Random Records - 4. The National - "Boxer"

The National

Boxer

2007

Beggars Banquet

(obtained from Amazon)
Best Song: "Gospel"

Another look at a random record. As warned with earlier essays, these ramblings could have very little to do with the album selected. Rather, the record could act as a springboard to other ideas, which this essay very much does. 

As a lover of popular music, for lack of a better term, I can look back at several milestones in half of a lifetime of listening, collecting, and reviewing that have served as monumental shifts in my experience. Some that stand out include my first vinyl record, my first CD, the change in taste from Top 40 to “alternative,” first concert, first iPod, etc. I can’t rightly say that all of these shifts were for the better, but there’s no denying they happened. The waves of technology and progress are but segments of an undimmed tide that either push one to the next shore or further out to sea.

Though The National’s 2007 album, Boxer, was not necessarily the one album that signified the shift from CD to download for me, it was and is a symbolic artifact of what was lost in the shift. While we at one time lamented the loss of the majesty of album cover art that was 12” x 12” with the oncoming of at first cassettes and then CD’s, I heard very little about the loss of liner notes and especially lyrics with the jump from CD’s to digital downloads. Additionally, as with most other consumable media, music became an à la carte concern.

Let me tackle the latter part of that first. I recently had a discussion with a friend about albums, and the time we used to spend with particular albums, to the point now at which we will hear a song on one of our devices and have been conditioned to hear the next song from the album follow close behind. For instance, I cannot hear Prince’s “When Doves Cry” without expecting to hear “Take Me With U” directly after. There are hundreds of albums I have experienced in this way. We don’t have that same kind of experience with music. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.

On some token, songs are taken in individually and assessed on their own merits. On the other side of that argument, we have to consider the purpose of albums. Are these songs meant to be taken in as a larger piece of singular art, or are they just songs recorded at one time and presented in a conglomerate without much thought? I’m sure we can think of albums that can be put into one camp or another. Boxer is, in my mind, the category of a larger piece of singular art. All of the songs fit together thematically, lyrically, and sonically. Listening to the album in sequence brings me back to my childhood and those giddy expectations of when a particular song would be telegraphed by the end of another.

Additionally, I used to be able to memorize every song title in my collection of physical albums. I used to know, say, that the Smiths song that everyone loved was called “How Soon Is Now?” while many of the digital downloaders who hear it think sometimes that the song is titled “I Am Human.” I used to know that the last three words in Simple Minds’ big hit, “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” were parenthetical. (I guess I still do). I used to know that the Who song was “Baba O’Riley” and not “Teenage Wasteland,” that it was “Space Oddity” and not “Major Tom.” But, maybe that’s just a case of being a nerd and not really of having physical artifacts of music. I can’t help but think, however, that perusing the tracklisting and liner notes added to the experience.

This brings us to the nature of the loss of lyrics. But wait, you’re saying, what about all of those lyric sites on the Internet? Yes, what about them? They are crowdsourced, like a lot of things that probably shouldn’t be, and therefore are wrong more often than not. For decades, we have been getting lyrics wrong, but at least we often had lyrics printed on the inner sleeves of records to settle arguments and gain clarity. We all have our own stories of mistaken lyrics, from the funny misunderstandings to the ones that you heard for years, only to reject the actual lyrics because they don’t match your collective experience and connection to the song. But then there are some that just don’t make sense. Another friend recently mentioned something about that “Captain of Trees” song. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. “Captain of Trees”? It turned out that he was referring to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and was mishearing the lyrics “in a day or two.” In his defense, Morten Harket’s voice reaches a note that makes lyrics difficult to decipher during that line, but “Captain of Trees”? Another time, a student, perhaps inappropriately, pointed me to a YouTube video that interpreted a line from Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” (“where dreams are made of”) as “wet dream tomato.” These are ridiculous examples, but sometimes the misheard lyrics make some bit of sense, such as when a good friend thought that “Voices Carry” by ‘Til Tuesday found Aimee Mann singing “Hush hush / Keep it down now / This is scary.”

The combination of these lost elements led me to have a singular experience with Boxer. I first heard the album digitally, did not pay attention to the song title display, and listened to a song with a lyric that I found odd, but intriguing. I had a small obsession with the song and the strange lyric:

“Your mind is racing like a pronoun,
Oh my God, it doesn’t mean a lot to you,”

I had yet to see that the song title was simply “Racing Like a Pro” and that the real lyric was “Your mind is racing like a pro now.” I imagined that because pronouns are shorter than the nouns they are replacing, that they tend to help people race through sentences. I imagined that it had a link to the next sentence with two simple pronouns of “it” and “you” as well as a personal pronoun of “my.” I started trying to deconstruct the song and that lyric specifically. What was the “it”? Was “it” the aforementioned “mind”? Who was the “you”? Is it “me”? Is it someone else? Why are the pronouns racing? I can’t say I got anywhere meaningful, but I really liked the sound of it. I really liked the idea of parts of speech being able to have lives of their own. Once I bought the album on vinyl, I couldn’t decide whether I was disappointed in the actual lyric or disappointed that I had allowed myself to be misled for as long as I had because of the nature of digital music.

Since that time, vinyl has seen a resurgence in popularity for those aficionados who either prefer the sound, the collectability, the aesthetic of the artwork, the lyrics, the sequencing of songs, or perhaps a combination of any of the above. That’s not to say that vinyl is for everyone. Plenty of people are just fine with listening to songs as disparate units without any connective tissue or tangible ephemera. I am hoping that with vinyl, I can once again make those deeper connections with my favorite music, and gain back what was lost with the onset of downloading.

I haven’t written much about the nature of Boxer and its music, but that wasn’t the intention here. It will suffice to say that I love this album, that it is my favorite album from The National, and that I highly recommend these songs as some of the most gorgeous examples of somewhat more meditative anthemic rock out there. While Alligator may have brought The National to my attention, Boxer gave me the knock-out punch, making me a lifelong fan. But, there I go, racing like a pronoun again…