In the race to bring about the end of human existence as we currently understand it, climate change may yet edge out war as the victor — an honestly inspired performance given war’s track record and its perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation. We, most of us, now live every day with the knowledge that climate change will likely, in the near future, deliver our ruin; and yet it’s such an unfathomable problem to solve, much less comprehend, that we force ourselves to go about our days as if nothing were wrong. With every passing year achieving the title Hottest on Record; with us creeping slowly but surely closer to societal collapse and the impending fallout from the failure of our governments to do literally anything to prevent the violence we will commit against one another in our collective desperation; not to mention hoping we’re all more amphibious than we understand ourselves to be at present; among all of this, fewer and fewer outlets provide relief from our increasingly ubiquitous eschatological fears. Decompression remains a necessary approach to interacting with the world if you are privileged enough to do so; overexposure to forces out of your control leads quickly to mental rot without some adequate time away.
Browsing The Guardian I come across the following headlines solely from the past two days:
- “Sea life in ‘peril’ as ocean temperatures hit all-time high in San Diego”
- “Extreme temperatures ‘especially likely for next four years’”
- “Humans are pushing the Earth closer to a climate cliff”
These read like the cursory headlines sprawled throughout the room where Clive Owen’s character has been abducted early in Children of Men, stitching together thread by thread a complete tale of how we have reached the fall once we finally arrive. Much like the malaise and confusion Owen’s character exudes in his post-transgression world, we will look back and see how clearly we saw the writing on the wall and failed to effectively incite preventative measures. The problem, of course, being that attempting to curb carbon emissions seems truly insurmountable at this point; we look directly at the wall-writing and feel infinitesimally small, like imagining the immensity of the universe when sitting under the night sky and having to take a step back from the arbitrariness of it all. Pair this with capitalism’s insistence on never-ending growth at the expense of finite natural resources and lives and you’ve got yourself one hell of a Molotov cocktail of a planet.
What I’m trying to say is that a constant thought in my head lately, gnawing away little by little at whatever sense of possibility I may be feeling, is how we’re well and truly fucked.
Recently I’ve turned to music, the one constant throughout my life, in a desperate effort to make sense of this bullshit situation we just happened to be born into. Ironically, the most cathartic of these musical channels are the ones facing this despair confidently, unflinchingly, with the wisdom that maybe pockets of beauty will still be found in this new age we stand on the precipice of. And of the artists braving this onerous territory, only a handful come close to the honest portrayal of our likely future that Godspeed You! Black Emperor offers throughout their exceptional body of work. In regards to the decay of our current way of living already being wrought by climate change’s exacerbation of natural processes, none of Godspeed’s records predicts the road ahead quite so acutely as their debut, F#A#∞.
Initially released in 1997 on vinyl for Constellation Records and then expanded and bolstered in 1998 for a CD release through Kranky, Godspeed’s first official outing is much darker than anything that would follow, relying less on perpetual crescendoing from despair into exuberance and more on interspersed vignettes that create a mysterious, uncanny narrative. Even the album’s brighter moments hide an undercurrent of desolation beneath their effulgent exteriors. There is no pure happiness in the world of F#A#∞, only moments of respite from what the world has become.
The album feels like a complementary inverse of William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (another work tenaciously looking at collapse and death): whereas the latter reflects social entropy through the music itself falling apart — as well as the completion of the work coinciding with the devastation and eventual fallout from the 9/11 attacks—F#A#∞ tells a full story of decay more traditionally through the interplay of spoken word, field recordings, and music. The 9/11 connection extends further to how the albums interact narratively, with F#A#∞ predicting the darkness to follow the effervescent ’90s and Disintegration Loops acting as an elegy for a time forever past. Fear has been the predominant muse in western culture since 2001, influencing us and the things we create and absorb while placing a subtle but vicious strain on our collective well-being. Climate change fits into this culture of fear, naturally, presenting a tangible threat to our future, more than any amount of terrorism could ever hope to achieve.
The album’s setting is not a world destroyed by the ravages of total war, but one devastated by human-exacerbated natural disaster and the atrocities committed by people in their desperation to survive in a forever-changed, corrupted existence. Here’s an excerpt of what the narrator at the beginning of The Dead Flag Blues has to say about the world around him, which could aptly describe our own:
The car is on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel, and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides, and a dark wind blows. The government is corrupt, and we’re on so many drugs with the radio on and the curtains drawn. We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death. The sun has fallen down, and the billboards are all leering, and the flags are all dead at the top of their poles.
