A Syllable Repeating

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When I was fifteen my favorite band announced a new record. It did not matter that radio rock bands of the era reliably released an album every two to three years like their clockwork label contracts demanded. I was only beginning to understand the concept of contemporary. Until then, all music was past tense. Kids on the bus shared earbuds to bump songs that were overplayed before they were born: Guns n. Roses, The Who, Led Zeppelin. More music from my favorite band seemed as monumental an occasion as the tortured release of Axel Rose’s Chinese Democracy, which again I only knew about from jokes made on the school bus by kids cooler than me. I preordered the album, got the bundle with a t shirt and pins, and posted possibly one of my first ever selfies soyfaced in my parent’s basement. Said photo is blessedly lost to time. I promise I looked for it. Confronting shame is half of what I write these for. Why are we ashamed of the things we love? Maybe that isn’t a question you ask yourself. Congratulations on achieving Nirvana.

For the rest of us, or maybe just me, shame comes from an assumption that complacency and apathy are intertwined. Progress, be it personal or political demands action, and loving anything can sometimes feel like standing still. Love can feel like uncritically accepting imperfection. Things must change. This is both the inevitability of entropy, but also a near-universal political rallying cry. I am aware that in reality love is capacious; love understands, encourages, and accepts change, but in our capitalistic consumer hellscape objects, art, music can feel hopelessly static. We are what we eat, and to hold dogmatically to anything, even allegiance to your favorite adolescent rock band can feel like a mouthful of mothballs.

The year was 2011. The band was Rise Against. The album was Endgame.

Rise Against’s biggest fans are a lot like the fans of big movie franchises: they are also Rise Against’s biggest haters, and if you ask an old RA head when the band disappeared completely from Relevance, they will usually point to this record or its 2008 predecessor Appeal to Reason. Coincidentally, this record is where their audience exploded, thanks to big singles “Satellite” and “Help Is On The Way”. The tired old debate of “selling out” wasn’t even really the conversation anymore, since the band had been on a major label for seven years. To the old guard this now felt like meathead music. It was hard to feel like a rebel when the high school hockey team would warm up to “Re-Education Through Labor”.

The song “Architects” didn’t and doesn’t get the same live or radio airplay as its brethren but also sparked an in-scene spat amongst “Against” bands. In 2010, on Against Me’s essential “I Was A Teenage Anarchist” the still closeted Laura Jane Grace had declared “Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?” and “The revolution was a lie.” In “Architects”, Tim McIlrath repeats the question, “Don’t you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire? Well I still am, and I still do.”

Grace later described in her memoir feeling surprised, and repulsed, “What’s Rise Against’s revolution? What’s the revolution? Is their revolution that a bunch of people are gonna start coming out to their shows and make them really rich and a really big band? Because that’s been done a million fucking times before. Is the revolution that they’re gonna be poster boys for PETA while wearing Nike shoes? ‘Cause I don’t fucking buy into it, man. I think PETA’s full of shit. I think a lot of their politics are kinda opportunistic and self-serving, personally.”

Unfortunately for Rise Against, Laura Jane Grace is much funnier and way more candid than they tend to be. There’s a Creed-like self-seriousness to Rise Against that I think is both a strength and weakness for the band. It’s one of the things that made them so attractive to a disaffected teenager looking for The Right Way To Be. I didn’t know I was queer and didn’t know I was depressed or that I would lose friends to suicide then, but the song “Make It Stop” felt urgent and important in the way being A Very Invested Ally To The Community felt.

It was an interesting time to be Rise Against in 2011. The bogeyman of George W. Bush was banished from the White House and replaced with Chicago’s own President Obama. Fight The Power lyrics weren’t as low-hanging fruit as they had been even in 2008. I think they coped a little better than Green Day did. However, societal collapse was in the air then as now, and any good doomsayer will tell you business is always booming.

The band’s 2010 rock-doc shows them rehearsing in a dingy New Orleans theater. You can recognize the riff of the soon-to-be single “Satellite”, but McIlrath is just muttering gibberish over it. Briefly he explains that before composing lyrics he just practices sounds and tones and volumes to get the general effect.

