self-titled - no. 3 - (Page 15)

“FEAR AND LOATHING IN MAHWAH, NJ” “Mahwah—a township of some twenty-four thousand people located at the top-right corner of New Jersey—is home to Ramapo College, which up until about seven months ago I made my home and studied ‘literature.’ It is the sort of place where a fellow will nonchalantly preface a compliment about your beard by making clear that he is ‘not gay, like, at all’ or an urbaneducation major will drunkenly explain that ‘niggers only care about smoking crack’ to no one in particular at the top of her voice. That is to say, the students there have shaped it into a hotbed of casual hatred, where they can inflate their own senses of self-worth in the crudest and cruelest way possible without fear of reprisal. In such an environment, it was hard for an idealistic young man like my nineteen-year-old self to not get a little bit hyperbolic with the lyrics to songs such as this one. This song is in F major because ‘fuck you’ starts with the letter F.” since Elvis Costello had already ripped it off [for the end of ‘Radio, Radio’] the door was pretty much open.” “UPON VIEWING BRUEGHEL’S ‘LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS’ ” “I thought for a while that I would tell people this song has something to do with Stephen Dedalus [the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] because [in Greek mythology] Deadalus was Icarus’s father, but this song has nothing to do with that. I guess I thought I would sound smart or something. I am a real asshole sometimes.” “TITUS ANDRONICUS” “This song is a real thorn in my side mostly because of the ‘Fuck everything, fuck me’ line, which isn’t even one of the real lyrics. That was an incidental inclusion, which was just supposed to be good for a laugh (even though I do stand by that statement 100 percent), but it has since become our most frequently quoted lyric, which is troubling on two fronts: 1) The world at large apparently thinks I have nothing more important to say than that, and true though it may be, [it’s] no fun for me to think about, and 2) whenever the band appears in a magazine or on a Web site, this lyric inevitably appears, and I have to have the same conversation with my father about how if I don’t watch my language, no respectable school district with even the slightest command of Google is going to hire me when I have gotten this rock ‘n’ roll thing out of my system. ‘Fuck me,’ indeed.” “ALBERT CAMUS” “MY TIME OUTSIDE THE WOMB” “I wrote this song walking home one night from one of Glen Rock, New Jersey’s two fabulous train stations. It is about hanging out in the aforementioned town from the years 1985 to 1998. As far as the lyrics, this song is mostly expository, and the music betrays how cool I thought Creedence Clearwater Revival was at the time. Before anyone comments that they have heard outros similar to the one at the end of this song in the past, I will say that if only the Modern Lovers had done it [on the song ‘Roadrunner’], we would not have, but “I wrote this song when I was a boy of eighteen, the time in a young suburban human’s life when they are most susceptible to Albert Camus’s particular literary powers. Camus has told fifty-plus years of dissatisfied teenagers, ‘Yes, I understand that nothing is “wrong,” exactly, but that is no reason for you to be completely unfulfilled and miserable.’ A very powerful message, thought my younger self, and I took it as a great excuse to mope about my uninspiring environs and overturn picnic tables with my buddies. “Here is a fun fact. The last three words of The Stranger—‘howls of execration’—almost became the name of our band at a time when everyone was saying what an awful band name Titus Andronicus was. Guess we showed them, even though it still gets spelled wrong a lot. Show promoters and flier designers of the world: Please spell our name right from now on? Thanks!”

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of self-titled - no. 3

self-titled - no. 3 Contents Titus Andronicus A.C. Newman Los Campesinos! Zombi Arthur Russell Gentleman Jesse Circlesquare Oneida Cut Off Your Hands Frances and the Lights School of Seven Bells and Free Blood ...Trail of Dead’s Conrad Keely cLOUDDEAD

self-titled - no. 3

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