A melancholy, crooning violin underscores the latter half of the narrator’s speech, leading then into a plodding dirge, paying respects to all that is no longer and all the possible futures that could have been. The genius behind this album rests on the way Godspeed never settles on one emotional current for long: this dirge is followed quickly by a train leaving a station, into a section that can be described as the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey but oriented downward; slowly descending strings swell like a steady fall into a hellish unknown. There are many sudden changes akin to this throughout the album, great leaps from the pits of oblivion into soaring meditations on what it means to be alive.
Because much of the album is instrumental, the images created in the listener’s mind will have a wide range of variation, vividly coloring a particular period in one’s life in ways it may not even affect another hearing the same sounds. And because much of the effects of climate change to come are unfathomable, what better way to tie the truly unknown into something tangible than through music that reaches to those extremes without being explicit in its intent? With F#A#∞, a little goes a hell of a long way. On my best days, climate change is like a tiny itch that I can’t seem to scratch but holds little sway over my attention overall. On my worst, it can be crippling, the fear of knowing we’re consigned to a future uninhabitable by our children at the expense of capital, that all-important economic growth that says nothing to us about our lives. Woe be unto us who have thrown away the future.
“Where are you going,” asks a disembodied voice repeatedly toward the end of the album’s final movement, Providence, and by the time you get there you realize it’s directed at the whole of humanity; a voice booming down from the heavens, wondering why we’ve traversed the dead-end path we’ve paved for ourselves. In the world of F#A#∞, even God is trying to make sense of our lunacy. The three different album covers make as succinct a statement as can be made about what we will leave behind in our wake: billboards, machinery, and myriad monuments devoted to almighty industrial capitalism — a system presenting itself as ubiquitous and immemorial, but in the span of human history only a very recent development, a blip on the radar; a system we still have time to transcend.
Like many great tales of despair, there must be a silver lining found at the end of it all, a glimmer of hope that the emotional terrain crossed was not a vain pursuit. The differences between the vinyl and CD versions of F#A#∞ are subtle but speak volumes to how this could all turn out. The vinyl edition technically never ends, with the vignette “String Loop Manufactured During Downpour…” locking into groove and theoretically looping forever (hence the infinity in the album’s title). In terms of climate change, if we maintain our current course without any correction, what else could this infinite be except death? The haunting drone of “String Loop” feels otherworldly, like organized noise that has existed forever and was simply plucked from the ether by the band. Another interpretation could be the sounds of the Earth that will continue long after we’re gone, repeating over and over whether we’re around to absorb them or not. We are of the Earth, and its continued existence with or without us provides a kind of peace; knowing the place from whence we were birthed will exist benevolently in spite of our actions.
The expanded CD version provides a more humanist approach, asserting that we will go on even after the fall, as we always, stubbornly have. “String Loop” doesn’t loop uninterrupted here, instead fading into a prolonged silence after four or so minutes. The silence is broken up after a time by “J.L.H. Outro,” an instrumental opening with a repeating guitar line so drenched in reverb that a drone is created underneath from the remnants of the melody. Continuing for another minute before the rest of the band comes crashing in with as much reverb, it becomes apparent how this track has the feel of a live performance, standing in the room as the sounds bounce off the walls and collide only in the way they do in a small performance space. “J.L.H. Outro” is the coda to this entire experience: culture will keep reflecting our world; love will still be around; we’ll keep going to shows; the mistakes of the past and present may be detrimental, but humans can withstand an awful lot.
At the end of the day, I have to believe we will create solutions to the horrors soon to be spawned by climate change; otherwise, I don’t know how I could even get out of bed in the morning. When the torment from these thoughts becomes too great, I’m thankful Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s work offers alternatives to facing this crisis alone. Between their first three records — F#A#∞, the EP Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, and the rightfully revered Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! — an entire three-part story arc tells the tale of disgrace back into redemption. New Zero Kanada follows the fall of F#A#∞ and portrays humanity in the thick of its woes, the ugliness of who we are deep down. Skinny Fists is the postscript to humanity, a world full of beauty; it’s essentially a full-length attempt at “J.L.H. Outro,” a reassertion that even amidst our faults we can reach spectacular heights. Heaven knows we need that message now, to be remembered and reiterated as we forge ahead tumultuously into the unknown.
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