Worth 1000: Macro Photography

(grasshopper photo via Wired)

MP3: Toy – Decorama

Registry of Lyrical Offenders: Frightened Rabbit – “My Backwards Walk”

Previously we spotlighted some dance-floor romance by the sour Scotsmen from Frightened Rabbit. The Midnight Organ Fight is still playing on repeat, but it has since come to our attention that singer Scott Hutchison has a strike on his rap sheet.

“My Backwards Walk” begins with a modest scene-setting of regret:

I’m working on my backwards walk
Walking with no shoes or socks
And the time rewinds to the end of May
I wish we’d never met then met today

So far, so good. Hutchison pens some admirable post-breakup verses, lamenting memories that won’t fade and warbling plaintively through “drinking to forget” lines. He just wants closure, or, to quote Charlie Nicholson (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in High Fidelity, he’s going through “one of those what-does-it-all-mean stages.”

I’m working hard on walking out
Shoes keep sticking to the ground
My clothes won’t let me close the door
These trousers seem to love your floor

Clothes/close is an underused rhyme, but the magnetic attraction between pants and floor is truly a new spin on the breakup-sex trope. Unlike the more typical variety (“you’re no good for me but I’ll stay”), Hutchison clearly gets only misery from his prolonged exit. Rather than describe the passion and mixed emotions keeping him around, all he can think about is his pants, crumpled in a heap. You get the feeling they’re still around his ankles, while he just stares down at them, choked in shame.

We’re almost in the clear — get in, get out; sad song, nice wordplay — when Hutchison tries to kick it up to another level of epicness.

You’re the shit and I’m knee-deep in it

Oops. Imagining an ex-lover as a pile of feces (at least two feet high, by our calculations) is awkward enough, but Hutchison slips up seriously with “you’re the shit.” It’s unclear whether he meant this, but in grade school, being “the shit” was like being “the bomb” or “all that.” Occasionally, with a bag of chips. That saying may not exist in Scotland — this is the part of the world where fries are “chips” and chips are “crisps,” and soccer is “football” and Bruce Springsteen is “U2.” But next time, dude, run your lyrics by an American buddy or something. Or just stop watching Saved by the Bell reruns.

MP3: Frightened Rabbit – “My Backwards Walk”

Keane on Encounters at the End of the World, Existentialism

Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World documents daily life and existentialism at McMurdo, Antarctica’s largest base, village, and human community. The alien landscapes surrounding the settlement are like photo negatives of familiar environments — mountains look like seabed, caverns darken underwater.

The film is one-half interviews with the scientists that inhabit McMurdo, wondrously pondering their existence on the living continent that shifts under them. But the movie is equal parts moving photography, as wordless scenes of animated landscapes and surreal wildlife float by in luminous shades of deepwater blue.

I tried to think of songs about this type of alien landscape, but they’re tough to come by; even tougher was finding a song about things like these utterly weird sea stars. But in terms of cataloging the abstract blindness, the complete isolation that allows Herzog’s philosophical ruminations, Keane does an admirable job in “Bedshaped,” the closing track to their debut, Hopes and Fears:

You’ll follow me back
With the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bedshaped
And legs of stone

The song’s actually about an erstwhile lover of the singer who has moved on without him. But the blindness of “sun in your eyes” matches the whiteout of an Antarctic wanderer, while “bedshaped, and legs of stone” is his heavy gait, legs atrophied, as he staggers through a depthless snowstorm. In the song, the whiteout compels a doubtful ex-lover to follow her beau; in Encounters, it lets a once-scattered collection of explorers look inward.

MP3: Keane – “Bedshaped”

M.I.A. Gets Fly Like Paper

You may have noticed that we have a weakness for well executed tales of earning a more … unconventional living (see: Clipse, Killer Mike). But M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” still catches us off guard every time. And now that it’s being featured in the Pineapple Express trailer, the Sri Lankan’s stock is rising even higher.

You’re probably already familiar with the hypnotic beat, courtesy of Diplo and a Clash sample. But M.I.A. also sports buttery delivery and a structure that is brilliant in its simplicity (every verse is exactly four bars, repeated twice over).

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name
If you come around here, I make ‘em all day
I’ll get one done in a second if you wait

In just four quick bars, M.I.A. gives an image with detail most coke rappers haven’t produced in their whole catalogs. The tropes are these: you’re a modern day Pablo Escobar, you supply kilos, you know different ways to work in yet another variant of the words “girl,” “white,” and “fishscale.” Our girl from Sri Lanka doesn’t waste breath on that, instead going for a picture that really sticks in your head. We bet even Pusha-T, a vivid writer in his own right, is kicking himself for not thinking of “visas in my name” first.

Even if bragging is your thing, and we’ll admit, we’re suckers for a clever boast, M.I.A. still handles it:

No one on the corner has swag like us
Hit me on my burner pre-paid wireless
We package and deliver like UPS trucks
Already going hell just pumping that gas

Again, here’s the specificity we crave is here — ask Omar or the Baltimore PD if you want to learn about “burner” phones and why they’re needed. And flooring the accelerator on the highway to hell? That’s brazen.

Finally M.I.A. leaves us with a punchline so good, it almost feels wrong to spoil it for you if you haven’t caught it yet. To close it out, she casually proclaims:

Yeah I got more records than the KGB
So uh, no funny business

That’s an exit worthy of some serious gunshot samples.

(Many thanks to hip-hop scholar and RNN co-founder R.T.D., who helped make this post possible.)

MP3: M.I.A. – “Paper Planes”

Worth 1000: Brett Favre Spills His Heart

(thanks to the St. Louis Star Tribune for the pic)

MP3: Jens Lekman – “I Am Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You”