Words by Jason Lee; photo by Marc Giuffre
Who out there doesn’t want or sometimes downright need a new drug at least once in a blue moon if not more often as so astutely observed by Huey Lewis and His News on their top-ten smash, “I Want A New Drug,” a song that bears witness to a blue Mr. Lewis as he navigates an Escher-esque series of crack dens, opium parlours, and needle-strewn dark alleyways complete with popped polo collar and center-part, searching in vain, and in his veins, for a drug that’ll make him feel like he feels when he’s with you awwww…
…which brings us to our main topic for today and that’s the parallel oft drawn by musicians, lyricists, and other more normal people between the addictive allure of drugs and a compulsive fixation upon romantic love/lust as illustrated by a song like Trent Reznor And His Nine Inch Nails‘s “The Perfect Drug” (1997), a song recorded for the soundtrack of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) on which Mr. Reznor confesses, without you it’s not as much fun to pick up the pieces; without you everything falls apart, a sentiment that nails one key parallel between drugs and love in how both place one in a precarious state of dependence that can never be fully satiated (versus, say, food) ergo the perverse appeal of each…
…which just goes to show how both the euphoric and the traumatizing side effects of love ’n’ drugs go hand in glove with eaach other all rooted in the universal Heideggerian desire for being/becoming a being who’s more whole, more complete, more fulfilled with love and/or drugs providing a readymade means of filling the aching hole at the very core of our beings—eliciting a jouissance that may at least for the moment banish the pervasive sense of Lacanian “lack” so common to our modern age where the very thing that’s most desperately sought is being itself or as Kelly Clarkson so astutely put it on her Evanescence-aided tour de force “Addicted,” it’s like I can’t breathe without you inside of me…
Warning: drug use; animal suffering; violence
…so it’s always refreshing to find a song that brings a new wrinkle to the Love-Drug Industrial Complex like a recent one by Brooklyn-based indie rockers Water Gun with their new single “Angel Dust,” a song that frames love & drugs as just as likely to provoke the sense of lack described above as to obviate it and what’s more the drug of choice in the song is one that’s rarely if ever been likened to love even at its most dysfunctional…
…that being phenylcyclohexyl piperidine aka PCP aka Angel Dust which started off as an animal tranquilizer and later got repurposed as an intravenous anesthetic for surgical procedures during the 1950s that is until doctors started noticing how often their patients woke up screaming so in other words we’re talkin’ a drug that’s far removed from the gentle euphoria of weed or even the jittery rush by cocaine etc. etc…
Warning: neuropsychiatric institutes; skeevy dealers; couple swapping; “drug trip” overacting
…cuz instead we’re talkin’ a drug that’s more known for creating a strong disassociate state, often with combativeness and compulsive behavior alongside severe anxiety and paranoia (and if ya got some trauma in your past better get ready for nightmarish flashbacks) which makes it a less than ideal metaphor for the euphoric bliss of new love or even far more romanticized depictions of lovesickness and really who wants love compared with Jackass’s Steve-O grieving his dead mom or an obscure rapper murdering his friend and eating her lungs…
…but Water Gun do and thanks goodness for it not that you’ll really get any of those creepy-as-fuck vibes just from the sound of “Angel Dust” but still it’s a vibe (see below) and we admire this collective of otherwise benign-seeming young people for going there (tho’ come to think of it if ya squint a bit, they do look like distant relations of Charles Manson) a group who in their first incarnation met on the musicians’ equivalent to Tinder so really who knows about these people…
…so yeah back to the song itself which again is refreshing in not treating love as a drug that brings emotional enlightenment or self-fulfillment or as a highly theatricalized source of psychological pain and suffering but instead find commonality between L&D as mundane but common means for shunning and avoiding emotional engagement as in “protect yourself [and] run away before the beauty is felt” as the opening lines of the song put it which is certainly a novel take…
