Quarantine the Quarantine: a Review of 4 Albums Getting Me Through This Shit

I've heard a lot of people say things like "ahh shit I was THIS close to getting my life together. thanks corona..." I have had a very different reaction. I've been barely holding on for months. So from one perspective, I was already in crisis and one more calamity shouldn't be too much to bear. But this would be bullshit. You can always feel worse. Things can always get worse. The pandemic proves this.

I, like many people, am just trying to survive. Maybe this is a significant achievement after all amidst this crisis. I assembled the albums that have helped me do that over the past few months. Put together, I think these 4 albums speak to 4 interrelated phenomenons we are all facing right now. During these nightmare times, we must all square off in our own way against: A) the immense burden of social distancing; B) the quarantine state of mind (AKA The Hell Zone); C) a bewildering sense of loss and dislocation; as well as D) the new normal that is living with Covid-19.

The Immense Burden of Social Distancing: TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain

TV on the Radio (TVOTR) is a band that is socially distanced from its contemporaries. From their debut 2003 EP, Young Liars, TVOTR have been key innovators in the indie rock explosion of the 2000s. Unlike some of their more famous contemporaries like the Strokes, White Stripes, and Killers, TVOTR don't feel like a throwback; their sound is distinctive and pioneering, not retro or nostalgic. They are in a space all to their own. And this isn't an easy place to occupy. Them being predominantly black doesn't make it any easier.

TVOTR's blackness is a key aspect in why their approach and sound is so different from other post-punk revivalists. They aren't looking back on the past with rose colored glasses precisely because for black rock musicians, the past was not some great time for them. Scores of great black musicians never had crossover success because labels and producers (and to some extent audiences too) didn't see the commercial potential in black rock/punk/alternative music. An obvious case study in this history of discrimination is the proto-punk visionaries Death who I am thoroughly convinced would have been as big as the Ramones had they not been born poor and black in deindustrializing Detroit. Being black and playing rock music is an isolating experience.

TVOTR feel like the culmination of the struggles of past black rock musicians who refused to be pigeon-holed into soul, funk, and R&B. Their struggles made possible the success of TVOTR. Few bands have had such an excellent string of albums as has TVOTR. In my mind, the greatest of these is their sophomore LP, the haunting Return to Cookie Mountain (2006).

Both social distancing and TVOTR's music can be described as sensations of impending doom, of waiting for the hammer to drop. It makes sense that Breaking Bad used TVOTR to build the tension as mild mannered Walter White transformed into the evil Heisenberg. Building a sense of unease is what TVOTR do better than anyone. TVOTR have this unsettling sound that swells then wanes constantly throughout the course of songs and albums. They are a study in the building and release of tension that makes music so cathartically powerful. TVOTR's song "Trouble" speaks literally to this sense of something terrible on the horizon.

Return to Cookie Mountain specifically is an album encapsulating the psychological effect of social distancing. The experience of a pandemic is an isolating one. We feel trapped, as if banished to exile on some foreign land. It is an alienating, even dissociating experience. We are ostracized from society. We lose that physical contact with others. We sense that our former selves have been lost forever to this crisis (listen to "I Was a Lover").

At a certain point in isolation, we don't even feel human (hear "Wolf Like Me"). We have a sense of powerless and futility in this social isolation ("A Method" and "Let the Devil In"). We would do anything for this feeling to end. The sense of desperation in this country is very real. "Blues From Down Here" speaks to this very palpable breaking point.

Without communal and governmental support, I don't think this social distancing can go on. On "Tonight," TVOTR sagaciously speak to our need for help, to not weather this burden alone. As they chant in the song's chorus: "Don't keep it silent and tortured, Or shove it unto the floorboards, Your busted heart will be fine, In its tell tale time, So give it up tonight."

Through mutual aid, solidarity, and sharing our stories, we must come together and weather the burden of social distancing communally, not alone. In some ways social distancing is a privilege. But in the immediate effects in has on our lives, it is an immense burden. We must carry that burden together for this to be sustainable over the ensuing months. "So give it up tonight."

