Listen In!
The future is hard to talk about. This is what one of my colleagues (hint: Ben) confided to me the other day. Originally I took it as an excuse for missing the mixpost deadline, but now I read it as a peremptory confession, one that I’m afraid I have to make to you right now: you’ll find little of a future in this mix. What you will find are present anxieties, dystopic murder-worlds, prevalent sadnesses, and some nice britpop.
The future here represented is a project of the present to present itself, or at the very least, five adults trying to make sense of the thing; you’ll find common binarisms of imagined reality and realized imagination, of utter annihilation and circumspect peace, precaution and willful abandon. Most of these songs evoke feelings about the future, and the majority of them describe crappy futures no one wants to live in (Jason has a knack for identifying these narratives). A select few capture what it would feel like to live in a time beyond comprehension (these are my songs). Niina took everything to heart and went into the future to figure out what we’d be listening to 246,342 years from now. Mike contemplated a quick shower.
All in all, it’s a clumsy, pessimistic, and ultimately typical gpants mix. Enjoy.
01. Laura Nyro, LaBelle — “O-o-h Child (Live)”
This was the most universally resonant song about “the future” that I could think of. Sure enough, originally recorded by the Five Stairsteps in the 1970s, it’s been covered dozens of times. What does everyone hear in it? Songwriter Laura Nyro’s stripped down take gets at its essence well, I think, especially those first three arresting, elegiac notes. Yea the chorus takes flight, and why not? We all want the future to be something better. But it’s the opening, titular sigh which gives that sentiment such a rich shading. It hints that maybe the future never comes, that it’s just an idea to make the present bearable. (Mike)
Ok, so this one was obv. one of the defining achievements of britpop, distilling Blur’s pervasive 90s ennui into a lament for the non-event of moving into a new century. They were, of course, looking forward to the inconceivably futuristic 21st Century, in which we spacemen are now deeply ensconced. Were they right to sigh boredly at the changeover? Well, aside from politically, I’d say that the new century has indeed been “nothing special.” I consider this one to be a cautionary treatise on investing too much in a promising future. (Ben)
03. Arcade Fire — “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
This song is cheesy as hell, but I really do love its mood and imagery. If one were to take this song literally, I guess you’d assume that some nuclear winter filled the streets with ice and snow, and some disease or radiation poisoning somehow wiped out the memories and language of the survivors. Romantic, huh? Now there is just the purity of love to bring color to the world, or some crap like that. But of course the imagery is a metaphor for the all-consuming bliss of a newly discovered love, and the tendency of a new couple to want nothing from the world but each other. It sounds a little too sentimental, but you know, it really does feel like that sometimes. (Jason)
04. School of Seven Bells — “Wired for Light”
I’ve been reading this comic lately called King City. It’s a serialized version of a hip book that came out some time last decade. Why am I bringing this up? Well, King City takes place in a weird future place in which cats can be injected with chemicals to make them do stuff like pick locks, turn into periscopes, and look I’ve got no words to really set down here this is largely a song that makes me think of polyspatial laser fortresses and the Flash Gordon movie theme. (Joel)
05. Owen Pallett — “Flare Gun”
Heartland is Pallett’s first album after resigning the Final Fantasy moniker; however, the gesture of using his actual name is false, because this is actually more a narrative album than ever before. Where some future terrors are tiny future terrors, this is an bombastic, vast jingle for eminent domain; backed up by flutey bits that remind me of a Sufjan Stevens level of wackiness, the narrator incites the “good men of valorous heart” to “consider a new start and sail today for the Heartland.” Indeed, the future of the Heartland is a sparkling one, if the speaker is to be believed. But is he? (Niina)
One of the best tracks on This Is Hardcore, an album positively riddled with them, this song gently reminds “the youth” that “the aged” were once just like them. I’m not gonna lie. Despite its crooning, anthemic façade, this song scares the shit out of me. I try not to think much about death, or about turning into a decrepit husk of my former self before dying, but it’s coming for me. It’s coming for you. It’s coming for all of us. Fuck. (Ben)
07. The Mountain Goats — “Quetzalcoatl Is Born”
This is the most personally resonant song about “the future” that I could think of. What my identification with the birth of a Mesoamerican feathered-serpent deity suggests I’m not really sure–maybe ask Joel, who conducts unaccredited psychoanalysis sessions in our extra office on the weekends. But yea, there was a pretty difficult period in my life where I was waiting, as John D. says in another song, for the future to arrive. And there wasn’t all that much to do but wait, really. It was truly and deeply purgatorial; I’d listen to this song over and over again, trying to detect any signs of life in me, any crackling or snapping corn. I wanted the universe to toss me into a fire so I’d come out purified and reborn. And that’s what I love about this song: its oddly inscrutable portrait of transformation. No one around, just some rustling fields, a strange gathering, and without a lot of fanfare you’re ready to start again. (Mike)
08. Jimmy Eat World — “Big Cars”