…a song which according to band themselves was written on Valentines Day last year by Gaby Mitford (lead singer) and Ryan “Dallas” Wax (lead guitarist) at Ryan’s apartment in the East Village. It came after a breakup when emotions were still pretty raw, the name angel dust came from kinda the idea of being addicted to someone in the same way of being addicted to a substance that you know is bad for you or not fulfilling…
…with love ‘n’ drugs depicted as merely something to be inhaled and then exhaled (hold you there until my lungs burn out) merely in order to produce a dissociative state (coldest when you hold me) but it’s the music that really sells it, wrapping the listener in a warm protective cocoon of light chiming guitar and heavier shoegazy distortion all married to a chugging, motorik rhythm section (courtesy of Gabriel Seiler and Whit Hemphill on drums and bass respectively) with vocals that circle obsessively around the same several notes before blasting off into escape velocity and back again just as quickly…
Photo by Aidan Bell
…all in service to a message that hasn’t been so adroitly delivered since Robert Palmer‘s great ’80s paean to dissociative love, “Addicted to Love,” where “oblivion is all you crave” as reinforced by the song’s legendary music video featuring a bevy of braless kabuki automatons playing (sort of) their instruments behind a suave as f—– Palmer who clearly doesn’t give a f—-…
…and if it all comes off a bit masturbatory (palm her?) well so be it but that’s sorta the point innit and likewise the former lover described in the Water Gun song who clearly doesn’t give a f—- either, someone who spoke “loudest when you told me / you would mold me now,” serving as mere mirror to the narcissist’s ego, and on another note we gotta praise the druggie punnage found in in the lyric above re: both “loud” (a potent strain of weed) and “mold” (magic mushrooms)…
..where love isn’t necessarily about running towards something or someone but can just as easily be about running away from something or other like the fear of dying alone for instance, an easily way to anesthetize oneself from painful feelings and if you go back and listen to “I Want A New Drug” again something like 95% of its lyrics are actually about what Huey’s running away from which appears to be human sensation itself which seriously we’re sorry, Huey, and didja know HW&TN scored three straight #6 singles off from Sports as in 666 so hey maybe Patrick Bateman was on to something…
…and while love at its most idealized is often depicted as “a perfect union” it strikes us as a bit emotionally fascistic to insist upon such a level of enforced homogeneity as explored on Elvis Costello’s album-length rumination on “love as power trip” on his masterpiece, Armed Forced (1979), which draws all kindws of parallels between love and realpolitik and was given the working title Emotional Fascism exploring situations where worst case scenario love becomes a fraught and even fascistic construct leading people to acts of inhumanity, unreason, and brutality but we digress…
…tho’ we will say that being on the same drugs as your partner can be a pretty fortuitous thing, and what’s more that being on different drugs than your partner can be downright hazardous to your health as astutely observed by emcee Christian Palko aka Cage aka Sam Hill where he warns a potential lover, I’m not sure you want to have sex with me / I’m on bath salts, you’re on ecstasy, a song also containing the couplet “party crashed like Sharon Tate’s / drawn my kids with Andrea Yates” which seriously should’ve won Palko a Pulitzer but we digress…
—the salient point being that Water Gun have likewise brought a refreshingly fresh perspective to the whole love is the drug conceit while also bringing a fresh take to ‘90s-esque rawk crossing Alanis with Dinosaur Jr with hmm ok let’s say 7 Year Bitch who as a band are totally, highly underrated to this day btw but hey, if ya know ya know, esp. if you were there back in the day headbanging along with Drew Barrymore…
…but here’s one thing that we do know that we’ll leave you with and that’s that despite this latest single Water Gun are far from surrendering to the void anything soon as judging by all the proactive plans they have for the near future as they described it to us recently where they’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from releasing new music to really try and find the exact sound which we have been wanting to create [and thus] have like 7 new songs written we are super proud of and we decided to release “Angel Dust” first because we think it is the perfect initial single release that creates the umbrella for the rest of our songs so let it rain we say…