I recently found myself thinking about the debate around art and suffering, how we tend to glorify the suffering artist in a way that normalizes unhealthy behaviors and fetishizes trauma, and yet the undeniable fact that some great art has come from great personal suffering, and it’s hard to imagine those works occurring otherwise.
I’ve also been watching the music video for Gang of Youths’ “Magnolia” over and over again. So that’s what this is about.
I was first introduced to “Magnolia” through Odette’s Like a Version cover. Based on the lyrics, I assumed this was one of those “take an upbeat pop song and slow it down for the dramatic tension” covers that, while maybe overdone, are overdone for a reason. I further assumed that I wouldn’t like the original song, because I keep telling myself that “upbeat pop song” is generally not my thing despite the mounting evidence to the contrary.
However, I do enjoy looking up the originals for covers I really like just to confirm how much better the covers are, so after listening to Odette’s version a few times I eventually listened to (and watched the video for, since it was the first result) the original Gang of Youths version. I was right about upbeat, but it’s more rock than pop, and I honestly enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.
More than that, though, there was something about frontman Dave Leaupepe’s performance in the video that I found really compelling. His loose, exuberant movements certainly fit with the vulgar but triumphant “we’re young and don’t give a shit” vibe, but to me that kind of dancing always carries with it a certain sense of desperation. Dance, like any art, is a form of communication, and this type of seemingly unchoreographed, fitful dance implies (again, this is just my interpretation) either someone trying to communicate something but lacking the knowledge to clearly do so, or someone trying to cover up their true pain with showy attempts at a joyful facade.
Hold that thought.
I liked “Magnolia” so much that I got the album it’s on, 2015’s The Positions. As usual when listening to an album for the first time, I had the lyrics up while I was going through it, and I happened to be using Genius.com, which, in case you don’t know, let’s users annotate lyrics with behind-the-scenes factoids, interview excerpts, or just their own critical analysis. So I was reading through some of these annotations and it’s like, hm, this album is much darker than I would’ve guessed. And then I get to “Magnolia.”
The annotations for “Magnolia” quote from a Rolling Stone article on the album: “Dave Leaupepe was on the end of a week-long bender that precluded sleep and eating, but contained plenty of drinking, smoking and vomiting up blood. That afternoon he had a bottle of ‘something terrible’ in his hand – ‘I think it was Southern Comfort, or terrible wine’ – and was stumbling drunk toward a train station, ‘about to do something fucking dumb’. His friends were already on high alert for his welfare, and fearing his intentions called the police, who intercepted the vocalist and took him to rehab… It was, says the singer, one of the darkest periods in his and the band’s life, precipitated in part by the fact his marriage was breaking down.”
So yeah, this fun rock anthem is about a time when the singer was so far gone that he very nearly killed himself. And it’s not like the song hides any of it. The darkness is there right from the first verse—”…I’ve savoured the last / And I’ve kissed it goodbye, there’s no kind of right way / To do what I’ll do”—and “Hold on, officer, I know that I’m a danger to myself” is a pretty straight-forward reference to the intervention that ended up saving him. The dissolution of his marriage is in there too: “…just show me the right things / That I didn’t do, oh, enlighten me now / with impossible love from the former you”, and then, in possibly the darkest line in the whole song, “Just tell everyone I know what I did, I did for us / And in haste, ’cause I’m terrified of dying in vain” (it’s also in the video, which culminates in the destruction of a table set for two). Once I saw it, it was hard to understand how I ever thought this song was a celebration of joyful excess.
And that could be the end of it. A guy suffered, wrote a rock song about it, and I didn’t pay very close attention the lyrics. It certainly wouldn’t be the first song to disguise dark subject matter with an upbeat sound. It’s not happy, it’s sad, the end.
But what if it’s both?
In an interview also quoted in the Genius annotations, Leaupepe had this to say about “Magnolia”: “‘Magnolia’ is about hitting rock bottom, the strange calm and intoxicating freedom of stumbling toward what may be the end with a belly full of booze and lungs filled with smoke and laughing at your predicament like the saddest and freest asshole in the cosmos. I think I wrote this song as an apologetic gesture to everybody in my life that I’d hurt — I think I probably still hope that it’s helped make up for it a little. I felt outnumbered. I felt wretched and wild. All glory. All trash.”
You can see how Leaupepe is viewing the song through the lense of contradictions: sad and free, wretched and wild, glory and trash. That last bit is actually actually echoed in one of the choruses of the song, and those choruses are key to understanding what I think is the fundamental contradiction of the song. Because for all that the verses and pre-choruses pretty faithfully recreate the emotions and events that inspired “Magnolia”, the chorus changes the narrative. In this version, the speaker isn’t on his way to a train station, “‘about to do something fucking dumb'”, but rather he’s “staggering home” because “There’s no way tonight, as far as [he] know[s] / That heaven will take [him]”. This is, I think, part of Leaupepe’s “apologetic gesture.” This rewrite is him saying, “This is what I should’ve done”. There are several different lines that follow this refrain each time it occurs in the song, but I think it’s telling that there’s one line that appears twice: “Show me the way, oh, show me the light”. He’s asking for help and, maybe, for forgiveness.
Leaupepe was able to write a song inspired by personal suffering that acknowledges his unhealthy behavior and even its appeal, but ultimately rejects it in favor of taking a step, however small and staggering, in the right direction. And I wasn’t entirely off the mark with my initial “we’re young and don’t give a shit” interpretation, because it is inherently youthful, not the grand sweeping gesture with which the elderly try to redeem themselves, but the potential of redemption, knowing that if you take that first step now you can take the next one tomorrow, and you have enough tomorrows to eventually make it all the way. The young can always mitigate the agony of self-destruction with the ecstacy of possibility.
I didn’t quite know where I was going with all this when I started, and if I’m being honest, I still don’t. If I had to take a stab at a conclusion it would be this: The “great suffering = great art” equation is problematic insofar as it glorifies art that justifies that suffering, and I don’t think “Magnolia” does that, despite being a pretty great song that came from decidedly great suffering.
Certain of Eventual Failure 