My whole life I have been surprised when art is more transparent than I think it is. If I admire a person\u2019s work then I tend to project onto the creator a sort of aloof mastery, as if technical skill implies utter detachment from the fiction: every first-person narrator a character, and every character held at an amused distance. Which is a myth I think many artists would like to exude about themselves. But then I keep finding out that part of the autobiography is fiction, and the fiction is the autobiography.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s so much self-loathing in Frightened Rabbit lyrics. The darker the tone of the loathing, the more I have identified with those lyrics, and held them close. But I didn\u2019t really believe that Scott Hutchison was referring to himself when he sang \u201cI\u2019ve got a voice like a gutter in a toxic storm.\u201d I didn\u2019t think he was actually rejecting his own work when he titled an entire album Pedestrian Verse. He had a beautiful voice and his verse was soaring even when it plunged. He could not have believed the converse about himself, I assumed, not in the face of the evidence.<\/p>\n
Now I feel like Minnie Driver in Grosse Point Blank, saying, People joke about the horrible things that they don\u2019t do. They don\u2019t<\/em> do them. It\u2019s absurd.<\/em> It is absurd. When I saw that he was a missing person, I thought, oh no, please don\u2019t find him in water. Don\u2019t let my favorite Frightened Rabbit song be a foreshadow. And then I thought, well, the things I guess are never right, so by imagining that course of events I have protected him. This person I don\u2019t know and never met.<\/p>\n The tenth time I typed in his name today to see if they\u2019d found him yet, the news had nothing, but Google suggested that I might try searching for \u201cscott hutchison forth road bridge.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the reason I keep thinking art is buried in layers of swirling mystery is that I came to popular culture a little late, and music even more so. I take it for granted that everyone else got a head start on understanding it in middle school and I, at 37, have somehow never caught up. I have never felt the same attachment to most of the famously dead musicians that my peers have. But Frightened Rabbit came to me out of spiritus mundi, in a tiny anonymous twitter game I made with my friends, so their music was Mine in a rare way. I can\u2019t count the number of times I have pounded up a Portland hill with my feet matching the drums in \u201cSwim Until You Can\u2019t See Land.\u201d Actually I can count, it\u2019s in iTunes. 68 times. That\u2019s how often my headphones have set my pulse to its beats per minute. That\u2019s how often I have flogged myself onward with its chorus under my breath, demanding, are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?<\/p>\n I\u2019m sorry for not believing you meant what you said, Scott. The pain in Frightened Rabbit songs has been a grounding wire for mine, at times when it built up to the point of danger. I\u2019m sorry none of us could protect you in return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My whole life I have been surprised when art is more transparent than I think it is. If I admire a person\u2019s work then I tend to project onto the creator a sort of aloof mastery, as if technical skill implies utter detachment from the fiction: every first-person narrator a character, and every character held […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-angst","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2853,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions\/2853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}