Friday 1st April 2011
OLD MONEY 3: SILVER JEWS – “SELF-IGNITION” (1998)
Despite those career high out-of-exile live shows halfway through the last decade, how Silver Jews are ultimately remembered is still a moot point. Initially regarded as a Pavement side-project, the band’s 1998 album American Water is generally regarded as their finest moment, primarily because it featured a heavy contribution from Steve Malkmus at a point in time when fans were aching for a new Pavement record. And while it’s true that it remains one of the best records Malkmus worked on, that doesn’t by default make it Silver Jews creative apotheosis (that award should perhaps go to the previous record, Natural Bridge).
For anyone who knows the value of David Berman, it’s an infuriating – not to mention insulting – assumption that Silver Jews were validated by Malkmus’ contribution. Even if Malkmus can play the guitar like an upside down Tom Verlaine, he never got anywhere the poetic insight of Berman when at his most uniquely astute. Which, incidentally, is all of the time. More so, there are songs around that same period that seem to have been swept away by American Water‘s tide.
“Self Ignition” is one of two B sides featured on the “Send In The Clouds” single taken from that much-celebrated album. With chiming guitar lines that spider to to the rhythm of Berman’s abstract insights, “Self-Ignition” is certainly typical of the music the band were making around this period, its structure suggesting an off-cut from the AW sessions. But to simply see it as a discarded afterthought vastly underplays its distinctive embodying of what makes the Silver Jews so valuable a voice.
If Malkmus played the guitar upside down, Berman always seemed concerned with describing the world in the same way. Instead of coming off smart-arsed and sly as Malkmus often did to his many detractors, Berman does what all great writers do: he recasts a familiar world in a unfamiliar light, while revealing some unexposed truism that felt like it’s been standing on our toes the whole time. Berman has always felt more grounded in literature than music.
You sense that for Berman life is one long challenge, whether literally or conceptually (as evidenced in his reported suicide attempts and poetry anthology Actual Air, respectively). Elsewhere in the Silver Jews ouevre, he’s asked “What if life is just saw hard equation?”. The key to that line is in the imagining – the ‘what if’. There, Berman was daydreaming on a quantitative solution for life’s ineffable vicissitudes. On “Self Ignition”, he’s resolved to dealing with the awareness that there is only daydreaming, there is no definitive answer. It’s fitting that such an epiphany remains hidden in an obscure song that forms a slight part of an obscure career that’s shadowed by the other career of a bit part member (digest that). More than anything, there’s an elegance here, even if Berman himself is elegantly wasted mostly.
“I have to remember that you’re not wanting me doesn’t make me any less here”: just because you’ve never heard a B side, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t make a sound. And the sound that “Self-Ignition” makes is an eternal one, because it’s questions have echoed for an age.
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Silver Jews – “Self-Ignition”
(Photo: Cosmic Parachute)