It reminds me of how Brandon Flowers admits to basically doing improv for all the lyrics of The Killers’ first few records. It’s amazing that it works. In hindsight, some of Rise Against’s clunky political posturing feels only an inch or two better than The Killers achingly earnest lib lip service “We got a problem with guns…” They do not demand a sophisticated analysis or offer particularly potent political solutions. Kids committing suicide: bad. Government mishandling of Hurricane Katrina: bad. They’re not wrong, but they are maybe not the most original.

Endgame weds the personal and political narratives Rise Against had made famous on their recent records. McIlrath is a pretty good sketch artist. He doesn’t have Springsteen’s surety for character and specificity, but he makes up for it with a desperate urgency in his cinematic scenes.

I’m interested in one of the least overtly political songs on the record, “This Is Letting Go”. I’ve always been hard on guitarist Zach Blair who joined the band for Appeal to Reason whose riffage leans too heavily on his time in GWAR. I think his lighter touch on this song was the right choice. The dialed back lead also makes way for Joe Principe’s galloping bassline which could be turned up just a little further to show people why he inspired me to start playing bass. He moves around the neck so nimbly and really drives both the rhythm and melody at once.

As for lyrics, it’s a classic Rise Against pop song with a simple hook that mutates ever so slightly to generate a genuine emotional arc.

The first verse presents a level of uncertainty atypical to McIlrath’s usual rah-rah rebellious narrators:

It takes some edge to admit inadequacy and insecurity in a way that doesn’t sound self-pitying. McIlrath also dodges the pitfall of setting up simple obstacles to make for a triumphant finale. The tension of “Once upon a time I could take anything” doesn’t actually get resolved, but reiterated. The first line is repeated as the final line, the last word sampled and echoed as the rest of the music gets stripped away. That adolescent ability to endure comes to an end. The song’s abrupt exit is accentuated by its position as the penultimate track before the fittingly apocalyptic title-track “Endgame”.

The first pass of the chorus goes:

Nothing out of the ordinary. It certainly sounds good in anyone’s voice. It doesn’t even distinguish itself as a Rise Against song here. Depending on your taste, the lack of specificity can be an invitation or dead end.

I love the song’s second verse, because even though McIlrath has described cars crashing in about six different songs, he’s able to revitalize it with an unexpected delivery.

I’m a sucker for simple tricks like this: there’s a brief rest after “syllable repeating” where the word “repeating” gets played again on delay. This serves four functions: bridges the syllable count for the following rhyme scheme, completes sonically the image of the preceding line “where the needle skips”, is actually a joke (literally repeating the word “repeating”), and cannily foreshadows the song’s final note where “anything” is played on the same delayed echo. 

Come the bridge, McIlrath presents my favorite of his cinematic sketches. About half of Endgame’s songs have a narrative bridge like this, where nameless characters emerge from the wings to make human a single dramatic moment. Listeners familiar with “Satellite” will recognize the trope, and they might prefer the direct approach of the nighttime escape described in that song, but I love the inky opaqueness of this scene.

The easiest reason to love this is how Brandon Barnes’ drums come crashing in on the word “boom”. He could just keep the beat with ever-louder hits on the floor toms, but instead does this fabulous roll that isn’t an obvious imitation heartbeat. There are no details about the characters, no distinguishing features. This third person address is the first use of the pronoun “her”, and we’re left to fill in the blanks. What is it the narrator knows? We don’t know, but perhaps we know ourselves. Is it a breakup song? Could be? Is it about death? Could be! Many songwriters aim for the murky uncertainty that allows their audience to slip into their characters’ skin and vice versa. I think McIlrath succeeds here.

The final chorus, as promised, switches things up just a little.

What does it mean to make the most of all this sorrow? I suspect the answer is different for everyone, and changes over time. I’ve been plenty sick of being sad, and yet I have rarely regretted my sadness. There is a safety in sadness, in mourning, in the black hole of pessimism. I’m not telling you to let it go, to get over it, because I sure haven’t. For me the song is less about letting go of these feelings, and more about letting go of the shame of feeling.