Here It Is Tomorrow

[roadrunnertwice]

Over the last several months I’ve been nursing an obsession with this song called Ballad of How You Can All Shut Up. Take a minute to listen, please, preferably with headphones. Back yet? Okay, now don’t hit me, lemme explain. (No, there is too much; let me sum up.)

So, Scott Miller; he had this band called Game Theory back in the ’80s, and they sort of teetered on the brink of success for a couple years and put out some critically-acclaimed but now basically impossible to obtain records, and then Miller moved on and formed The Loud Family, which, I guess you could call it Game Theory 2.0, although I think of Game Theory as Loud Family 0.8; there are definite differences in the material, but both were first and foremost Scott Miller’s Current Band, so. The Loud Family’s debut was 1993’s Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things, from which this is the next-to-last song. (Third-to-last track, including the nine second guitar fumble at the end, but that renders the numerology less poignant so fuck it.)

Fast forward a tick: Last song on the album is called “Give In World,” and it’s a love song for a gal named Shalini, and it goes a little like this:

Sha-ley-ni, Sha-ley-ni
It’s a right-now world
And will you wait the long wait for me?
Sha-ley-ni, Sha-ley-ni
It’s a give-in world
And will you fight the good fight with me?

Fast forward a few years more, and, to gank a yuk from a review of Interbabe Concern that I always quite liked, that answer turned out to be “no.” Okay, now stop fast forwarding all over the place and zoom out: Sometime around the end of Game Theory, Miller got into this production habit of incredibly dense self-reference (which, to be fair, he was already in a lyrical habit of incredibly dense everything-else-reference), which extended through the Mitch Easter-produced Loud Family records and then imploded violently and conclusively in Interbabe Concern, with later records standing a bit more freely. Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things is, I think, where this technique really came into its own, which, that kind of makes sense, given that Miller had just changed project names and I have to imagine he wanted to make clear that he was both in connection with his past material and transcending it.

Which brings us back to “Ballad of How You Can All Shut Up.” If the self-reference is dense elsewhere, this thing is a briskly rotating neutron star. What you’re hearing here is a grinding and distorted mechanical voice intoning a set of unpronounceable “song” “names” from the downslope of Game Theory’s Lolita Nation ("DEFMACROS / HOWSOMETH / INGDOTIME / SALENGTHS / OMETHINGL / ETBFOLLOW / AAFTERNOO / NGETPRESE / NTMOMENTI / FTHINGSWO / NTALWAYSB / ETHISWAYT / BCACAUSEA / BWASTEAFT / ERNOONWHE / NEQBMERET / URNFROMSH / OWLITTLEG / REENPLACE"), while a calm female voice patiently translates or explains by speaking (mostly) lyrics and song titles from earlier on the album and from Game Theory’s entire career (hover on lines for the concordance):

My name is…
How are you?
Treat me like an object
Sell me something I haven’t already got
Causal virtue
Actions neatly chained
Another wasted afternoon
Here comes everybody
Here it is tomorrow
If and when…
Waiting in lines and answering phones
Legal means
Decisions made too fast
A pyramid structure
Elegance of line
Sense of place
It’s all rigged
We all told you so
No one ever got through

It’s like the song is revealing everything that came before as a secret code, and daring us to break it. (Also, credit where due, I wouldn’t have caught 3/4 of that without this helpful Game Theory/Loud Family lyrics archive.) Okay, so anyway, about a third of the way into this full-scale devouring of the past, Miller starts playing guitar and singing:

Come on over baby
I can show you what it’s like
Why, this can’t go on for another night

Dreaming I’d been looking good in your photographs
(You know that, you know that)
Dreaming I’d be getting vertigo at last
(Kim Novak, Kim Novak)

You can trash my little dream
(Wrong again, wrong again)
You can laugh at my little dream
(Wrong again, wrong again)

But you can shut up while it ends
(Oh baby, oh baby)
You can shut up while it ends

And then, okay, then?

SHAW-LEY-NI
The leaves change color
SHAW-LEY-NAW
Leave the leaves
Believe what you like
It’s change
Change your name
Leave town

I’ll front-load the caveats here and say that there are any number of things you could be talking about when you talk about resigning yourself to changes you have no say in and moving on, especially since this is coming at the end of a record on which Miller did, in fact “change [his] name” (though I don’t think he left San Francisco). But. Given that:

• The “Believe what you like / It’s change” pushback comes right as the mechanical voice is attempting to force a segue into “Give In World”’s ill-fated profession of true love…
• The contrast between these lines’ disinterested assertion of a changed world and the savoring of misery and loss in the song proper echoes the push and pull throughout Interbabe Concern between songs like “The Softest Tip Of Her Baby Tongue” or “Where They Go Back To School But Get Depressed” and songs like “Just Gone” or “Not Expecting Both Contempo and Classique,” which (while not necessarily showing signs of getting over it or even necessarily of recognizing that there’s an over to which one can get) acknowledge the absurdity of denying reality and fumble toward some new way of living with it…
• And this final rebuke just happens to be delivered by the actual, real-life Shalini Chatterjee—

—The end effect is that “Ballad of How You Can All Shut Up” resembles a piece of Miller’s epic 1996 breakup album that broke off, fell from orbit, and cratered explosively several years in the past. Like Wilco’s one-two punch of “Jesus, etc.” and “Ashes of American Flags,” this is a song that presents a convincing illusion of being able to predict the future.

But those Wilco numbers only seemed to be singing about something in the future. The nature of “Ballad”’s overproduced self-referential implosion does something even more subtle and creepy: it fakes clairvoyance, but it also shows its work, suggesting that if you know which seemingly-unrelated facts to line up like pool balls, if you know your position on your album, if you happen to have the translation key, then the future is an open book.

This sort of willful over-interpretation of what amounts to Miller having some fun in the studio and tossing off a shout-out to all the folks who had actually listened to all of Game Theory’s records is obvious and transparent bullshit, but I find it tremendously entertaining and cool, and I am pretty sure this is how all those “Paul Is Dead” guys felt.

Comments

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

Wow. I bet their albums sync up with David Lynch movies.

I have nothing interesting to add, except that the signature C.B. radio style voice distortion (in the first half of the song, when he's reading off song titles) will forever remind of when I used to play guitar and I'd sometimes pick up trucker chatter on my small amp, which would freak me out. *twang twang twaaaiaiaingBZZJJJJJTT YEAH I'LL PICK UP A SACK OF POTATOES FOR DINNER [click] HA HA HA HO HO HA HO HA [click] BBBBJJJJTTTZZZ...*

(actual conversation)

[roadrunnertwice]

Haha, that's totally awesome. We used to get weird interference on our cordless phones, but it's much creepier in an amplifier.