I want my armageddon!

I Want My Armageddon!

“Disappointed the threat is gone/ Get nostalgic for bombing runs/
But don’t you think it’s true/ We’ll be afraid again soon?”
(From “Atomic Kid” by Versus)

Wake Up Atomic Kid

Growing up in the ’80s was strange in many respects. The same could probably be said about any decade. What the hell were kids thinking during the Holocaust or the Black Plague? A special anxiety underscored everything in the ‘80s, borne out of regular reminders that our life expectancy was in question, and a few world leaders bent on control might decide its length. We were told that our very existence could be cut short at any time.

We lived with the very real fear that civilization, as we knew it, could easily be wiped out, and we might all die under mushroom clouds. As improbable as an all-out nuclear confrontation was, the looming prospect was scary enough. From cheesy, jingoistic pap like Red Dawn and Rocky IV, to hopeful, cautionary tales like War Games, and the television mini-series The Day After that attempted to incorporate some realism, conflict with the “evil Soviet empire” and nuclear doomsday scenarios were endlessly presented in movies. Cold War propaganda saturated every aspect of popular culture.

I was raised in a Roman Catholic household. My parents aren’t ridiculously religious, although the words ridiculous and religious are pretty much synonymous in my mind. My folks insisted me and my siblings go to church every weekend, but religion wasn’t a big part of our home life. Still, I was frightened enough by the idea of atomic annihilation to pray, yes pray, it didn’t happen. It’s all I ever prayed for.

Now I understand that I am predisposed to expect the worst, it’s an unflattering but real part of my personality. That being acknowledged, I don’t think I was the only kid terrified by the nuclear arms race with all of its sensational trappings. I’m no psychologist - in fact I could probably be a case study for one - but I wonder if the idea that our future was tenuous at best had more of a long term effect on my generation’s way of thinking than anyone ever imagined. Once the possibility that we stood on the brink of nuclear destruction burrowed deep within our subconscious, did it breed a nihilism that gave rise to the so-called “slacker generation?”

I hate it when people play hot potato with blame. It’s especially infuriating when they try to duck and dodge their own responsibility by spewing ludicrous mumbo-jumbo about deep seeded psychological trauma. Therefore I would never pin my lack of direction, initiative, and accomplishments on lingering fear planted by Cold War prognostications of imminent destruction. I’ll own up to my own lazy and indecisive nature, but I’m still at a loss to explain how I developed such a bleak view of the world and the future.

I once had a college professor who suggested to me that I had unresolved abandonment issues. She wasn’t a psychology or even a religion professor; she taught acting classes. But since Method Acting was the preferred approach of the faculty at my school, some professors assumed their years of study and experience with “The Method” afforded them special insight into the minds, hearts, and motives of others. She was a very nice lady, and I have no doubt that she was trying to coax me to a “breakthrough” for my own good. At the time I was still smarting over the betrayal of a high school sweetheart, and suggested that as the cause of this pervasive fear that everything would end, and end badly at that, but she said she believed it went much deeper and farther back.

I didn’t think much more about it at the time. Later, with the help of an actual therapist, I started to consider the possibility that the great uncertainty and fear I associated with the future might be due to the fear I had growing up that my parents would divorce, and I would have to choose between the two, or maybe even be abandoned by one of them. I don’t have many memories of my maternal grandmother. Before I was too old, the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease forced her into a nursing home. But, one of my earliest memories is of her asking me whether I would choose to go with my mother or father if they ever split up.

Maybe all of my childhood fears fed each other, creating an overwhelming snowball of doubt, defeatism, and futility that eventually swallowed me like The Blob. Maybe all these questions about the future predisposed me to think of it as a dark, forbidding place. What difference does it make anyway? Some would argue that the state of the world is enough of a reason to feel like giving up.

