Okay, it’s Tuesday and once again I’m doing my blog post on music. This time the song I’m going to be talking about is “Bored In The USA” by Father John Misty. The first time I listened through the song, it seemed to be a pretty typical indie folk song. The lyrics basically detail the singer’s disillusionment with the “American Dream”. The song begins with the verse:
How many people rise and say
My brain’s so awfully glad to be here for yet another mindless day
Now I’ve got all morning to obsessively accrue
A small nation of meaningful objects they’ve gotta represent me too
By this afternoon I’ll live in debt
And by tomorrow be replaced by children
At least to me, it seemed the singer was railing against the consumerism that has become a staple of American culture. This observation, however has been so overstated within the indie folk genre of music in the past few years that it has been transformed into something cliche and unoriginal.
While I enjoyed the first portion of the song, the portion of the song that truly stands out is towards the end, where the singer begins listing his complaints:
They gave me useless education
And a sub-prime loan on a craftsman home
Keep my prescriptions filled
And now I can’t get off but I can kind of deal
After each of these lines the listener can hear an audience laughing. At first listen, this addition baffled me. This is the climax of the song, where all of society’s lies and disappointments are called out for their shortcomings, and the singer can finally air his grievances. Yet after each complaint these laugh tracks played, taking away from the seriousness of his issues and limiting any sort of catharsis that can be achieved through their airing.
Now, I’ve looked into the singer, Father John Misty, and come up with two possible interpretations for the laughs. The first is that Father John Misty is showing how the problems he faces: meaningless, debt, drug dependency and fading love, have become little more than punchlines repeated on late-night talk shows over and over until they’ve lost all semblance of meaning. The other possibility is that Joshua Tillman, the man behind the pseudonym Father John Misty, is mocking the rest of those indie-folk bands that portray themselves as disillusioned while still living a rock star life made possible only by the system they claim to despise.
Again, I’m not sure I’ve come even close to fully understanding this song. I didn’t even talk about how it relates to the song from which its name is derived, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”. However, the chance that the writer of the song, Joshua Tillman has created a musical pseudonym, Father John Misty, in order to satirize a genre of music seemed very similar to Kilgore Trout and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The difficulty of distinguishing author from character hasn’t gotten any easier for me, it seems.
James, I feel as though you have still made progress even though you cannot necessarily draw the line between author and character. You still have acquired the ability to recognize that the line that distinguishes these two identities is blurred. You are still able to make the distinction that there is no distinction, and that in itself is an acquired trait forged from this very class. On another note, I feel like the singer/writer preaches how they're trying to find meaning in their lives, and can't necessarily find what they're looking for.
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