The Hell Zone: Car Seat Headrest's Monomania

There is definitely a Corona state of mind. The racing thoughts, the frayed nerves. The overwhelming anxiety. We are all living it. I find that the work of Car Seat Headrest's Will Toledo speaks powerfully to this so-called Hell Zone. Since Will Toledo's whole aesthetic is of a depressed hyper-introverted rock star, you could really pick any album by Car Seat to discuss The Hell Zone. However, all the self-released work Toledo did before signing to Matador Records has a purity and originality to it that later projects sometimes lack. For this reason, I chose 2012's aptly titled Monomania.

"If we didn't have to ever leave our houses again, this Covid-19 thing would be so bad" is a thought that has often popped into my head over the last few weeks. If I avoid almost all news coverage of the crisis and don't talk to anyone, I can almost maintain equilibrium. However, as soon as I start watching news or reading articles, I go into this emotional tailspin of panic attacks and despair that I'm sure others experience too. To me this is 'the Hell Zone.'

I think Car Seat Headrest speaks so well to this, I have very little to say other than "take periodic breaks from Car Seat for your own sanity." Don't be afraid though, the whole record isn't just breakneck anxiety and crushing depression. There is space to breathe in this album and it is well paced. At a certain point, the whole thing washes over you in a way that makes you both panicked and calm all at the same time.

The fact that Toledo struggled in obscurity for so long is practically criminal. I truly believe Toledo is one of our era's great living artists. His music speaks to the alternation between panic and powerlessness that encapsulates what its like to live through what Naomi Klein calls "disaster capitalism." His music has a detached quality to it even as he goes off the deep end of his own panic attacks. This combination of anxiety and passivity has been my experience during the pandemic. Tracks like "Misheard Lyrics," "Times to Die," "Los Borrachos," and "Sleeping with Strangers," all speak to the generalized anxiety of this Coronavirus hell world we all inhabit.

Loss: Hole's Celebrity Skin

Courtney Love seems to make a lot of people nervous. Others outright hate her and blame her for Kurt Cobain's death. A lot of this is pernicious misogyny since her career and reputation have been tarnished for doing things (partying, substance abuse, etc) that never seem to harm the respectability of male rock stars. I'm willing to go even further and say that Courtney Love is just as important to the history of alternative music as was Cobain. The music she put out in the 1990s, especially the albums Live Through This (1994) and Celebrity Skin (1998), actually hold up better than anything Nirvana did. Live Through This should be an essential listen in the #metoo era. And its followup, Celebrity Skin, is a masterful work on loss and mourning.

Coping with Covid-19 means confronting the effect that a mass death event has on both the collective and personal psyche. As a result of our nations mishandling of this pandemic, tens of thousands have died. If the business community and the republican party have their way, hundred of thousands, if not millions, more will die too. As the US prematurely opens the economy to bail out corporations, there is a desensitizing effect brought on by the average Americans inability to protect themselves and their loved ones in the face of the thresher maw of neoliberal capitalism. American society has not really had to deal with something like this in several generations. The closest analogy would be the psychological impact of the AIDS crisis on the gay community in the 1980s and 1990s. Just like that crisis, Covid-19 will irrevocably alter the course of the rest of our lives. This enormous sense of loss is something I'm not sure we are capable of processing, certainly not right now. It will sit with us and linger. To move into a post-Covid world means to learn how to cope with this overwhelming sense of loss.

We're not just mourning the loss of life. On a less literal level, we are all mourning the loss of normalcy, the loss of the personal equilibrium that this crisis has shattered. Tens of millions have lost their jobs, health insurance, as well as any reasonable sense of safety. We've lost the ability to say this is a problem in foreign places. We've lost the complacency of a pre-Covid psyche. We are in crisis. That is an enormous thing to process.

And I find Hole's Celebrity Skin speaks compellingly to all these issues. Hole's members were processing a collective death event as they wrote and recorded the album. Guitarist Eric Erlandson cited the drowning death of beloved artist Jeff Buckley, as well as the death of his father from pulmonary edema. Bassist Melissa Auf der Maur's had passed away recently from lung cancer. Previous bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose two months after Cobain's in 1994. Courtney Love developed this theme of drowning that permeates Celebrity Skin, an emotional rollercoaster of an album rife with references to death and the bands recent tribulations.

