Deep Voices #21
I can hear so much music
Deep Voices #21 on Apple Music
Last week I learned that Chet “JR” White, who was in the band Girls, passed away at 40. JR was the bass player and producer, the heavy presence who grounded the group, at its core a duo between him and songwriter Christopher Owens. I was heartbroken to hear he’d died. Within 12 hours of finding out JR had died, I learned that Kevin O’Meara, another 40 year old bass player I knew many moons ago, had also passed. Kevin was in the DC band Early Humans, a behemoth trio active in the early 2000s. He was quiet and friendly, a devoted weirdo who I often saw wearing pants with one leg cut off at the knee. They have no connection beside the obvious parallels, but it felt cruel. Both died so young.
It’s been a fucked up, nonstop year. I don’t believe either Kevin or JR’s deaths were directly related to Covid, but indirectly, who knows. It can’t have helped. Being alive right now feels like there are a million comets all flashing through the sky at once. Some pass by Earth without too much trouble but a fair amount crashland and explode. You can’t go outside to check out the damage because of quarantine, so you kind of just hope it wasn’t too bad.
At points in my life, both Early Humans and Girls were part of my definition of self. Early Humans first, when I was a freshman in college. They played constantly and defined power with tightly wound post-hardcore songs. Their drummer hit like he was breaking up concrete with a sledgehammer. Watching them perform, you mimicked the music, the feeling moving from a wiggle in your gut to a full-body takeover. Someone posted a photo of their last show on Instagram. It was in a living room of a house in Washington, DC in the summer of 2002. Kevin is wearing white boxers and a white headband and no shirt, playing bass with his leg propped up on his amp, looking both focused and entertained. It’s unclear where his other leg is. It looks like he’s floating.
I became a fan of Girls about ten years later, when I was just beginning my career as an arts journalist. I was deeply enamored with not just their music but their lifestyle. Eleven years ago, I spent a few days in San Francisco writing a story about Girls, and watched JR and his partner in the band, Christopher Owens, run around by the ocean, get high in an abandoned rose garden, flirt with whoever, and stay up really late. It felt like stepping into a dream. That’s what their music felt like, too, these simple pop-rock narratives about love and desire, both won and lost. JR was the stoic wiseman, the kind of guy who thought he always knew better than everyone else and often did. He talked about his parents a lot. He dressed well. He was proud of what he was good at.
There’s no guide for mourning people like JR or Kevin, people you didn’t know well but who are wrapped up in some sense of your understanding of yourself. Their deaths feel like a fog, something bleakly omnipresent but which I can move through without too much trouble. I heard about Kevin’s death in the morning, while watching my baby crawl around on the floor. I almost hate to say it but I felt lucky. Thank god he knows nothing, I thought. He will not remember this year. He will be fine. I will always be his dad. In the past, being so close to death, it would always feel like it could have been me. I’m not sure it does anymore.
As usual the saving grace of everything is music. When I heard about JR, I listened to one of my favorite Girls songs, this seven minute wandering track, “Carolina,” where his bass works magic. But I didn’t listen to any other Girls songs that day. They didn’t feel heavy enough. Even their songs about despair are imbued with recovery. I wanted to listen to something more harrowing. I walked to the grocery store to buy a giant squash and put on Rune Bagge, an Danish artist who makes really intense and fast techno. I didn’t want to hear any words, just drums moving at the speed of light. In a way, listening to him is almost like listening to ambient music, because it erases the outside world. You don’t float off on a cloud like you might if you listened to Brian Eno, you get dialed in to what’s being pumped into your head. It’s like when a bee flaps its wings so fast it looks like they’re not moving. It’s like both feeling and not feeling at the same time.
I’ve started this week’s playlist with my favorite Girls song, “Forgiveness,” a uniquely sublime piece of music. “Nothing’s gonna get any better if you don’t have a little hope, if you don’t have a little love in your soul,” goes the beginning of the song, Owens almost whispering. “Nothing’s gonna get any better if you're drowning in your fear, if you’ve got nothing but sorrow in your soul.” “Forgiveness” is quite long, and for the first five minutes it’s restrained and pleading before a guitar solo explodes and brings the whole thing into relief. After that solo ends, seven minutes into the song, the vocals return. “And I can hear so much music, and I can hear so much music, and I can feel everything now/And I can see so much clearer, when I just close my eyes.” I cannot tell you how many times I have listened to this song. I basically treat it like scripture.
Early Humans’ music isn’t available on streaming, though it’s been uploaded to YouTube. There’s much less moral clarity available in their songs than in Girls’. In fact, revisiting them, they feel dated. Nothing wrong with that, it’s human and that’s what happens over time to most things we create. But it’s not forgotten and it’s still part of an amazing legacy, and of so many people’s stories. Truth is, Kevin’s not someone who's been on my mind at all much the last few years. That’s okay. He’s in there somewhere, like everyone I’ve been lucky enough to know and admire. All of those experiences, all of that conversation, that art and music, shapes us in unknowable ways. I am blessed we crossed paths, even if we didn't continue down the same one. I’m sorry his ended how it did.