Godspeed You Black Emperor! – F♯A♯∞ (1997/1998)

1. The Dead Flag Blues
2. East Hastings
3. Providence

NOTE: F♯A♯∞ was originally released on vinyl in 1997, and was (to my knowledge) completely rerecorded for CD in 1998, with new content added and several segments reordered. The vinyl release had two sides, “Nervous, Sad, Poor…” on side A and “Bleak, Uncertain, Beautiful…” on side B. On the CD release, “The Dead Flag Blues” is roughly identical to side A, with the exception of a movement that was removed and added to the song “East Hastings,” which includes the first half of side B, expanded and with new material added. “Providence” begins with entirely new material and includes the second half of side B, concluding with original material. I own both formats, but unless otherwise noted, I’m referring to the CD release, which I heard first.

I’m going to do something a little different with this review. Godspeed You Black Emperor! (changed to Godspeed You! Black Emperor on their final release, Yanqui U.X.O.) are a post-rock band. I hate writing directly about post-rock, even music of this calibre, because it almost necessarily devolves into hyperbole and tired cliché, as I mentioned in my Gregor Samsa review.

So I’m not going to talk about the music. Not directly, anyway. I’m going to tell a story. It’s a true story, as much as autobiography can ever really be true. Memory is faulty, especially in regards to emotions and thought-processes from long ago. It’s the kind of clichéd story a thousand people have written, the sort of story I’m almost ashamed to write, though it just so happens to be a very fitting time to do so.

It isn’t about politics or patriotism. It isn’t rational. It’s about fear and insecurity, about catastrophe as filtered through the eyes of a child who had never before seen true catastrophe unfold, a child who was still in many respects numb and coping from a suicide that had occurred only several months prior.

I’m an optimist and I’m not an anarchist. I don’t believe I’ll ever see civilization crumble. I believe there’s a decline coming eventually but that we’re still working our way up, that things will get a lot better before they start getting worse, that people who believe we’re at the critical peak of human history suffer the same delusion as every other time period.

But to a 12 year old child whose scope of the world was almost preciously small, 9/11 was the beginning of the end. It was life being pushed to the tipping point on the edge of any false sense of security I may have had, tumbling headfirst into the abyss of uncertainty. Life could end, even for people you cared about. I had learned that recently. America is not invincible. That was a new one.

“They’re bombing the east coast.” That was the misinformed hyperbole that first introduced me to the situation. That was the sound of my safety net snapping. You can’t really blame them for the error. Everyone was in a frenzied shock, nobody knew what was really going on. The drive home from school at 8AM was eerie and unreal. We didn’t speak. The radio was chaotic. The sky seemed empty. I don’t remember if it was gray or blue, cloudy or cloudless, but it was empty and infinite.

I got home and sat glued to the television. What happened had already happened, but I watched the planes strike and the buildings fall over and over again. New angles, new footage, a news ticker that still didn’t know anything. I watched people jump to their deaths. The concept of jumping from buildings was still fresh in my mind. I had imagined it in detail during many sleepless nights. It haunted my dreams. And here it was on camera, faces just too far to make out. It wasn’t suicide, it was decision making. It was a choice: fall or burn. Some people chose to fall.

And my world was spinning. I wouldn’t even call it fear, it was deeper than that. It was dread. It was horror. As far as I knew, I was watching the world end. I didn’t know who or why, but New York City, the iconic emblem of America, was burning. If they couldn’t protect that, they couldn’t protect me. I couldn’t imagine living a normal life afterwards. I wasn’t even sure if I would live. I remember thinking of events I had planned in the near future and wondering if they would ever actually even happen, if I would make it that far. I couldn’t think of what would kill me, or how, or any of that. I wasn’t reasonable. I was young and I was scared. I remember standing in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and being terrified of how small and windowless the room was and how vulnerable that made me feel. The rest of the house didn’t make me feel better. I went outside and the sky wasn’t an empty and infinite expanse anymore, it was a point of attack. I imagined the sounds of jets flying overhead. Explosions. I had no appetite. I couldn’t think straight. I went to the supermarket with my mom and just sort of drifted through the aisles in a daze. Nothing felt real. Everything felt infuriatingly irreversible. I had felt that several months prior. It was denial in the face of tragedy, and I knew it well.

I don’t remember anything else about that day. A few brief moments of time, and that’s it. All I can remember are the emotions, the irrepressible, absolute sense that I can hardly even call a sense and which, at the time, felt more like knowledge, the knowledge that the world was crumbling and that civilization was broken and that the future was dead. It was immense and powerful and unshakable. It resounded in the core of my being to the point where I didn’t even need to think it, I could only feel it as a single, all encompassing darkness and emptiness.

I can look back on it now and call it naivety, but it was that vision of destruction and apocalypse that catapulted me into adulthood. The lack of a safety net, the knowledge that the unthinkable was possible, the insecurity of having to depend on myself more than anyone else. I didn’t experience it personally, but I experienced it vicariously through television and dreams, I experienced a taste of what was possible and from there my imagination went wild. Things calmed down and life resumed as normal, but the possibility never left. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was the end of mine, at the time. I was right in my assessment that things would never be the same, even if my scope was far more apocalyptic than the inevitable transition from childhood to adolescence that it actually entailed.

A part of me died that day. And parts of me have died since. But that isn’t a bad thing, and it didn’t leave any emptiness when it passed. The void was filled with a newer, more mature self. It’s change, and everyone goes through it, even if they don’t think of it in such a morbid way. I’m not the person I was then. Neither are you, probably. The apocalyptic end of my childhood just happened to have been catalyzed by catastrophe. Makes for a more gripping story, I guess.

But it’s no wonder I was preoccupied with such apocalyptic thoughts. Everyone is fascinated with the apocalypse, and it isn’t about death, it’s about change. People picture the apocalyptic future that they, should they die, would never see. Nobody pictures the experience of dying during the apocalypse, they picture the aftermath. Change. The crumbled buildings, the lifeless roads, the empty homes, the gray and smoke-filled sky, the ashes falling, the forests burnt to nothing. Kitchens with the tables half-set, unused playground equipment. A world without people. A desolate wasteland. Change. Our fear of death, if we have it, isn’t a fear of the act of dying. It’s a fear of whatever comes after. Even if we believe that nothing follows it, we picture our conscious selves experiencing that nothingness. Death itself can only be understood as change, because we cannot fathom anything other than eternity.

It isn’t the death of our civilization that intrigues us, it’s the persistence of its corpse.

This album, to me, is about the end and what comes after. It’s about the overlap between bleak desolation and gentle calm, and the unfathomable beauty that perseveres through even the darkest of situations.

The Dead Flag Blues

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