Believe it or not, fewer and fewer people these days give a shit about 1991, the greatest year in rock-and-roll and probably the greatest year ever. Seriously, the next time I check Friendster and only four people have My Bloody Valentine as one of their favorite bands, I’m going to go apeshit. Coldplay? Guster? Give me a fucking break – neither of these bands recorded in 1991.
So Valentine’s Loveless is one watershed moment – and holy living shit, if you don’t know about this album go buy it immediately, put it on loud, and shoot yourself, you worthless asshole – and another 1991 masterpiece, the topos of the next however many words I can crank out without becoming a stodgy high-felutant Village-Voiced fuck off, is Spiderland, the dark and sparse and decade-ruining masterwork of Louisville’s Slint.
Its simplicity, its straightforward lyrical narrative, its emphasis on mood over actual song structure, its quiet/loud switcheroos was misleading, and an entire decade was wasted supporting post-rock bands that tried their best to approximate what made Spiderland so incredible, groups of songless, unskilled, LOUD, quiet, fucking waste of time jokes. When people say Spiderland ruined the 90s, they really are blaming Slint for the thousands of dollars they invested in CDs and tight cotton tees of bands who promised to have transcended the fundamentals of song structure by creating “moods”, who purportedly found the magical riff and were just going to play that for eighty minutes of post-rock prophecy. Yet here we are, not enlightened, and not listening to Mogwai.
Why did the Spiderland formula work for Slint but rarely for others? I don’t know, but let’s talk about “Good Morning, Captain” anyway. The closing track on Spiderland, “Captain” has the unfortunate reputation as American indie rock’s biggest cliché. Regardless of how great the song is (and I’m going to show you), there’s something dreadfully wrong about a song that makes its way onto every mixtape any indie girlfriend with fishnet for a bra has ever given to her non-hipster boyfriend (a rarity for indie girls but bear with me). “Good Morning, Captain” is a new generation’s “Marquee Moon.”
Musically speaking, this is simplicity and sparseness to the max – two chords, the chords themselves only two notes, no vocal melody, and the guitar part never plays during the narrative verses. Even for Spiderland, “Good Morning, Captain” lacks the syncopation of the A-side and linear complexities – the burden of the song, really, is on the narrative, and the music plays more of a theatrical role than a particularly active one.
So regarding the narrative: you motherfuckers ever heard of Samuel Coleridge? He wrote “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” over several revisions, and for whatever reason, next to Christian rockers love for quoting the First Letter to the Corinthians, the poem is an unusual touchstone for a number of rock songs: recall how Iron Maiden has its own musical tribute to Coleridge, or earlier how Public Image Ltd. performs an eleven minute song about getting rid of the albatross, entitled “Albatross,” or how recently there’s a new band out from Philadelphia called An Albatross, who are fucking terrible. Anyway, “Good Morning, Captain” deals with the poem too. Not simply a musical tribute or adaptation, the song finds Slint going a step further, filling in the mythic fissures Coleridge etched into the poem, making visible the poem’s invisibiles Naturas that the poet mentions in his preface. I don’t plan on summarizing the Rime, but to me what is most strikingly absent from the poem is the Ancient Mariner absolutely fucking losing it – telling the Wedding Guest “I lost it” just doesn’t account for the utter amount of shit in this guy’s pants. He was terrified, he was a wreck, he was remorseful (I mean honest to God, why the fuck did he kill that bird?), and what “Good Morning, Captain” effectively does is make explicit the Captain’s fearful inner monologue that, as we have it, refuses to exhaust itself.
Maritime is more of a cop-out description of the song’s opening – melodrama aside, the guitars are practically crying, and the balls out sloppy swaggering militancy of the bass and drum backing conceals the song’s fundamental aporia. When the Mariner (heretofore referred to as the “Captain”) finally reaches the front door, we meet him in unusually broken form, a lame fuck and a long ways from the positively nagging, self-sure, been-there-done-that Coleridge original.
“Please, it’s cold.”
Listen, the Captain is afraid and a tragic figure, etc. etc. etc., and that’s all well and good – but he’s pretty good at being scary himself. Coleridge makes a point of pulling the Captain out of his own narrative when the wedding guest questions whether he himself is actually alive; Slint takes this one step further and blurs who says what. The effect is that as listeners we must account for a certain reciprocity of terror that comes from Slint vocalist Brian McMahon’s perfectly ambiguous lyrics. When “there appeared the delicate hand of a child,” whose “face was flush and timid”? The child’s, or the Captain’s? When the young boy “stared at the captain through frightened eyes,” are those simply the child’s, or in fact, is the child staring, in some sort of Platonic, evil eye, fascinare male lingua sense of it all, through the captain’s frightened eyes? It’s a brilliant conceit, as Coleridge himself certainly spends ample verbiage on the Captain’s ocular glitter – in fact, of all the Mariner’s features, his eyes are most often described.
Two-thirds into “Good Morning, Captain,” Slint has brought out most tellingly the Captain’s loneliness and the reciprocity of his fear. Musically we can sense that the first two stanzas are delivered outside this new roof of hospitality, and now inside the house, we approach the Captain’s attempt at sleep with increasingly off-kilter guitar lines. Supernatural seems a fair descriptive, but most particularly apt when the Captain feels “the creaking of the stairs beneath him.” As he is about to open the door to his chamber, Slint launch into guitar noise ebbing and flowing out of dynamics, and eventually sputtering out into ominous string percussives. The key to it all is Slint’s superior sense of space, time, and timing – the instrumental passage has but one idea, and amidst its gradual confusions, becomes a statement of enormous and terrifying potency. And the Captain hasn’t even opened the fucking door yet!
“I’m trying to find my way home.”
What follows are three of the most intense minutes of the American indie rock tradition. Call it melodrama, call it sublimity, call it emo and act like you’ve been there and done that, but the second half of “Good Morning, Captain” separates the song from the rest of the album, not to mention the collective wet fart that is the most post-rock. That is to say, the finale does transcend the lack of song structure and communicates some seriously passionate stuff – it fulfills the post-rock promise. As importantly, Slint touches upon the one aspect of the Captain that Coleridge perhaps intentionally leaves open-ended – the Captain’s remorse. In Slint’s version, the Captain knows he fucked up. The barrage of crunchy strings, the cymbal manslaughter, McMahon’s pathetic “I’ve grown taller now. I want to police to be notified” coupled with his pained scream “I miss you! Awwwwwwwww miss you!” are the album’s loudest, most self-interested moments, a torrent of emotion that extends painfully and indefinitely, and has no choice but to fill out and into the listener as well. These are, of course, the moments I fear most – the last thing an asshole like me wants to admit is that there’s something that, in one fell swoop, totally devastates him, let alone a stupid little rock song.
-- Nick Sylvester
