Mason Proper, Sufjan Stevens, “Oh my gods,” and the Sublime Song

I don’t think I’m going to review the new Mason Proper album, Olly Oxen Free, for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s been done by many others.
2. I like it too much. I don’t want to have to think about the album. I just want to listen to it on repeat.

I admit this to you for a reason. My favorite song on Olly Oxen Free is the album’s last song, “Safe for the Time Being.” When I was thinking about writing about the album, I was going to make much ado about singer Jon Visger’s amazing singing of the repeated line “oh my god.” His singing on the entire album is masterful, and the band’s ability to write music so intricate around such rich ideas and narratives as Visger’s makes this one of the best albums of the year.

But such petty phrases and distinctions as “best album of the year” become paltry and meaningless when the music is able to invade your consciousness and emotions, taking on a life of its own in your body and soul. I’m not trying to sound all kooky or metaphysical here. When I listen to “Safe for the Time Being,” I stop whatever I’m doing and listen closely, shuddering here and there. I can’t help it. Very few songs have a similar effect on me.
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But I’ve been presenting everything all backwards here. I didn’t begin writing this to talk about Mason Proper. I wasn’t even listening to “Safe for the Time Being” when the inspiration for the post hit me. I was going through my back catalog.

When I last visited my folks (and therefore my CD collection, which resides with them) I picked out a few albums I’ve been meaning to listen to, and grabbed Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois album from a few years back. I never actually made it all the way through the album because this happened.

The link is to my first blog, before Todd and I started The Post-Rockist. What I didn’t write is that after I left the computer I took the CD out of the player, put it back in its case, and never played it again. Until ten minutes ago. I was guarding myself, because I didn’t want to use up moments like the one that Stevens’ “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” gave me, that feeling like you actually live in the world and that something someone else has made/created/written has effected your entire being so completely. It’s a little bit scary, this violation of the self by an out-of-sight person whom you’ve never met. But it makes you feel so damn alive too. It makes you feel like you actually exist.

And so as I was going about my business, paying bills or whatever, I thought I’d throw in Illinois with the full intention that I’d skip Track 4. But my mind focused on the menial tasks at hand and allowed the song to play. Before I knew it, I was staring into my empty living room from my kitchen table, listening with every bit of attention my mind could muster without shutting all other parts of my body down, to Sufjan’s humanizing tale of one of the worst serial killers in US history.

How dare Stevens create such beauty through the tale of a killer? How dare he make you feel so fully about a man who took people’s lives away?

Or perhaps that’s the only way he could achieve such an impossible song. Such a human song. When he raises the tension higher and higher, and then builds up to the “oh my god,” I just want to weep. I can’t believe I held it in. The way that Stevens sings that “oh my god” makes you feel the terribleness of what that one man did to those poor boys. It makes you feel your own mortal weakness, and makes you feel terribly alone with everyone.
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Which is why I think “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” is such a sublime song.

This word “sublime” gets overused, like when it’s used to compliment someone’s fancy evening dress or something (”You look sublime, dahling!”).

But back when I was in college, I remember reading about Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime. Burke says that “terror is in all cases the ruling principle of the sublime.” You use the sublime to talk about things like God, who is unimaginably great, so great that the reality of God is supposed to strike in us a feeling of profound terror. Having grown up Catholic, I did have occasional feelings in my youth of this kind of sublimity while in church (I think incense contains some sort of hallucinogen).

And if you’re like me, and college turned “God” into “god,” it’s rather profound to get that feeling from something like a song. And perhaps that profound feeling is from the very utterance of the “oh my god” in the song. I mean, even if you have thrown off your parents’ religious faith and made amends with the fact that you will die someday forever and that there ain’t no heaven, you have to admit that humans are certainly capable of those sublime feelings religious people get when they’re in church (and the extreme cases of those fellow humans who fall prey to those nut-job faith healers). It comes from inside us, and something occasionally draws it out.

In my case, it happens when Sufjan Stevens sings “oh my god” in “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”
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After I snapped out of my shocked state, I thought immediately to the “oh my god” that opens “Safe for the Time Being.” I thought about how “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” makes me feel, and that “Safe for the Time Being” makes me feel somewhat similar to how the Stevens’ song makes me feel. Then I thought about how these feelings may fade with repeated listenings of the songs.

Then I went to my iTunes and unchecked both “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” and “Safe for the Time Being” so that they won’t play unintended, won’t play until I’m ready for them.

I don’t want that feeling to go away. I want to save it for when I need to feel like a human being, as terrible as that can feel sometimes.

Mason Proper – “Safe for the Time Being“

from Olly Oxen Free

Sufjan Stevens – “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.“

from Come on Feel the Illinois