First Language: Geek

Something about Oysterband’s lyrics often gives me chills. None of it is very complicated. Most of the ideas in lines I return to over and over to have definitely been expressed elsewhere. If asked to provide an objective opinion on Oysterband like “lyrically speaking, is this one of the best bands of all time?” I don’t know if I would say yes. Awesome, absolutely, but maybe not grand-scale fantastic I’ll-cast-my-vote-a-dozen-times. Although then again I might; I really love Oysterband.

 And yet somehow, there are songs and lines I listen to that cut me to the quick. Listening to Oysterband, I feel heard and acknowledged, not as Daniela Smith-Fernandez, but as a human being. When I think about it, one of the big themes that arises in their lyrics is this idea of how to balance individual struggles with being fair and collective struggles for justice on a grander scale. I don’t know. That’s what I hear in it. The poetics of trying to live leftwing politics.

Yeah, go ahead and disagree with me; I never said I was being objective here.

When mentally I turn to Oysterband lyrics, it’s because I feel like what they are saying could only have been said that way -the voice wrapped the syllables just so, the lines said just like that. In other words, it feels like that idea could never have been said any other way. The medium is the message, and if you try and distill it out of the line you lose the poetics of it. (Apologies to folk singer Amelia Curran - the line “A song is something that can’t be said any other way” is from an interview I did with her in the Manitoban. The article can be found here).

It’s a little bit like how I adored the movie Bollywood Hollywood but don’t think it’s objectively particularly good, and I’m not about to loudly recommend it . (I strongly suspect everyone has a few of those in their back closet). This is one of the reasons I tend to feel that the way people appreciate art/creativity has as much to do with what they bring to it as what is actually there. When I saw Bollywood Hollywood for the first time I had finished a fourteen hour banquet serving shift, I watched it on my laptop in bed slightly delirious at four in the morning giggling and happy. At that point, it was pretty much one of the best movies I’d ever seen in my life.

Objectivity be damned; I thank the people who made that movie for providing something that I appreciated so much. It’s so easy to tear things apart, but I believe it’s also important to hold on to the memory of way making things still matters. Call it art, call it metaphor, call it narrative, what matters is that people use these external imaginings to make sense of their lives all the time.

Fuck high art, fuck low art and excruciatingly detailed standards (especially mine), there is no passivity in a relationship with art as we each make it our own. To me the measure of quality is that a creative work resonates with many people in their own way, that they return to the ideas, images, expressions over and over at various points. The moments I know I’ve hit a good vein as a writer are when someone tells me that what I wrote hit something true about their own experiences. Or even, in one case, when a friend of mine turned to me and said she felt like she knew me better (or at least differently) after reading something I had written. When what I say connects to how they process the world. When it ceases being about me and starts being about me as part of something greater.

Anyways, here are a few Oysterband lines I keep returning to over and over. Who knows? Maybe they’ll hit some other people too.

Every place that I have been

Leaves its message on my skin

So many prophecies and signs

So little time, so little time.

-Put Out the Lights, Shouting End of Life

I like the idea that your experiences leave traces on you. Especially if you, like me, have been in so many different environments it feels like the old stories get lost when you enter a new space. Of feeling like one coherent self. If you consider places to mean physical behaviours and mental frames of reference, this can also be interpreted as the simplest  summary of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus I’ve ever encountered.

Cross my heart

There’s nothing I regret

It’s just that single perfect path

I haven’t found it yet 

-Native Son, Deep Dark Ocean

No idea. I just like it. 

All that hunger, love and anger

Bottled Up in eyes of blue

That can’t see someone else’s point of view…

-Little Brother, Deep Dark Ocean

Really it’s just the line “all that hunger, love and anger.” A perfect expression of appetites.

And your life’s like the voice in the room upstairs

Raised to someone you never hear

You can try and try, it never comes clear

Are you saying or swearing your prayers?

-Lost and Found, Trawler

Anyways, Oysterband rocks.

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