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| _Biography;; | |
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Parched thorn bush and arid scrubland. Gunfire was crackling and the flat-topped Acacia trees looked on fire in the copper sunset.
On an elephant GPS-tagging operation we'd run into armed ivory poachers from over the Somali border and they'd shot a local teenage girl
in the thigh. At the manyatta campfire now an early, unmastered version of Matt Good's Avalanche I'd brought from home was playing on
a 70s-era, shoebox-sized Phillips cassette player. The Samburu warriors wore dud plastic digital watches, trinkets, wrapped around their
arms to the elbow; in the West at their age they'd be hanging at the West Edmonton mall checking out the latest New Balance. Duded up in
red tartan skirts, beaded necklaces, twined Xmas tinsel and multicoloured telephone wire, they were cleaning their Kalashnikovs as I tried
to sew the squirming girl's wound together. We were miles from a field hospital. A needle and dental floss was all I had. The calabash was
going around, sloshing half-full with fermented milk and goat's blood, and while this brave young thing grit her teeth tight, her matte
black skin split open, the flesh inside alarmingly pink, the usual trivialities of the world of pop could not have seemed more irrelevant
or remote. And yet here's the weirdest thing: My mind was detached (maybe this is how it held itself together under pressure), thinking
that this music, with its scintillating guitars and achingly beautiful melodies, is the best work he's ever done... This is probably not what Matt had in mind when he wrote these songs, but what the hell, he only wrote them. It's a cut-and-paste world anyway. Edit an improved Phantom Menace on your computer with Jar Jar mercifully cut out. Sample all the hard work that some funk guitarist put into learning his instrument years ago. Cram what you're writing with knowledge cribbed from the net. Stamp your e with a Mitsubishi logo. "Hey, baby," purred Alanis, raising a stiletto heel up onto the motel bed and adjusting the clasp of her black lace garter belt. "I'm Miss New Wave." Matt shifted uneasily. The tendons in his bare arms visibly twitched. He could feel the Magic Fingers losing energy already and he was all out of quarters... Matt's lyrics are never easy to understand in the first place, never have been. They're somewhere between personal and political, so you have to plant your own flag where it feels right. All you know for sure is that his stuff demands a bigger life of you. So which of these new songs are personal and which are political? Oh shit now I've got to interview Matt Good. I heard he's an asshole, everyone says he's dark and crazy omigod I even read it in a magazine. And sorry, but his book was so abrasive and misanthropic I wasn't sure I'd ever want to meet him. "A lot of people saw me that way," he says. "That's what 'Hunting Rabbits' is about. Like I was this very stern individual and that was what had to be brought out of me by the end of each encounter. I felt like I had to deal in fear. I felt I had vanished and had to discover myself again. Like I used to be a hell of a lot purer. Like I wasn't always such a miserable bastard. That's the irony: the process of loneliness I'm experiencing up on stage and all the people are cheering." (This confession, by the way, after he'd pulled a hunting knife on me in a bar in Coquitlam, his hometown in B.C. After eighteen beers he'd recklessly told me about seeing psychiatrists for his perpetual nausea and anxiety attacks, but shrinks being for wusses, as you fucking know, he didn't want that let out. Like Tony Soprano, I pictured him sprawled cynically over a chair, never giving in to that passive couch bullshit. Then the old anxieties in him welled up I guess and he puked all over me. Now that's what I call bonding.) You really want to know what the other songs are about? I can safely say that if they're political they're not as explicit as, say, Rage or Audioslave or System of a Down, but that's because Matt's craft is subtler. "There has to be a thread left for you to pull," he says. "Then you're included in the experience. Plugging listeners into some social consciousness - that's the trickiest damn thing. That's Bob Dylan's brilliance - he'll tell a story, but it resonates with an extremely social conscience. If I have a basic ambition, it's to impassion people - for my music to become the soundtrack track to other people's lives. To their first kiss or the first time they picked up a cause." Late into the night we talked - or let's be honest, he talked while I sat stunned like a citizen arrested for not thinking enough - about Third World debt relief, human and civil rights, religious intolerance, Trudeau's Night of the Long Knives, CNN, Afghanistan and Iraq, moral vs. intellectual choice, the Internet and how it gives people the right to make a great white noise of uninformed opinion and how he's starting a Bagheads social rebellion in which people will leave their homes wearing paper bags on their heads to assert their continuing God-given right to anonymity. What else? Oh yes, North Americanism, continentalism... "I have a huge problem with Canada becoming a little America," he said. "We're living next door to the world's biggest media monster. I'm concerned about the impact the US has on how we see our own stuff. Our sense of national unity is fragmented enough already." Then the guys in the bar around us, your typical beer-swilling hockey enthusiasts, start yelping along to The Tragically Hip's 'Nautical Disaster,' which is playing on the jukebox. "See?" he says. "Now that is not exactly the most straightforward song as far as lyrical content is concerned. In fact, the majority of our mainstream music is more intelligent, more abstract, than American mainstream music. Perhaps our inferiority complex is based on having to actually lower our standards to be able to compete and be accepted by our them." "Um hang on, let me try to understand. Because we don't do dumb as well as the Americans do, therefore we feel dumber?" "Exactly!" But I'm digressing. There are also... wait for it... love songs on Avalanche. That may be, in my opinion, what makes this Matt's best, most mature work yet. These are songs of loss, regret and pain, with enough tenderness and vulnerability to give you goose bumps. Just listen to the emotion, listen to the pain and the rage, the sheer caring. It's elegiac but it's proud too. Though he says he mixed it with an "antique vibe to give it a sense of going back in time, of going home," it's also ferocious, defiant and forward-looking. One foot in front of the other, at any cost. I suppose I could tell you which songs are about Iraq and which ones are about the girls he should never have slept with, but if you're really going to own this CD you've got to let it take root in your heart. It doesn't matter what he had for breakfast when he wrote 'House of Smoke and Mirrors' and it may not matter which town he's really talking about in "A Long Way Down.' He heard these songs in a certain way at the time, and they were a catharsis for him then, but that process is likely on the wane now. Don't even think of e-mailing him to ask, don't rummage through his garbage looking for clues. You'll never know him, and knowing him is beside the point. This is not dictation. It is not pre-chewed, annotated or government approved. He probably doesn't even like half of it anymore. He's already off making new things. As you're reading this he's slapping down a painting, or scrawling a pissed-off harangue about our terminal apathy, or testing that new Fevernova soccer ball on a pitch near the sea. I bet you could clock that notion Matt mentioned of the "soundtrack of your life" to the invention of the Walkman. (He had one surgically attached to his head at the age of ten.) Now you didn't have to go to Africa anymore. Suddenly that aimless walk downtown, the stale air subway ride, that shit-kicking October afternoon when you should have been in class, it all became your own personal blockbuster - every scene a pivotal one, the money shot, a killer montage with a hit single score. That was the first download, years before the Napster, but instead of robbing income from the musician you claimed to admire, you were stealing meaning. Who cared anymore what the musician meant to say; now the songs were in the service of scoring that movie starring you, written and directed by you, distributed by you to an audience of one: you. Music fans know this, of course, but life's a struggle, what with the media and the industry perpetually fixated on the gossip, the celebrity, the clothes and the hair, herding us into vicarious lives. This has got to be Matt's biggest pet peeve. That's why it's up to you to piece it all together yourself. It's yours now. -30- By Daniel Richler |
