Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #186

Guest Post by Andrew Womack + "I'm Waiting for the Man" by Lou Reed - 07/07/21

Today we have a guest post from the writer Andrew Womack! I met Andrew back in 2013 when I submitted two humor pieces to his website The Morning News.

Andrew was a pleasure to work with as we edited the pieces in Google Docs and traded back and forth ideas.

You can read our work together here.

And below is a proper bio!

Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News. He is always working on his next installment of the Albums of the Year series. That is a mask of his face.

Okay, take it away, Andrew!

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Fucked Up, “Track VIII” from Year of the Horse (Act II)

My Spotify is broken.

To be fair, I was the one who broke it. Rather than liking individual songs as I hear them, I use Spotify to find and compile new music—only what’s been released in the current year—as part of the way I create my annual Albums of the Year lists (or one time, biannual; or nonexistent in the case of 2020, because 2020).

More precisely, here’s how I broke my Spotify:

1. Whenever I find out about a new album—from friends or Twitter or newsletters or really anywhere—I add it to my liked albums, where it sits until I have a chance to listen to it. Maybe I’ll end up loving it. Maybe not. Maybe I should add these to a playlist instead, but the heart button is right there: Tap me. So the album gets “liked.”

2. Every few days I’ll sort through these saved albums, listening, deleting some, and sequestering others to a “best of” playlist to await further pruning.

3. By the end of each year, I’ll have zeroed out my entire list, leaving it ready to accept the incoming year’s albums.

The result, as I discovered when I tried to do this Shuffle Synchronicity, is: I have no Liked Songs to shuffle. I only have Liked Albums, and because of how I broke my Spotify I don’t actually know whether I like any of those—yet.

So here’s a chance to find out. To dip my hand into the agony box from Dune and see how I fare. I spin up a new playlist, fill it with all of my “liked” albums as they stood this morning, shuffle, and receive:

“Track VIII” from Fucked Up’s Year of the Horse (Act Two)

Oh, I had a feeling it’d be something from this one. The odds were in favor of the machine selecting something from this 81-track, four-album expedition (which I’d been putting off for exactly those reasons). A song sequence that, based purely on the number of tracks, makes up nearly 11 percent of my playlist. So it looks like I’m getting pushed into the deep end here. Here we go.

* * *

The opening is haunting, giving way to a brief mellowness. Then we’re back, as the song wavers between anticipatory and foreboding. What’s unwavering: the percussiveness. Even the vocals acting as a rhythm device. A driving undercurrent, steady, while it’s anything-goes up above, on the surface. Enthralling.

The vocal melody is a strong cord, wound tightly around the ascending symphonic components. From what I’d known about these albums, I thought they were supposed to be hardcore? I quickly check to make sure I didn’t shuffle into a different song by accident. But this is the right one. It certainly feels right.

Each new bar brings a new mood, though it isn’t at all jarring. The segues are imperceptible, despite the drastic shifts. There’s a constant, unerring shifting throughout the song. Organic, like earth, it’s mostly understood yet unpredictable.

I only catch these lyrics on this first pass:

To break the feral giant

Make the fears(?) pliant

It’s a big feeling. A powerful feeling. Yet the song never cedes control—and therefore a powerless feeling.

The distortion pedals are grinding. There seems to be a very large shadow approaching in the doorway. And then, right at two minutes and 29 seconds, it’s done, the guillotine dropping ahead of wherever the album goes next.

* * *

I loved it, no question. I want to hear what happens next, to confirm or deny my speculations about where the music leads—but I’m not sure the rules here allow for that, so I’ll respect the margins and put this one song on repeat. Even after a dozen (more? I lost track) back-to-back plays, the song’s thrill never dilutes. Maybe this one track is an aside in the larger context of the albums? If so, it’s hardly a throwaway moment. What a wonderful, tumultuous ride that was.

I tap the heart button, adding it to my Liked Songs.

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Thanks so much, Andrew!

Loved this post.

It’s funny it seems to fit a bit with the song I had today, too.

Which is:

"I'm Waiting for the Man" by Lou Reed

And is about Lou Reed (or the narrator) waiting for his drug dealer.

‘Horse’ of course is slang for heroin.

And in your song above, to me at least, there appears to be a reference to this kind of drug use:

He grasps his glowing spike;
Plunges it deep to her thigh
Shoots his old mare good-night
And takes a god to ride

Which compliments somewhat Lou’s lyrics:

I'm waiting for my man
Got twenty-six dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington, 125
Feelin' sick and dirty
Huh, I'm waiting for my man

To answer your question above, Andrew, yes, Fucked Up is/was a Hardcore band. However, they have since gone it seems to do all sorts of art-rock.

Pitchfork writes of this album:

Year of the Horse isn’t merely a collection of narratively linked songs. Each of its four epic movements is an intricate and overwhelming assemblage of recurring motifs, lyrical callbacks, and spoken-word scene-setting. The band’s chief architect, Mike Haliechuk, collaborated with Toronto playwright David James Brock to craft a dramatic tale involving a mythical horse named Perceval on the run from an evil wizard king named Sour, en route to her rightful home among the moon and stars. We see much of the action through the eyes of a young girl named Blanche, whose abusive, alcoholic mother belongs to a posse of hunters sent to track down the wayward mare. For all its Games of Thrones cosplay, the album’s underlying themes—animal protection, environmental devastation, dysfunctional families, and the craven, destructive desires of powerful men—root us in a world that feels all too familiar. 

And also that this experimentation has created tension in their band:

There’s another story playing out on Year of the Horse, however, and its main characters are Fucked Up themselves. The saga of the band can seem like one of perpetual conflict, namely between the unrelenting, punx-not-dead growl of frontman Damian Abraham and the high-art aspirations of Haliechuk and drummer/fellow musical director Jonah Falco, while bassist Sandy Miranda and guitarists Josh Zucker and Ben Cook (who sat this one out) dutifully play both sides like kids caught in a custody battle. That tension seemed to reach its breaking point on Dose Your Dreams, where an eclectic musical palette and myriad guest-vocalist cameos threatened to crowd out Abraham, who admitted to questioning his future in the band at the time.

This is not too dissimilar to the break between Lou Reed and John Cale of The Velvet Underground where Lou went on to make more classic rock and roll while Cale went into a more experimental direction.

It’s also interesting that this version of “I’m Waiting for the Man” I shuffled to today is a solo version recorded later that is much more stripped down and basic than the original with Cale.

“I’m Waiting For The Man” by The Velvet Underground, Nico

Or as Wikipedia notes: ~"Lou said the reason why he had to get rid of Cale in the band was Cale's ideas were just too out there. Cale had some wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and Lou just couldn't have it. He was trying to make the band more accessible."

And

~“Arguably, the artistic frictions between Cale and Reed are what shaped the band's early sound. The pair often had heated disagreements about the direction of the band, and this tension was central to their collaborations. When Cale left, he seemed to take the more experimental tendencies with him, as is noticeable in comparing the proto-noise rock of White Light/White Heat to the comparatively dulcet, folk rock-influenced The Velvet Underground, recorded after Cale’s departure.

Cale also has a recorded live version himself on Spotify:

“I’m Waiting For The Man - Outtake” by John Cale

I wonder what kind of music the original Velvets would have made if they stuck together as long as Fucked Up, but like Fucked Up sometimes didn’t have albums that included every member?

Okay, that’s the one hundred and eighty-sixth Shuffle Synchronicities.