Ulysses Lyrics #1 (6/6)

Hey all, this is the inaugural post of a new project of mine, where I dive in and do a Kind of Deep Read of the newest and most exciting feats of songwriting, rap, and lyricism. I think as long as I am working a mostly pointless job outside of my field of expertise, I can put my MA to work here on Steemit - analyzing and annotating as I was put on this Earth to do!

My first Deep Read will treat a few choice sections from one of my favorite new albums: Wide Awake! by Parquet Courts.

This is the Courts' forth album, released in May of this year. They first came on my radar with narratively dense, americana-twinged songs like "Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth" (Content Nausea, 2014) and evocative punk tunes such as "Berlin Got Blurry" (Human Performance, 2016).

For this go-round, the punk quartet has departed a bit from their rugged punk routes in order to produce an bouncy, eclectic, and at times dancey rock album with the help of the indie-hitmaking producer Danger Mouse. Andrew Savage, PQ's frontman and songwriter, described his vision for Wide Awake! as a punk album you could put on at parties.

But that's enough about the albums sounds - you clicked here for lyric analysis! To that end, one way to check if A. Savage fulfilled his vision for this album is to look for some wordplay you wouldn't mind hearing come over the speakers in a cramped Brooklyn (where PQ is currently based) apartment party. The smell of someone's cat's liter box - which they keep in their kitchen for some reason - is wafting under your nostrils, the glassy sounds of garbage collection on the curb outside tells you its gotten so late that its actually kind of early, and you hear a lively chrous open up with:

I'm wide awake!
Mind so woke 'cause my brain never pushed the brakes
I'm wide awake!
Eyes so open that my vision is as sharp as a blade
I'm wide awake!
Movin' and groovin' and I ain't ever losin' the pace

Announcing Wokeness

As goes the lively hook of the album's ninth, titular track: "Wide Awake". The assertive words are chanted over tinny percussion and a grooving baseline, demanding that the listener wake up, get up, and dance. However, Andrew Savage
has noted a different take regarding the lyrics above. Last May, he told GQ:

"It’s a tongue-in-cheek song about being awake, in the sense that people use the term ‘woke’ now.”

This specific use of 'woke' draws attention to the evolution of the term in recent years. While the word has its origins in black American communities as a way to denote identity and a concern for social justice, derivations like "stay woke" have since been injected into the mainstream by cultural products ranging from Childish Gambino's "Redbone" (Awaken, My Love!, 2016) to the blockbuster horror film Get Out! (2017) to a 2018 The Business of Fashion article posing the dilemma "Fashion Got Woke. But at What Cost?". The last example perhaps best captures how use of the word has changed. Once primarily indicative of black identity, 'woke' has recently been used as a way for anyone - white people, businesses, or in this case, a large industry magazine - to display their knowledge of social issues in a self-congratulating manner.

The cheekiness here works great. Andrew Savage has written a dance-y tune, acceptable at any reasonable person's party, with an embedded critique of the colonized term. White people will no doubt chant along to this catchy song, announcing how 'woke' they are - as the beat invites them to do. That lyrics like Eyes so open that my vision is as sharp as a blade strikes us as chantable in the first draws yet more attention to transformation of the term - its used to announce the awareness of the person uttering it.

Finally, we can note the repetitiveness of the song overall. "Wide Awake" doesn't move on from the lines noted above, but rather repeats them for all 2 minutes 39 seconds of the track. The intention here, as it falls on my ears, is to draw attention to what exactly we are talking about when we talk about wokeness, while also demonstrating how repetitive - perhaps even tiring - the discourse can sound when trotted out over and over again. As a white person, or a company, or a publication, you can only proclaim your wokeness so many times before it starts to sound empty and self-serving.

The MTA Runs on Your Wasted Time

A huge theme of Wide Awake! and Parquet Courts' larger oeuvre is the quick chaos (social, political, technological) of the current moment and its affect on an individual's emotional well-being and imagination. The title of 2014's Content Nausea speaks to that modern affliction, along with many turns of phrase in the newer project. Wide Awake!'s first track, "Total Football" refers to humanity and humans in flux, as "conductors of sound, heat and energy" and "conduits of clear electricity". On "Violence", Savage laments that there are "no folk songs about ATM machines" and wonders what consuming reality TV shows set in prisons does to a person's perception.

Halfway through the double-track "Almost Had to Start a Fight / In and Out of Patience", Savage comes to a real-world symbol of speed, chaos, and modern disappointments: The MTA ( as it stands in 2018).

In and out of patience
Don't have enough to share
Sometimes on life itself
I'm neither here nor there
The MTA
(Took the first of it)
Twenty-minute delay
(Wasn't the worst of it)
Saw it underground
(You could burn to death)
Now you're right on time to take what I got left
Funky music playing in my head

A quick MTA run-down for those of you living outside NYC:

Due to decades-long funds mismanagement, a failure to upgrade the system’s basic infrastructure, the havoc wrought by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and many other issues, the MTA by 2018 has become a joke. It has the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world, and is known for leaving passengers in all kinds of strange, decidedly unpleasant situations.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/nyregion/mta-train-delays.html

The line "You could burn to death" probably refers to harrowing instances like this, where passengers were stuck in a train car as it overheated and filled with steam:

S/b F train stuck for over an hour w/o light and air just rolled up-passengers dripping with sweat begging to get off #mta @MTA #effedtrain pic.twitter.com/NXJ3pDJtji

— Chelsea Lawrence (@chelseahbelle) June 5, 2017

That's all for now! Hope you have enjoyed this reading so far. Conclusion coming soon.