BETRAYED. You’re VERY SPECIAL. Not me though.