Everything you've heard is distorted in your head

[dolorosa_12]

In an attempt to distract myself from stressing about Australian politics (namely the nailbitingly close Eden-Monaro by-election;* Australia being what it is, I know the outgoing MP in this electorate, and went to school with his son), I decided to attempt to do the sunshine_challenge this year. You can see all the prompts as they are revealed by clicking on the image above.

The first prompt is 'red,' whose first fannish association for me is always the song 'All Systems Red' by Calexico. This is the most explicitly, overtly, specifically political of the band's most explicitly political album, Garden Ruin — the entire album is a heartwrenching, despairing cri de coeur about what it felt like to be USian during the Bush (as in Dubya) era. I identified a lot with the sentiment of the album as an Australian in my early twenties, protesting horrors on the other side of the world to a government that closed its ears to our cries. Looking back on the album with the distance of more than a decade, the entire attitude and mood of it is more problematic that I was perhaps prepared to acknowledge at the time: the idea that wars are things that happen far away, that there are no obvious horrors closer to home beyond the horror of those far-off wars being committed 'in your name,' and that the grief and despair you feel at watching those wars unfold on a TV screen are the feelings that should be centred.

With that caveat, though, I still love this album deeply, and this song I love with a fervent intensity. I have always loved thematically linked concept albums, and song lyrics that do something interesting, and Garden Ruin was the first album since Massive Attack's Mezzanine with lyrics I really felt I could sink my teeth into. It gave voice to the exact feeling of lost innocence and idealism, the realisation that moral right and self-righteous protest meant nothing and were merely twigs to shore up against our ruin, swept easily away — all those feelings that permeated my late teens and early twenties. The song is a kind of resigned howling scream of grief, lent that rare kind of eloquent lyrical clarity which only appears when the lyricist is writing with barely controlled fury.

That I should pick up this prompt, and write about this song, on 4th July is entirely by coincidence.

Watch on YouTube

Also, the live version is just gorgeous.

Watch on YouTube

*In the time it's taken me to write this post, the votes in Eden-Monaro have come in, and AntonyGreenABC has called it for Labor, and I can breathe easy.

Comments

[trepkos]

Wow - an election that went the right way? How big is the area this affects?

[dolorosa_12]

Unfortunately the result doesn't change the configuration of the Australian parliament at all — the outgoing MP (the one who is the father of my school friend) was from the Labor Party, and so Labor has held, rather than gained the seat. But it was a by-election where the full weight of the ghastly Murdoch press was being thrown at Labor, so for them to hold the seat is really good. Also, because voting is compulsory in Australia, the electoral infrastructure is really good (it has to be able to cope with elections which have over 95 per cent turnout, sometimes in quite remote and inaccessible areas), so even though it happened during the pandemic, the set-up for postal or early voting was really robust.

The electorate of Eden-Monaro itself is a really interesting one. For seventeen consecutive elections, it was a bellwether seat, in that it always went to an MP of the party that ended up winning the election. In 2016, Mike Kelly (the outgoing MP) won it for Labor, even though Labor didn't win that election, and he won it again in 2019, even though Labor didn't win that election either. Most constituencies in Australia are either urban, surburban, rural, or remote outback. Eden-Monaro is a weird one in that it is all of these things: it comprises Queanbeyan, which is a suburban commuter town outside Canberra where a lot of people who work in Canberra but can't afford to live there live, it also includes a lot of picturesque seaside towns which are mostly just places where Canberrans go for summer holidays, and there's a lot of rural farming regions included in the electorate as well. So it's a real mix of voters and communities — hence why it normally goes to the party that wins the election. A lot of the area was very badly affected by the bushfires in December-January this year.

[trepkos]

Well, at least it was held - is your Labour party better than ours? (Which is now just another Tory party.)

[dolorosa_12]

The Labor Party in Australia is quite centrist — compulsory voting is good, but it does mean that the two major parties both aim to be as centrist as possible, since they need to appeal to the widest range of voters, rather than just convincing people on 'their side' to turn up and vote.

(As an aside, I'm an Australian immigrant living in the UK, so I can vote in UK elections — so both the Australian Labor Party, and the UK Labour Party are 'my' Labo(u)r parties. I don't have quite as bleak an outlook on the UK one as you do, though, and I think Starmer has done a good job so far as leader.)

[kore]

I love Calexico -- their live performances are so gorgeous.

(also YAY LABOUR)

[dolorosa_12]

Calexico really is fantastic — I'm envious that you've been able to see them live.

Yay Labor indeed! (The Australian Labor Party spells its name the US way, even though Australia uses British English spelling conventions...)

[newredshoes]

ljdhflajkgfh I saw Calexico touring with Iron & Wine when they put out their first EP together; The Book and the Canal is an all-time top album for me, but I've actually never quite known which one to land on next. I will look into Garden Ruin, thanks!

[dolorosa_12]

I hope you enjoy Garden Ruin — it's very different from Calexico's other work, but it's one of my favourite albums of all time.

Lucky you, seeing them tour with Iron & Wine. That must have been incredible live!