1991: Slint, Spiderland
By Genevieve Oliver
I first heard Slint on a plane. It was 2013 or 2014 and I was flying back home, to Seattle, from New York, where my family was then and where I live now. My friend Bianca had recently sent me hours and hours’ worth of ‘80s and ‘90s postpunk via Dropbox and I'd put it all on my phone prior to the trip. Enter––via shuffle––a kind of unexpected visitor: that splintering oddness, the clattering drums. I had been writing in a notebook and I closed it and watched out the window at the golden light we were falling into and listened. The headphones didn't seem to go loud enough.
-
Hay has been made about the Louisville, Kentucky quartet Slint and their two albums, Tweez (1989) and Spiderland (1991); mostly the latter, mostly, as is customary, by men. Spiderland was recorded in four days in 1990 after which, rumor had it, the vocalist and guitarist Brian McMahan checked himself into a psychiatric hospital (it’s unclear whether or not this is true). The songs had existed in embryonic form since 1989 or earlier. McMahan had recorded lyric ideas in his parents' car, over four-track tape recordings of the band's rehearsals.
By the time Spiderland was released, Slint had broken up. All four members were in their very early twenties, playing in other bands and attending college, so the group’s dissolution didn’t seem so much like an ending as a beginning. A blurb on the back cover of the LP urged interested female vocalists to reach out to the band via the drummer and de facto bandleader Britt Walford's parents' house. P.J. Harvey sent a letter expressing interest.
Spiderland has since been regarded as a kind of math rock magnum opus and/or haunted masterpiece of outsider art, hyperanalyzed both for its various time signatures and for clues at the enduring mystery of how four teenage boys (some of whom had recently been literally recording their own farts to cassette) could make something so strange, complex, beautiful, and striking, and then fairly dissolve into the primordial ether from whence they had come. (The album cover, featuring the four members treading water in an Indiana quarry, is particularly salient to this metaphor.) But, like many works of outsider art, Spiderland was not accidental. Alchemical, yes. But not accidental. Not always considered in the critical narrative around the band and the album is the fact that Spiderland is a cohesive, persuasive, and moving document about coming of age as a true outsider.
-
In this contemporary eon of grief and rage and frustration I find myself returning often to the final track on Spiderland, "Good Morning Captain," one of the greatest musical documents of grief and rage and frustration, and pondering the circumstances of its making. The song's rough narrative is of a person who has survived a shipwreck climbing up to a house and asking to be let inside. A child looks out from a window, is terrified by the sight of him, and turns him away. These spoken lyrics serve as a bit of a means to an end: to the song’s last two minutes, when a different first-person voice emerges, shakily at first, then shouting over the guitars: "I'm trying to find my way home – I'm sorry – and I miss you." (McMahan puked after recording this vocal take.) The end of the song––and, thus, of the album, and, thus, of Slint's recording career––it is a kind of scorched-earth conflagration of desperate, scouring longing. What always gets me is that the longing is larger and stranger than the kind of longing normally captured in the guitar music of the nineties or for that matter most guitar music at all except for deepest blues. The longing is basically cosmic. That "I miss you" is coming from the very abject core of the collective human psyche. That "I miss you" is general. That "I miss you" is for everybody who has ever died––everything we've ever lost. So in the eon of grief and rage and frustration...
-
Many of the most important people in my life have had the first initial C. One of them is my brother Chad. One of them is my best friend Clara. Two others are my ex-best girl friend who I'll call Carolina and a person I considered a kind of surrogate sibling to me when I lived across the country from my brother. Let's call him Curtis.
I told Curtis I was getting into Slint. He probably said something like, "Fuck yeah," and then recommended about 15 other tangentially related bands, as he was wont to do. We went to shows and for walks together around my neighborhood on Capitol Hill in Seattle, talking about music. Eventually Curtis leveled me with the dual confession that he was a heroin addict and also had feelings for me. This was, obviously, difficult to process. It was particularly difficult to process because I had recently come to an interesting conclusion about myself, which was that I don't really experience sexual attraction. (There are a few words for this but I don’t like any of them.) It was also quite difficult to process because I come from a part of southern New York State that was hit pretty hard in the early waves of the opioid epidemic. When I was the head lifeguard at a country club pool, I had to send an employee home a couple times over the course of one summer because he was grieving so many friends who were dying. Dying and dying and dying.
When I first listened to "Good Morning Captain," I don't think I could necessarily contemplate that level of missing. I fantasized about a version that went, "I don't miss you." This would be targeted at Carolina, who had gotten bored of me as soon as she'd begun a serious relationship. I didn't miss her, I was telling myself. Our friendship had briefly but memorably been incredibly close and lonely to the point that people used to think we were a couple. She had suggested that we move to Seattle together, but she had reneged upon that pretty quickly when she had started dating this person. They are now married, which is part of why I haven’t spoken to Carolina in almost ten years. We both blamed each other for the end of our friendship, and I will concede that she was probably right. I was jealous; I couldn’t understand how or why she had replaced me so easily. My heart was broken. She was in every imagination of the rest of my life. I did miss her and sometimes still do. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that being so powerfully obsessed with not missing somebody is its own unique form of missing.
