The billboard said "The End Is Near"
Phoebe Bridgers - 'I Know the End' (Punisher - 2020)
For weeks and months in 2020, we all wanted to scream. We needed to scream. This tweet, from the anonymous confession account Fesshole, sums it up rather succinctly.
As the first reply says, I’m glad that worked for this person. For those who weren’t on the verge of checking out early, the need to travel that far to let a primitive roar like that may not have been so urgent.
By (very) late spring, we did have something that we could use to live vicariously through someone else’s screams. It might be too close still, but if anyone cares to ask me what new music reminds me of 2020, it would be; Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Saint Cloud, Rough and Rowdy Ways, Song For Our Daughter and @pho Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher.
Bridgers gave a video interview to Genius where she walked through the song line-by-line, saving the people who contribute to Genius a lot of time and effort with their references. She also spoke of the song in general;
This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It’s like a super specific feeling. …. It’s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, “Well, what genre is [My Chemical Romance’s] ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ in?” It’s not really an anthem — I don’t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.
When you try and mash all these ideas together, you can’t be surprised if you end up with incoherence. The song starts out lamenting life on the road touring, not one of my favourite subjects for an artist to tackle on their second album, to be honest. By the song’s end, we are staring down the apocalypse at the end of the world.
Bridgers said in a piece to Stereogum that the chorus melody was developed with touring drummer and former partner Marshall Vore. As her funk evolved to a touring funk and the Wizard of Oz1 references became a secondary part of the song, it was rearranged and worked to the extent it was the first song started for Punisher and the last one finished.
The opening line, “I hate this part of Texas”, is based on graffiti that, no matter where you might be in the world, musicians touring in the underground music scene will see “that part” of Texas turning up time and time again2.
Touring makes Bridgers feel like her life is on pause; she makes not particularly grand plans for her return home but can’t even execute those; she gets up and sits back down again, arguably worse than not getting up in the first place. Back in her room, she has much of modern life at her fingertips - video on demand, friends on video, hot food at the touch of a button. This world where everything is available to the customer makes everywhere and nowhere feel like home.
In the song’s middle, we turn our attention to the apocalypse. Bridgers wonders how the burnouts on the beach would react when the news of the four horsemen reached them. Firstly we have the swing set rusting - something that happens to every beloved child plaything exposed to the elements.
In the same interview with Genius, Bridgers explained that:
…I remembered all these nights. I would cancel on my friends and be like, ‘I’m just going to have a relaxing night in,’ and then by like 9PM you realize you wish you’d gone out or something. So I would walk down from this apartment to the park next door and just like sit on the swings, ‘cause it made me feel like at least I left my house.
This section contains my favourite lyrical flourish of the song. She talks about pushing a friend away through words and actions, but they still come back - this mirrors the act of pushing someone on a swing and the defence mechanism of pushing a person you care about away to see if they’ll come back.
Next, we mistake a Space X landing for aliens arriving, and we tour modern America’s malls, slaughterhouses, picket-fenced houses and arcades but start to focus on the juxtaposition Bridgers feels between the familiarity of hearing ‘America First’ rap country songs3 and disavowing the beliefs contained within that clash with her values.
This ties back to ‘Chinese Satellite’ earlier on the album.
You were screamin' at the Evangelicals
They were screamin' right back from what I remember
They are undoubtedly the people who put up the billboard that reads “The End Is Near”, but Bridgers has to concede, right at the end of the album, that they have a point about that, if nothing else.
With so many ideas brought together at the end, there are plenty of tiebacks to the rest of the album. The quiet garden life reference ties back to ‘Garden Song’ and the haunted garden. The bird in the teeth from ‘Moon Song’, there are siren sounds - a callback to ‘Halloween’. More of a stretch, but there are slot machines which could reference the arcade in ‘Kyoto’ and, as mentioned above, quibbling theology in ‘Chinese Satellite’.4
For someone that goes around dressed like a skeleton, there is a lot of focus on ghosts in Bridgers’ work - from the cover of her 2017 album Strangers In The Alps to the picket-fenced house, which is, of course, haunted and talking of disappearing away from friends, the more modern interpretation of ghosting.
