17. Lovecraft in Brooklyn
“Someday, someday Mount Fuji’s gonna blow,” Darnielle sings in “New World Emerging Blues,” a song from the We Shall All Be Healed writing sessions. “Someday, someday Mount Fuji’s gonna blow/And spray hot ashes on the villagers below.” Then it gets worse:
Someday, someday the ocean’s gonna rise
Someday, someday the ocean’s gonna rise
And I will emerge from hiding and shrug off my disguise
And worse:
Someday, someday the earth will be black as tar
Someday the earth will be as black as tar
And we are gonna see each other the way we truly are
It’s the reverse-world at full strength. You can hear in the way Darnielle sings “truly are” that the speaker knows just how bad the sight of one another will be, the same way that he knows how terrifying it will be to everyone else when he emerges from hiding and shrugs off his disguise. We’re in the space of art—a space where we’re free to think and feel by way of non-standard images, characters, scenes, and stories—and so there’s no reason to imagine that Darnielle’s commitment to the song’s point of view is an expression of his own volcanic rage and asphaltic deadness. It is, instead, a means of intensifying a series of feelings into a revolutionary, new-world-emerging state of mind. The state of mind is the imagined end-point, not the apocalyptic inversion itself, and the aim of the whole process is to make us more spacious by getting us to enter modes of consciousness that are at a distance from our own.
“It’s gonna be too hot to breathe today,” the speaker of “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” tells us in the song’s first line. “But everybody’s out here on the street/Somebody’s opened up the fire hydrant/Cold water rushing out in sheets.” Power chords—B5 and G5, with transitional A5s—arrive in single blasts on the first beat of every other measure; Hughes and Wurster stick, for now, to jittery, minimalist parts. “Hubcaps on the car like funhouse mirrors/Stick to the shadows when I can,” Darnielle sings in the first pre-chorus, and then, as if it’s a mantra, as opposed to a chorus, he says-sings “Lovecraft in Brooklyn.” After two more mood-setting verses, there’s a paranoid, apocalyptic surge—“Rhode Island drops into the ocean/No place to call home anymore”—and we’re on to the bridge, which adds a sing-song chromatic melody to the mix and ends on two bars of a tension-building F#. Back on B5, with the rhythm section loose and running, Darnielle goes into his best “dude’s-gonna-come-unglued” mode and sings, an octave up,
Woke up afraid of my own shadow
Like genuinely afraid
Headed for the pawnshop
To buy myself a switchbladeSomeday something’s coming
From way out beyond the stars
To kill us while we stand here
It’ll store our brains in mason jarsAnd then the girl behind the counter
She asks me how I feel today
I feel like Lovecraft in BrooklynYeah!
The song is about “how when you’ve placed yourself outside of everything else, then everything else starts to look distorted or monstrous,” Darnielle said in 2008. When the speaker goes to the pawnshop for a switchblade, it’s because he’s genuinely afraid of his actual shadow, and he’s very serious about that alien-brain-extraction story, which comes from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness (1931). “One must condemn Lovecraft’s ugly racism,” Darnielle wrote in the Heretic Pride press kit, “but his not-unrelated inclination toward a general suspicion of anything that’s alive is pretty fertile ground.” If your fear and hatred extend to every living thing, a new but uncannily old world rises to the surface, a world that precedes our socialization, a world in which “monsters from the depths of time rule the void, occasionally poking their tentacles through to touch unfortunate persons whose hearts and minds will never recover from having faced the unthinkable vastness of the wholly and truly alien.” When the crowds at Mountain Goats shows shout along with the “Yeah!” at the end of the song, what they’re affirming, as far as I can tell, is their familiarity with that void, that touch, that vastness. The energy of the “Yeah!” spills into the outro, where the band keeps rising from F#5 to A5 to B5 and holding it, drums pounding. “Ugly things in the darkness,” as Darnielle sings at the end of “In the Craters of the Moon,” which virtually segues, on Heretic Pride, into “Lovecraft in Brooklyn.” “Worse things in store.”
(I strongly recommend the live version below)