This post eventually gets around to a long discussion of “Red Tide” by Neko Case

I just realized I could’ve done a whole series of awful “Criminal“-related titles for these Thief posts – the Thief II one could’ve been  “I’ve been a bad, bad girl/I’ve been Karras with a delicate man,” and, of course, the morality post, “I’ve done wrong, and I wanna suffer for my sins.”

Hindsight.

Anyway, it’s probably for the best. It’s easy to ruin a great song by associating it too much, even jokingly, with something literary or nerdy. I’ve already done this to Neko Case’s deadpan cover of “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” by connecting it with Thief’s dangerous nymph Viktoria, but like Viktoria I have no regrets.

I’ve obviously drifted quite a distance from this blog’s original music focus, for the simple reason that my short- and long-term obsessions are rarely musical and I’m better at talking about other things (unless the musicians are Kristeen Young and Morrissey and so on, people whose writing is knotty/plotty/referential, and therefore more suited for a fiction person like me). But while I’m talking about Middle Cyclone, “Red Tide” is the best thing I’ve heard since Music For Strippers:

It feels so dark and inexorable. I think it’s about the abuse of nature, and how so many romantic and nostalgic American images are inseparable from that abuse (“there’s a smell here of gravel, and cigarettes lit/when the match made them sweet/when the engine turned over…”), and then she twists it all into an apocalyptic sketch, which all makes me wonder if “that was a day…to remember” is a reference to my childhood obsession, the Titanic. If so, it’s very subtle, and therefore the only good kind of Titanic reference.

The fevered “I want to go back and die at the drive-in/die before strangers can say/’I hate the rain, I hate the rain!’” (a strongly musically emphasized line, spoken in obvious passion, which is interesting given how much she distances herself from this strange remark in the actual lyrics) gets at some kind of truth about Fifties nostalgia, a truth that -if she’d spelled it out- might have been dubious and dull. Instead it hits like a hammer to the side of the head. Which I’ve recently experienced quite a lot in virtual form.