I Want Out

Teenage Nazis walking into gay bars with hatchets to chop up “them faggots,” Muslims holding aloft signs that read, “Butcher those who mock Islam,” then decrying those who associate their religion with violence, increasingly younger mothers spiking their babies’ skulls off the sidewalk, it’s fucked up times we live in. But it’s not just the Muslims or Nazis causing problems. There’s plenty of blame to spread around, even here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Scrapping the whole thing in favor of starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

But that could start a whole other treatise I’m not going to get involved with right now. Besides, claiming that the world is an irredeemable cesspool because of what we see on the front page of the paper, or on cable news networks is a weak argument at best. It’s too easy to dismiss that sort of attitude as a lazy cop out. And the gray areas make it a slippery slope to stand on. For example, Christians would cite the movement to legalize gay marriage or to protect a woman’s right to an abortion as an example of society’s rapid deterioration, and I would sharply disagree.

We’ve been told that there is ample fire power in the world’s nuclear arsenal to blow the earth up many times over, but it’s hard to believe that it would ever come to that. I recently read the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, written in 1946. That detailed chronicle of the only use of atomic weapons on a population presents a picture that is much more difficult to handle than the idea of the whole globe blowing up at once, a picture of a world that survives and has to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Which is worse, being blown to ashes in a split-second explosion, or dying slowly from atomic fallout, and watching skin slip off of people’s hands and arms as you try to help them up?

The Lessons of Hiroshima

The nuclear threat still exists, but in a form that is perhaps even more terrifying. Politicians leverage the fear we have of rogue states or individual terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons to push agendas that make no sense, like the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Even if Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons, which was pure speculation, we knew for a fact that North Korea already developed missiles that could reach California. Still, we didn’t invade North Korea.

Iran has elected a president who is taking the role of Hitler of the 21st century. He’s already stated that he wants to wipe Israel off the map. So, if Iran gets its hands on nuclear weapons, it’s anybody’s guess what magnitude of devastation could be left in the wake of a chain reaction it sets off. Even in the improbable case that nuclear weapons were deployed, the earth wouldn’t explode in one massive, blinding blast. But it might be better if it did.

Imagine for a moment nuclear weapons in the hands of a terrorist. Not too long ago I read Perfect Soldiers, a book that profiled the 19 9/11 hijackers, but also examined in depth the rise of radical Islam and the cult of Bin Laden. One section details the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It paints the man in charge of that operation, Ramsi Youssef, as an inept, at times bumbling, character.

Youssef’s plan, if you can call it that, was so haphazard that he didn’t even pick someone to drive the rental van loaded with explosives into the Trade Center until the night before. The main reason he executed the bombing when he did was because he ran out of money. Lacking funds, it came down to do something now, or consider the time and money invested in the plot to that point a loss. So, he got someone to drive the van, and then he fled the country.

If someone like that can do the damage he did, what chance do we stand of winning “the war on terror? If somebody wants to do something badly enough, and losing their own life, as well as the lives of others, in the process is not a deterrent, it’s going to be pretty hard to stop them. They will find a way. The rise of terrorism puts a very real, very human, and unpredictable face on death and destruction that makes the cartoonish portrayal of the Soviets during the ‘80s seem oddly comforting.

At least with the Russians we knew where the threat was coming from. Now, the quiet, mild-mannered guy in khakis you see at the office every day could deliver Armageddon. Remember Sting singing; “Believe me when I say to you I hope the Russians love their children too?” Well, terrorists love their children, but think they’d be much better off as martyrs than to live with Jews.

It’s questionable whether any of the hard lessons of Hiroshima have stuck, or if the right people learned them at all. Likewise it’s difficult to swallow the popular opinion that the West won the Cold War when an undetermined number of Russian nukes might be unaccounted for. Then there’s North Korea and Iran. Maybe it’s understandable that some people would consider a meteor colliding with the earth, and taking the whole damn thing out in one fell swoop, desirable when contrasted with the protracted war on terror.

“…maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.”

We were promised Armageddon. But people regularly confuse Armageddon with the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse refers to a cataclysm that destroys evil forces, and raises the righteous, whoever they may be, into power. It implies a rebirth, a rebuilding, a fresh start. Armageddon is simply a decisive battle between good and evil forces, and correctly or not, is often associated with end game.

A rebirth doesn’t sound too bad, until you get into that sticky stuff about good and evil, and who or what makes the judgments. As you may have already gathered, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, and my impressionable mind has been buzzing. I bought some books about Zen Buddhism. It has been brought to my attention by several people that I have a real problem living in the present moment, and my fixations on the past and fears about the future cause me a lot of distress.

