![]() ![]() Several years ago, I used to write a monthly column that ran on the final page of an arts and culture publication. There is an episode from the first season of “True Detective” where Woody Harrelson’s character chides Matthew McConaughey’s character for tossing around, what he calls “ten-dollar words.” And out of all the things that have stuck with me from the first season of “True Detective” - even more so than the phrase “Time is A Flat Circle,” or calling someone “The Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch” - it’s the idea of a “ten dollar word.”Ī word that, perhaps, you use to make yourself appear more intelligent than you actually are.Īnd I am guilty, of course, as many writers are, of peppering their work, as they are able, with words that they might not feel confident enough to use in conversation, but are able to sell within their writing.Īnd one of the words I think of, when I think of a “ten dollar word,” is legerdemain. ![]() It would have been, roughly, between the lyrics about the song’s protagonist thinking of someone “for who he still burns,” and about the woman in the song “hoping in time that her memory will fade,” that I realized “The Distance” is about toxic masculinity.īut this is not about the band Cake, or their song “The Distance.” And it is only tangentially about the notion of toxic masculinity in pop music, because once you hear a song this way, it is difficult to stop yourself from doing it. The song, initially released in the autumn of 1996, was inescapable if you were of the MTV-watching generation at the time - the seemingly right blend of infectious pop songwriting and oddball arranging and instrumentation it was not until I heard the song, enough times, enough days out of the week, in the year 2017, that its lyrics, or, like, the heart of what it is about, hit me. The tastes, as a whole, were extraordinary in their eclecticism-some days, you could hear Backstreet Boys or a compilation of hits from the Disco era other days, you would hear the abrasive, throbbing rhythms of festival headlining dubstep producers.Īt other times of the day, you would hear the smattering of what could, for the ease of argument, be called “alternative rock” from the 1990s.Īnd I had not thought about the song “ The Distance,” by the band Cake, in several years until I heard it playing off of a co-worker’s phone, from one of his Pandora Radio stations. My co-workers - it was their space, after all - were almost always in control of what music played while we were working together, taking turns plugging the aux cord into their phones, and meticulously picking the soundtrack for part of the day. I was not unwelcome - not exactly, but within this relatively small, shared workspace, I had been given, like, the bare minimum amount of room needed to complete the tasks I needed to. By all accounts, it was “their” space - my co-workers, in an entirely different department than I was - and I was just there. I used to spend a lot of my work days in a relatively small, shared workspace. But more with songs representative of the zeitgeist of a different time.Īnd the first time this happened, I had not intentionally sought out a song - the song in question well over 20 years old at this point - to listen through this kind of analytic. ![]() This has not exactly happened for me - not yet, with songs I truly once held dear. And there is a danger to doing this simply because the more you find yourself analyzing, there is the risk you may, perhaps, tarnish a song you once held dear, because you find the conceit of it is now difficult to reconcile. But that’s not what this is about not entirely.Īnd this would have been at least five years ago, when I was struck by the concept of looking at pop song lyrics through an intersectional lens. Stream: ‘Claptrap’ – Duncan SheikĪnd one could, if one was so inclined, write at length about the idea of toxicity as depicted in contemporary popular music – specifically, toxic masculinity. Uneven and frustrating, thoughtful and intricate, the strangely titled ‘Claptrap’ contains enough compelling and memorable moments to rejuvenate the interest in longtime, but perhaps dormant Duncan Sheik fans. ![]()
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