Tag Archives: ennui

Désenchanté

2006-01-14_Desenchante.m3u

  

Water beads on the shiny hood of the old Citroen as the girl’s driver noses it out into the rain. A groundsman closes the tall door of the stable behind as you look over your shoulder through the sloping rear window.

The girl’s knee presses against your thigh and she pulls at your hand, putting it on her own thigh.

It feels like someone else’s hand on someone else’s rich beautiful girlfriend’s perfect thigh.

How did I get here? you ask yourself, as though a plot device in a cheap melodrama.

But no flashback rolls out… just the dull, internalized throb of what felt like 20 years of smoky northern european discos. Even when his girlfriend made him stay by the side of the lake at Interlachen for a week, he felt the throb, like a factory worker who can’t lose the pound and grind of the machines, no matter how far away he goes. Or how drunk he gets.

He never used to drink that much. What happened there? he asked again, the words hanging like a bad digital reverb in the empty soundstage he imagined his mind to be.

But there was no threshold… no tipping point. Now, the alcohol was simply the sea that every night floated on. Every night a carefully measured voyage from wary alertness as he reached the club and set up to a deadened weariness as he got home at dawn… a slogging, dots-in-front-of-the-eyes almost deadness that was somehow both comforting and terrifying in its indistinguishable familiarity.

Of course, I didn’t necessarily have the jaded turntablist/DJ above in mind when I wrote this song. In fact, at a time when I’d been writing a lot of blues, I found myself thumping out the familiar 1-4-5 of a 12 bar blues and heard myself sing: “I’m sick of the blues…”

But I thought to myself… yeah, the world’s never heard a song about a guy or gal who’s been down so long, down’s got ’em down. How can I subvert this?

So I made the song a lament not about depression, loneliness, and heartbreak — but rather about literally being bored with blues music. Which I was. (In a loving way, mind you.)

But I was also bored with a lot of music. The catalog of styles reeled off in the first verse of this song is suggestive of what I was listening to back in ’94 (except for Madonna and Bono, of whom, indeed, I have always been sick).

By the time I got to the second verse, I realized that, while I could just spend three verses listing off music styles, maybe I needed some kind of development. So I started listing off trendy cuisines. And the last verse, a brief catalog of putatively desirable destinations, directly suggested the title I ultimately chose and hinted at the vignette above, variants of which I used in the past to promote the ‘studio’ version.

The studio version (and the studio, as I’ve noted before was some cheap gear hooked up to my computer, in mid 1999) was an instrumental — or more properly, a dub. I did cut vocals and they did suck.

So I did some serious dub deconstruction and reconstruction. (I remember when we used to have to do dub mixes in realtime… imagine… jumping around, bumping faders back and forth, wiggling Echoplex levers, smacking guitar amp reverbs… how undignified it all was. Too much work.)

Today’s acoustic version:

 

Dub version (1999):

Désenchanté

I’m sick of the blues
I’m sick of reggae too
I’m sick of rock and country
rap and techno too
I’m sick of Madonna and Bono
of course I always was
m sick of world music
ambient trance and dub
I am sick to death of everything
I always loved to do
I’m sick to death everything
but most of all of you

I’m fed up with cuisine nouvelle
I’m cuttin’ off Cajun too
I’m bored with bouillabaisse
with Thai and Greek I’m through
I wish I had a dollar
for every overpriced Bordeaux
I wish I had a dime for every time
you blew my roll
I am sick to death of everything
I always loved to do
I’m sick to death everything
but most of all of you

I’m désenchanté with
Cannes and St Tropez
I cannot regain
that simpaticismo
I felt in Spain
I can’t explain
this ennui borders on pain
but all around the world
everything’s about the same
I’m sick to death of everything
I ever loved to do
I’m sick to death everything
but most of all of you

1/19/94
(C)1994, TK Major

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Having Fun

Having Fun!

 

The admittedly sardonic lyrics in this tune might make it seem like I think life is meaningless. But that is far from the case. Now, I don’t know what it all means… and I don’t think anyone can tell us or that we’d even understand if they did. But meaningless?

No.

That said, I was a lot more habitually sardonic in 1980 when I wrote this song. And I did consider myself a hedonist… but I was lying to myself, even on that count.

