Pretentious attention
I’m genuinely stumped here. I think of myself as a fairly serious (if spotty these days) consumer of pop music. But there’s this song I keep hearing, called “Empty Walls,” whenever I’m in the car and toggle over to to the Bay Area’s reliably terrible Live 105 – the new rock alternative – that has me perplexed as to how I’m supposed to take it. There’s the operatic dexterity and franticness in the vocals usually associated with high-kitsch Euro-metal like the Scorpions and (um) Europe. And then there’re these flagrantly, audaciously, transcendently moronic lyrics:
Pretentious attention
Dismissive apprehension
Don’t waste your time, on coffins today
When we decline, from the confines of our mind
Don’t waste your time, on coffins today
Don’t you see their bodies burning?
Desolate and full of yearning
Dying of anticipation
Choking from intoxication
These lyrics are anchored in the titular metaphor, which is virtual nonsense: “Left behind those empty walls.” (“Empty walls”? Don’t you mean “bare walls”? The emptiness of walls is supposed to convey some kind of paradigmatic feeling of hopelessness that it, well, doesn’t, because what would it mean for walls to be “full”? Full of what? Foam insulation? Is our despair, then, over heat loss?) But there’s something so deranged and unembarrassed about the performance that I can’t help suspecting that the singer- Serj Tankian, on a solo flight from his band System of a Down, which I’ve only heard of – is pushing into some new dimension my stodgy aesthetic can’t comprehend and can appreciate only via a sort of personal critical crisis. I should hate this song, but I find myself waiting for the loony vibrato in those high notes and then, when it comes, truly digging it. What the Hell’s wrong with me?
Matt, you should surely pop in the #1 record on 9/11, SOAD’s “Toxicity”, and listen to it from start to finish. Very rarely do a handful of Armenians cause a riot on Sunset Boulevard. Usually they just monopolize the tables at the Hollywood & Vermont Starbucks. But Serj & Co. have access to the kind of arresting genius that makes music worth hearing — and the chops to relay it unadulterated. Even if it does sometimes sound like, y’know, the pagan incantations of battleaxe-wielding dwarves.
— James · Jan 18, 10:44 PM · #
Even if it does sometimes sound like, y’know, the pagan incantations of battleaxe-wielding dwarves.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
— Alan Jacobs · Jan 18, 11:31 PM · #
Compared to some of Mr. Tankian’s previous lyrical productions Empty Walls sounds positively Shakespearian.
— Jaldhar · Jan 19, 12:20 AM · #
<I>Even if it does sometimes sound like, y’know, the pagan incantations of battleaxe-wielding dwarves.</I>
That’s an excellent description of certain passages in <I>Toxicity</I> – which you should give a listen, even if it is outside the bounds of your normal musical fare. It is claimed that they have been influenced by Armenian folk music, and my Russian, part-Georgian wife found this credible upon hearing them. Arresting genius, indeed
— Maximos · Jan 19, 02:28 PM · #