Sad Ass Songs – Brandon Brown

Brandon Brown: Well I strongly disagree! In fact, while I skipped what was once a yearly practice of summarizing the year in pop and jams, if I had done it I think “Tuesday” would be a strong contender for Jam of the Year.

MC: OK, then defend this song//this guy’s voice to the guy at the club who grew up listening to M.O.P.

BB:  Ha ha. Nah. I mean, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m at a point in my dotage where I don’t really want to defend songs or voices. If you don’t like it for whatever reason, I get it. I find myself trying to be more defensive about things (songs, poems, books, whatever) that I don’t like. As anybody who’s read Carl Wilson’s magnificent Journey To The End of Taste, probably the best book ever written about Celine Dion, knows, sustained dedication to what it is you think you hate provides you with all sorts of nuance and problems.

BB:  I haven’t seen the video for “Tuesday” actually.  I’m really bad at watching videos!  But I can totally imagine what you’re describing.  I mean, first of all, I think we need to talk a bit more about what’s happening with mood in this tune.  For me, it is one of the all time masterpieces in a genre with no name that I usually just call the “Perfect Day” school of pop tune.  “Perfect Day” as you know is a very very happy song that sounds like a very very sad song.  It’s precise counterpart is incidentally “Who Loves The Sun?” which is a very sad song that sounds like a very happy one.

MC: I love the idea of the “Perfect Day” genre. Do you think your poetry ever fits in that category? I think it does some//a lot of the time.


BB:  That’s interesting.  I mean, first of all, let me just be clear that I am not so hubristic as to think that any poem of mine is remotely on the scale of greatness of “Perfect Day” or “Tuesday!”


I’m an ordinary person I guess, and so any jubilation or melancholy in my poems is profoundly ordinary I think.  I am, however, interested in what I like to call strong ambivalence.  I’m interested in weak ambivalence too, which is the normal kind.  The etymological root of “ambivalence” almost means the opposite of how we mean the word: it means “feeling very strongly in two different directions” while our word “ambivalence” means “not even feeling strongly enough to really care between two different options.”


And, again, weak ambivalence is super interesting, as an almost omnipresent register of the contemporary.  But I think a lot of Top 40 is actually about strong ambivalence.  Like how you can actually hate everything about the spectacular economy in which pop has to be produced, distributed, and exchanged, and be completely in love with said song.  It’s sort of a classic odi et amo problem—poetry has taken this up as well.


MC: OK, quasi related to this whole interview—there’s this quote in Top 40 that I love: “Pop excels at narrating catastrophes like earthquakes, death, and meeting someone you instantly love, the events that bring about the feeling that everything has suddenly changed.” When I read that, I thought, yeah, so does poetry. Does poetry ever do that for you? 


BB: Thanks Mark!  I mean, yeah.  I think poetry can be pretty good for moments.  I mean, moments.  Like fuck Kodak, but those moments.  I’ve been reading a lot about the rococo and there’s this interview I just read with Phillip Sollers about libertinage.   There’s all this fucked up stuff that he says in the interview, but one thing I sort of liked was that he described rococo painting as being good at moments, good at portraying the unpredictable and unstable economics of moments.  I’m really interested in our temporal fictions—the nine hours of the work day as opposed to nine hours of free time.  How these are supposed to be the same.  And moments are terrific exemplars of these fictions.


And then of course pop songs and poems are both objects that are concerned with rhythm, another, maybe the best, temporal fiction there is.  So the fact that they both so often address themselves to questions of time might just be obvious.


MC: When was the last time you cried? What were you crying about?


BB:  I made this joke last year about how Friday Night Lights was sponsored by Kleenex.  I thought it was pretty funny!  But it’s hard to remember the last time I cried because I’m always tearing up and crying.  I am especially vulnerable to cinema and television, and classical music.  I recently read a bunch of novels by Toni Morrison and all of those made me cry at different times.  On the other hand, I hardly ever cry about my personal life even though there’s a fair amount to cry about—I think that’s probably the result of a lot of disgusting sex socialization.