Can you help me figure this out?
Deerhunter - 'He Would Have Laughed' (Halcyon Digest - 2010)
I wrote about how much live music I saw in 2008 earlier this month when we looked at The Fleet Foxes’ ‘Oliver James’. In May 2008, I had a packed schedule that saw me travelling to Brighton’s The Great Escape, where I saw, amongst others, Ladyhawke, Alphabet, We Are Scientists, Slow Club and Bon Iver in tiny venues with capacities in the low hundreds. That Saturday, I was at The O2 for Girls Aloud, but before The Great Escape, I was in East London for a quadruple bill of Times New Viking, No Age, Soiled Mattress & the Springs and Jay Reatard.
Jay Reatard was an artist I became aware of in 2006 when SOMBies,1 such as Simakos and Pavement Ist Rad, eulogised his 2006 album, Blood Visions2 and felt the need to see him in person alongside Times New Viking and New Age, whose Rip It Off and Nouns albums had just been released in the UK. Reatard also released several singles that year on Matador Records and included a split double AA side with Deerhunter in which they covered each other’s songs.3
Within two years, Reatard was dead. He died, aged 29, of cocaine toxicity with alcohol and flu contributing factors. I remember hearing this story as I was visiting friends, and earlier that day, reports were coming in of the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
Later in 2010, Deerhunter released their fifth studio album, Halcyon Digest, the follow-up to 2008 efforts Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. which sat nicely alongside the albums from bands at that Barden’s Boudoir show in my recollections of that year. Halcyon Digest is the band’s most critically acclaimed album and contains such neo-psychedelic high watermarks as ‘Helicopter’, ‘Revival’ and ‘Desire Lines’. The final track, ‘He Would Have Laughed’, is dedicated in the lyrics sheet to Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., the actual name of Jay Reatard.
The song was recorded by lead singer Bradford Cox, separate from the rest of the album, at Notown Sound in Georgia. It has Cox’s world-weary voice, a simple looping riff and drum pattern and many effects I would like to describe as twinkly. Many have debated whether the song is about Reatard or dedicated to him; the lyrics are often in quotation marks - does this make those lines quotes? Would he have laughed at the idea of a song being a tribute to him? One thing that I do find interesting about the lyrics is they are entirely non-judgemental, and not only that, there is empathy and warmth.
Specific lyrics focus on the passage of time and becoming an adult, how losing that childhood innocence and satisfaction by the small things grows into a yearning for something larger and marked by the people you lose - either those you drift away from or those that fall through the cracks. The second line, which Cox seems to hesitate and stumble over, intrigues me. I’m no clearer to understanding what a “cult of time” is; perhaps the line “Can you help me figure this out” later on is a plea to all of us. After that, literal interpretation becomes harder still as the words sound more like sounds that Cox is playing with as they come out of his mouth with the deliberate or unusual enunciation of certain words. It is as if he can taste what he is signing.
The song, and so the album, ends abruptly. It moves from having run time left to having no run time quicker than you’d anticipate. It is not a jump-cut to black like the ending of ‘Her Majesty’ halfway through a chord, and it gives plenty of warning that it is ending. It is just the timing of those last few notes that is hard to predict; in that sense, it is more like the final scene of Synecdoche, New York, in terms of an ending being a surprise but not a shock. We are warmed up to this by a move to a more ambient instrumental setting to match the point where the lyrics become detached from meaning. The song becomes even more twinkly and arcs towards songs with an ethereal atmosphere like the closing track of Kid A, ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ and Brian Eno’s ‘An Ending (Ascent).’
The song is just about the most popular Deerhunter song on Spotify, which is rare for a closing track and even rarer for one that didn’t get a single release. I think this is because the song marks a leap forward in the band’s discography to show that they could produce something beautiful, refined and elegant. I am a big fan of their brand of American-filtered shoegaze meets Krautrock noise they nail on songs like ‘Nothing Ever Happened’, but this song showed they could take something wounding as the tragic death of their friend aged 29 and turn it into something that sounds so appealing and deals with that abruptness in a cathartic fashion.
SOMBies were users of Sound Opinions Message Board; a forum spun out of Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot’s Chicago-based independent radio talk show, which I occasionally posted on from 2005-2013.
If you are unaware of it and are a fan of punky garage rock, you should look into the songs ‘Oh It’s Such A Shame’, ‘My Shadow’, ‘Death is Forming’ and the title track.
‘Fluorescent Grey’ / ‘Oh, It's Such a Shame’
i went to high school with pavement Ist rad. he was a couple years older than me and i always looked up to him