#401: Sundays, "Hideous Towns" (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQSGLVJU8p4

The fact that one of my favorite first-wave punk songs is expressed as an attempt to start a dialogue, though, hints at the real mismatch between me and punk rock: I don't, anymore, do self-righteous anger well. I used to, and certainly there are no shortage of worthy targets: too many of the world's nations are run by rank-hungry sociopaths, too much of its land and air and water is churned through in the ruthless pursuit of short-term private economic profit, and too much of its culture is run by cowards terrified of funding anything but the latest escapist sequel to an escapist sequel that had already lost whatever spark of individuation it began with. Anger is, as Johnny Rotten observed, an energy, and some extraordinary people (I.F. Stone, Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Nader, Walter Reuther, Catherine MacKinnon, Malcolm X, Cesar Chavez, Greg Palast, Glenn Greenwald, to name some post-WWII Americans) have clearly found it an endlessly renewable one -- but in my body it burns up too quickly, and gives off toxic pollutants. So even if I try to focus on the evils of the other, rueful awareness of my own imperfections gets in the way, or I veer off topic and find myself more interested in the good things about my allies than in the bad things I'm supposed to be fighting.

I was a low-level community organizer once, in poor areas around Boston. I was okay at it -- helped one neighborhood get streets full of horrible potholes repaired after a decade-plus of being ignored, helped another get some traffic enforcement on cars racing 50 mph through streets that were the only place their kids could play -- but the relentless earnestness and long hours made me miserable, and I doubt I could do it again any time soon. Too, I could try to be punk rock, but I would probably come out more like the Sundays' "Hideous Towns".

The Sundays, whose radiant debut Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic was released the same month in 1990 that I bought my first music cassettes, were described as "jangle-pop". Harriet Wheeler's high, darting, cooing voice skidded over her husband-to-be David Gavurin's Smiths-like guitar, processed to gently reverberate as he played runs of individual notes, or soft chords, or fast ringing flurries. The melodies were lovely and sometimes jazzy, and it's easy to miss the dissatisfaction with the world running through the songs. "Liberty and money don't go" together, she points out in one song, and "desire's a terrible thing" in another; no wonder the highest compliment she can think of for "England, my country, the home of the free" is "such miserable weather". "I Kicked a Boy" is a personal memory she's judgmental enough to highlight as a happy one -- "I could have been wrong", she grants, "but I don't think I was".

"Hideous Towns" is an insolent title -- "they make me throw up", she helpfully adds -- and the song is equally displeased with the army ("it drove me barmy"), the Civil Service ("it made me nervous"), and Piccadilly Circus. But the repeated focus is on her frailty -- "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will just finish me off" is my favorite variation of that particular cliche -- and "I'd like to be in history" is a brief yearning self-dismissively placed between repetitions of "my hopeless youth, it's so uncouth".

The resulting music, then, is not weaponized guitars and drums; it does not attack the queen, the fascist regime, since Harriet and David know they're perfectly capable of making themselves morons if so inclined. But what it is, instead, is oddly uplifting. "Hideous Towns" is in constant off-balance motion. Paul Brindley's wobbly note-by-note bass guitar  and Gavurin's rhythmic chords tug obliquely off the beat, pulling us upward, out of our chair even if we get a bit dizzy; Gavurin's melodic lead is strummed eagerly, the echoes high and shimmering. Wheeler's vocals are minor-key, like sad admissions are supposed to be, but they soar and dive like young birds set free in a playground of rooftops and clotheslines. If you and I were perfect -- and for all I know, you might be -- we'd obviously be the right people to place in charge of the system, so I guess we'd be obliged to crusade for the job. If we're not, though, we might as well do what we can to find beauty and grace and exhiliration among the ruins.