It’s an unreleased track! It’s rare! They’re not that bad! Look, I never thought I’d be in this position, putting Jimmy Eat World on a mix past the age of eleven, but we’re here now and we need to discuss this. “Big Cars” comes from the fabled Mark Trombino (think Clarity, pre-Dreamworks) sessions of Futures, their hotly-anticipated and (for many) largely disappointing follow-up to Bleed American. For me, Futures was a pretty good album: it’s the last “listenable” Jimmy, and in many ways the culmination of a lot of emotive themes they’d been riding on since Teenage Fanclub gave them a woody. When I got my hands on these demos (essentially a whole new album of material), well, I got a woody too. If we’re to treat the Trombino cuts as an alterna–Futures, then this track is its big opener: crunchy guitars, call-and-answer vocals, buildup to explosive chorus. It also plays real nice with our “futures” theme: “If there’s something wrong / you just press delete,” Adkins laments after discovering the backspace button in this elegantly-composed analogy of technologization to impermanence. Then comes the part where the song title becomes obvious: “Family can sleep well tonight, / we’re a long, long way / ‘til all the good names / for your big cars / will be used” See? Mazda Cosmo Sport? Anybody? (Joel) [editor’s note: HAHA THIS IS WHAT YOU GET FOR PUTTIN ME IN CHARGE OF A MIX YOU CRANKY FOOLS]
09. New Order — “Dream Attack”
I like to figure out what songs are about. I’m pretty good at it. Here is what this song is about. In the grim future, global war rages. A monolithic dystopian government discovers that our protagonist, an ordinary family man, has a weak latent psychic ability that can be amplified into a weaponized form. He is now the key to a devastating surprise attack that will destroy the enemy forever. His loving wife begs him not to unleash this holocaust. But he must do his duty to his country. On the morning of the attack, he wakes up and looks out the window. It’s just like any other day. He goes down to breakfast. His wife’s eyes silently beg him not to go through with it. He has no choice. Rather than face her and his own uncertainty, he leaves, abandoning his untouched breakfast. He knows she will not be able to live with him after this, but there is nothing else he can do. He can save his country. He travels to the government facility. The machinery is settled into place over him, connected to his brain. There is no turning back. He would do anything for her, but he can’t change who he is and what he must do now. He closes his eyes and concentrates. The machinery hums to life, and suddenly the entire hemisphere is illuminated with rhythmic pulses of an unholy light. Somewhere, unseen, enemies are being struck down as though by the hammer of Thor. The attack is a success, but at what cost? It is the beginning of a new, frightening age. I’m serious. That is exactly what this song is about. (Jason)
10. Janelle Monae — “Sincerely, Jane”
Janelle Monae, Afro-Futurism’s heir presumptive. Like my dreamy crush Joanna Newsom, she’s an outré female artist with her own distinct aesthetic. And like my other dreamy, gay spaceship of a crush Sam Delany, she refracts social experience through the lens of science fiction, looking crazy cool in the process. Sincerely Jane comes from her EP Metropolis Suite I of IV, a song cycle about dystopian android enslavement and a more-human-than-human protagonist (the remaining installments will be packed into her forthcoming LP, the Arch-Android, to be released in May). Monae is unusually literal here, calling out the gun, drug and sex trades that suffocate communities around the world. But it’s impossible to sound boring or preachy on a track like this. The horns carry the song, they sound nothing so much like particularly jazzy elephants swaying back and forth–outsized, a little goofy, but undeniably powerful, like Monae herself. (Mike)
11. Class Actress — “Careful What You Say”
This is a warning song, a right-now-future kind of song. It’s danceable enough to seem blithe, but it’s actually rather severe – “how many times do I have to say it?” Translation: don’t fuck up, or there will be some answers required. Her beautiful voice just makes it all the more terrifying, because you know beauty is always cruel (god, I did just quote Cradle of Filth). When she gets to the repeating singsongy end part (“careful what you say / it hurts me when you talk that way”) I think she’s just taunting us. Guys, lately, when I think of a song about the terror of the immediate future, I think of this one. (Niina)
12. Talking Heads — “(Nothing But) Flowers”
Here’s one we can take literally. Some apocalypse has cleanly wiped away human civilization. Noise and pollution are no more. The world is fields and flowers, birdsong and beauty. But this guy is right, most of us would hate every second of it. And with that admission, we can acknowledge that the things we do to harm the planet are pretty much inevitable. The scene described in this song probably really is in our planet’s future, with the difference that none of us will be there. Also, I’m ashamed to admit that I unironically love the Talking Heads. (Jason)
Close your eyes and picture a wobbly widdle plushie bear singing this song to you. Now open your eyes and gaze into the twin flickering iPhone screens worn on this sentient mound of stereoscopic wires and microfibred debris gathered by a kid robot and shaped into a familiar ursid that’s trying to start a thing with you. This tragic Furby is still speaking human gibberish after millennia of isolation. He lives in an android’s septic tank, and probably knows the Oracle from The Matrix. Don’t cry for him, he does not compute. He does, however, respond to hugs. (Joel)
14. Neil Young — “After the Goldrush”
So look, it’s pretty obvious to everyone that Neil Young smoked a great deal of weed in his day. “After the Gold Rush” is a key example of the sort of lyrical output such indulgence produced: it’s got “mother nature,” “knights in armor,” “silver spaceships flying,” and of course the line where he just flat out states, “I felt like getting high.” Broken up into three verses—past, present and future—the song charts the development of, and destruction caused by, the rise of human civilization. Then it posits a somewhat fantastical sci-fi conceit for how the human race might carry on after we’ve irretrievably fucked everything up here. Fun stuff! (Ben)
15. Mirror Mirror — “New Horizons”
Mirror Mirror’s entire album actually presents a future impression contrary to Pallett’s glimmering vistas; it’s something darkish and Pink Floydish, combined with the awesomely stressful carnival antics of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (my favorites). This song is a bit happier-sounding than some of their others, but it still gets me a little nervy when someone asks me about any society whatsoever, much less the “society for the advancement of inflammatory consciousness”. The future is right there, and as anyone can see, you’re such a sensible girl, and everyone agrees we’re going to be friends for a long long time. (Niina)
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