i remember reading a review a good while ago, of kid dakota's the west is the future, and there's something about the title that really resonnates with me. whenever i start to talk about it, though, i track onto manifest destiny from high school history lessons, and mr. batrick's 'crude maps' of america, which mostly turn out looking like scarred elephants. the reviewer seemed pretty disappointed with the mediation on D. Jackson's drug addiction, in 10,000 lakes, where he sings 'I didn't come for ice-fishing, I didn't come for duck hunting,' and finishes with 'I came to get better.'
i see his point, although i don't think that 10,000 lakes is jackson's cathartic blanket. looking at their press photos, which one is jackson - which one was the addict? i'm not sure, it's not something i'm ever going to guess at. i'm not even sure that he had the problem when they recorded so pretty, but i'd say that the cape in 'smokestack' is jackson's expulsion. but it's not even about the cape - it's about the second half of the song, where the slightly amplified guitar is just being idly strummed, over and over on the same chord, where the usual songwriting process breaks down. again, it's hard to talk about what would have driven him, but i think that those notes paint a picture of the absolute desolation of the west. and here the notions of manifest destiny actually work - the phrase 'the west is the future' was never as false as the ironic tool its used for, never the easy slice of stereotypical propaganda that runs alongside Careless Talk Costs Lives and Working Less Helps Our Enemies. the future was pretty shit, and so was the west. the west was looking out further than most people could ever see before, and it was exciting, and it was scary, and it was an opportunity, and it was scary, and it was really fucking scary. we can say it was narcissistic, that moving to the west was stripping your thin skin off, that it was crying in front of your wife and child when the crop failed - when it rained too hard, not at all, or when animals ate it. it is the only time when barbed wire has not been sinister. it is the stretched hand of a president shouting go, go, there is your future. your future is in a needle and pills, because there is nothing scarier than dead wheat and a mountain range in the distance. over there, over there you will see a map of your psyche, and you will be able to see unstoppable trouble - hours, days, weeks in advance. your inward becomes your outward, and you can watch yourself be destroyed.
after the few seconds of chords comes these little notes, this time slightly more amplified, slighty distorted. they've made this half-tune that fits over the space - i'd like to use the barbed wire analogy again. they're the backdrop for a few tuneful words, but they really don't need to be; the notes are a desperate last cry as much as the words are. one, two, three: pluck, pluck, please, please. but this is one of those rarer times when lyrics add another layer, rather than being the only layer or something in the way.
the first cry is like a little excuse. he's carrying on this story, he's pretending that he's pissed off about something, or that nothing is wrong...'and when i came back it had wasted away', like a punchline or a twist. and then a stuttering qualification, 'by "it," i mean, most of the best part of the day', and then you remember that constant chord underneath. it's hanging around there, it's the moment in a film where the camera is cutting back and forth between two people who aren't talking.
'i promise to quit if you promise to stay,' and that little half-tune that he brought into the house earlier is still his only hope, it's repeating again under the lyrics like another stretched hand over a table. we've got the dead, sandy flats of repeating chords; the failing hope of a couple of found notes - and then we've got this different thing, an actual plea, one that he genuinely thinks will work, and one that admits what he's been hiding all the way through the dry winter and backward spring.
and then the repeating chords stop, just for half a second. he hits muted strings instead of a solid note. he scratches the pick downwards quickly, and then starts again. it almost seems like a freudian slip.
i read that so pretty was 'a sinister twist on the classic breakup album,' on the kid dakota site. i would never have thought of it that way, but after the fact, it seems important that i'm picturing this guy with his dead crops and his track marks, and he's pleading to a woman over a table. what if she didn't stay? and in the same way that the west is the future, is quitting the best thing, or the american thing, or the unknown thing?
i have this green candle in a dirty, white candlestick. there is about an inch and a half left, my eyes have been itching for a while.
kid dakota - smokestack
it seems unfair to plow one piece of land and leave the other intact.
