Everything Hits at Once

That is one smoking hot video from The Kills. I’ve been watching it for a couple of days now and thinking about sex, violence, and fiction. Throw in drugs and rock ’n’ roll and I’m shitting clichés. What is it that makes it appealing? (And please, if you disagree with me let’s get it going in the comments, I’m sure this one is not everyone’s g-spot.)

Chuck the cinematography, the great song, and the kickass wardrobe–what’s left is two attractive people having a physical confrontation and I still think it’s hot. It’s all about sexual tension going in the wrong direction. Or maybe the right. The reason I throw fiction into the mix here is because I believe it’s how we explore existence and create meaning. And I write a lot of it when I’m not online.

Art allows us to explore these themes without further traumatizing ourselves by actual violence. Part of the reason I love The Kills video is because it is fiction. Don’t go thinking I’m advocating rape or domestic violence, or even violence, period. But I am interested in making art about it, to understand. To think about why I’m enrapt watching VV and Hotel act out a fight. Or why Myg and I bicker and tease all the time—or even beat the crap out of each other with kung fu HUDs inworld. I like going right to the edge, to feel it without suffering the same consequences. Sure, maybe I’m sullying my beautiful mind, but guess what? It’s too late for that. I’m here for the experience and have the tinnitus to prove it.

For me, a lot of it is vicarious pleasure. I don’t drink, because I would have been dead decades ago and I’d like to stick around and watch the show, so I’m unlikely to end up with the “I was drunk” excuse for a good romantic scrap, and the last time I hit a girl I was in fifth grade. She decked me with a counter punch and I stayed down. (Nadia, if you’re out there, sorry I was such a prick, I think you had it goin’ on and I just was too young to understand it.)

All violence is obviously not sexual, and not all sex is violent, but there is most certainly a set that is the intersection of the two. I don’t buy the idea that the presence of violence cancels sexuality. And if you want to argue that the violence portrayed in the video is actually not violence, per se, and is rather simply foreplay, you’re just playing semantic games to make yourself feel better. The video, if not the song itself, is about violence-encoded sexual tension. If you buy into Freud and Jung at all, it’s also about the introduction of violence as a cover for shame over sexuality, i.e. we want to hit each other because we’re ashamed of wanting to fuck each other. It all starts with a punch in the arm on the playground.

Whenever the topic of sex and violence comes up, I hear the bridge to Bush’s hit “Everything Zen.” (I’m going to digress into music because that’s where my mind goes often and I don’t have much left to say coherently on that Kills video. And if you click on the song titles in this post, you can hear the tracks. Go Blip.fm.) I’m not a huge fan of Gavin Rossdale and co., but I admit enjoying the hits and the top-flight production of both Steve Albini on Razorblade Suitcase, and Alan Winstanley and Clive Langer on Sixteen Stone.

Until I started writing this post, I’d always misheard the lyrics in the bridge of “Everything Zen” as “there’s no sex in violence.” Apparently I was wrong. It’s: “there’s no sex in your violence.” Mumbles Rossdale strikes again.

Before recognizing my error, I was going to use this as an example of how irritated I can get by the occurrence of political positions I disagree with in songs. (Those that I agree with, I’m in favor of. Fight on, brothers and sisters.) But instead I want to point out how miscommunication can fuel a discussion and because I want to digress, poring over the lipstick traces in the laundry with a magnifying glass.

It’s my impression that “Everything Zen” is often read as an anthem against rape or any connection between violence and sexuality—because of that one repeated line. At least, that’s the argument I have in my head when I hear it and can find a few instances of when I Google it to back me up. But upon recognizing my error, I revise my understanding. The way I look at it now, it’s more like a statement of desire for the addition of sexuality in some unnamed interpersonal violence rather than the banal horror of whatever is there. But really, that’s just reading way too much into it, because the lyrics to the song are a Waterloo of wtf? I’m all in favor of obscure lyrics, but without the music these are fucking thin. And to hype the line “Raindogs howl for the century” as some kind of ode to Tom Waits and Allen Ginsberg is ludicrous. Even if Rossdale meant it that way, at best it’s pretty weak sauce.

Follow me a little further down the rabbit hole. Albini produced Bush’s sophomore album, Razorblade Suitcase. I don’t recall whether the criticism of Bush for wanting to be too much like Nirvana and The Pixies came first, but the band would be at a loss to refute the influence after choosing Albini—who had worked with the Pixies on Surfer Rosa and Nirvana on In Utero.

Part of the formula that makes a song like “Everything Zen” connect with listeners is the sum of carefully selected familiar elements. Here’s how you aim for a hit if you’re Bush: You start off with some fairly inspired Neil Young-style guitar onslaught (familiar to every rock fan since 1979’s Live Rust), throw in the Eddie Vedder vocal style that was de rigeur, make sure you enunciate “find my asshole brother” at the end of the first stanza, and then kick into a soft-loud-soft-loud structure that was perfected by the Pixies early on in their career. Bush managed to do it up right, get some hot-shit producers to make it pop out of your speakers like a shower of new ball bearings, and next thing you know, Mr. Rossdale is proposing to Gwen Stefani (I’m sure this is the real root of my animosity toward him).

Speaking of the Pixies, let’s get back to sex and violence. Here is the primer for Nirvana, and Bush, and thousands of other bands that came after. I can’t count the number of times I’ve failed attempting to write a song with the simplicity and power that Pixies achieve repeatedly. It was that perfect confluence of talent and neurosis that makes a great rock band, and usually also makes it an unsustainable endeavor. Let’s take “Tame,” from Doolittle. Now there are some abstract lyrics that hold up under scrutiny:

got hips like cinderella
must be having a good shame
talking sweet about nothing
cookie i think you’re
tame

i’m making good friends with you
when you’re shaking your good frame
fall on your face in those bad shoes
lying there like you’re tame

uh huh huh

tame

It’s all about tension. The lyrics and the song structure work together to make that point, and it doesn’t sound much like anything in rock before. The way Frank Black screams “tame” in the chorus conveys extreme sexual frustration and pushes violence back into the picture. Tell me you don’t get a little twinge when he sings “fall on your face in those bad shoes”—you know he was happy watching her fall, teasing her about her shoes. What a great line with a beautifully ambivalent word choice in the use of “bad,” in this case simultaneously suggesting the shoes are: a) not good, perhaps unstable, or b) good in the way of “badass.” And then you get a picture of her on the ground with the misuse of “lying” and the introduction of dishonesty—Frank Black thinks the subject’s entire presentation is a sham, she’s not tame at all. It’s driving him crazy.

And it drives me crazy. If you’re still reading, thanks for indulging me. Happy weekend and just because I need it, here’s another from The Kills.