Neutral Milk Hotel
“Engine” (From the “Holland, 1945” single)

I feel like I’ve gotten kind of far afield from why I like music. There’s this thing about what like garbage in garbage out? My guru Louis CK was talking about how parents make their kids eat fast food and drink soda and eat sugar and then they won’t eat an apple. And how the kids watch TV and so they don’t enjoy a nice day outside. Whatever Louis CK is like a million years old so he’s an idiot. But maybe there’s something to that.

Like I’ve been writing about witches raping people and Kanye West being a genius and stuff? What is that all about. Haven’t I read a book ever? When I get up at six in the morning on a Saturday to research audiophile headphones that I plan on using to wring every detail out of a 320mbps up-sampled web rip of an Internet rapper’s five thousandth release this month—should I be in the hospital? Do I need to sign away my volition and become a ward of the state? There’s something wrong.

It seems like a good thing to make the most infectious pop song ever. Bright, nice, glossy. Like Kanye West or Kesha or Katy Perry. What’s wrong with that. This is just a misapprehension of language bought under the drunken influence of metaphoricity. Damn he’s a good salesman though.

There’s something to challenging music, bland food, hardship, and difficult phrases. Neutral Milk Hotel has some melodies and they’re catchy. So this isn’t so much about Neutral Milk Hotel. But,

1. I wanted to post this version of “Engine” because, in the words of nerds and Merlin, it is canonical. To start, it was recorded live in a London Underground station underneath Piccadilly Circus.

2. I had this epiphany listening to the song this morning because it is like what? It’s just a nice song, and it’s emotional. You don’t need to fuck it with a thousand Pro Tools boxes or chop/screw it to make it POP. It’s fine. It’s like nice weather. Version 1.0 is exactly fine enough. It’s a nice day outside.

What is the point of writing about music. Like, it’s perfectly pleasant to site here in bed with the dog sleeping against my leg. I have a perfect sight line on the houseplant. The sun comes through the half-uncurtained window, left like that so the plant could get sunlight in the morning before I start to work and have to close the curtain. I don’t need to remix light. (People kind of do that when they rave, though, don’t they?) The aesthetic experience of light is exactly perfect.

Light’s the medium, and we never confuse light for the things it’s the precondition for perceiving. Which is something that trips me out. In a sense, without light, there would be no things. Words on a page are just light.

Sound being invisible is also trippy. Because then all of a sudden sound cum music is a whole another thing. It’s like, it can be decadent. It’s almost forced to be decadent. Because you can’t see it. I suppose there’s ambient music, right, but that shit is so boring. I probably won’t ever find ambient music more interesting, but I think it would be a healthy step to find other music less interesting.

I’m trying to remember what my epiphany was. I think it just had to do with realizing that thinking (about) microgenres are funny, and thinking that Kanye West is a genius, that what’s the deal with that because it’s ridiculous. There just seems to be a pertinacity to vivacious or bright-sounding music that’s like worse than a persistent suitor running through a long dryspell. I don’t like it. It’s desperate.

The main thing, though, is that the (read: “my”) constant attraction to yet more and more flashy, awesome, catchy, great pop music might just be a sign of emotional or mental impoverishment that not only won’t be solved by finding better music, but may be presenting as the need for constantly improving music. What I’m saying is that, pace my previous thoughts on Salem, what I’m looking for may not be “true post-rock” so much as “true post-music,” as in something else that helps me get it up for putting words next to words. Like National Novel Writing Month?

Maybe! We’ll see.