"Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas": Harvey Danger, the Post-Ironic, and the Secret Lives of One-Hit-Wonders

 

[Like Blondie, a group, not a person]

So this year, as part of my continuing quest to find Christmas music I don't hate, I stumbled upon this hidden gem:

Harvey Danger's "Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas" just nails the feeling of abject melancholy that comes from, well, having to work on Christmas, a severely under-represented element of the whole Holiday experience (and really, if you're thinking of going to see a movie on Christmas day, please think twice; it's bad enough that the police, EMTs, and other essential services workers have to be on call that day, without a spoiled middle-class compounding the yuletide misery of an overworked underclass).  In the song, the narrator notes the irony of serving movie patrons who come to "spend Christmas alone together"--not to mention the agony of his family being "two time zones away," while his "vodka and snow is melting/the alcohol isn't helping."

That is, I guess he could say that "the agony and irony are killing me."

Wait, where have we heard that line before?

Don't even pretend you don't know the words to Harvey Danger's "Flagpole Sitta," the perennial late-90s one-hit-wonder to end all late-90s one-hit-wonders--a song that still gets overplayed on the radio to this day.  It has featured in multiple film soundtracks, British TV shows, Edward Snowden clips, videos of bicyclists beating a minivan, countless karaoke nights, and whatever station your manager tuned to in the background at work.  At this point, the question of whether you love, hate, or even feel indifferent towards this song is largely irrelevant; it's just burrowed too deep into our common cultural consciousness, just another tiny part of the air we breath without thinking.

Much like Springsteen's "Born in the USA," Neil Young's "Keep on Rockin in the Free World," U2's "With or Without You," and The Police's "Every Breath You Take," "Flagpole Sitta" ranks among the most wildly misunderstood songs of the American Pop canon--in this case, a sarcastic screed against the empty pretensions of alternative culture ("I want to publish zines, and rage against machines, I wanna pierce my tongue, it doesn't hurt it feels fine...") that is persistently read as a sincere and unabashed homage to the same.  Partly this is the band's own fault, inasmuch as they wrote an unapologetically joyous earworm of a melody that can't help but sound like a celebration of whatever it's mocking.  Besides, such an ironic misreading seems apropos of a tune that finishes with "the agony and irony are killing me (whoa!)". 

But enough on a song we've all heard a million times already!  For my stumbling upon of "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" didn't just reveal to me that '90s-trivia-question Harvey Danger actually wrote another song worth listening to (or even another song period), but tripped me down a rabbit hole to discover that, guys--Harvey Danger was actually really good.

For after discovering "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas" and determining that it needed to be on my Navidad playlist, I quickly learned that the track is available for free download on the band's own website, as part of a 2009 B-Side collection called Dead Sea Scrolls (the fact that it wasn't available for sale anywhere else tells you all you need to know about Harvey Danger's non-Flagpole-Sitta popularity--though unjustifiably, as you may soon see).  I downloaded the whole album a month ago just to get the one Christmas song; nevertheless, it wasn't long till my idle curiosity got the best of me, and I gave the other 13 tracks a cursory listen.

How do I describe what happened next?  Did they benefit from my utter lack of expectations?  Or does that mean I engaged them with a mind open and free of hype?  In any case, from that cursory listen, I suddenly found myself listening to Dead Sea Scrolls with rapt attention from beginning to end--and then again--and again--and again.  It sure didn't sound like a B-Sides collection, no--it sounded like the best album I'd heard in years.

This is especially important, because just last Spring, I was catching up with an old college buddy, wherein we lamented about how the perennial experience of our early-20s--that of discovering a gorgeous new album that transports you outside of yourself--was one that neither of us had had in several years.  Oh sure, we still kept up plenty with contemporary music, but though we enjoyed much of it, little of it swept us off our feet like when we were just a little younger.  Indeed, we quietly worried that we would never have that experience again, that maybe we couldn't have it again.  (Studies have shown that most people won't get into anymore new music after the age of 34).  Maybe, sadly, we had finally outgrown the possibility of having that experience with music, as our brains slowly calcified into old age.

I hope that gives some context to my hyperbolic statement that to finally have that experience again with Dead Sea Scrolls has been a bona fide Christmas miracle for me.

The lyrics are clever yet soulful, the musicianship in turns subdued and ecstatic. It's another mark of the inherent injustice of the universe that The Shins are renowned for lesser-examples of the same while Harvey Danger has been otherwise forgotten.

