This is not a song by Anthony Kiedis,
I thought it best to begin by revealing this.
I know it sounds like the guitar was by John,
But I’ve never met him and he seems creatively done.
It’s hard to deny that people like the sound of
A bunch of pricks in the Californian sun and,
You know what, I’ll at least give them this,
You know where you stand with a prick.
Cause everyone’s nice and they’re all getting sober,
Care for the planet and care for their neighbor,
Donate to this cause, share widely everyone,
But first give me some Californian sun.
So you walk past your shame to hand out some fliers,
Course it’s a pain but you have your desires,
You know all the slogans, like you know the exceptions,
You want to do good but right now need connections.
When musicians say, “yeah that feels good,”
That just means it’s already understood,
It’s familiar, it’s cosy, and you’re scared and you’re lonely.
I sequenced some noises should I send them to Ghostly?
What a coincidence, your emotion occurs in
12 tone equal temperament excursions,
If you write by the grid, then you die by the grid,
Medicated, shredded, and perhaps with a kid.
These are all way of avoiding your fate,
The belief in your feelings and the trust in your taste,
Desperately looking for someone to help you,
A god, a tradition, a drug in the news.
Art’s not transcendent, there’s nothing more boring,
Than millionaire gurus and their YouTube sermons,
A way of being, sure, or right time and right place,
Find a couple rappers, grow a beard on your face.
But I’m not really out here to judge,
Perhaps God will, when he’s done with his cults.
It’s hard to be honest with rewards on the line,
It’s hard to save face when everything is online.
We’re all people like you in search of a feeling,
We’re all people like me in search of some meaning,
Something to cling to, is it status or healing?
It will always be both, until we all stop breathing.
I’m scared, please make the feeling stop.
I’m scared, please make the feeling stop.
I’m scared, please make the feeling stop.
Sun, please make the feeling stop.
I wrote this song at the end of August last year. A basic loop of the guitar and drums had been living on my computer for a while, and I thought it sounded a bit like the Red Hot Chili Peppers so…
At the time, my lyrical interests had taken a more cynical, wry direction. I’d written earnest love songs, told Dickensian stories of various kinds, and explored post-colonial dystopias and freeform impressionist electronica, but didn’t feel like I’d written much music that touched more directly on that endless dance between futility and humour, pessimism and joy.1 Last summer, I got to work.2
On the one hand, today’s tune takes a bit of a gloomy look at the performative virtue politics of contemporary life, especially those of artists pursuing their own special visions/careers/lives. “You know all the slogans, like you know the exceptions” — conveniently, the exceptions always seem to kick in right when you need to take that flight or work with that client.
True, but since we love to practice a ruthless criticism of everything existing here at Steve on Steve: isn’t that low-hanging fruit? Surely it’s a good sign if even deeply cynical people want to say they agree with progressive political tenets. That’s winning! And, to be more compassionate, perhaps virtue signaling says more about how powerless people feel. What else is there really to do, when voting and protesting — even some of the largest in a nation’s history — change very little.
“You want to do good but right now need connections” — but what if something that seems like an individual’s flaw (too much striving) is just the product of an economy built on success, competition, and growth. It’s surely sensible to want some financial success in a world that terrorises ‘losers’. But it can feel like we’re caught in an endless telling of the joke about the two guys in the woods who encounter a bear. One man bends down to tighten his laces. The other man looks at him and says,“Are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!” The shoe-tyer replies, “I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you.”
But there is another layer here, in that artistic success is often sought as a means of accruing not economic success but social status. Anyone paying attention knows there’s no money in music. As my friend John was saying recently, as much as the industrial production makes certain forms of scarcity rarer than they once were (access to food, communication technologies, etc.), social status is inherently relational: we can’t all be the top dog.3
But this is bleak in its own way. Buddhists, stoics, and the like have been telling us for centuries not to worry too much about what other people think. We’ve always wanted a route off the hamster wheel of social approval. At the very least, perhaps we can choose the forms of status we seek. We’re not simply subject to the whims of biological programming that says might is right. (I’m sure most would admit, upon deep introspection, that the highest form of status is a subscription to Steve on Steve.) As long as you’ve enough status to have friends and to not be socially ostracised or targeted, think wisely about where further ladder climbing will actually take you. Looking inwards is not a bad idea.
But how far in? Surely we ought to raise an eyebrow at some of the more dogmatic parts of ‘self-expression’ culture and the insistence on valorising feeling as the rosetta stone of existence? As if the existential terror of life can be cured. Freud said the purpose of psychoanalysis was to transform “neurotic misery into common unhappiness.”
And hey, racists often do feel threatened. Fascism depends on highly-emotional people, scared people. Feelings aren’t the truth. I know many wonderful people, and sometimes some of them feel worthless, and they never are. Taking a step back and thinking about things is good, even if it makes you feel a bit bad. “Sun, please make the feeling stop” — careful you don’t numb yourself too much there, bud.4
I sometimes chuckle at how musicians’ publicists would have us believe their clients’ ‘inner essence’5 is somehow represented in the same four chords that everyone uses. Even the jazz folk6 are using the same somewhat arbitrary 12 notes a few blokes divided the octave into 500 years ago. Comforting sounds are so often familiar sounds. To what extent should an artistic practice be confined to the grid — of the DAW, the ‘gram, existence? Where is the unique terror of your mortal soul? Perhaps it’s nothing to do with a soul at all. I wouldn’t know: I write almost entirely using those aforementioned 12 notes...
I began this write-up by suggesting these tunes were part of a new lyrical approach for me but, as the hyperlinks dotted throughout this piece show, they were more of a natural outgrowth. Steve does love his songs with multiple perspectives and unreliable narrators. I mostly don’t actually know what I think, and art is good at dramatising conflicts — negative capability, always, maybe.
Sure, I make fun of Rick Rubin, but I have my Taoist-inflected lullabies.7 Though it’s a lot coming from a multi-millionaire with a guru beard, much of Rick’s self-help-for-artists schtick is fine: do your own thing. Build your own little world instead of trying to win at someone else’s.
And yet taste is a thing. We need some kind of language to explain why John Taylor's Month Away is a better song than They Own The Media.
Or do we? The obvious difficulty is that taste is so often enshrined by the powerful. And it’s boring, and inherently conservative, and misses the importance of context, which changes. But the absence of elitist tastemakers isn’t necessarily preferable — the turn to algorithmic playlists hasn’t exactly led to a flowering of idiosyncratic culture, has it?
As always, the answers lie somewhere between thinking and feeling, tradition and exploration. Which is to say I don’t have them. See you next week.
Of course, by last fall, that was in full swing.
I’ve already shared I Don't Know ‘Bout That from that period.
Perhaps the advancement of transport technologies ameliorates that a little. People can move around a bit more and are less dependent on kinship networks.
Soon, I plan to write about vibe merchants, which is what I think musicians have allowed themselves to be turned into. Agents of the numbing, dreaded, vibe.
A sumptuous genre.
Incidentally, Rick, if you have the guts to work with a critic of yours, please leave a comment and subscribe. I double dare you!
Great song! awesome beat. has a such a compelling beat to it, full of momentum, which you dont let up.