When you wake up with a Bon Jovi song in your head, like I did this morning, you know you’re hurting for some good new music. Of course, there are a lot of snags in the world today surrounding any thus endeavor, many of which were outlined in Will Butler’s recent essay “The Joe Rogan Controversy Has a Deeper Cause,” which recently appeared in The Atlantic surrounding the Neil Young/Spotify fiasco.
I mean, really, I don’t even have to ask: I know my second favorite band of all time still loves rock and roll (that should give a clue who my favorite is) but they can’t afford to record a new album and don’t anyway see it as a lucrative project. Their last album, Stitches (2013), still stands as a benchmark model in sound and folk-rock expansion, existing almost the whole time on this surreal plane of melody and texture. It brought us classic songs like “Frosted Tips”; “Magdalene” and “A Thin Skin of Bullfight Dust”; in other words. But it also sounded completely fresh and renewed on a sonic level, which makes it even more disheartening to me that they’re evidently removed from music, professionally speaking, at this time.
For some reason, anyway, amidst the neverending gaggle of songs in their catalogue I adore, I got to thinking of “Million Dollar Funeral” last night, a sub-three-minute folk-pop etude that graces their standout second album Quicksand/Cradlesnakes (2001). Like many Califone songs, it’s distinct and indescribable, with, generally, what they do in melding rustic, almost antiquated instrumentation with a direct, digestible update on pop music being utterly mind blowing. In the case of this tune, a fiddle surfaces early and often, presiding over the mix, essentially, like something melancholy and richly American.
Califone, in their salad days, were based in Chicago, which, at least by Midwestern standards, is a relatively materialistic type of place. “Million Dollar Funeral” was probably spawned by singer/songwriter Tim Rutilli watching some news bit about a celebrity funeral of some sorts. The song was borne, then, out of the ugliness he perceives — the massive consumption transpiring around an event whose appeal and meaning is supposed to be spiritual, and what’s more, basic to human existence. “Million Dollar Funeral” is a song that mourns the monetary entity intertwined in our fundamental rites as Americans, which is an ironic thing to perceive in the first place, in a sense. What’s funny, too, is that I don’t even know all of the words to the song. Heck, I don’t even know very many of them. But I know that this is the narrative technique Rutilli is employing by way of proximity — from digesting his “Lap dance for the boys’ choir / One by one” in “Dime Fangs”; and, more wholesomely, the intense sadness and poignancy of the titular mention of “The eye you lost in the crusades” on the cut from their primary classic, Roots & Crowns (2006). After all this analysis, anyway, “Million Dollar Funeral” is free to stalk the earth, in all its eerie, simple potency and emotion, but constantly doomed, bound to that self-defeating realm of a staggering cost placed on the mere “celebration” of an human life, a predicament which also, in a way, is funny.
..
<script async src=“https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-5127494401132808”
crossorigin=“anonymous”></script>