Intrigued at this incredible find, I quickly dug deeper.  On the same free download page, I learned that in 2005, five years after the utter flop of their second album King James Version had sealed their place in the dubious pantheon of one-hit-wonders, Harvey Danger had attempted to embrace this whole newfangled file-sharing thing by offering their third album Little by Little for free online.  Wilco had similarly revived their flagging career in 2001 with the much more renowned Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead would do the same to even greater acclaim just two years later with 2007's In Rainbows; by contrast, Harvey Danger's much more modest success with "over 100,000 downloads" and selling "most of" the ensuing physical copies with bonus tracks, gets understandably overlooked in the history of internet-only releases--which is a shame, because this really is a great album.

I don't want to oversell this one, it takes at least a couple listens for it to get under your skin; but once it does, you'll find that "Little Round Mirrors" and "Incommunicado" both sound like songs you've always known, that have always existed, and you will be perpetually surprised to realize that they were only ever released on a largely-forgotten one-hit-wonder's online crapshoot.  You'll wonder not only how you ever got along without the de ja vu of these dispatches from some alternate universe Billy Joel, but why on earth they aren't as much a part of the cultural air we breathe as "Flagpole Sitta".

And then there's the masterpiece "Moral Centralia."

Granted, I'm biased; I went to High School in Centralia, WA, my family moved their when I was 9.  My mother is buried there.  I got an Associates degree there.  That town is a part of me.  But I moved away from there 10 years ago, and my family moved to Vancouver a few years ago, thus ensuring that I'll never live in Centralia again; really, I haven't given that rundown town much thought since.  But this song has revived Centralia within me something fierce; for what Seattle-based Harvey Danger has done is perfectly capture the uncanny feeling that comes from living in a place that is exactly half-way between Seattle and Portland on the I-5--that is, it is both in the middle of everything and in the middle of nothing; it is both equally close and equally far from the two most important cities in the Pacific Northwest; the whole world moves right through you while you feel stuck going nowhere when you live in Centralia.

I had never thought of it this way before, but the town really is the perfect metaphor for that infernal feeling of limbo you feel after a breakup, which Harvey Danger must have felt each time they stopped in Centralia for gas and the bathroom on their way down to Oregon.  "When wicked thoughts come inter alia/You wind up in Centralia, morally" they sing, and that is not a place you want to wind up, I assure you! 

I now had two full albums by a band I thought I would never listen to more than one song by.  I hadn't felt obsessed, truly and really obsessed, by a band in too long, so I decided it was time to go all in with Harvey Danger.  It won't surprise you to learn that their "Flagpole Sitta"-featuring debut Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? is available for only a penny on Amazon, and their flopping follow-up King James Version for not much more, so I easily got my hands on both.

First KJV: it didn't take me much googling to find that I of course was never alone in realizing that Harvey Danger was amazing, nor that they had a cult following as passionate as it was small--and that among the faithful, KJV is considered their magnum opus.  The band clearly desired it to be understood that way--like the Bible translation it is named for, KJV is a self-conscious attempt to present the Authoritative Version of the band's sound.

I have now given several listens to KJV and I can now say with deep conviction that...it's fine.  Not bad.  But here I'm gonna have to break with all the other budding Harvey Danger enthusiasts out there and say that it makes sense why this album never capitalized on the success "Flagpole Sitta", for the songs don't quite stick their claws into you the same way Where Have All The Merrymakers Gone and Little by Little do.

That's not to say that KJV isn't an achievement; it has far more ambition than Where Have..., and far more fully develops their aesthetic that was first introduced by "Flagpole Sitta": what has often been labeled as the Post-Ironic.

Perhaps KJV's "Sad Sweet Heart of the Rodeo" might help illustrate what is meant by Post-Ironic: the lyrics and video tell the story of a city-girl who pines for the wild-life of the rodeo.  The topic of many of Country song, for sure, but this is a punk anthem by a leftist Seattle-based Indie band, and thus that yearning is written from that distinct perspective--it is a reexamination of rodeo culture by those who are otherwise most suspicious of it.  In the song, she is mockingly lectured by her boyfriend that "The Marlboro Man died of cancer/And he wasn't a rocket science when he was alive", to which she responds with a derisive "ha-ha-ha."  That is, the ironic deconstruction of the rodeo mythos is in turn ironically deconstructed with that laugh. The irony has been ironized. She craves the rodeo life not because she doesn't understand the irony of it, but precisely because she does, and is tired of it.  In the smug "soft city condescension" of the Postmodern, she is seeking the Post-Ironic.