I’ve been trying to read the material with an open mind, but so far it seems like hooey to me. Maybe it should worry me more than it does that I find it easier to identify with Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club than with Zen Buddhist texts. I won’t say that the book version of Fight Club is better than the movie adaptation. Both are excellent and just different enough to stand on their own merits. It might be too much for high school kids to handle, but I firmly believe Fight Club should be taught in college literature classes.

“What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.
“I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.
“For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone.”

That quotation, as well as the one that heads this section, are from Fight Club. Would it be better to bulldoze the whole damn world to rebuild it than to piss the planet’s resources away little by little over a long period of time? That depends on your perspective, whether you see the glass half empty or half full, whether you prefer a long, slow death or a quick snuff. Is it better to burn out than to fade away? At the very least it’s interesting to think about.

And anyone who thinks we aren’t trashing and crapping on this planet, killing it slowly, is either stupid or in denial. All of those who naysay the effects of Global Warming should come to Buffalo for a while. The seasons are clearly shifting; weather patterns are changing. A city that has been known for its snow and cold has had precious little of either this year. It’s snowing today, but we had our warmest January in 50 years.

The Buffalo area has had days in January 2006 when the mercury reached past 50 degrees. A few weeks ago I was out running around in jeans and a sweatshirt. I’m no historian or meteorologist, but it seems to me that Buffalo winters have been arriving later and with considerably less fury of late. That’s just the tip of the iceberg – which is melting by the way – as far as evidence that Global Warming is a very real phenomenon goes.

Does any of this, as frightening as the possible consequences are, mean that we should tear everything down and start from a clean slate? Do current events suggest that quick and decisive obliteration of the human race is preferable to any likely scenarios of the future? Probably not, but it’s interesting to think about where nihilistic views come from. Did the anxiety of the nuclear arms race in the ‘80s convince a generation they had no future, so there was no point in doing anything? How the hell do I know?

I probably just have too much time on my hands and a hyperactive imagination. But, that’s the beauty of a blog. I don’t have to provide any answers. I don’t have to back anything up with too many facts or research. I can just throw the ideas out there for you to think about, if you want to.

"You Wear That White Tuxedo How You Gonna Beat The Heat?"

“You wear that white tuxedo, how you gonna beat the heat?”

“What’s up with Steely Dan?”

“What’s up with Steely Dan, Matt?” A friend asked me this when I revealed I had been listening to a lot of The Dan’s 1974 album Katie Lied. It’s a question worthy of a book-length response, unfortunately I don’t have the drive or determination required to write a book. People assume I’m a staunch indie rock purist who only listens to bands that pass a battery of tests I’ve developed to assess their credibility, or lack thereof.

It would likely surprise, even shock, a lot of my friends and acquaintances to learn that over the past few years I have bought CDs by Steely Dan, Thin Lizzy, The Kinks, Neil Young, and a whole ass-load of Motorhead. For the sake of full disclosure I’ll also admit entertaining the notion, if only briefly, of delving into the catalogs of T. Rex, Elton John, Mountain, and early ZZ Top (but, that momentary lapse of reason was solely due to the fact that Motorhead covered ZZ Top’s “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” on an early recording). And then there are the current bands I’ve been enjoying that make no effort to hide the considerable influence of classic rock in their music, like White Whale, The Long Winters, Rhett Miller, Mary Lorson & Saint Low, The Minus 5, and The Broken West.

Maybe it’s the natural effects of aging. Maybe it’s inevitable that you’ll end up being that guy you swore up and down you never would. Or, maybe it was just boredom, the need for something outside of my sphere of routine experience that lead me to check out classic bands already enshrined in the rock pantheon. I was no stranger to Steely Dan when I bought the remastered CD of Countdown To Ecstasy, its second album, released in 1973, a few months ago. For many years I’ve had an on-again, off-again fascination with Steely Dan.

“Who Else Was Going To Do That?”

