Mom and Dad

An archaic term that lit by a cigarette, bed replenished and depleted by orgasm, sings the tune of spilt lineage...

A lit past moon glistened by moorland recumbrance and the hallowed fascination of bone mouldered into loamy need, stubborn, my soul resposes while body, rent by the translucency of distinct urges knit from the ancestors of those bones, lays the land with its oldest friends, sharing a flask of worm and lichen, knowing the staying glory of a moment by which eternity etches its invisible, charmless feature, unchanged but to smile through the upheaval of stone and treeroot groaning with the mirth no humour can in the eons between yawns define.

Bone, tree, rock, loam--all with wet-eyed winks claim the same story, the only one, never told but always heard like the chant of the young girl's heart or airless wind. Contradiction binds through knotty stems and with grace procured by or for Gaia welds that seamless tale. And beauty unspeakable with certainty abounds, bounds, and traces the parameters of its demise.

The reproving upturned hand of a compromised blow to the quavering consumer of the Bacchus juice transmutes the juice into the ink of this pen, this bitch-sword, and in reproof finds its like through the word that, stabbing with the minutae of subtle, accumulated cuts leaves finally the g(r)aping wound unstoppered by cork or poulstice. The lust of gusted wind brings its calm-drip through a stylus less sword when said than surgical tool, cutting out the tumorous growth each slice regrows.

"Dry the Rain," an interpretation for Brandi, who does

You almost always talk about making life better; and you almost always feel better when you're bettering another's life. 

You can't imagine how you touch me. 

"If there's something inside that you wanna say, you say it out loud it will be okay: I will be alright, I will alright, I will be your light, I will be your light". 

Few if any people realize that Beta Band's "Dry the Rain" is the defining light of our century, and the most fundamentally Catholic during the same span, though it says not one word about Christ. I explained why I thought so in an essay I wrote couple of years ago, the kind that analyzes a poem-lyric line by line (called "explication") and then theorizes in between or in the end about the sum meaning of the work.

 

The shortest version I can render is that the lyricist's plea to have the gloomy-eyed Mott (Mutt? It is the ambiguity in key words that is part of the defining process of this song, mimicked as it does the ambiguous sense of morality the last century and this one, through many creeds, all philosophies and the horrors of war that themselves were willfully inspired by capitalist creed) take him in "dry the rain," a plea from a son to a father for aide and by extension, symbolically and as a statement of collective consciousness, for the "gloom-eyed one" amidst his junk, the rubble of his mental and physical consumerist constructs, a plea from a citizen for society to shelter him, redeem the legacy of his misdeed.

 

During this period, the music and voice are very grainy, further reflecting ambiguity through the harmony of form and of content that defines this as song as--for as far songs go--a Modern and Post-Modernist work of art; for the two are indistinguishable; the song perfectly echoes Marshall McLuhan's Modernist credo that "the medium is the message". 

The singer asks thrice of Mott to take him in and dry the rain, the number a symbol of the Trinity and specifically of Christ's word that Peter will thrice betray him before the cock crows. Here we see that the singer acknowledges tacitly his own complicity in his misery and confusion, as a son in the transitional phase into manhood, into accountability, will.

And the music again reflects this shift by the suddenly clear tone of the singer's voice, the filtering of graininess in the music, which accelerates slightly in tempo and, along with this newfound certainty of the singer in his plea, his greater insistence to be sheltered, aided, have made sense of what his father-society has left him, he grows in confidence. By the third plea, a full shift in sound has occurred, strong and defiant. The staccato growth of notes, now without a hint of muddle and assertion, leads to a sudden doubling of notes, two sets of notes running in parallel. The new strand has as its core a trumpet, the clarion call of angels: renewals, grace, mounts and is at hand.

Here enters finally the ultimate message, the redeeming forgiving of father to son, human to society, and ultimate God's Own grace: "If there's something in side that you want to say, you can say it out loud it will be okay, I will be alright, I will be alright, I will be alright, I will be your light." The trumpet now dominates between the two strands of notes, and again the ambiguity of language is retained: for no matter how closely you listen as these words are--also thrice uttered, like the plea, also thus retaining unity--you can never be exactly sure when he sings he will be alright or he will be the light; but the differentiation is clearly heard or, more to the point, and casting this piece as genius, you can feel it. Symbolically, by being alright by the previous generation's truth if only is uttered, the singer, now fully accountable, fully a man or woman, fully integrated into the world of God BY it, says that the truth will make him, the singer, the light; and that the generation preceding his need never fear his wrath if the truth is all that is said.

Redemption, forgiveness, grace, a welding of form and content aligning precisely to Modernistic tenets, raise this work into the upper echelons of artistic expression.


Okay, I guess that wasn't the shorter version...

I will walk now, loving you, and hearing in your voice always that trumpet.