Primitive Tools And Stutters

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “No One Is (As I Are Be)”

It’s not as if Stephen Malkmus has been spending his years writing a lot of songs that make perfect literal sense, but I find this one to be particularly slippery – I can key into the central emotion here but I can’t quite tell you what that emotion is, and the lines resonate with me in a major way, but when I really think about them, I am hard pressed to tell you why. And this may be part of why I love it so much, because it falls between the cracks of emotions and ideas in some distant corner of my mind. It’s obvious enough that it’s one of his songs about aging and maturity, but it flips the script from more recent Malkmus songs dealing with that subject matter, wherein he’s the grounded guy giving someone else advice. This is more like the sound of a guy settling into the idea of settling in – discovering that he’s happy to be out by the wood shed, pondering the depths of friendships, reflecting on the “never-ending nightlife that we shared.” In the end, he asks “What does it mean?” and the only answer he’s got is “I want to be there.” And maybe that’s the best summary of this song’s mood we can get: It’s the sound of wanting to be there.

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