The Photo Atlas, Bruce Springsteen and the Great American Teenage Myth

The Photo Atlas taps into the motifs of what I call the Great American Teenage Myth in the lyrics of "Dress Code". We have kids hopping into a car, hitting the interstate and driving fast even though they won't make it, which is significant not only because its a scene that might as well have been sung by Bruce Springsteen (The first three lines of Born to Run), but because it was sung by guys who grew up in Colorado, not New Jersey, and yet share the same basic events of driving fast and reckless down a highway towards a place they know they won't reach.  There is even a shared wailing of "woah oh", and although it represents the ecstatic emotion of being briefly wild, uninhibited and free in one song, and perhaps a cry of pain from unrequited love in another, both emotions are part of the same event. Because what is the physical scene of the Great American Teenage Myth but running away from home and having to come back? Starting as the little child that packs a couple of peanut butter sandwiches and his stuffed tiger to get away from a hegemonic mom, how much have we progressed to the rebellious teen that just wants to run away and live his dreams. And there in lies not only the image of running but also the sense that The Great American Teenage Myth is a chase of something that has only become more solidified since childhood. A yearning of something that has become increasingly intense, and less and less bearable to not act on. 

But the myth is not satisfied. Calvin returns home and Bruce doesn't know when his dream is going to be fulfilled but he hopes one day. And there is the emotional underpinning of the shared story. It's a time of hope and dreams, but also of denial, impotence and inability. The balance of those emotions, and the knowledge that one has to return back to a cage of home is what creates the tension and ultimately the ecstasy of the brief escape or the grief of returning unfulfilled.

All this tied in with images of cars, the open road, and addressing a romantic interest builds up to create a common story that we can enjoying by nodding and thinking 'Yeah, I get that' when we hear someone else say it. 

Anyway, here's The Photo Atlas's new song "Dress Code" off of their new album Stuck in a Honeytrap. It's fun, angsty, unrequited, and comforts me with a feeling of warm nostalgia for our shared story. 

The Art of Peer Pressure

In my last big article I talked about the humanity and life that the artist necessarily gives to his music, and now I'd just like to talk a little bit about how we as listeners bring our own existence into the work, and in that way create or make its meaning manifest.

On Wednesday morning I read that my D.A.R.E. officer had been found deceased in the drivers seat of his silver ford focus from a self inflicted gunshot wound. I think he was the first police officer I ever met, and the guy that made me think it would be OK to have police officer as my plan B career choice, because simply put, he was just a nice guy. He didn't try to scare us straight, he just treated us like what we were, a bunch of little kids that only really knew about police from cops and robbers. He was gentle, and kind, and I knew that that was what I wanted to be and do with my life.

After reading all the comments and closing the article, I tried to move on and go back to work but "The art of Peer Pressure" just kind of came up in my head. I didn't summon it, I was just tapping my fingers, and there it was, mid beat just humming along in my head.   Now there's something really special to me about "The art of Peer Pressure". It moves, but in a different way. It's not slow or fast, and maybe its because of the clack and the drum, but it's steady in a cold cold way. Kendrick raps softly, and he just keeps going. He lays on word after word of his story saving only the title, select verses, and the chorus to explain it. It's a song that personifies its content, a long aimless drive that just goes until it breaks. In that content he illuminates the duality of who he is and who he becomes, and the strange unresolved tension that that masking presents. I would especially like to present that. This song is unresolved. They drive around, they break in, they drive out, and drive around, and the song ends. Kendrick is still his troubled self, there is no resolution.

And where is there resolution. A cop dies broken, and the criminals hate themselves for the crime, but its all they have to be and what else can the cop do but do his job? Everyone's hurting. Everyone's speaking soft. One was gentle and one was not, and one is being gentle with himself and the other is dead. And yet everything just keep doing. A cop dies broken, and the criminals hate themselves for the crime, but its all they have, their job and their identity.

We made a right, we made a left, but we were just circling life.

***

In writing this I wasn't sure if it was something that I wanted to write about. I didn't want to trivialize something as incomprehensible as a loss of human life, but there's a Jewish tradition that goes that even if you visit the grave of a stranger you leave a small stone on their grave in recognition of their life, their death, and your witness to them.  I'll leave this as my stone. A symbol of my witnessing of a life.