For the Post-Modern is absolutely drenched in irony; self-awareness and deconstruction are the names of the game.  Simply put, the world is awful and impossible, and with the failure and complicity of most religion in its awfulness, along with all other institutions, counter-cultures, and belief systems, the lone salvation that the Post-Modern can turn towards is ironic self-detachment.  By the early '90s, Post-Modern irony's cultural supremacy was complete.

Which of course meant that now irony itself had to be interrogated and deconstructed.  Not surprisingly, irony was found wanting; in literature, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen lead the charge to reject irony and cynicism, to find a new sincerity that could somehow move us past the anesthetizing numbness and meaninglessness of the ironic.  9/11 would exasperate this trend, as ironic self-detachment and a casual, cynical shrug were now luxuries we could no longer afford, anyways.  We had to start believing in things again, or the fundamentalists (both at home and abroad) would start believing in things for us.   In music, Arcade Fire helped lead the charge for this new Post-Ironic sincerity in the 21st century; mid-'00s Emo, for all its other flaws, was likewise an expression of this Post-Ironic sensibility; Harvey Danger's KJV then, released in the halcyon days of 2000, was arguably ahead of its time.

For as much as Harvey Danger sang that "irony is killing me," they fully understood why irony was so desperately needed in the first place.  KJV's opener "Meetings With Remarkable Men" describes a dinner with Jesus himself, who had "two words about inanity: fundamental Christianity," which was an alarmingly prescient prediction of the havoc that fundamentalist evangelism would wreck upon the U.S. electorate over the course of the new millennium.  That is, Harvey Danger understood the danger of fundamentalism that irony needed to deconstruct, even as they likewise recognized that irony alone is insufficient to create new meaning.

Besides religion, the other recurring theme in their oeuvre is cinema: the very first track on their very first album, "Carlotta Valdez", is a retelling of Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film about deconstructing (and then reconstructing) false appearances; on KJV's gorgeous "Pike St./Park Slope" (a piano ballad that presages Little by Little), the singer asks his crush "Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory movie house or something"; and of course on "Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas", the narrator is opening that very repertory movie house on Christmas day.  Like irony, cinema is both the solution (wherein you can self-detach from life by rendering it all just a show) and the fresh problem (now you are trapped by the very shows you tried to self-detach with)--just as Christmas is both what you need and what hurts you all at once.

But just where does one find the Post-Ironic, the new sincerity?  I am willing to make the argument that in their very last single, released in 2010 on their free download page a full year after their final show, they find a hard-won resolution.  Almost too on the nose, it is entitled "The Show Must Not Go On".

This song, by the way, is their best one, and that's saying something.  For when I pooh-pooh KJV a bit by saying, though more ambitious than Where Have..., it is not as good as Little by Little or the masterpiece Dead Sea Scrolls, what am I really saying?  That their 4th album was better than their 3rd than their 2nd than their 1st?  That they just kept getting better and better?  That if they had enjoyed even just a little more commercial support, they could have just kept up that trajectory and churned out ever more shining masterpieces, and that it is to our condemnation that we never encouraged them so?

But I worry that if they had had the success they needed to keep growing artistically, they never would have produced this one remarkable song; though obviously a final kiss-off to the music industry (if they couldn't succeed on their own terms, they determined to at least end it on their own), the lyric's are about finally getting over a long-lost crush--and my goodness, that is a song I could have really used multiple times throughout my 20s.  Even as I am now happily engaged and my torrential 20s are fading into the rear-view mirror, this song can't help but conjure up those old feelings once more.  "You can bash your head against a wall for years/The wall is not impressed", "It's not hard to see a beautiful girl/And imagine the life that you could have with her", "So much of what we so grandly call love, is simply in our heads", and "You can try, try, you'll never read her mind/Which is fine, fine, cause she cannot read yours", are all lines I fully plan on using with other troubled young men I will doubtless meet throughout my life--as I wish someone had once said to me. 

Moreover, that song, I think, is the purest expression of the Post-Ironic ethos: wherein you use irony not to deconstruct others' illusions, but your own; not to self-detach from life, but to finally reintegrate into it again; not to mock or parody the performance (as they unsuccessfully tried to do in "Flagpole Sitta"), but to end it.  This is not finding escape in either the empty spectacle of rote religious observance or of cinema, but in getting up and leaving the theater altogether for the fresh light of day.  That is how you make it so that "the agony and irony" are no longer killing you.

And that is how you find meaning again, even if you have to work on Christmas--not by ironically mocking or self-detaching from the holiday, but by letting Christmas be meaningful enough to hurt you when you don't get it.  And because missing Christmas can wound your soul, you now know that you have one, and you can feel again, and be passionate and ecstatic and free again--as we behold in that wild, wonderful second-half and outro to "Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas"...