You Will Find Something Unique

There are two constant truths in American society: the world is ending, and everyone loves the 80s.

The internet, we are told, is eternal, even as corporations and copyright lawyers wage war over its archives. Occasionally the internet reanimates something from before its time. So it was that somehow in the aughts Arizona new wave band, The Jetzons, had their discography—less than an hour of music—rereleased.

When Gin Blossoms frontman Robin Wilson was just starting out, he considered a favorable comparison to The Jetzons as “better than selling a million records. That’s how important they were.”

Jetzons’ keyboarder Brad Buxer would go on to be Michael Jackson’s musical director, and he is credited with securing The King of Pop’s contributions to Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Among Buxer’s additions to Sonic’s sonic canon, he used an unreleased Jetzons track, and the internet eventually made the connection.

Were it not for my ebullient love for the Sonic games, and the strange elephant memory of the internet I would’ve never encountered this band that broke up long before I was born. I would’ve never encountered the frenetic festival of synth and guitar that is “4-3-1”.

It’s one of those songs I try not to give away the ending of, because it’s overflowing with surprise. I love playing it for people and watching them vibe along to the woozy synth verses and Bruce Connole pretending to sing until the bridge roars in. I say pretending because he throws his voice up and drops it low in a wry cartoony warble. His affected indifference oozes the charm Brandon Flowers thinks he has.

Connole describes a narrator lying in bed, absolutely exhausted, haunted by strange voices and promises of “something unique”. The visions that come are apocalyptic. Rosaries, little white crosses on the top of the hill. Some kind of horrific bloodbath. Not that any of it moves our narrator or apparently Connole.

The world is always ending—and that gets a little boring, doesn’t it? You said it was ending last week! But it’s not so much Chicken Little or the boy who cried wolf. It’s the enervation that comes with knowing the truth. The world is always ending somewhere for someone. As a dear friend recently said to me, “Life is a long march of losses!”

I scroll Twitter on my work laptop and am fed bizarre headlines of dead bodies found in tractor trailer trucks, wanton murder, jaw-dropping injustice. Were it not for the internet, I would not be so aware of an overwhelming inundation of atrocity. Things certainly seem worse than they were yesterday. For the newly dead and grieving they surely are. Nostalgia tells us there was A Better Time, and for some reason it’s always the 80s. Remember Reagan and Thatcher and the AIDS Epidemic? Fun times!

Enervation isn’t apathy, though it can effect the same.

Then the solo hits.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled sadness to bring you this important bulletin: Anxiety Attack Imminent.

And to this honky-tonk, double-time, sudden square dance squeal, I say “lol” and “lmao”.

For all the song’s navel-gazing lugubriousness, this solo says to me, “We had you in the first half, didn’t we?”

It’s cut short, and the verse melody returns, as though the bridge was a mere anomaly. But no, there’s another minute long solo picking up the manic energy right where it left off. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. The shift is so abrupt and the tone almost antithetical to the rest of the song. It dances on the precipice between total mental meltdown, and middle-finger-up-the-nose hedonism. This is the sound of a brain on fire with cognitive dissonance. Everything is indeed horrible and is indeed happening right now, and only an incoherently screaming guitar lick can say it eloquently.

There is much to be said of aesthetic responses to agony. I for one believe that enshrining pain in the pantheon of muses is a sick and twisted way to force artists into accepting injustice and evil as natural or fertile states for creation. The ever-popular tortured artist is a pernicious myth.

The Jetzons fell apart for many reasons, though the outside consensus seems to be that Connole suffered from a terrible addiction to heroin that prevented him from doing what he loved. Counter to cultural narratives of divine-drug-induced-illumination, Connole said of his addiction, “It never made me play or write any better.” His illness was not inspirational, his pain not at all pretty or worthy of praise songs.

Art is made in spite, not because, of the pain, in spite, not because, of the ever-present apocalypse.

Connole is still alive, by the way, and still making music. In the 90’s he got his start in web design making a website for his latest band, the Revenants. This led to a steady job at Silicon Valley startup sonicbox [dot] com, an early audio sharing site. Nothing to do with a blue hedgehog.

A funny sidenote, the online archive of The Phoenix News, where most all of these Bruce Connole’s quotes are sourced from has been purged or simply left to die. 404 pages on every link. Eternity isn’t as long as we like to think, I suppose.