Playlist: Abject Doom
B-Side Collection's Summer of Distractions
Summer is usually one of my good seasons. Maybe it is the heat rising off the dirty Brooklyn sidewalks, or maybe it is the heatwaves in general, or maybe it is the fact that I have been existing fairly close to the emotional bone these days as I work to turn a series of one dozen Google Docs filled with words about times I have been sad into something resembling a book, but it’s been a tough one this time around. I have been feeling something boiling inside me, and it is hard to parse, but the thing that has given me some comfort is a specific type of song about misery, doom, and obliteration of self with certainty of disaster and no chance at redemption.
Today, I want to share a few tracks I’ve been listening to that all share that theme.
Modern Baseball - “What If…”
Holy Ghost is, without question, my favorite Modern Baseball album. I think it is the only one I can really lose myself in now that I am out of college and mostly uninvested in songs about being a loser and going to parties and having unrequited crushes.
The record is split into two halves: the first featuring songs written and sang by Jake Ewald, the other featuring songs written and sang by Brendan Lukens. The full-album experience is interesting, as the split is delineated and obvious. Listening back to Holy Ghost today, it is clear that the band were on their way to their eventual break-up. Ewald’s tracks are thoroughly developed, longer, more interested in pushing the songwriting potential, lyricism, and performance of the band in general. Lukens’ songs, by contrast, are scattershot and messy, mostly coming in under two minutes in length, faster in tempo, as if the writer is mostly invested in getting them out, not looking back, and finishing as quickly as possible. I looked at the liner notes the other day and realized that certain lyrics on Lukens’ side are incorrectly transcribed there, a suggestion that it was more about getting the performance out than scrutinizing it.
While I’ve grown to love Ewald’s half of the record (especially the track “Hiding,”which feels like the first step toward the songwriting prowess and lyrical confidence he’d develop over the following Slaughter Beach, Dog albums), I have revisited Lukens’ half far more often. The lyrics are paranoid and scared, generally hopeless, and that all comes to a head on “What If…”
The track opens instantly with a first verse that I think about all the time, a type of confession and self-interrogation that is truly uncommon in what I am going to simply refer to as This Kind Of Emo Music.
When I was younger, I thought of caring
as a reason for some to praise me in envy.
“So humble and kind, no better person.”
Now that I’m older, I see what I’ve been:
Ruthless, ungrateful, always trying to tear up tracks
And reader, I have been here, in this exact trap of thinking. It’s not until the next and final song on the album, “Just Another Face,” that Lukens will lay it all bare with “I’m a waste of time and space,” but there’s a sense of self loathing laced within a vein of supposed self-improvement. Maybe it is a necessary step through whatever it is I am going through, but I have been thinking a lot about every bad thing I have ever done lately. I have been thinking about this essay and considering whether I have been a good person who has done bad things and what kind of grace I deserve. Maybe it is simply because I was raised Catholic, but confession of my shortcomings feels like a necessary step toward my self-forgiveness. When I’m feeling this way, It’s hard not to see every embarrassing, self-serving, or otherwise ugly thing I’ve ever done and said, lined up like balls on a pool table. The only way out is through they say, but unfortunately, in my experience, that is not true. The other way out is through imagined disaster, a collapse of the part of the brain that recognizes something it doesn’t like, and that is exactly where Lukens goes in verse two:
When I was younger, I thought of deep space.
Pick me up swiftly, carry me away,
drop me off willing, lightyears long gone,
never again seeing those who I love.
“It’s not about me this time!”
There I go lying again.
Please save my soul,
I don’t know what I’m doing anymore
The Mountain Goats - “No Children”
Somewhat recently, I watched David Lynch’s Lost Highway for the first time. I loved the movie, and I will spare you the details, but a review from the critic Will Sloan on Letterboxd has really stuck with me: “It’s the job of all serious artists to lay their most evil and disgusting thoughts on a slab for the world to see, and yet so few do. Lynch does.” I wrote every word of this review down in my notebook alongside a few other pieces of writing advice that I try to keep in the front of my mind while working.
The thing I love about “No Children” is that every line desires misery, pain, and oblivion. There is not a charitable or redeemable thought throughout. Beyond this, there is a distinct hope for disaster in every sentence. Outcomes that are purely a matter of choice on behalf of the speaker are hoped for: “I hope I lie and tell everyone you were a good wife.”
There is an obvious and ugly resonance with a lyric like “I hope you die / I hope we both die,” which probably explains why this song (otherwise inexplicably) trended on TikTok a few years ago. Longtime B Side Collection readers know that I have mixed feelings about how John Darnielle has contextualized the violence against women in his songs. I am positive that some Mountain Goats scholar online somewhere will have a longer, more nuanced explanation for and contextualization of this song’s obvious suggestions of gendered violence, and I encourage you to seek it out (a couple of cursory searches give me “It’s just a character,” which doesn’t really do much for me, but feel how you will about it).