Curtis overdosed a bunch of times. Almost died a bunch of times. Was, allegedly, technically dead, albeit briefly, at least once time. Called me in the middle of the night once while I was extremely stoned and I almost cried on the phone because I thought he was dying but instead he tried to invite himself over (much later he told me he had been homeless and had no place to sleep) and I freaked out and said I couldn't see him. I regretted that conversation every day for five years, even after I heard through the grapevine that he was doing alright.
In 2019, I ran into Curtis at the Ballard farmers' market while I was visiting another friend who still lives in Seattle. The next day we met up in the park. We walked around talking about music like we always had. We had probably the most emotionally difficult conversation of my entire life. We parted ways and agreed to keep in touch. The last time I saw him I was going to my friend's door and I turned around and he was walking backwards down the street so he could watch me, and we waved at each other. I haven't heard from him since then, but as far as I know he’s doing just fine.
These anecdotes may beg the question, was I in love with Curtis and/or Carolina. I can truthfully tell you I don’t know. I know that I loved both of them as much as I have heretofore known myself to be capable of loving anyone. And it wasn’t enough, or otherwise it was the wrong kind.
-
In the eon of grief and rage and frustration, I have had a lot of time to psychoanalyze myself. We all have, I suppose. I hope all of you have been as productive as I’ve been. Oftentimes, in the course of this, I return to Spiderland and its various tales of alienation. In the opening salvo, “Breadcrumb Trail,” the narrator goes to a carnival. In the twisted chivalric romance of “Nosferatu Man,” named after a friend’s t-shirt, he quotes Hank Williams: "I could be settled down and be doing just fine, ‘til I hear that old train rollin’ down the line…" In “Don Aman,” a chilling meditation on social isolation that presages the album’s final thesis, he feels desperately inadequate at a party: “Like swimming underwater in the darkness / Like walking through an empty house…” In "Washer," he breaks up with a girl or with existence on this mortal plane. And then: "Let me in, the voice cried softly from outside the wooden door..."
"Good Morning Captain" is highly economical if nothing else. Nothing is wasted. During the recording of Tweez, Walford told the producer Steve Albini that he wanted his bass drum to sound like "slapping a ham." The bassist Josephine Wiggs, with whom Walford played in the Breeders circa Pod (1990), when he was nineteen years old, said that he played "so behind the beat you almost felt it belonged in the last bar." His drums on "Good Morning Captain" are incredibly controlled and almost lyrical. Not a single errant echo. The guitarist David Pajo dive-bombs every cymbal crash with haunting melodic chimes or waves of sweeping noise: onomatopoeias of McMahan's harrowing scenes. Todd Brashear's bassline menaces.
The longing that accompanies outsidership is possibly the definitive musical condition of the nineties. Desperate wanting and unwanting. The deep humiliation in that jealousy. "Load up on guns and bring your friends..." / "When you were here before couldn't look you in the eye..." / "Never was a cornflake girl..." On Spiderland that dichotomy is at its crispest. I want in. I want out. I want into that house. I tell myself I don't want into that house. But I am standing outside that house screaming, I'm trying to find my way home, I'm sorry, I miss you...?
-
After a very long time and a lot of angst that doesn't warrant description, I have accepted the fact that nothing is really all that wrong with me. Or, I guess, I've accepted that fact in the theoretical sense. Basically every friendship I've ever lost has come down to the reality that there is some threshold which I cannot cross. I can't blame anybody for leaving me there: after all, it's my own fault. Whatever's beyond that threshold, I don't understand it. I don't particularly want to. And yet.
I do feel that it's a bit of a gift. If you are any kind of creative person you will recognize the inherent usefulness in a special strangeness that allows you to glimpse something of the human condition from outside. I also feel that I'm prone to overstating its giftishness, because I don't want anybody to feel sorry for me. I'm aware that I pretend I'm more content being this way than I really am, because I understand that I have to prove to most people in this world that I can be whole without this piece of what is generally understood to be normal human consciousness... but perhaps in using the word 'without,' I'm showing my hand.
I don't feel like I'm missing anything. I feel like I'm a very whole person. I feel like everybody else looks at me and thinks I'm missing something. I feel like I have to prove to them that I'm not. I feel like I try, but all they do is look out the window at me, and, with the same bloodless and cruel nonchalance in which McMahan recites, "roll down the shade against the shadow... lost in the doorstep of an empty house." I'm sorry, I miss you, et cetera.
You and I both know well enough that the house is empty. Decades of feminist and queer theory have proven to us that the house is empty. So what the fuck am I doing on this doorstep?
That "I miss you" is spiteful, desperate, humiliated, enraged. A longing from another time, another life. Maybe we can't understand all the things we miss. Maybe we only know we miss them. Is it enough?
Genevieve Oliver is an abortion rights fundraiser, union organizer, novelist, and rock climber from the Hudson Valley. She operates a weekly music newsletter called Fidelity III.