I’m not about to lay some ridiculous theory on you about Steely Dan embodying the core ethos and ideals of punk rock, or go on about how they have as much in common with Stiv Bators and Iggy Pop as they do with Pat Metheny and Winton Marsalis. Overzealous record nerds and critics have attempted that type of subterfuge way too often with way too many artists. You know, like when people say that Frank Sinatra is “rock n’ roll” because he embraced the same essential spirit of rebellion and exuded a similar up-yours attitude as early rockers? That’s just fucking bullshit, an absolute load of crap.

Frank Sinatra is, was, and always will be music for old people. And Sinatra was a sworn enemy of rock n’ roll. It’s well documented that he openly detested and disparaged it, basically called it garbage, an abomination. Fuck Frank Sinatra. Because of nonsense like that - people painting Sinatra as “rock n’ roll” - I’m not going to try and sell you any bill of goods about Steely Dan; they have no connection to indie rock whatsoever.

Some people might perceive the recent rekindling of my interest in Steely Dan as a flip, ironic gesture. A hipster championing some old band only because he’s confident nobody else in his circle of friends ever would. It might appear to be whimsical posturing; picking a band that most people would expect me to hate, and becoming its vocal proponent. That is not the case. Over the years, I’ve often realized that the song caught in my head at a given time is a Steely Dan song, mostly “My Old School,” “Bodhisattva,” “Bad Sneakers,” and “Reeling In The Years.”

Now I’ll admit it would be a hoot to convince the style-conscious indie snobs that Steely Dan is the seminal, quintessentially overlooked band they have to have on their i-pod. Make them think that without Steely Dan there’d be no Death Cab For Cutie, Spoon, Camera Obscura, or Broken Social Scene, even though it’s not true. I thought about pulling this ruse with the Allman Brothers after I first heard The Black Keys. I don’t even like the Allmans, but there is absolutely no reason anyone who digs The Black Keys should ever scoff at Eat A Peach. Point being, oftentimes the chasm separating “credible” bands in the indie world from their ridiculed ancestors isn’t as wide as imagined.

But convincing indie rockers to embrace Steely Dan would probably be an extremely tough sell. I can’t think of any band, indie or otherwise, past or present, that sounds like Steely Dan. And maybe that’s why I like them. Like my friend James said, “Just the idea of the band is cool…I mean, who else was going to do that?”

He’s got a point. What other 1970s hit-makers and major label staples were writing lounge-jazz tunes about pedophiles, like “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies” from Steely Dan’s 1974 album Katy Lied? Now, I am by no means endorsing or condoning the practice of pedophilia, nor am I suggesting that every band should venture into such tricky, potentially sickening lyrical territory. But here’s the thing, a lot of seedy, creepy shit goes on in this depraved world, and ignoring it won’t make it go away. And to their credit, Dan songwriters Walter Becker and Donald Fagen never let things get too graphic; a lot is implied.

And what’s up with that saxophone on “Everyone’s Gone To The Movies”? It bores into your skull like a hallucinogenic drug. Much of the time it was just subtle skewing of pop music conventions that lent Steely Dan an aura of unsettling strangeness, like the trippy backward guitar tracks on Countdown To Ecstasy’s final song, “King Of The World.” As often as not Becker and Fagen’s songs didn’t assault you with their quirks or subject matter culled from society’s underbelly, their weirdness just hung in the air, like a haze of opium smoke.





“Any World That I’m Welcome To Is Better Than The One I Come From.”

My recollection of the 1970s is vague at best; I was born in 1973. But based on scraps of memory that sporadically surface from my subconscious, and impressions of the decade I’ve taken away from movies, books, and television shows, it seems the ‘70s were a time when many people used their personal freedom to experiment with sex and drugs, among other things, frequently to an extent that was self-abusive. Perhaps I’m totally misguided in my theorizing, but there seems to be ample historical precedent to explain why people would feel lost, adrift, and willing to throw caution to the wind during the ‘70s.

