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Partially Naked Self-Examination Music Blog, Week 15

April 10, 2010 by Mark Linsenmayer Leave a Comment

Here's "Wasted Youth," a song by Steve Petrinko, also (like week 14) from the MayTricks 1991 EP, which I'm retroactively calling the "Happy Flowers EP," as "Happy Flowers" was to be the name of the album that we started recording with this lineup shortly after making this demo (at least according to my decision; I don't know that the band had agreed upon this).

This is a song Steve wrote at age 17 about the Tiananmen Square massacre. Now I don't usually write social protest (Steve doesn't either), and the earnestness and some awkward bits in the lyrics always rubbed me wrong, but I still liked the darkness of the song and the power of the bridge, and I love the feedback-soaked Pink Floydesque thing that our guitarist Dave Roof did with it. Nonetheless, this was not recorded for any later album, so this is the definitive band recording, such as it is.

Rhythmically, the song is sort of a mess, but I actually did quite a bit of work in that respect, moving around some of the out-of-time drum hits (which are on the same track as the bass and drums) and lining up the keyboard (which was recorded too quietly in the initial live band performance and so was re-recorded on its own track) and the vocals so that they're in sync. This likely doesn't mean much to you non-musicians or people who've not seen what digital magic is possible nowadays in fixing up multi-track recordings, but trust me, this is a lot better than it was.

So, social protest songs... These struck me as disingenuous (at the time we played this; now my opinion is as always, both liberal and self-contradicting). Art, if honest, expresses personal pain, and unless the tragedy is happening to you, then you're just faking it, and I'd be pretty sure that someone sitting in a high school classroom in Michigan is not going to have a clue what it's actually like for protesters getting gunned down under a totalitarian regime. So instead of being about the event, it's actually about one's fantasy of the event, which to me seemed a weird thing to have a fantasy about. Discuss! (Note that I did eventually write a social protest song myself, a pretty oblique thing about the Iraq war and the Giuliani-type response to terrorism called "Lock Them Away." I tried to make it about what actually made me depressed about the whole thing, not pretending to be a soldier a la Billy Joel's song about Vietnam or something.)

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