Many of Stephen Malkmus’s songwriting contemporaries and forebears invite grand metaphors when considering their work. On this site alone, I’ve written about the closing of the American West in Bill Callahan’s songs “Drover” and “Baby’s Breath” as well as the hero’s journey and Guy Debord’s concept of dérive in “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)” by Bob Dylan.
Malkmus’s songs aren’t apocalyptic Blakean poetic visions or suggest outlandish allegorical comparisons. Instead they are solidly set in this world and for this world, even his story songs. The fun is figuring out the set properties that Malkmus has established for these free-standing objects. It’s a personal game to determine how Malkmus operates and plays within these strictures, how they interact with Malkmus’s other work, or connect to other songs by his predecessors and peers.
A good example is “Lariat,” the first single off of Malkmus and the Jicks’ 2014 album Wig Out at Jagbags:
It’s a short song in the vein of other Stevie Pop Songs such as “Us,” “Gardenia,” and “Senator,” which was previously explored on Recliner Notes. “Lariat” begins with a jaunty acoustic guitar, which is doubled by an electric guitar, constituting the melodic hook of the track. Malkmus sings this same melody for the two lines of the first verse. The lyrics for these lines are exemplary examples of Malkmusian wordplay, especially the rhyming of “chariot,” “carry it,” and “jerry rig” with the title of the song. Of course, SM being SM, “lariat” never actually appears in the lyrics.
It’s hard to determine what “Only a chariot could carry it across this void” actually means. It certainly evokes intriguing images, but ultimately the line works because of how those specific words sound in combination with each other. Likewise, what does it mean to “candy coat your Latin kisses”? Is the song’s narrator trying to figure out an acceptable way to talk up substandard smooches? Is the kiss Latin because it’s coming from a loved one who originates from South America? Or is it a reference to the three different forms of kissing according to the Ancient Romans — “basium,” “osculum,” and “suavium” — thus Latin kisses? It doesn’t matter because it sounds so good sung by Malkmus with that melody.
Stylistic and tautological mind-benders crop up in the song’s chorus: “You’re not what you aren’t” and “You aren’t what you’re not.” These statements taken together cancel each other out as does the next line: “You got what you want, you want what you got.” These declarations of negation are welcome because, “People look great when they shave.” This non sequitur does nothing to reveal a deeper truth after the aforementioned Lewis Carroll-esque meaningless dictums, but it sounds perfect in union with the music and the melody. Malkmus caps the verse off by pushing the point about people looking great when they shave, asking, “Don’t they?” No arguments here!
The poetry in the second verse moves onto more solid ground with Malkmus singing, “We lived on Tennyson and venison and the Grateful Dead.” The rhyming of “Tennyson” with “venison” should be put into the Rhyming Hall of Fame, right up there with Bob Dylan fusing “subpoena” with “Angelina.” Further elevating the wittiness and beauty of the line is the namecheck of the Dead, which may mean that the phrase “jerry rig” from earlier in “Lariat” is in fact a reference to Jerry Garcia. The Dead have seeped into Malkmus’s work before as their song “China Cat Sunflower” and other Dead tunes have cropped up in live Jicks shows. There is a another reference to the Dead on Wig Out at Jagbags. In Malkmus’s ode to his hometown of Portland — “Cinnamon and Lesbians” — the band includes a musical quotation from the Dead’s “St. Stephen.” Perhaps these allusions are a signal from Malkmus that he is ready to embrace the title of Saint Stephen.
Malkmus was asked about his relationship to the Dead by Esquire in an interview with the release of the album and he admitted to being ambivalent:
“It’s kind of odd being not a fan. I mean, I kind of appreciate the Grateful Dead for what they are as a weird American kind of… five guys making a sound. I don’t really get the whole cult….Well, sometimes there is sort of a counterculture, do-it-yourself side to them that I appreciated. But you take the good with the bad. There was certainly some kind of watered-down side to it all by the end, right? Not to mention depressing drug use that’s sort of a cautionary tale, a cautionary baby boomer story. I watched Jobs with Ashton Kutcher. And you’ve got Ashton Kutcher playing Steve Jobs. And he’s walking around on bare feet and kind of singing hippy-dippy stuff. But he’s also this voracious capitalist. And the Dead were, too. They were definitely a money-making baby boomer thing. They were peace and love and then they grew up. Or they never were maybe. They were always the children of their parents.”