As we get to the end of the song and album, the video for the song gives even more credence to the theory that the cathartic shouting is a nod to Ari Aster’s 2019 folk-horror film Midsommar. Without spoiling it, there are scenes where people accept their fate and a fair amount of screaming about what has been experienced.
Much like the references to previous songs, the song's outro haunts the album's climax. We also have most of the guests and the collaborators5 return to do likewise. The song kicks up a notch; brass and guitars swoon and soar over it as it gets louder, more intense and chaotic. It starts to sound like a mid-2000s North American Indie Rock song - which, when performed live at a festival, would see members of six other bands appear, many Canadian with curly hair and smashing a coconut into a toilet seat.
Bridgers on this ‘doomsday chorus’ in Stereogum
It kind of came together naturally. I was basically like, “I want a huge outro” and Conor6 was like, “You know who plays crazy guitar for shit like that is Nick Zinner.” I knew that already, because he was on Better Oblivion. …It was easy to build an outro like that. The group vocal happened on a day where there were enough people. “Oh, it’d be a good day to do a group vocal today.” I’m sure it took forever, but I didn’t think twice about putting a million things on it. It was hard, actually, to take stuff off and pare down because we got too excited. It’s compressed sounding still, but it was worse, because the beginning of the song is sparse and it sounds loud and nice and as more things get put in you have to turn them down and it’s all the sudden this weird wash of nothing. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves.
We are momentarily brought back to the start as the melody from the opening instrumental ‘DVD Menu’ returns, but we end with an exasperated and raspy Bridgers exhaling the last few breaths, which by the time of the album’s release ended up being a poignant and sad ending for many. But before that is the scream.
The scream takes us back to our friend from Fesshole, shouting into the void to maintain his sanity. Purging himself of negativity and anger - feeling alive at a time when so many people’s lives were on pause or stop.
It was a time when a drive up to visit grandparents was, for many people, not on the cards or even illegal, which is why in the video and live performances7 in front of crowds, the audience gets a kick from joining in and shouting along too. I can’t say how many people think of COVID-19 frustration when they lean back and open their lungs up - I certainly do every time I hear this song because it reminds me of that time when precious moments were snatched away and because there is something joyous about being together.
As Bridgers, herself has said.
I’m looking forward to someday having people sing it back to me in a crowd. I think that would be so fucking fun…There’s something so victorious about singing fucked up lyrics with a bunch of people.
I hope regular, and new readers alike have enjoyed this eight-entry detour through the decades. We will take a look at some of the data later this week. Then The Run Out Grooves will take a week off before we jump back on the Acclaimed Music list with Patti Smith and Arcade Fire.
Three clicks and then home as well as the tornado.
See the Camper Van Beethoven song ‘I Hate This Part of Texas’.
While Old Town Road was rap, country, and everywhere in 2019, there is no “America First” mentality to it. This tweet suggests that Sam Hunt or Jason Aldean are the songs in question.
It should be noted that in Her Genius interview, Bridgers says, in a self-deprecating manner, that fans give her too much credit. She said in the interview she didn’t sing about pelicans in ‘Smoke Signals’ because they are considered a symbol of death in ancient cultures but because it sounded better than seagulls.
Singing for the final chorus comes from; Bridgers, Malcolm McRae, Lukas Frank, Conor Oberst, Kane Ritchotte, Tomberlin, Christian Lee Hutson, Blake Mills, Nick Zinner, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker.
Conor Oberst is no stranger to an epic final song with Bright Eyes’ ‘Road To Joy’ sure to feature on here at some point.
If anyone is reading this a reasonable distance from 2021, there was a lot of coverage of her SNL performance with people angry at a woman dressed as a shiny skeleton smashing a guitar. These were possibly the same people calling her a “silly little girl” over her Glastonbury in 2022. as she spoke out against the US Supreme Court overturning Roe vs Wade.
My favorite from the album, and one of my favorites of 2020. What an incredible track from an amazing album!