Close Listening: Yo La Tengo // "This Stupid World"
Close Listening is a series diving into my particular song obsessions at the moment. I’ll be careful not to “dissect the bird,” but rather climb aboard and fly for awhile.
Staring right in front of me
Smoke shows in the mist
Cry from laughter, cry from pain
We see what you think we see
Just as you don't, but do
Repeat as needed, repeat againThis stupid world
It's killing me
This stupid world
Is all we haveStaring in disbelief
Out of body, out of place
Blood on your fingers, but we're carefree
Can't hear a word you say
Reach for the skies
Better not be none, and none will beThis stupid world
It's killing me
This stupid world
Is all we have
This stupid world
It's killing me
This stupid world
Is all we have
The power is in that chorus: this stupid world / it’s killing me / this stupid world / is all we have. A power built from the purest form of human truth: contradiction. Raging guitars, set aloft by quiet, sweet harmonies. We die, we know we die. We live, because we have to.
Yo La Tengo is not a band you turn to for political commentary, yet they’ve moved gently in that direction. They titled their 2018 album There’s A Riot Going On, and it wasn’t (just) because they’re fans of Sly Stone. “This Stupid World” is not concerned with politics per se; it’s a protest against bullshit. We see what you think we see / Just as you don’t, but do. Bullshit is nefarious because of its cynicism. Harry Frankfurt: “Liars know they are obfuscating the truth; bullshitters don’t even care, so long as they win.” This is the miasma floating over the land. Yo La Tengo subtly scramble up the words. They don’t fall where you think they should. The world nowadays seems similarly scrambled.
Years ago, I came across this quote by the poet Gary Snyder in an interview with The Paris Review: “The first step, I think… is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. Make us love the world… and then begin to take better care of it.” It knocked me flat. Here’s something I felt but couldn’t quite articulate. Snyder, another quiet artist, with whispered, well-earned wisdom. This world is all we have, in all its beauty, despair, sublimity, stupidity.
Cynicism colors so much of our realities. It’s there in ostensibly friendly conversations: every joking “fuck the world,” every shrug at the hotter weather. We denigrate and curse this world out of sheer habit. It is cynicism masked as acceptance.
Worse is cynicism masked as artistic bravery. The artists who sing the ills of the world in the darkest shades and tones, with no sense of grief as ballast, of any emotion besides numbness or perverse joy. It feels childish. Yes, art requires self-expression, but I don’t believe that hating the world is self-expression. It’s just selfish. Above all else, artists have an obligation to a higher form of truth, higher than just the individual.
The long-held youthful dream is that music can change the world. It doesn’t, not on the timescale of governments, policy, or uprisings. Music moves below the surface, an undercurrent, an undertow if you let it. It can change one person at a time, which is still a miracle. A changed person ripples outward, quietly changing others through a charged contact. It took me a year to grasp this seemingly simple song, to tune into its wavelength and wander its depths. I’m different now.
Three musicians, united by marriage, trust, three decades of tours and albums, love. Locked into a brittle groove, making their own storm and holding onto a piece of driftwood as a life raft. “This Stupid World” hovers in place but requires you to venture forward, through the storm.
“Many love certainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair, itself a form of certainty that the future is notable and known,” writes Rebecca Solnit. Yo La Tengo says it’s okay, we can love this stupid world. We can sing of its messiness. We can dress it in tangled briars of guitar distortion. We can be joyous in our rage. We can choose the possibility contained in a one-note, droning song where a lot happens that never could’ve been known before the feedback bled out of the amps.