Having Fun

There’s a startling new religion
sweeping through the subdivisions
Having Fun is what they call it
Soon you’ll be a Fun-a-holic

Well, there isn’t any priesthood
doctrine’s anything that feel’s good
It’s the one true religion
There’ll be no more revisions

Having Fun (on the job)
Having Fun (while at play)
Having Fun (all night long)
Having Fun (all through the day)

Well, we’re all upon a journey
going back unto the Funhead
When we finally arrive there
we’ll have all the Fun we wanted

There are some say Fun is boring
but to them I’ll give this warning
Have Fun while there’s time
because the Fun stops when you die

Having Fun (on the job)
Having Fun (while at play)
Having Fun (all night long)
Having Fun (all through the day)

Having Fun
Having Fun
Having Fun


Blog Within a Blog…

One of my friends died unexpectedly a few days ago. It wasn’t natural causes. It was an accidental drug overdose.

He was an amazing man in many ways. Not an intellectual, but whip smart. He was, as he sometimes liked to say, the baddest white mofo in all of Compton when he was growing up. Which probably wasn’t too hard. There weren’t many white mofos in Compton. But he did grow up wild, got into drugs and what it takes for a poor kid to get money for drugs.

Still, after some very hard knocks, he got clean and sober and remained that way for over a decade. In fact, he was one of the people who gave me the courage to quit drinking in the mid-90s. I figured if he could turn his back on some very hard drugs, I could certainly crawl out of the bottle.

But, like so many of us who are drawn to substance abuse, he was a very complex and volatile guy; a very moody guy, at times.

Those of us who knew the public side of him rarely caught glimpses of this troubled man that he usually kept hidden. But his closest friends knew that he wrestled with some very powerful and troubling demons. Still — all too often — he seemed to want to fight that fight in private, away from those who might help him. Call it ‘drug shame’ if you will — but in the last several years he would disappear from those who loved him most when the demons got the best of him, sometimes for weeks or even months.

When he moved in across the way from a friend of mine, a former college teacher, who knew my friend through me and through the coffee house where we had all met, she was delighted, because she knew the affable, often wildly funny public side of him. But she didn’t see him much. He was a contruction crane operator and when he worked he worked a lot and hard.

The last few days, she didn’t really think twice when she saw his front door open and music coming through the screen door when she left for work and came home in the evening — figuring our friend was simply taking a few days off. But when a note on the door went unanswered, the landlord finally let himself in.

He leaves behind his mother and stepfather, his grandmother, and a teenage daughter he cherished dearly.

And a lot of confused and and very sad friends.

I’d like to turn to you out there and give you some advice, a warning, anything… but, honest to God, I just can’t think of what to say.

 

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A Star Is Bored

EmptyHotelHallwayThis recording of this song aspires to what I believe the music press likes to call “amiable sloppiness.”

I thought it was important to deflate any unreasonable expectations of slickness — or even competence — early on.

A Star Is Bored was a frequent part of my sets back when I was doing the acoustic post-punker thing in the late 80s and early 90s. I virtually never read the rock press but I was stuck in an airport or train station on a backpack tour through Europe back in ’86 and picked up a Spin magazine. In it was some kind of article about some rocker. The writer couldn’t seem to get over the burden of this rock star’s crushing boredom. The rock scribbler was pouring out empathy for this multimillionaire.

Now, I’m as compassionate as the next jaded old cynic, but somehow I was having a rough time wrapping myself around this rich rock star’s life dilemma…

Anyhow, this is what spilled out…

A STAR IS BORED

A star is bored
prowling empty hotel hallways
He’s never alone
so how come he’s always lonely

Nothing gets him down
it’s all just the same
saying “If you think you’re bored,
then you should see me!”

Down in the bar
leaning into a smokey corner
trying not to catch her eye:
“Say, cowboy, why you dressed like that?”

And it always seems to
go down about the same
It kills a couple of hours
but it don’t kill the pain

Tell him a story
make it long, make it lonely
Lots of starstruck summer nights
and the moon’s reflection on the river that runs through
everything

Nothing makes much sense
but he guesses that’s just life
Ya play a few songs
and then they turn out the lights


Yeah, nothing makes much sense
and he guesses that’s just life
You have a couple of laughs
and then you call it a night

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