Here’s the final bookend to my Songbook’s extended-over-a-coupla-years meditations on “the 60s dream in rock.” “The Keepers” sounds pretty late-60s or early-70s itself, but it’s from Ty Segall’s 2013 album Sleeper. Besides being a fine slice of moody acoustic-rock, it captures a present-day feeling of powerlessness better than any other song I’ve heard.
While an oh-so earnest band of our era, The Mowgli’s—they remind me of the 80s band The Alarm that the teen-aged me loved dearly—might declare that love’s not dead!, and while Segall himself might write lovingly at the end of Sleeper’s liner notes, “The Keepers” indicates that whatever peace, love, and understanding idealism might be cultivated by today’s young generation, it can no longer have any political impact, since none of us are any longer citizens in the real sense of the term. Rather, we are kept animals. The second stanza (there’s no chorus) lays out the basic idea:
And we drink the water, and we drink the wine.
We are the animals, we are the swine.
Let the keepers keep the time,
let the sleepers dream so fine.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kQZvpkNjA2o%3Frel%3D0%26controls%3D0%26showinfo%3D0
(That’s the whole album—”The Keepers” is the second song, and track info can be found here. Of course you should buy if you find yourself coming back to it.)
I’m too little a fan of 70s/80s-era Pink Floyd to really explore the likely allusions here to their Animals album, but I will note that in this song, we are not simply sheep-like kept animals, but swinish ones. Now some of the animal-humans, apparently, are also sleepers whose primary action is to dream. It appears that since they cannot act upon their loving idealism, at least not politically, they channel it into dream-works.
Sleeper unsurprisingly has a couple of other songs in which sleeping figures prominently. Its penultimate song, “Queen Lullabye,” is a psychedelic reverie sung to a traveler of the moon, and to another of the sun, but both its title and its monotonously extended conclusion might mean to indicate that such inner-space travelling is a sub-adult and dead-end diversion. The album’s lead song, “Sleeper,” associates sleeping with dreaming, with escaping, with dreaming of and sleeping with a beloved, and most interestingly, with the singer’s own activity.
I dream sweet love, a dream for you…from your baby, boy blue.
That “you,” while in one sense the beloved, in another seems to stand for the listener, i.e., for the Ty Segall fan. The song will go on to say I want to sleep all day with you, but the dream in the above line does not have to be interpreted only as a dream of you, since it is said to be “for you.” So in this second sense, the singer is recognizing that his listener uses his music to dream, to escape, and so can be addressed by him as my dreamer, and as my dream’s dream come true. As Walt Whitman said, the poet’s poetry must strive to create its true audience, its special breed of men and women whose new dreams will move history forward.
But in “The Keepers,” that creation, and that inspiring of dreams, takes on a problematic character. Before we get to the naïve-sounding whistling that concludes the song, the two last stanzas show us that the activities of the dreamers are essentially futile:
And we read the notes, placed in our hands,
forged in the sands, from distant lands.
And let your hair grow, and let them know
that the dreamers can still shake hands.
But we live here now, and it smells of death.
And the youth is wasting, the Earth’s last breath.
But we can still dream, and shake our hands,
and sing a song so grand.
What do the dreamers do? They shake hands, either as fists at a protest, or as handclasps at a fellowship of dreamers, and in either sense to let them, apparently the keepers, to know of their opposition. They grow their hair long, as the hippies did and the nouveau psychedelic rockers like Ty Segall do. They sing a song so grand, and going back to back to the earlier stanza, they dream so fine.
Now while the main point of the song can only be appreciated if one just accepts its lefty politics as a given, we should note that one of the specific points here is rather characteristic of simplistic and histrionic thinking. Earth’s last breath? That’s in the spirit of the global warming dogmatism that wins the environmental left no friends among those, like Matt Ridley, who are dedicated to open-mindedness and academic freedom, and which makes the youth who are continually fed it rather anxiety-plagued, as studies show. Ridley’s piece, like hundreds of others, indicates that we just don’t know whether the human-caused portion of global warming is a serious danger, let alone a soon-to-be-irreversible one, and that there is plenty of evidence that it might not be.
Segall simply assumes the worst. Of course, there’s some poetic justice in that willful error of judgment contributing to the song’s only blatant error of artistry, the smells of death couplet. (If Segall doesn’t yet realize how laughable it sounds, I prescribe three listens to Camper Van Beethoven’s “Club Med Sucks.”)
As for the notes, placed in our hands line, my best guess, because they written in distant but sandy lands, is that the pages of the Bible are the primary notes in mind. Since I’m a Christian (i.e., to refer to lyrics by Segall’s collaborator Mikal Cronin, one of those old men who sing the song about Jesus) this charge of forgery is one I of course contest and object to, if in fact that is what Segall means to convey; but I mainly take such a smug dismissal of Biblical religion’s claims as a given of the overall political-cultural lefty stance, at least in our time.
