{"id":163391,"date":"2023-02-17T13:31:04","date_gmt":"2023-02-17T18:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=163391"},"modified":"2023-02-17T14:00:57","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T19:00:57","slug":"love-songs-slow-show2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/02\/17\/love-songs-slow-show2\/","title":{"rendered":"Love Songs: \u201cSlow Show\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Matt Berninger. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

This week,<\/em>\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0Review\u00a0is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In her 1993 memoir\u00a0Exteriors<\/i>, drawn from seven years of journal entries, Annie Ernaux describes overhearing a familiar pop song at the supermarket. She is struck by the pleasure she experiences\u2014and by a \u201cfeeling of panic that the song will end.\u201d This prompts her to consider the relative emotional effects of books and music. While certain novels have left a \u201cviolent impression\u201d on her being, the impact hardly compares to the \u201cintense, almost painful\u201d feeling produced by the song. \u201cA book offers more\u00a0deliverance<\/i>, more escape, more fulfillment of desire,\u201d she writes. \u201cIn songs one remains locked in desire.\u201d The structure of pop music is inherently erotic; the repetitions of rhythm and melody continually summon and satisfy aching anticipation. Love songs bring this otherwise sublimated longing to the surface: some through grand, theatrical gestures, others by drawing out the dialectic of desire embedded in everyday life\u2014say, the feeling of being alone at a party, sad and self-conscious, desperately missing someone.<\/p>\n

This is the premise of \u201cSlow Show,\u201d a somber but rousing midtempo track from The National\u2019s 2007 album\u00a0Boxer<\/i>. The narrator spends the verses separated from his lover, surrounded by people but unable to reach them, confined to the claustrophobic quarters of his own mind. Guitars flutter frenetically over foreboding squalls of feedback, while Matt Berninger\u2019s mumbling baritone evokes the narrator\u2019s recursive, dead-end thoughts: \u201cStanding at the punch table, swallowing punch\u201d; \u201cI leaned on the wall, the wall leaned away\u201d; \u201cI better get my shit together, better gather my shit in.\u201d In the choruses, an atmospheric sweetness swells as he briefly spans the distance, if only in his imagination: \u201cI want to hurry home to you,\u201d Berninger croons, \u201cput on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up \/ so you can put a blue ribbon on my brain.\u201d His halting syntax smooths out into the simple, fluid choreography of a fantasized intimacy, which disrupts his anxious solitude.<\/span><\/p>\n

But even the utopic space of the chorus is marred by doubt in its final lines: \u201cGod, I\u2019m very, very frightened \/ I\u2019ll overdo it.\u201d The same fear that strands the narrator alone in the midst of a party gnaws at the edges of his reverie, manifesting now as a terror of spoiling the moment. (In the roiling \u201cConversation 16,\u201d released a few years after, Berninger intensifies this same dread: \u201cI was afraid I\u2019d eat your brains \/ \u2018cause I\u2019m evil.\u201d) Within each gesture of mutual understanding between lovers there lurks the possibility that the bond might break; the separation that shapes desire shadows every tender encounter.<\/p>\n

The song\u2019s extended coda collapses this play of distance and return into a single, paradoxical image of missing what one doesn\u2019t yet know. Over a melancholy piano line, Berninger sings a quatrain adapted from the chorus of a song on the band\u2019s nearly forgotten debut album. \u201cYou know I dreamed about you \/ for twenty-nine years before I saw you \/ you know I dreamed about you \/ I missed you for, for twenty-nine years.\u201d It\u2019s a nearly mythic origin story for the mundane set of relations sketched in the rest of the song: in the beginning, there was a longing.<\/p>\n

Nathan Goldman is the managing editor of\u00a0<\/em>Jewish Currents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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