Insidious Lassitude

…Ryan Adams is talking about rock music in the 80s, specifically hair-metal. “It was like the roaring 20s, but with guys that looked liked really gruff girls”, he proffered between debuting songs from his new record in Boston the other week. Then followed a discussion of his BC Rich Warbeast, which he says is “basically, like, the most most badass guitar ever”.

I want to say that he’s being ironic about a time before irony, but I don’t know, and I don’t know that even he knows anymore. I could probably find some irony in that, but I can’t be bothered. Last the world heard from Ryan, he was shrieking “Guitaaaar solo!!!” in the middle-eight of a quasi-comicbookmetal song called ‘Halloweenhead’ that had thunderstorm sound-effects in it. And not even irony could provide a subterfuge for that. Though perhaps it was irony, for there followed not a solo, but the same couple of notes repeated metronomically for a few bars, like they were echoes still reverberating from the 80s. I suppose that middle-eight could be a metaphor for the 80s, and a self-effacing snark at Adams’ own recent output too.

The same could almost be said for his new song ‘Magick’.

‘What goes around comes around / Listen to the music play  / Listen to the magic / And watch the record go round / Cuz what goes around comes around’

Ryan’s like some sort of magical thinker, constantly beleaguered and burdened by his endlessly vaunted ’songwriting gift’ and bewildered by his inability to understand and find causality for it, he’s forever seeking refuge in rock music, and in particular the rock of a simpler time, the rock of his nostalgic youth. He’s like a child trapped inside a man’s body, forced to live by cheek-by-jowl with an artistic ability he can’t fathom - the ‘gifted’ his name is forever prefaced with, and which only curses him to eternally fret about how it works. You get the impression that this bewilderment extends into his personal life and realtionships too. And so it goes that, trapped like that circular lyric, unwilling to engage with his mojo and waylaid with stasis, he tosses out what on first listen seems to be non-commital derivative nonsense like Magick. But the child’s spelling and the lyrics - ’Turn the radio up and get down/ let your body sway / its magic!’ - are perhaps just further evidence of Adams’ lost-in-adulthood longing for a simpler time. A time of comicbooks, and 80s rock records with their aspirational agenda of sunshine, girls and cars; a time when he didn’t have to think about his - ironically, always very witty and self-aware - grasp of irony, or understand his art, or engage in emotional sophistication and complexity in his life or his music.

As I’ve commented (at length) before, Adams has a fascination with magic. Back in 2003 in the first genesis of his proto-comicbookmetal subterfuge, he tossed - with a typically astoundingly deft fusion of vulnerability and arrogance - the potential masterpiece ’Anybody Wanna take me Home’. Even the title is sugestive of Adams’ duality - anybody wanna take me home, as said by an unhappy child; or anybody wanna take me home, as said by an adult in a bar to women, or by a drunk - and the song features a quintessential Adams apparently-throwaway lyric. Picking over the existential scabs of his lost youth, he sings of ‘disappearing like magic’. Like magic itself magically does once you’re an adult - once you can no longer just ‘turn the radio up, let your body sway and listen to ther music play, listen to the magic’. Like Adams oeuvre, it’s devastating in parts. In both senses of the word.   

Even the cliche ‘what goes around comes around’ in the Magick chorus is vaguely magical thinking in its construction - or lack of. But, typically, Adams counterpoints it immediately with a kind of knowing self-aware wink to the limitations of rock music and his own desire to toss out rock records with riffs appropriated from other rock records: ‘Watch the record go around and around’. They’re both cliches, but are both deployed to cock-a-snook at one another, and illuminate each other. The magical thinking is summoned as refuge, then immediately kicked into touch. What a predicament.

The other song here is another tossed-out piece of nonsense. Complete with typical Adams one-liner flourish. ’If I could I would fix it’ he sings to a woman in sincere and self-pitying style. And then, naturally, he twists the olive branch and cheats the sentiment: ’so I would always win’ - it becomes clear that he doesn’t seek to fix the situation by redeeming himself, but by changing the rules of the relationship on which the interaction takes place on. In much the same way that a child might, he sees it as a contest, in black and white - or magic and non-magic - and it’s apparent it isn’t and complexity rears its head he feigns disinterest, throws his comicbook toys down and stalks off to cradle his BC Rich like a comfort-blanky and toss out some songs he desperately hopes are meaningless and don’t betray him. But in the end the songwriting gift always betrays him, even if it’s just a line or two these days.     

Ryan Adams - Magick

Ryan Adams - Fix It