And Breaking That Window

If I had a quarter for every time I stopped in the middle of writing something, smacked my forehead with epiphanic emphasis, and exclaimed, “Oh goddammit I’m trying to make La Dispute’s 2011 sophomore album Wildlife again!” I’d have enough money to do a load of laundry in my building’s basement.

What in Wildlife compels me so deeply is the portrayal of emotional paralysis. The ouroboros of inaction. How can I process the losses in my immediate life when I must process the tragedies of the world at large? How can I process the tragedies of the worlds at large when I must process the losses in my immediate life? They are one in the same, yes, but griefs compound. It feels honest and compassionate and current a decade on.

If you know of La Dispute you probably know about “King Park,” the seven minute ballad that tells of a child murdered by mistake in a drive-by shooting. The song reaches its apex with vocalist Jordan Dreyer giving voice to the killer who asks, “Can I still get into heaven if I kill myself?” There is no amount of memes that will render this anything less than haunting.

The band spent at least one tour opening their live shows with the song. I can see why, since everything after feels easier to stomach. As a band and an audience it could be tortuous to sit through a set just waiting for that song to strike. Best to get it out of the way.

“King Park” sits at the center of Wildlife. There are still five songs left after it. My friend tells me they haven’t heard the album all the way through in years because they can’t listen past “King Park.”

It’s a shame because the rest of the album is fantastic. 

King Park is the first of three songs on the album about other people’s pain. The following two: “Edward Benz, 27 Times” tells of a son stabbing his father, while “I See Everything”, describes another son dying of cancer. The narrator appears to hold these stories up against his own loss, trying to shrink his own grief by finding meaning or perseverance or solidarity or some other panacea. Hey, it could be worse? 

The profound anxiety around the death of children now reads less as a ham-handed allegory for the “death of innocence” and more as the real and present fear of bringing new humans into a world that will kill them. There is grief in the present and that heralds grief in the future. 

My student asks to be excused from class because they cannot find her uncle in the rubble that American bombs have made of her homeland.

This is not a metaphor.

My friend just had her baby. Homebirth. Bathtub.

The album’s denouement follows these tragedies with another trifecta, the narrator lambasting his own confused efforts at coping in “A Broken Jar,” and then an anguished anxious cry in “All Our Bruised Bodies…” about how much he fears the violent future. The album ends with “You and I In Unison,” where the narrator addresses someone missing. 

Only recently on a long lone late drive from my parents’ house home, did I listen again and come away with a different consideration. I used to believe the album was addressed to a former lover, and maybe I still think that but where a simple breakup was the primary tragedy in the narrator’s life, I now see the death of someone dear. This reframe is more than likely because I have since lost someone dear.

I want to focus on the followup to “King Park”, because I think it sometimes gets lost amongst the rest of the album’s earth-shattering howls.

After King Park’s raging outro. “Edward Benz, 27 Times” offers about seven seconds of rest, with a riff that sounds like a single ship out to sea, rocking back and forth on autumn waves, before the guitars rip open again and Dreyer is frantically shouting once more. It’s almost comical the contrast between his delivery and his subject. He describes an old man asking for help fixing a broken door.

The verses pause for a moment of quiet with spoken word interludes only two lines long, before launching back into full-bore bellowing. Never has the simple task of backing into a driveway to do a neighborly deed been delivered with such fire and fury.

The song is an inversion of “King Park” and the long building tension to a climactic confrontation. All the mundane moments of “Edward Benz” are told at the highest emotional register, and when it comes time to describe the violence, Dreyer’s histrionics drop away to near deadpan reporting: the son stops taking his medication, thinks his father a stranger, stabs him over and over. 

The father lives to tell the tale, to ask for help repairing the broken door. Unlike the other songs, everyone survives. And yet.

The dead do not have to remember. We do.

Of course, Dreyer can’t hold back from another bombastic conclusion, and the song pulls away from the story, to the memory of the memory.

There has got to be more to give.

My partner says she heard from Abby today. I have to remind myself she means her sister, not my childhood friend now three or four years dead.

She asks if I’ve heard the news and I don’t know which murders she means. Palestine, Lebanon, New York, or Missouri today?

Storytellers’ credo does not make them immune or immortal. 

Thomas King writes,

“Don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now.”

I’m trying to raise more money for families in Gaza. I’ve made new posters calling for an arms embargo. These are limited edition. Numbered and signed. If you make a donation to a Palestinian family’s fundraiser after reading this of $20 or more, send me a receipt and your address and I will send you one of these posters.