Dog Day's Night Group: An Anhedonic Manifesto

Originally posted Monday, August 13, 2007

Forget death, love, sex, suicide. There really is only one question in contemporary rock culture and that is pleasure – getting it, losing it, looking for it, but mostly not getting it, mostly not getting it or understanding it or even really wanting it.The party line on this is that our pleasure receptors have been damaged by all the overstimulation – all those flashing lights and exploding frames and gratuitous boob shots – of pop culture (very old story, by the way – Plato accused his contemporaries of ruining their philosophic souls by choosing the lyrical grief of Euripides over the higher, harder pleasures of mathematics). Then there’s the opposite view, that we have had a century more or less devoid of pleasure in art, with the over-intellectulized, anti-emotional fallout of modernism and post-modernism leaving us incapable of touching the world except through several layers of irony and ambivalence.Right. Anyway. I used to be pretty militant in the former view – I don’t think I saw a single television program for ten years (this was easier than it sounds, since for some strange reason I had no friends). I was derisive of all Hollywood movies, even – no, especially – the arty ones (even now, something in me dies when I hear an otherwise reasonable person singing the praises of Lost in Translation). I threw myself into the modernists, the stoics, the negative way mystics, convinced that the pleasures of actual, like, experience could never match those of sitting alone in a room where one word led to another to a constellation of ideas possible only in the rarified air of my perfect solitude.Then I had a breakdown. So I switched to the other view, decided I would only survive by learning to enjoy the things other people enjoyed. I spent two years attending rock concerts, renting DVDs of hit HBO series, trying desperately, and with varying levels of success, to like pop music, blockbusters, parties, sex, and the flashing screens of Time Square.Then I had another breakdown. Now I’m too confused or just don’t care, which I think puts me in a perfect position to appreciate Night Group, the latest album from new wave quartet Dog Day. The album, as I hear it, is an anhedonic manifesto, a step-by-step guide to living life with the pleasure and pain knobs turned way down. I like this album, not because I think it does anything new exactly, but because it crystallizes something that’s been in the air for years, a numbness that is not separate from feeling, that is its own legitimate expression of what its like to be an (at least potentially) thinking, feeling person at the beginning of the 21st century.You can hear it on “End of the World”, where the singer eggs on the end times because he can no longer tell his happiness from his unhappiness (whether keeping his head above water or sinking back down into the swamps, “a subtle change is all I feel”); on “Oh Dead Life” where a (maybe literally) deadening apathy is indistinguishable from life as usual.Night Group isn’t nihilistic. It has gone past the “no fun, no feelings, no future” of punk, past the “let’s fuck and get high like there’s no tomorrow because there is no tomorrow” of new wave. Instead, it affirms the ceremonies of feeling as placeholders, waiting for life to return to them with the patient confusion of a senile old woman regarding her husband and trying to remember what he has to do with the life she once had.All nodes of meaning and possibility are acknowledged here – love (“Sleeping, Waiting”), marriage (“Vow”), ambition (“Defeat”, “Bright Light”), “fun”, at least in the sense of drinking and making noise (“Night Group”) – acknowledged and treated with all due respect and passed over. On Night Group’s standout tracks, “Oh Dead Life”, “Great Pains”, and “Gayhorse” (but especially “Gayhorse”), the singer has decided to live, not for any of the reasons stated above, but because the form of things demands it, because just as love means living with someone you might not always like, just as the flash of feeling and insight onstage is the result of piecemeal grunt-work behind-the-scenes, so living consists of the small, repeated decision that one can’t stop here, that there is still a direction, still somewhere – not better, perhaps, but at least different – that one is going.