Godspeed You Black Emperor!

I listened to Godspeed You Black Emperor! the other day for the first time years. “Hung Over As the Oven In Maida” came up during shuffle on my iPod while I was dozing on the shuttle ride back home to SF from work. The song instantly transported me back to high school when I first discovered GYBE as an angsty teen ready to go to college. “Hungover…” is an epic song - over 18 minutes long - and is as dramatic, brooding, frightening and hypnotic as I remembered it. Even now, I still don’t know how I am supposed to feel when listening to it. There is a street sermon in the the middle of the song - in any other song, it would be trite Goth-lite tripe but it works so well here.

and so we have this
you have it in your secret windows
and you’re understanding to understand it and to bring it forth
it takes minute detail
it takes a holy lifeit takes emotions
it takes dedication
it takes dedication
it takes a death

My personal memory of GYBE is from 2000, when my then-boyfriend and I trekked in to Manhattan to see them live at The Knitting Factory in Tribeca. GYBE was performing as part of a benefit for the Anthology Film Archives. We got there extra early to get near the stage and as the small venue filled with artsy New Yorkers and cigarette smoke (the days when you used to smoke indoors!), the excitement grew quite palpable. Then came the films. Oh my god. Terrible, long, painfully obtuse and art-for-the-sake-of-art experimental films. One was a 10 minute loop shot of a woman waving a large piece of cellophane plastic, as the color went from black-and-white to violet to blue to green. I don’t think there was a single person in the crowd that cared for the films; people even started sitting - sitting! - on the nasty Knitting Factory floor out of sheer boredom. There was over an hour and a half of films before they finally FINALLY came on. Unfortunately, I had to leave only a song or two into the show so that I could make the train back to Long Island lest I incur the wrath of my parents - instead of leaving thrilled by their dynamic live show, I was mostly pissed at having to spend 90 minutes watching shitty art films. A writer at The Village Voice must have been at the same show I was, as evidenced by his blog post.