Now the hard part—I have to figure out the song. But do I? Does it allow itself to such an easy interpretation? It would seem upon a cursory reading, to be pretty straight forward. It has a very simple structure. Three part structure with a single line chorus, “always already gone.” In the first stanza it is all a series of “I” statements, in the second, “You” statements and in the final stanza, as the relationship was deemed to be doomed at the start and this final realization of this fate, the I’s and You’s are mixed. Oddly too, the vocals are layered…so is there even a unified voice in this song? There seems to be a Hegelian synthesis. I know my amigo baited me with this song. “Always already is one of Kant’s favourite phrases in the whole wide world. Heidegger picked up the use of this phrase and the bastard pupil, Jackie Derrida used it extensively. It would be easy to turn to these kind of theoretical guys, masturbate with their themes and see what kind of progeny I get when I mix them with the sweet female vocals, stringed instruments and the narration of a failed relationship.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell the story I want to tell. It would seem that there is some female narrator telling a former lover who left them, that the lover was always already gone, the relationship was doomed to failure. The lover was not happy, they wanted freedom and entering the relationship resulting in only the taking of freedom from the narrator. The lover, like a bird had to fly away (Yes, Mr Ronnie Van, she remembered you tomorrow).
The fun part is the way this song moves through the realization of this relationship. First denial (crying in the dark) “It seems you were always/ Always Already Gone” to realization , “You're free to be always/ Always Already Gone” to acceptance, “Because you were always/ Always Already Gone.” So the narrator is simply suffering from a trauma. This song then becomes her testimony to the events that unfolded in her life. As such we have to read what was left unspoken. She is always left with a story to tell…but is her story is done, why does she continue to sing the song.
Now Always Already. This is why these ingenious folk use this phrase. Kant, Heidegger and Derrida all use “always already” as a technical term to define those actions that must be ongoing for the system to operate. We are always already in the world. Meaning—we are never born into a world that we are not in. We can’t abstract our self completely from the world. We’re stuck. Okay, if we apply that to this song, what do we get? Something really depressing. Every relationship, every story worth tell, the condition of possibility of every story is the always already that we can never consume subsume the other. The stories we are left to tell are condition by the possibility that at the outset they are set to fail. Yikes, right? Well no, not really. Of course this has to be.
We all lose our freedom when we embark on a path. We have to make a choice. This choice can be entering into a relationship (and people will argue me if that is actually a choice or something much like a revelation which one has no real choice about—but if it were a religious experience how could we put it into words. Revelation doesn’t have a language. When it is put into words it is subjugated to the logos, it is gathered into philosophy. Am I doing my philosopher bullshit again? Okay, I’ll stop. Point stands. I hope the Williams sisters don’t come after me). We have to decide. Can we ever make a decision? More interesting, are all decisions failures. We choose a path but we get stuck on then, we get mired in them, we forget we even chose a path. Perhaps this is what The Magnetic Fields actually see. Always already gone. We enter into something, we make a choice, and it is a failure—we as finite being had to fail. No matter how hard one tries to keep something, to hold onto a decision, someone, something, we are always thrown back to the origin. From whence the authority to make a choice? Every choice throws us back. We have this ultimate freedom. We cede it when we make a decision, but we exercise it when we cede it in the decision making. No matter how hard we try to hold on to something we will fail. The decision has always already been made, it was doomed to failure always already. So why do we fetishize failure as Adorno says? So we can write songs, duh!
The story is what matters. At the beginning the story was already over. It had an end. It had to. But the end is the beginning. Or rather the end was in the beginning. A good ole fashioned and cliché unity of opposites. Heraclitus, warming his ass by the fire would be proud.
Which brings me to a fun point. This is a song is about death. Sorry folks, that’s just the way it is. What ends all relationships? Death of course. This song could be about a lover who died. He was taken by death. That certainly was always already decided. We can’t hold onto a relationship much less life. Ah, but as with every story, death is the ultimate deadline. We have to write in the face of it. Death takes all of our freedom. As we approach our death, as time marches along, we lose our freedom. We are forced into making decisions, we have to make choices on how to live, and in so doing we lose choices, we turn our backs on them, our options become more and more limited, until we have no decisions left—death.
The story is done. But is it? Did we end at the same place we started? Even if the end was foreseen. That shit hits the fan. Things end, we all die—this entire song is a song about conflict. All poetry all worthy music is a combat against this. The song continues even in the failure the destruction that death and failure leave behind. We defeated. We repeat always already gone, but haha, you are not. We have trapped you and held us close to us and in our memory through this song. The song has trapped you in the repetition. You were always already gone, and you are—but within the song. So within this finite song, the freedom you so desired is allowed, but you are trapped within the song. She could have dreamed you, but she didn’t. She has the story to tell.
Of course I might be full of shit (I am).
This is actually a song about our parents.
Here's the song!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4HxeiuZsxA
1 comment:
play freebird
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