There are some songs so devastating I actually don’t want to post them. This is not one of them: despite its many virtues “Hornless Unicorn Anthem” does not offer a brief glimpse into the face of God. It’s just ass-kicking, upbeat fun, with bright keyboard tones and unabashed silliness. And so much the better. In a sense the song speaks for itself: it is the anthem of the hornless unicorn, and in the first person it lays out its concerns. I understand it. I can write about it. I encapsulate it. I love it.

This post, however, is not about songs like “Hornless Unicorn Anthem”, songs I can hold. It’s about songs that inspire in me an awe-filled silence. Old songs (which should raise suspicion in any canon-haters out there). Songs about love and change and all the things that bad songs are about except they’re actually about them. And though they may weigh on my heart, I will not name them. At least, not now. Instead I will practice the fanatical obscurantism of the age and delve back into my fetishized, hand-packaged, limited-edition numbered copy of whatever and proceed to distract myself by pouring over the little ticks and spasms of the unremarkable guitar parts and the vocal hooks between two bits of silence. At times I sense that these little pop songs (that I love, as one loves old photographs) are bad music… and that I have chosen them for the same reasons young me chose books over sports, navy blue over red: because of a handful of pre-existing environmental factors, genetic predispositions, and random events. My sense in these moments is that the little pop songs are not good but good for me. In the age of individualism they are simply mine.

If every so often I get what may be a glimpse beyond this horizon, I sense that the resulting experience is beyond my critical practice (such as it is) and my everyday listening. Usually I cannot write or judge or do the dishes but only sit and think, or cry. I am overcome by a force that seeks to reorder my life in pursuit of a goal higher than daily comfort or pleasure–that holds the day-to-day in disdain and works me into a frenzy of regret over a life wasted in doldrum. But for all the overstimulated inspirational hogwash that swells in my breast I find myself, mere hours later, craving pepperoni and an evening on the couch, as always. And when I reach for my headphones I’m back to whatever’s on my iPod Shuffle, most likely something I’m head-boppingly into or reviewing, something I’m putting onto mixes, something that’s a minute on the lips, forever on the hips. Something that’s basically no big deal.

The Mathletes are gracing my iPod these days, so to speak… but don’t take that as a slag: in this lonely, disappointing life, maybe just getting you from the streetcar to your front door is good enough.

Hornless Unicorn Anthem - The Mathletes

p.s. This is the first track from this month’s Cokemachineglow podcast. I assembled and sequenced it myself, and I’m pretty psyched about it. Have a listen here.