Celebrity Skin is an exploration of Love's unique approach to dealing with catastrophe and personal loss. The album juxtaposes its sleek production, multilayered guitars, and harmonized vocals against the trauma of the events the band experienced. Love's almost punch-drunk, desensitized attitude on the album belies the effect the deaths of her band-mates and husband had on her psyche. If you look at the album cover to Hole's previous album, Live Through This, you instantly understand Love's attitude towards hardship. On the cover, Leilani Bishop brandishes a pained smile as mascara and tears run down her face. The image speaks to Love's defiant attitude toward the death all around her. Grinning ear to ear through the pain, Love broadcasts a radically defiant outward beauty amidst internal agony. As she bellows on the almost triumphant song "Malibu," "Oh, come on be alive again. Don't lay down and die!."

I think this is what makes the extremely painful content of the album so paradoxically anodyne. The album doesn't hide its agonizing nature, but rather covers itself in a "candy coat" as Love states on "Hit So Hard." Harnessing a little of Courney Love's indefatigable spirit is something we desperately need amidst our own difficult times.

A Post-Covid World: Curtis Mayfield's There's No Place Like America Today

As Alex Press writes in Jacobin, the concept of "'Afterwardness' saturates the present." We can't go back to our former world, our former lives. This is a harrowing thought, but it could also prove emancipatory. People are waking up the reality that the government could pay us to stay home, pay us to get well, pay us not to work. It could guarantee jobs, as leftists have advocated since before the crisis. And we are all learning who is essential (the workers) and who is not (the shareholders). Through the collective power of walkouts and sickouts, workers are wresting incremental gains from the hands of the rich. As Press articulates, "the future is open."

That phrase, 'the future is open,' suggests enormous opportunities for positive social change are indeed possible. Perhaps that is a naive attitude amidst the tragedy that is rapidly befalling us. Regardless, the time is now to define what it will mean to live in a post-Covid world.

I find that Curtis Mayfield's music embodies precisely this sort of attitude: an almost irrational optimism amidst life's tragedies. Mayfield wrote uplifting, politically conscious soul music that encapsulated the collective struggle of people of color working towards a better future. His silky tenor voice reached such soaring heights even as his life descended into near despair. In 1990, he suffered a tragic accident at a concert when a lighting scaffold struck him. Leaving Mayfield paralyzed from the neck down, he still managed to record his last album, the buoyant New World Order. Recording laying on his back one line at a time, Mayfield defines perseverance amidst almost incomprehensible pain. I think we could use a little bit of Mayfield energy amidst our current struggle.

Arguably Mayfield's masterpiece, 1975's There's No Place Like America Today presents just such a message. Every song speaks to the indefatigable spirit of the Black radical tradition and the sustained struggle for freedom and dignity for all peoples. Mayfield does not sugarcoat the situation either. The opening track, "Billy Jack," speaks to the violence engulfing inner city communities and tearing families apart. Later tracks "Blue Monday People" and "Hard Times" similarly articulate just how dire things have gotten. One line, though, from "Blue Monday People" distills Mayfield's spirit down to a simple yet powerful idea: "But when cupboards are bare, our love we can share." Love can mean a lot of things in music. When Curtis Mayfield uses it he is referring to the collective love of a people striving together towards freedom. This concept of love is what will help us endure this pandemic.

As a beacon of hope, few tracks can compare to "So in Love." One of the greatest compositions in the history of funk music, the song is far more than a simple love song. As Mayfield says, "this love affair is bigger than we two, lose the faith and it will swallow you." The challenge of organizing and finding solidarity in such isolating times in immense. But Mayfield articulates both the need and power of love. It is "the key to our success to see each other through."

And the final track, "Love to the People" makes it even clearer what Mayfield was talking about when he used that familiar four letter word. Again, his message of hope was not oblivious to the grim meat hook reality people were and are facing. He explains in the first verse: "unemployment lines, a lot of people standing in, news is bad on every TV show." Later he makes hard times concrete: "Nothing but beans on the table, livin' the blues, paying the dues, I'm not hardly able." As the song hits the chorus, Mayfield exclaims "love to the people, little bit of warning to the cold, little bit of brotherhood, guarantee it can be good for the soul." And that's the message. Building a more humane, just future will require Mayfield's expansive faith in collective love.