This is where it gets a little strange.
The car's on fire and there's no driver at the wheel, and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides, and a dark wind blows. The government is corrupt and we're on so many drugs with the radio on and the curtains drawn. We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death. The sun has fallen down and the billboards are all leering and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles. It went like this: the buildings toppled in on themselves, mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble and pulled out their hair. The skyline was beautiful on fire, all twisted metal stretching upwards, everything washed in a thin orange haze. I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful. These are truly the last days." You grabbed my hand and we fell into it like a daydream or a fever. We woke up one morning and fell a little further down, for sure it's the valley of death. I open up my wallet and it's full of blood.
A bleak, beautiful, drugged-up musical apocalypse: music to die to and music to bring you back to life. Godspeed You! Black Emperor have an uncanny ability to find the beauty in desolation, to find elation in destruction. There is a palpable sadness running through their debut album f#a#∞, yet the apocalypse is portrayed as being immeasurably beautiful, not a happy event by any stretch of the imagination, but beautiful and breathtaking in its own way.
This is my favourite album, without a doubt, because it’s a perfect balance of intellectual and emotional music. The quiet passages are reflective and force you to consider your world, but when they build up to those orgasmic crescendoes, emotions take over and you find yourself overwhelmed with anger and frustration and sadness. Without trying to sound like a wanker (who says I need to try?), f#a#∞, with its ebbs and flows of rationality and outrage, is a representation of how the human reaction to chaos operates.
Chaos is at the heart of this album, you see. It’s all about how we deal with things we cannot explain---those random changes we see in the world and maybe attribute to God or the economy or crime or any number of uncontrollable factors, trying to impose human rationality onto the sheer unpredictability of the universe. f#a#∞ decries the notion of control, be it human or divine, presenting it as nothing more than the silly delusions of a race that doesn’t understand the world it lives in.
I’m not saying that Godspeed (or indeed I) understand the world we all live in, but sometimes it’s obvious that there’s nothing guiding events: that things happen just fucking because, and there’s no amount of preparation or prayer that can prevent them. We live in a world full of unpredictable chaos, and we’d better get used to it, or else we’ll all perish. Trying to control the universe is like a mote of dust trying to control the air currents on which it floats. Futile, yet admirable.
Admirable because this album is at its core deeply humanist. It’s a tragic view of humanity, exposing our worst facets and showing us as the superstitious and gullible creatures we are, but it doesn’t judge. I believe it’s an objective view of humankind, showing but not telling, allowing the listener to make up his own mind. Of course, it plays more to the darker aspects of everything: humanity, the universe, chaos, everything is depicted as dark and forbidding, yet strangely beautiful. Overwhelming in its uncertainty and breathtaking in is grandeur.
This is the album to listen to if you’re feeling unsure of the future, if you’re feeling like everything’s going wrong, or if you can see that nothing really matters and that the splendour of destruction is the only thing that makes the world possible to live in. Splendour and grandeur and beauty, these things can be found in the bleakest of places and at the most desolate of times, because f#a#∞ is hopeful. Not hopeful for a bright and shiny future, no, but there’s hope running through it at its deepest, darkest levels that maybe we’ll stop concentrating on the horrible things that happen in the world, outside of our control, and start watching in awe the patterns and machinations of the universe.
But that’s enough philosophizing for now. Time to move from the intellectual to the emotional, from the academic to the musical. In its crescendoes and diminuendoes, its dynamics and its cadences, its depression and its ecstasy, it is the ultimate ride. f#a#∞ will bring you up and down and around the world and convince you that music can truly be the greatest art form. It tells a story using only sounds, and there is no traditional narrative here: only the plants and payoffs and reversals and recognitions of feeling.
The album climaxes more than once, each time more rapturous than the last, each glorious outpouring of musical armageddon more compelling and more disastrous than that which came before. It moves up and it falls back and it moves further and it falls back, eventually reaching its final culmination of all the hope and despair and beauty and desolation that has pervaded it throughout its hour-long onslaught of barren fugue.
I know that this is only my interpretation of this album: what I’ve said here may not at all have been the band’s intentions when they wrote it, but isn’t that the essence of great music, and indeed great art? You take from it what you put into it. I’ve put everything into this record, and I’ve gotten back so much more, because in the end it's answered the question I've been asking all along, and it's now up to you to figure it out: do you think the end of the world is coming?
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