The Detachment Kit – “When You Need…” from Of This Blood (2004 Frenchkiss Records)
Twenty years ago we allowed for quite a bit more sass than we do now.
It’s like MLK said: “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”
Okay, that’s not what he was talking about, but I maintain that it applies.
Here’s something weird: Back to the Future, released in 1985, reminds us of how other-worldy the year 1955 had been, just thirty years prior. Well, Of This Blood didn’t come out thirty years ago, but rather nineteen, but even so, it’s hard to envision a film set in 2004 as feeling so starkly different from now. But definitely there would be some sass.
And then I thought maybe it was a weird analogy for me to be making here, so I checked this 1993 newscast:
Turns out it does feel pretty different from now.
So why do this? Well, I first heard The Detachment Kit in 2002. That was twenty-two years ago, and I was twenty-four, and very unsure of what I was hearing, or rather, what mental bucket to sort it into. It was a pre-iPod time, during the reign of the compact disc. I was visiting Chicago to spend time with my then-girlfriend, now-wife. The Detachment Kit are from Chicago, so she was playing me some hometown jams I guess, but not talking like that, because that would have been annoying.
These days I know that album inside and out and consider it a classic of the genre (if post-punk-inspired indie rock is a genre) and see it as emblematic of a time in music.
In my defense I had attempted to hitchhike to Chicago the day before, but it was March, and so it got dark early in the upper Midwest, and so when, in the pitch black of late evening, I hadn’t made it further than Eau Claire, Wisconsin, it was clear that I was going to have to buy a bus ticket. I arrived in Chicago early the next morning, breakfasted at a diner, and, red-eyed and unslept, set myself about the business of trying to figure out what The Detachment Kit were doing.
Guitars were jangly, vocals sassy and impassioned (or, if sass is artifice, let me say sassy but impassioned), drums big and loud, and every so often there was screaming. Having come from hardcore music, and also having come from an all-night bus ride, I didn’t understand why there was screaming. This wasn’t hardcore music, and so it seemed out of place, especially because I hadn’t yet sat with the album, something I wouldn’t do for some time out of frustration at my inability to sort their sound into a bucket.
Time is funny. Now I listen to that album and wonder why they never got their due. I guess everybody can’t be Les Savy Fav.
These days sass just sounds like drugs to me. “When You Need” opens with the evangelical carnival barking of an indie rock auctioneer, not all that different from the opening track from Mclusky’s 2002 sophomore full-length Mclusky Do Dallas, “Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues.”
Where Mclusky sings about “aching from fucking too much,” Kit vocalist Ian Menard sings about, well, fucking:
We must we must fight and fuck, rub and touch, fisticuffs
Spittin’ blood on the ol’ pinch and thud
We must we lust try it all, try to call, fill our protocol
Smearin’ lipstick all over the bathroom walls
We create the illusion that we’re part of creation, but we’ve never been there and we are never alone
It was a hedonistic time. We were still in the early days of a very long war on terror and were still enjoying the last remnants of the new car smell from all those brand new vehicles we bought at the urging of our president in a post-9/11 America.
I also read a certain desperation in these lyrics, like they are born out of uncertainty, and anxiety about the future. That makes sense with the benefit of history. Maybe that’s why “When You Need…” is as much a song about drugs as it is about fucking:
Wake up with the makeup
The powdered nose and the rubber hose
Wondering what happened in last night’s overdose
What’s that
If there was a drug scene around me in 2004, I was as far removed from it as could be. Had I examined lyrics such as these in those days, I would have written them off as selfish and immature. Looking at them now with the wisdom of my years, however, I can see the hedonism as a form of escape from the reality of a world that was too flawed to accept at face value, and I am finding that I have a lot more compassion for such a stance these days.
The Shuffler 