Staff Pix 4/24: Main Character Music

“Mira Niñita” by Los Jaivas

The kind of song that just seems to be about everything. Deeply spiritual and overwhelmingly beautiful, like watching the stars in the night sky illuminate their way through the din in real time. As much a song about a father connecting with his daughter as it is about something far more abstract and difficult to define, the precious microinstants where life explodes in a bouquet of colors and the boundaries of existence stretch beyond what anyone ever thought possible, into the realm of the fanciful and the fantastical. Even as the music elicits nostalgia, it refuses to exist anywhere but the present, Los Jaivas’ wistful dreamworld at once making way for the infinite potential of the future with one bold “Florecerá”. In short, music that makes you remember that magic is very much real. — Lucca Swain

“All My Friends” by LCD Soundystem

“All My Friends” is stunning, shattering, whatever you want to call it. It’s one of those songs that somehow simultaneously brings everyone together while making everyone feel like they’re the only person in the room. A complex lament to the passage of time and getting old—friendships dying out and reforming over and over again—this song to me feels like waking up, dancing while brushing your teeth and making your habitual breakfast, and rushing out the door with arms wide open just to walk down your predictable street and pass another day. It’s like looking out the window and seeing everyone in their own world. Young and old couples and kids in strollers and stressed weathered businessmen and everything in between. Seeing everyone and still choosing to only be in your world. To put it another way, when I saw this song live and got to experience that feeling firsthand, it literally felt like my brain was going to explode from the intensity of the moment. The fervor!! Every sweaty body a little blip in time and space yet the biggest, most imposing stars in their own universes… “That’s how it starts!” — Julia Schramm

“I Spoke With A Fish” by Mount Eerie

A song in the shape of a philosophical negotiation or a sutra sung out loud? Depends on who you ask. In perhaps the most whimsical song Phil Elverum has ever released, he talks with a fish and his heretofore solid idea of reality begins to unravel. Elverum begins by telling the fish “What you see as a palace is running water,” a kind of rationalist explanation, almost condescending in its attempt to impose a supposedly superior truth on a poor naive creature. But the fish only reflects back his ignorance, saying “What you see as those mountains is flowing matter.” The two might as well be modern incarnations of a Buddhist teacher and his disciple. It is said that Buddhist scriptures are written in riddles, paradoxes, or “twilight language” to intentionally bypass the rational mind, forcing a person to trade intellectual analysis for direct, intuitive experience. In what follows Phil Elverum does exactly that — looking at the world anew, his “small perspective fading.” He finds a new comfort in asking “who am I but the blink of an eye?” because he now has a holistic answer: “A stance that a river would take/ If it even wanted to pause.” The world is much larger, and more intertwined than his little idea could allow. And so is music: “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall/ The flashing glint on the marble where the eye once was/ On a taxidermied marlin’s frozen leap/ With or without me there to see.” Once Elverum has learned his master’s lesson, the two can appreciate the other’s way of being and how that being is equally enmeshed in the flowing matter of the world. “I like how you move through the water as one flowing muscle” Elverum says; “I dig your style too, man” the fish says. Fish fables are apparently all the rage in the 21st century, just look at how popular David Foster Wallace’s This is water still is today. The important difference though, is that where Wallace opts for a kind of empathetic solipsism to overcome nihilistic ennui, Elverum suggests that an embodied harmony with the non-dualist world. He shows us that we are not imprisoned in our minds in quite the same way Wallace would suggest, and he does so by trading perspectives with a fish. By the end of the track, it is unclear who you might call the main character — maybe it’s both of them, maybe it’s neither. Maybe that’s the point. — Christian Jones

“Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads

This is my beautiful house! This is my beautiful wife! This life is my own and I’M LIVING IT! A song for the ages, “Once in a Lifetime” is about slowing down and taking a necessary step back. Byrne’s voice oozes with equal parts gratitude and frustration as he preaches about the unraveling nature of time and its tendency to scoop us up in its rapid progression. As long as we exist on this earth, the structure of time remains a constant, (“Time isn’t holding up / Time isn’t after us”) but so is our consciousness… So regain it! Take a step back! Recognize what is around you and hold it in your hands, cherish it, and never let it go! — Sophie Parrish

“Immaterial” by SOPHIE

I’m not fixed to anything corporal, I’m intangible, I’m iridescent, I’m immaterial! My body is a vehicle for me to be carried in, and I can decorate it how I like, do with it what I like, but my existence is bigger than that. It lives in my imagination, my own fantasy world, not bogged down by any physically or socially constructed limitations. In my head, “I can be anything I want / anyhow, any place, anywhere, anyone / Any form, any shape, any way, anything, anything I want.” — Lauren Williams

“Celebrity Skin” by Hole

I’m all I wanna be: a walking study in demonology. “Celebrity Skin” by Hole is nothing if not an ode to the people we all are beneath the superficiality of stardom: the clothes we put on, the makeup we might even wake up in, the smiles we wear to keep up the facade of perfection. Like a moth to a flame, fame is a spotlight that beckons and destroys—asking for our souls but getting rid of us as soon as our skin wrinkles and sags past its prime. As a critique of the hollow nature of Hollywood, “Celebrity Skin” also serves as a reminder that you’re exactly who you want to be regardless of impossible beauty standards that exploit pounds of flesh for every dollar possible. Reclaim your own story! Be the main character of your life! And listen to Courtney Love while you do so. — Heather Thorn