Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. He also lets women wear his glasses. Now they are broken. Real talk about this and Pissed Jeans Hope For Men, which you can purchase here.
Download: Pissed Jeans, “People Person” (via Sub Pop)
My friend Harris tried to tell me that the recent Pissed Jeans show where my glasses got moshed to death was “vital.” He thought a lot about that word, so did I. He meant that there was something aggressive and raw, regular energy bunched up and turned outward, group hullabaloo from individual pentings. And maybe that was true, people letting their insides expand and burn out in effigies of rage. But where he saw nobility I just saw failure. Even before Pissed Jeans played, when they had just plugged their instruments in, when the only sound was accidental, people began bumping elbows and smooshing their sweaty shoulders. There was nothing friendly or excited, just violently anticipatory. I’m not going to front like I don’t want to slam dance, or that I wasn’t drinking but I have to clarify here that I am not a complete loser dirtbag without respect. When Pissed Jeans played actual songs, the little mosh cocoon got popped and people started to punch and push people and it was ugly. I’m not being naive; I saw fights at Disembodied shows at skate parks when I was 14. I had my dad take me to see Crown of Thornz in middle school. I’m not a gigantic stupid baby when it comes to shit like this. But when you just have undirected hate in your heart, getting it out at the Pissed Jeans concert is not the move. Guys, their album is called Hope For Men. It’s a nice thing. So, when I took my glasses off and put them in the crook of my shirt’s neck, I did not expect them to get smashed out of my body like I was hip checked. Sightless, I kneeled over, put my arms out in a circle and felt the ground to find my glasses. I’d gotten smacked from behind and to the right, so I looked forward and to the left. Except I couldn’t see anything because I am blind. I thought a shoelace was my glasses, I thought a paint spot on the floor was my glasses. Nothing was my glasses, so I started to panic. I sat down and put my legs out, moved people out of the way. My friend Jessica saw this, thought I had gotten hurt in the brutal mosh and tried to pick me up from under my arms. I made myself immobile and started yelling “Glasses! Glasses!” but she didn’t understand. My friend Brian saw her unable to lift me on her own and thought I was possibly extra hurt and tried to grab me from the other side. “Glasses! Glasses! Glasses! Glasses!” I yelled. They didn’t get it. I made little circles with my hands and put them to my eyes and they understood and let me go and said “Oh shit.” They looked around, found nothing. My glasses were nowhere. I squinted, pushed past a circle pit and went to the back of the room and sulked. But there was no piece of them, no sliver of lens or frame. There had to be something—no one would steal broken glasses from the floor. And then, when everything was cleared out, my friend Andrew saw them snagged underneath an amplifier. They were broken, but even through crooked legs and scratched lens I could see long enough to get new ones the next day, which was exactly what I did, spending the rest of a long evening squinting and pissed. It subsided when I got some glasses and returned to the sighted.
So, bespectacled and calm, I thought about this “vital” idea. Maybe there was something to it. He told me guys were banging on an old piano, yelling, generally being gnarly and fierce. And that there was something powerfully positive about that energy. I thought about this this weekend. I watched Hearts of Darkness—the documentary about filming Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola loses his mind and a lot of money. He has no idea how to end his film and lets Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando spend days improvising dialogues about death and fate and garbagey gobbledygook. But he spent the time and he did it, he stood there in the Phillipines and lost weight from sweat, filmed a waterbuffalo sacrifice, listened to drugged up Dennis Hopper talk about nothing forever. He let the actors decide what needed to happen when they should and he let 15-year-old Laurence Fishburn run shit. His wife tape-recorded him in secret. He took his shirt off in public. Shit was a mess. And he thought so most of all. He said the movie was terrible trash. And I don’t think he’s right but that doesn’t matter. He did it. It was grand and stupid and mean and difficult and if you are going to make moves, that is the scale they should happen on. Pissed Jeans, they don’t. They hit the drums hard and in time. They turn from the audience and their songs are about ceiling fans and area rugs. It’s small. The men on the cover are hugging. There is nothing grand or complex about that. Tiny movements or large ones, and they know where they fit it, so they stay compact and make their movements minute and specific, quell rage and focus finely. Where is the nobility in small anger? It’s nowhere, guy with a rattail, and now I am out 400 dollars for an eye exam on 14th Street, new frames and lenses. And I’m not caking, you know? So, what’s it worth if not something large. Because it’s not vital, it’s stupid.
I saw on Sunday Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibit at the Guggenheim. It is called “I Want To Believe.” The introductory summary text about it, pasted in the lobby, talks about his enormous desires and plans, creation through destruction and the meshing of East and West like they were birthed from the same body. His art is huge, literally, and exciting and awing. This massiveness, the literal and figurative, this text writer had postulated, was why the show was called “I Want To Believe.” But that can’t be correct. If it was about a universal goodness and hope, it would be called “I Believe.” It’s not. “I Want To Believe” means he isn’t currently believing, that there is a block blocking belief. In rememberance of bombing victims, he inverted fireworks and turned them black and launched them in a daytime rainbow. There are few things starker than a black rainbow but there is not hope in it. It’s immensely grand, but even at that scale it cannot be pure hope. The desire for hope is strong but nestled with realist bummers, and when you see such grandiose success like that, still not fully wide-eyed, then there’s nothing vital, just selfish positivity in the shape of a mosh.
Related:
- Pissed Jeans, “Dream Smotherer” MP3
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- Schnipper’s Slept On
- posted on Mar 4, 2008 in SLEPT ON
- tags Pissed Jeans, rock