The hell that Viet Nam became, its graphic brutality brought into people’s living rooms by the news media, the enduring mental toll on Veterans, and the way that war tore America in two was enough to disillusion many who grew up in the peace and prosperity of the ‘50s, then subscribed to the hopefulness of the free-love hippies in the ‘60s. In addition, witnessing the Cuban Missile Crises, the Kennedy (John and Bobby) and King assassinations, Watergate, and the rise of international terrorism could certainly crush the idealism of an entire generation. All things considered, it would be easy to understand why some people believed the human race was on the brink of its demise. Many of them probably became fatalists and nihilists, or at least embraced hedonism, figuring there might not be a tomorrow, so do everything today, and enjoy it to the fullest.

Steely Dan’s music seems to capture the excess, experimentation, self-absorption, and darkness that underscored the ‘70s. The lyrical component was always slightly warped. Even one of the group’s first and biggest hits, “Do It Again,” has some of the bleakest words to ever be wed to a pop song. Certainly, not every one of the band’s songs was dismal and defeatist, but a lot of Steely Dan’s catalog has something unmistakably deviant and cynical lurking beneath its placid smooth jazz surface. Even relatively straightforward, nostalgic tunes like “My Old School” and “Reeling In The Years” pack a knowing resignation and bitter aftertaste.

This juxtaposition of dark, realistic lyrical content with some of the mellowest, most innocuous music imaginable, a lounge influenced jazz-pop hybrid, is one of the main reasons Steely Dan is so damn intriguing. Some would argue that I’m attracted to the gritty, subversive aspects of Steely Dan’s music because I am an eternal pessimist with a predisposition to be negative. They would have a point, but I have a different explanation.

I believe the most interesting music combines elements that are seemingly completely at odds with each other, things that aren’t expected to go together. A perfect example of this can be found on records by one of my all-time favorite bands, The Muffs. Inside their tight, concise, sing-along pop songs, modeled after ‘50s and ‘60s rock n’ roll pioneers as much as pop-punk bands that followed, singer/guitarist Kim Shattuck punctuates her vocals with lung-busting screams and primal growls. Long gone, and greatly missed, Buffalo group milf covered their hooky power pop tunes and soulful grooves with a thick layer of noisy, churning, swirling guitar that drove some casual listeners away from what were otherwise extremely accessible songs, but came out with intense, textured, infinitely interesting records.

“And Somebody Else’s Favorite Songs”

A simpler way of explaining Steely Dan’s appeal is Becker and Fagen’s knack for writing melodically centered, effortlessly memorable songs. I call this Abba’s Law. It explains why so many people I’ve known with otherwise impeccable musical taste and extensive knowledge love Abba…or The Spice Girls, or Madonna…you get the idea. They simply cannot resist the magnetic pull of the catchy, candy-sweet pop melodies designed with one purpose, to set up permanent residence in your head. Even at its most brazenly commercial moments, on its most grotesquely over-produced tracks, like “Peg,” “FM,” “Josie,” and “Babylon Sisters,” Steely Dan is maddeningly catchy, and several of Becker and Fagen’s tunes have haunted my memory for so long I doubt any exorcism could rid me of them.

Steely Dan will surely never replace Versus, Superchunk, Shudder To Think, Fugazi, or any number of other indie rock bands in my heart or CD collection, but I cannot deny I like them. I won’t stand behind them unconditionally however. The amount of wanking on any Steely Dan album is off the charts. These guys are trained and technically proficient musicians, and they were eager to show off their chops. Plus, their musical background, listening interests, philosophy, and approach to playing differ radically from my own.

Still, their form of expression is no less valid than any punk band. And in fact, I’m at a point in my life where I see very little difference between extended solos on a Steely Dan album and the noisy guitar experimentation of Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo; it’s all wanking to me. At least Steely Dan comes back to a chorus I can sing along with. I guess I really am losing my edge, huh?

In the liner notes of the 1998 reissue of Countdown To Ecstasy (MCA), Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote, “…There is a substantial body of opinion which holds that Countdown was the best Steely Dan album, bar none. Generally speaking, the type of person who typically holds this position is not the sort of individual you want sitting across the table from you at a dinner party, especially one where alcoholic beverages are being served.” I am one who holds the aforementioned opinion, so perhaps it’s not quite time to put me out to pasture. I can cling to that tiny remnant of rebellion, as derogatory as it may seem. We all do what we must to continue living with ourselves.