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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
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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.
Also, the live version is just gorgeous.
*In the time it's taken me to write this post, the votes in Eden-Monaro have come in, and