Titus Andronicus
The Monitor
There's probably never been a worse time for concept albums. We haven't hit the point where enjoying an album in its entirety is the latest way to advertise ones oldness, but that's obviously were this train is heading, whether some of us like it or not. Concept albums are probably the worst offender in that conversation--you have to listen to them all the way through, in order, the album art (all of it, not just the cover jpg) is usually a factor, you have to genuinely care about the people who create the album enough that you might give a shit about buying the thing itself...basically, you have to do a bunch of stuff that nobody really wants to do anymore, because music is pretty much another commodity that is ingested with an astronomical sense of greed that rivals 17th Century Catholicism.
Luckily, Titus Andronicus didn't really know how to make a concept album. Oh, they may have tried, but they didn't pull it off. They made something else entirely.
"From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide."
You're supposed to buy into something else with The Monitor. That it's about the Civil War, which is why there's some cliched historical images of soldiers on the front cover. That it's about growing up in New Jersey and hardwon patriotisim, which is why there's so many Springsteen guitar riffs and lyrics. That's why there's a story that runs through the background of the album--leaving home to fight, finding out that fighting can be soul-destroying, hating oneself, refusing to give up, etc. This is about something, dude. It's like American Idiot, but not boring; like Southern Rock Opera, but without Lyrnyrd Skynrd.
The quote above is from a speech Abraham Lincoln gave when he was 28 years old. It was a response (of sorts) to the murder-by-incineration of a young black man by a St. Louis mob a few weeks earlier. The speech was given to a group of young men, and it's used by Titus to open the album's first song, "A More Perfect Union".
Yeah, you got it. This isn't fucking Tommy, it's not Zen Arcade, or if it is, if the concept album is where you want to hang your hat, then here: this is an album about teenage/early 20's angst, for boys who want to be certain kinds of men. It's about fantasizing about getting the chance to be violent, really violent, to kill people and fuck people over and aggressively quote every badass war line you can remember from a movie or make up your own. It's about getting the chance to have your intestines ripped out of your body and saying "Is that all you bite, motherfucker?"
In that vein, it has a storied precedence--you could think of this as the late release bridge onto Pulp's This Is Hardcore, which was an album that existed so that young man's rage could transmute into young man's solipsistic gotta-get-laid, won't-make-a-convincing-rapper mentality, which is the primary purpose of This Is Hardcore, despite it supposedly being about other things and also being the last useful thing that Pulp (or Jarvis Cocker) did. Titus is an album resolutely uninterested in sex, frequently jumping so far that characters will be children (sarcastically apologizing to their mothers) to old men (the type that sit in bars with other old men and reminisce about being young men who sarcastically apologized to their mothers). The gap in between--the gap where wanting-to-get-laid is, which is ultimately the gap that produces the storehouse of energy that motivates young men to dolotsaviolence and drinkandfightwiththeboys--is never addressed, unless one counts "To Old Friends And New", which is a terrible ballad, the worst song on the album, and kind of sounds like Conor Oberst covering something off the Urge Overkill Stull EP. On it, Titus seems to have felt the lack of a "boy talks to woman" track on their odyssey into the fires of overlong puberty, but the complaints leveled are far too tame, far too restrained--for it to have worked, it would've had to maintain the blind rage and psychotic machismo that populates the songs leading up to it. (It would've needed to be more Odd Future, honestly--the characters painted here, young men who shake the barley only to find the bodies they can drop, boys who fantasize for futures of local bars, a happy alcoholism and the dark arts of "dirty old men"...those are boys who grew up with misogynist stains on their teeth, they didn't whine about the "big words" their girlfriends used to assault their potency.)
All of it--the confusion, the aggression, the failure, the dumb ass picked-up and immediately-dropped Civil War nonsense--it all leads to "Battle of Hampton Roads", which is totally a song of the year, if the only determination required were to point out songs that list things that everybody remembers and shares. In no short order, it's about being a huge asshole and being really worried that the hugeness of that assholery will result in a life of abandonment, it's about being worn out by blank check cynicysm and yet still consumed by the desire to choke self-promoting talentless hacks until their eyes bulge out of their gigantic fucking tick heads, it's about wanting to vomit in a trash can whenever a stranger tells you about the personal tragedies they wear like t-shirts, it's about giving up and going somewhere else to re-create yourself while knowing all the while you're just going to start quoting the same goddamn television shows again, it's about being a gigantic fucking pig that eats nothing but something else, regurgitates it, and then gets furioious and indignant when no one responds to it with the proper display of gravitas and worship, it's about having nothing to say that's original, but claiming that the way you say it is an absolutely new, fresh way to say it, and, of course, it's about playing really loud guitars because you gotta play something, no matter what, even if it's just your ego and a fantasy version of the child you wished you were back in a time when everybody was most proud of the children who were good at being aggressive, violent fuck-ups, because the rest of them were weak ass crybabies who couldn't do shit during the harvest season, and even less during the war season.
But then again, maybe it's just about freedom. That's also something else entirely.
-Tucker Stone, 2010
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