Being confused is so much more admirable than being sullen

It’s right to say that a song you can’t get away from inflicts a certain kind of punishment on you, so that you can neither escape, assimilate, or reject whatever hold it aims to have. Good art – the kind that punctures your skein of normalcy and lifts you above the everyday functionality of feeding yourself, answering to the body’s execratory functions, and maintaining whatever degree of fidelity to the expected thresholds of self-presentation in the early 21st century (hygiene, small-talk, answering the phone) – makes promises it cannot keep and makes you feel like its shortcoming is somehow your fault. This is part of the genius of Eminem’s “Stan” – it lets the air out of the dream that a fan’s absolute identification with an artist offers recoupable returns.
For the past two days, whenever time and technology allow it, I’ve listened to “The President’s Dead” by a band called Okkervil River. I have an addictive personality; sometimes I’ll read a book cover to cover, and cover to cover again. Likewise with songs/albums: I’ve had the same CD playing in my car since September, though that’s partially the result of the CD player being very selective in what CDs it will allow to be played; when I was teaching, I listened to the last Sufjan Stevens album from the time I got home to the time I went to bed for two weeks. Other examples (Wallace’s “good old neon,” “usual suspects” at 15, cosmological constants first year in college, Two Gallants for endless walks through stupid streets for the entire second half of August, Les Savy Five’s “Rage in the Plague Age” last week, etc) reinforce my susceptibility to being caught up in the thing itself, working with each new exposure to unearth a newly resonant moment that calls into question whatever notion of the larger whole I had conceived. “The President’s Dead” came alive to me when I first heard the “rat-tat-tat” entrance of the snare drum, effectively ending the acoustic guitar/narrative folk strain of the song’s first part while enacting the “three shots” line. This is an intentionally incendiary song, and though I’ve grown less enamored with being incendiary for incendiary’s sake, I think it works. Have a listen.