THANK YOU! This idea that depictions of relationships must always be healthy and positive (or else stern and condemnatory, of the bad ones) is everywhere these days. I was deeply depressed when I learned that The Mountain Goats never play “Going to Georgia” anymore, probably my favorite song by them, because John Darnielle now finds its …
THANK YOU! This idea that depictions of relationships must always be healthy and positive (or else stern and condemnatory, of the bad ones) is everywhere these days. I was deeply depressed when I learned that The Mountain Goats never play “Going to Georgia” anymore, probably my favorite song by them, because John Darnielle now finds its depiction of unhealthy, passionate love to be antisocial and regressive. Obviously he’s entitled to his feelings and his setlist but it just seems like such a loss for a performer who’s so skilled at capturing dysfunction to cut out that part of himself out of a sense of responsibility.
What’s more, the anti-GT critique seems like another example of the relentless modern attack on ambiguity or even subtlety in art. The Boy in Giving Tree immediately loses his happiness when he starts asking the Tree for material things (in addition to being about parenthood I think GT is an ecological story as well), and he only regains happiness when he’s too incapable to make use of the material and has to resort to pure communion with the loved one. But we apparently can’t trust kids to think, “Boy, seems like the Boy shouldn’t have done that!”
On the overall idea of not needing to qualify and put disclaimers on every little thing in society, I'm completely down with that. It goes to my question of "why did we stop trusting kids to figure things out on their own?" When did parents stop understanding how to parent? The same late Boomers and early Gen X-ers who got to ride their bikes across town and who were told "Don't come home until the streetlights come on" decided that THEIR kids could only have a scheduled and supervised "playdate" for fear some molester was waiting around the corner for them if they strayed a block or two from the house.
I blame all those breathless "Datelines" where we blew up the fears of society into a ratings grabber. Helicopter parents are the *default* now (at least on the Left Coasts) and "free range" parents are eyed warily. Talk about losing all sense of what boundaries are appropriate!
That IS depressing...kind of like when the Dead stopped playing “Jack Straw” because it depicted an unhealthy co-dependent relationship between trainhopping drifters...or when Robert Johnson stopped playing “Me and the Devil Blues” because of its depiction of spousal abuse or...oh wait, artists didn’t do that until approximately 5 minutes ago. Darnielle is disappointingly woke to the extreme. We don’t need to hear your take on any social or political issue, dude. You are not Bono. You wrote good story-songs. We hoped for some refuge from the deluge of social justice jihadism and you just wouldn’t give it to us. Thanks for nothing.
It’s especially weird since it’s not like Going to Georgia is his only song that shouldn’t be emulated in real life. To my knowledge he still plays “No Children,” about codependent spouses drinking themselves to death. But I think that the impact that the Sunset Tree album (which I love) had on people, with folks always telling him that “This Year” saved their lives, gave him a self-image as a healer of broken souls, and that entailed disavowing some of his earlier stuff.
THANK YOU! This idea that depictions of relationships must always be healthy and positive (or else stern and condemnatory, of the bad ones) is everywhere these days. I was deeply depressed when I learned that The Mountain Goats never play “Going to Georgia” anymore, probably my favorite song by them, because John Darnielle now finds its depiction of unhealthy, passionate love to be antisocial and regressive. Obviously he’s entitled to his feelings and his setlist but it just seems like such a loss for a performer who’s so skilled at capturing dysfunction to cut out that part of himself out of a sense of responsibility.
What’s more, the anti-GT critique seems like another example of the relentless modern attack on ambiguity or even subtlety in art. The Boy in Giving Tree immediately loses his happiness when he starts asking the Tree for material things (in addition to being about parenthood I think GT is an ecological story as well), and he only regains happiness when he’s too incapable to make use of the material and has to resort to pure communion with the loved one. But we apparently can’t trust kids to think, “Boy, seems like the Boy shouldn’t have done that!”
On the overall idea of not needing to qualify and put disclaimers on every little thing in society, I'm completely down with that. It goes to my question of "why did we stop trusting kids to figure things out on their own?" When did parents stop understanding how to parent? The same late Boomers and early Gen X-ers who got to ride their bikes across town and who were told "Don't come home until the streetlights come on" decided that THEIR kids could only have a scheduled and supervised "playdate" for fear some molester was waiting around the corner for them if they strayed a block or two from the house.
I blame all those breathless "Datelines" where we blew up the fears of society into a ratings grabber. Helicopter parents are the *default* now (at least on the Left Coasts) and "free range" parents are eyed warily. Talk about losing all sense of what boundaries are appropriate!
That IS depressing...kind of like when the Dead stopped playing “Jack Straw” because it depicted an unhealthy co-dependent relationship between trainhopping drifters...or when Robert Johnson stopped playing “Me and the Devil Blues” because of its depiction of spousal abuse or...oh wait, artists didn’t do that until approximately 5 minutes ago. Darnielle is disappointingly woke to the extreme. We don’t need to hear your take on any social or political issue, dude. You are not Bono. You wrote good story-songs. We hoped for some refuge from the deluge of social justice jihadism and you just wouldn’t give it to us. Thanks for nothing.
It’s especially weird since it’s not like Going to Georgia is his only song that shouldn’t be emulated in real life. To my knowledge he still plays “No Children,” about codependent spouses drinking themselves to death. But I think that the impact that the Sunset Tree album (which I love) had on people, with folks always telling him that “This Year” saved their lives, gave him a self-image as a healer of broken souls, and that entailed disavowing some of his earlier stuff.