The second line of the second verse of “Lariat” contains even more musical references, this time to Mudhoney, the album Torch of the Mystics by Sun City Girls, and Bongwater’s album Double Bummer. Malkmus commented on these musical shout-outs in a 2014 Rolling Stone interview:
“Some of the imagery is taken from a time of 1988-1991….It’s an era of silence, that people don’t really talk about. There was maybe Galaxie 500, maybe trails of Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s not a time that’s been said, ‘This was an amazing time.’”
By giving this musical time period its due and the earlier lines about consuming venison and Tennyson, Malkmus seems to be invoking the memory of a golden summer. More details of this utopian portrayal emerge when the band moves into double time and Malkmus sings:
Bobby spinning out
I was so messed up
You were drunk and high
Just a rambling wreck
Coming off the breaks to see what was shaking.
It certainly sounds like a wild summer of getting fucked up with friends, complete with booze, drugs, surfing, poetry, music, and eating weird meat. Is Malkmus getting nostalgic on us? Is this a things-were-so-much-better-when-I-was-younger song? On face value, the final words of the song may seem to support this reading as Malkmus sings, “We grew up listening to the music from the best decade ever / Talking about the ‘80s.” Malkmus, throwing down the gauntlet! Fueled by the heat of this take, the band rocks out the end of the song, a joyful and irresistible ending to this short, compelling slice of pop music.
Malkmus was asked about his “best decade ever” claim by Billboard and he had this to say:
“I was trying to write something that Taylor Swift would write, or maybe even more Katy Perry. I was thinking in wide ways. For me I’m a seventies guy, and sometimes when you’re in your early adolescence or when the chicks are just a little older, and kind of out of your reach, they’re the ones you sort of like at that young age. Seventies chicks and seventies rock.”
First of all, it’s hilarious that, with “Lariat,” Malkmus is trying to channel Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, who traffic in an entirely different pop sensibility than Malkmus ever has. But the bigger takeaway from this quote is Malkmus’s statement that he is in fact as “a seventies guy.” Listening back to the hot take about the music of the best decade ever, it sounds like he’s giving that title to the ’80s, but, in fact, he actually pulls off a pun: “Talking about the A-D-D’s.” Moreover, he insisted in the Esquire interview about hin uncertainty about the Dead, despite the shoutout to the band in “Lariat” and writing a song that sounds an awful lot like the Dead’s “St. Stephen.” Putting aside a few catch-them-before-they’re-gone references to obscure bands, it becomes clearer through these interviews that Malkmus isn’t writing about his own golden summer and other youthful memories in “Lariat.” The song’s narrator is a fictional character created by Malkmus to channel real feelings about nostalgia. But this guy also allows Malkmus to keep a little distance from these emotions, while also enabling him to subvert expectations and keep his tongue firmly in cheek. All of this is happening within the context of a short, yet endlessly catchy pop song.
Throughout this entire series investigating the songs of Stephen Malkmus, the first instinct when analyzing his process is to say that Malkmus is playing with something. It could be a story song, a guitar epic, a pop song stuffed with pop culture allusions, or simply the way a specific set of words is delivered within an exact cadence of a line’s meter; it’s always about finding the game. What is the novel element that gives a Malkmus song its oh-so-perfect, singular spark? While he’s not prone to sweeping statements about the universe or encouraging emblematic analogies to Greek myth, Malkmus ensures that there’s always a sense of play in his songs and tries to draw the listener in to participate in the particular game of the song. It’s an open invitation and it doesn’t matter if you even know what the game is even if there’s even a game happening. He’s simply happy that you’re there.
Recliner Notes 