Segall has not been known for political music. As the standout genius of the new “garage” scene(all those bands should read my account of the primitivist aesthetic in 80s garage music), he seems to have been mainly about very(!) high-energy rock n’ roll, and a fuzz-drenched face-melting vibe. Punk-ish, but psychedelic and head-banging also, vocally delivered via a boyish stoner persona that delights in sneering, joking, and creative word-slurring. Yes, from the start a certain tunefulness and thoughtfulness has come through, and becomes even more evident on the mostly acoustic Sleeper. And yes, on the basis of “The Keepers,” I’d guess there likely are other reflective songs with political implications scattered here and there in Segall’s already extensive catalog.
Now according to “The Keepers,” particularly if interpreted in tandem with “Sleeper,” Segall’s own activity can become one of things that keeps his fellow dreamers happily distracted from the fact that the earth is in deep trouble, that the keepers decide everything, etc. Going back to its first stanza, we see that it contains the rather adult (and rather un-rock n’ roll) idea that given the seriousness of our actual socio-political situation, certain kinds of so-called fun might be unhealthy escapism:
Look in the mirror, see what you see.
Be what you be, only you know,
what you’ve done.
Let the sleeping play for fun.
If we initially let “Sleeper’s” apparent recommendation of a sleepy-dreamy way of life blend with the let your hair grow lyrics of this song, upon reflection we see that Segall is calling us to question both rock n’ roll fun and hippie-esque rock dreaming—i.e., to question everything Segall himself seems to stand for! While we are apparently to identify Segall’s whole album as inspired by a muse of sleep, he is telling us that sleeping is pretty much a bad thing. And that the secret source of the keepers’ power is to be found by looking in the mirror.
And who are the keepers? Well, since they keep the time, it is clear that they run the socio-political machine and provide the official account of its history, and since we are animals, it is clear that they control us. This song doesn’t specifically point out who they are, or who will they be, but in the context of our times, the likelihood that Segall has the NSA in mind, and the corporate lords of the internet more generally, is pretty high. Segall’s 2014 album, Manipulator, has a couple of songs that definitely point in this direction. Like the contemporary punk band The Savages, Segall is worried about how the internet world makes one “available” to be manipulated, like an animal in a cage.
More generally, Segall’s concern here is in tune with that of thinkers of many different persuasions, say, the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen when he speculates about how legalized pot and internet porn and distraction will keep the many “losers” of the new economy just happy enough, or the conservative comparative-constitutionalist James Allan when he points out the decline of democratic say. All such thinkers seem to be glimpsing an unfolding society in which most of us will belong to a subject class that is given the mere illusion of say through our avenues of self-expression and through periodic elections. The real rulers will be Silicon Valley and media executives, justices of the various courts, agency chiefs, speculator-bankers, and “treaty”-drafters. I will again quote the French political philosopher Pierre Manent on how this looks in Europe:
What characterizes the European situation is that what we say as citizens has no importance whatsoever, since political actions will be decided in an indeterminate place. …if the process continues, we will soon leave behind the representative regime to return to a command without word. …One does not know where the rule comes from, only that one must obey it.
This feeling is not yet as strong in America, and there is reason to hope that the things which do make our nation exceptional, such as our Constitution, our still-lingering penchant for Biblical religion, and our having a real conservative movement, will keep us from moving as far into civic powerlessness as the Europeans already have. Not that Segall’s San Francisco left-leaning crowd sees that the trends they hate would be better fought by voting for conservatives, but by 2013, they certainly were admitting that Obama and co. treated them as keepers do their charges.
I doubt that Segall means to be quite as hard on “his” sleepers, his rock-clan, and his own activity, as what his words in this song in fact convey. Just as we feel he cannot be fully serious about condemning his sort of youth for wasting their time in the face of imminent environmental catastrophe, we suspect that he cannot be fully running with the suggestion that their embrace of his music is a kind of irresponsible escapism. Otherwise, why is Ty Segall still doing the Ty Segall thing?
So I’m willing to cut him some slack when he’s coming up against the logic of his lyrics, and when he’s coming up against, as all rockin’ leftists do, the dismal choice implicitly contained in their too-despairing visions of modern society: a) either live up to the stringent moral demands of revolutionary activism (“Stop yer rockin’, and run to the barricades—don’t you know that the earth’s about to suffocate!?!”), or b) give up on political action, by means of retreating into the “low pleasures” of rock hedonism and/or the high dreaming of rock artistry.
And I’m grateful that Segall has expressed the feeling of powerlessness that all of us are increasingly feeling, even if I think that it hits the leftists among us harder. A conservative, even one like yours truly who keeps glancing forward to certain late-republican possibilities, can still say with The Modern Lovers, “Hey, the modern world’s not so bad, so let’s all go share a little rock n’ roll!” By contrast, Segall’s political ideas doom him to utter gloominess whenever he dares take them seriously.
That’s an old pattern, but ours seem especially uneasy and blue times for our more thoughtful young leftists, despite poll results that indicate a swing of public opinion towards greater liberalism and leftism. “The Keepers” goes well beyond the guarded ambivalence about leftist prospects I noticed in the early-2014 Woods song “Moving to the Left,” into something more like outright despair, or a resignation to disillusionment. But taking the two songs together, and thinking of a number of others, we notice that those who have some claim to be considered the artistic grandchildren of John Lennon are not at all in a celebratory mood. They have eyes, and mirrors too.