Mid-Week Music: Colin Newman - "2-Sixes"
There’s a lot of music that I used to love and listen to constantly that I’ve set aside as I got older, and there’s even more that I have quietly shelved now that I’m sober (um, The Pogues). I’ve always made lists, top-tens, that kind of thing, and it’s interesting to see not only what has fallen away but what has persisted.
Colin Newman’s album Commercial Suicide has persisted. It’s a record that my friend Patrick shoved into my hands as he was flipping through a bin at Used Kids record store in Columbus, Ohio when we both lived there. Patrick did that to me a lot and his aim was true. Newman is most well-known as the front person for punk/post-punk band Wire, but his solo albums are quite different. Commercial Suicide confused a lot of his fans at the time, I think. It’s an album of melancholic and sometimes dark chamber pop, awash in strings, woodwinds, brass, piano, and glassy synthesizers. I can easily say it’s one of my favorite albums. It has held up through every period of my adult life. Whether or not you like this song, I encourage you to give the entire album a chance, front to back.
The song “2-Sixes” opens spaciously, cautiously, a dialogue between familiar and unfamiliar sounds. Then the words, sung in a strained voice, as if at the top of its range:
Incidentally it works so easily
A matter of what restrains, a matter of what delays
Everything which changes time, all things which move in lines
In between this it comes so quickly
A motion of those gears, the boredom and the fear
That all things are constrained by, all things which live or die
Um, yeah. We like to think of time as linear (and we use clocks and calendars to codify that), but our experience of it is colored by our emotions among other influences. We count days, driving a stake into the timeline to measure our progress and to see where we’ve been. To put things behind us. To move forward.
And yet it seems so easy
Anything is possible, it's a matter of decision
Of all things which change in time, and all things which move in lines
And yet this assumption of free will is not true. I do not choose my future any more than circumstances outside my control choose it. It SEEMS so easy, but it’s an illusion.
The safest choice may not be the wisest, but who is to judge in this?
Who can decide, who can know best?
And all things must function under the constraints of what went before
This is where it gets pretty much like “fuck.” We make safe choices (to bury our trauma in substance use, to stay with an abusive partner, etc.) and because of how time and those million potential paths of the future (see my last email) work, we cannot be judged for them. There is no judge. So are we doomed to “the constraints of what went before?”
So let's dance and forget about who we think we are
Oh, let's romance and find out who we really are
And all things that function under the constraints of what went before
May not be the only possibilities, there's always a chance
Of something new, of something that hasn't happened
In a long time, in a long timeOh yes. “There’s always a chance of something new.”
I am full of possibilities. You are full of possibilities. We are full of possibilities.
Let’s dance.
Love,
David