The lines that get stuck in my head lately are the ones that imagine self harm in excruciating detail:
I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow,
I hope it bleeds all day long.
Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises;
we're pretty sure they're all wrong.
I hope it stays dark forever.
I hope the worst isn't over,
and I hope you blink before I do,
and I hope I never get sober.
I’ve been trying to severely limit my drinking over the past year or so. I’m hoping to write more about this in the future (it is notoriously hard to write yourself out of an open wound) but it has been a rewarding, upsetting, and all-encompassing experience. Every few months, I take a few months off of drinking. The benefits are not immediate, but when they come, they are unavoidable. There are a few obvious ones that any medical professional will tell you about: my skin is clearer and softer, my guts feel less inflated, and I am far more in touch with my emotional core (for better and worse). There are also some less obvious ones, like a stronger and more clearly-stated-in-my-psyche relation between mind and body that has continued to surprise me. As it turns out, to exist as a consciousness within a body is a wild thing. When I think too much about it, I want to start drinking again.
I’m not particularly interested in weighing the pros and cons of a sober lifestyle at this point in my year, and the jury’s still out as to whether I will keep this up, but I will say that abstinence from drinking has revealed to me the extent to which my life has revolved around alcohol for the better part of my twenties. Specifically, it has revealed to me how my desire to drink a lot and quickly is part of a larger hope that it stays dark forever. The truth is that it is easier to drink myself into a state of managed oblivion than it is to confront my ugliest, scariest feelings, to lay my evil and disgusting thoughts on a slab for the world (read: myself) to see. What will I do with that information? As I said, it is hard to write yourself out of an open wound.
Julien Baker - “Funeral Pyre”
I believe we are meant to understand “Funeral Pyre” to be a love song. If you are lucky to have lived a life into adulthood, you likely know how it feels to love someone so strongly that you would burn yourself alive to prove it. In the grand scheme of emotional rock music, self destruction as a means of demonstrating devotion is far from an uncommon theme, and it is almost always short-sighted and perhaps laced with a low-burning resentment. Forgive me, but we are going to stay on Hawthorne Heights through the end of this paragraph. I am of the belief that it is at best unfair to follow a line like “cut my wrists and black my eyes” with “because you kill me, you know you do, you like it too and I can tell.” It is sometimes surprising to me that I grew up on a steady diet of the “Ohio Is For Lovers” music video and turned out the way I did (I am not always as appreciative and loving of the person I grew into as I should but I can imagine worse outcomes).
But back to “Funeral Pyre,” as I’ve continued to listen to this song over the years (to the point where I am pretty sure the “Sad Song 11” version from the Tiny Desk Concert is my favorite Julien Baker performance), I understand it differently. I read the song as a conversation between two versions of the speaker: the speaker we spend this verse with is begging and pleading with the version of herself that she is desperate to love to no avail.
Call me a coward, but I'm too scared to leave
'cause I want you to be the last thing I see.
C'mon, call me a coward, because I'm too scared to leave.
Watched you pouring lighter fluid out onto the leaves
and I would've loved you with the dying fire,
let you smother me down to the embers,
frostbite turning my limbs as black as cinder of funeral pyre
It is sometimes sad, but we are not usually at the mercy of what or whom we love, least of all ourselves. Lord knows that I have spent years in front of the mirror, desperate to love what I see in front of me. I’ve read about how to accept ones’ self, tricks of self-delusion, convincing yourself that those bodily faults are actually objects of affection. I have happiness in my heart for those of you who have fought this battle and found some small oasis of self love on the other side. I am still working on it and I’m sorry to say that on my worst days, when I am sure there is no hope, I think about how I would burn it all to the ground if I could, watch the essential bits of myself turn to coals in a pit of stones in the forest, be it as a means of surrender or as a sacrifice toward the unlovable part of myself, an offer of peace and dedication to prove to some unprovable thing inside me that will not accept kindness, not lets its shoulders down. I love “Funeral Pyre” for many reasons, but maybe my favorite thing about it is how Baker sings the lyrics slowly, lets each syllable marinate on her tongue, how her desperation for acceptance is palpable in each word, how clearly and with such conviction that I believe everything she says.
Thank you for reading. Are there any Abject Doom songs that you love? That give you a strange sense of comfort? Let me know by leaving a comment, or by telling me on Instagram or Threads. You can also follow me on Letterboxd.