And then there's the rage. John Darnielle is by all accounts a very thoughtful, kind and well-adjusted man. That's certainly the way he comes across in interviews, on Twitter and in so, so many gentle, compassionate songs. As I've said, I shook his hand once, and it was large, warm, soft and welcoming; the smile he sent my way was there in his eyes not just on his lips. But the song he was singing at the time - the song indeed we were all hollering at the top of our voices - is one of the most vicious accounts of marital break-up ever committed to music. You know the one I mean. There's an essential humour to the way he does it, a purgative quality which approaches celebration when he plays such songs live, but there's no getting away from the sheer anger at the heart of much of JD's work.
Indeed, getting away from (or over) anger is something JD shows limited interest in doing. There's little suppression, sublimation or simple avoidance at work here; few easy narratives of moving on or rising above. Any forgiveness there is comes hard (see 'Pale Green Things' for an example) and forgetting doesn't happen at all. Rather, old wounds stay open; or at least never quite heal properly and retain much of their original hurt (note - there is a lovely Mountain Goats cover of the Trembling Blue Stars' mournful song 'Sometimes I still feel the bruise'). Real, imaginary or somewhere in between, JD's grievances - the failed relationships, the abuses of power, the betrayals of trust - have a lasting energy that he seems able to draw on at will and in a frighteningly convincing manner. He appears unafraid and unashamed of his own anger, writing about it not to make it go away but to experience it more deeply, to know it more thoroughly, to - let's admit it - enjoy it to its full. As it rarely does for the rest of us, anger also renders JD even more articulate than usual, leading to some of his most compelling lines, the ones - 'I hope I lie/and tell everyone you were a good wife'; 'I hope the people who did you wrong have trouble sleeping at night' - that his fans sing along to with so much relish. In these lyrics and elsewhere, his rage is utterly venomous and hungry for the consolation of revenge; but it is also legitimate, based on a deep-seated sense of injustice as well as innate optimism ('I hope...). It is okay to be this angry, The Mountain Goats tell us, when you have been wronged this badly. More than that, in the right hands anger can be a creative force.
'Baboon' is a delightfully spiteful case in point. The song has the same basic structure (verse/chorus/verse/chorus) as 'Absolute Lithops Effect' and is as compact and focused as most early Mountain Goats songs, but in this case the mood created is a sour, ugly and belligerent one. It's a nasty, embittered little thing, set in a strange, poisoned landscape ('Daisies on the hillside like cancer on the skin') in which - as so often in JD's songs - a doomed relationship seems to be reaching its inevitable end. There are very few details from which to infer a particular story, and the lyrics trade in vague, if suggestive, abstractions ('Pure power/Stripped of meaning/Sky burning/Spring cleaning') but it's really the general atmosphere of anger and impending violence that is the point. As the title suggests, this is an almost bestial cry of self-preservation ('I'll be skinned alive before I'll take this from you') in the face of a destructive, or at the very least disillusioning, other - the 'you' into whose face each word of the song is spat. On record, the effect is augmented by unusually full instrumentation for the period - by which I mean primitive drums and a shrill (I think) melodica - though the seductive squalor of the song is perhaps even more evident when it is played live and acoustic. Either way, it provides one more example of JD's wit being bound up with his wickedness; in this case the killer line being 'I'd be grateful my children aren't here to see this if you'd ever seen fit to give me children'. When it's done this well, anger is a real pleasure.
'Baboon' is a delightfully spiteful case in point. The song has the same basic structure (verse/chorus/verse/chorus) as 'Absolute Lithops Effect' and is as compact and focused as most early Mountain Goats songs, but in this case the mood created is a sour, ugly and belligerent one. It's a nasty, embittered little thing, set in a strange, poisoned landscape ('Daisies on the hillside like cancer on the skin') in which - as so often in JD's songs - a doomed relationship seems to be reaching its inevitable end. There are very few details from which to infer a particular story, and the lyrics trade in vague, if suggestive, abstractions ('Pure power/Stripped of meaning/Sky burning/Spring cleaning') but it's really the general atmosphere of anger and impending violence that is the point. As the title suggests, this is an almost bestial cry of self-preservation ('I'll be skinned alive before I'll take this from you') in the face of a destructive, or at the very least disillusioning, other - the 'you' into whose face each word of the song is spat. On record, the effect is augmented by unusually full instrumentation for the period - by which I mean primitive drums and a shrill (I think) melodica - though the seductive squalor of the song is perhaps even more evident when it is played live and acoustic. Either way, it provides one more example of JD's wit being bound up with his wickedness; in this case the killer line being 'I'd be grateful my children aren't here to see this if you'd ever seen fit to give me children'. When it's done this well, anger is a real pleasure.
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