“On Sebadoh’s ‘Tree’ and the Death of the Romantic Comedy”

Clearly, the overall tinge of this post is destined to be rather dark, so I think I’ll open on a more positive note, just discussing this song, itself. It features as track five on The Sebadoh (1999), Sebadoh’s most underrated album and I’d even say their best. “Tree,” as it were, for me, taps into a certain psychological phenomenon, I’d even vouch. What this phenomenon caters to, specifically, is a right brain/left brain discrepancy. My left brain has almost no use for this song as it’s not “cool,” in the traditional sense. I mean, it’s really wimpy and sappy, for Christ’s sake. It’s like a romantic comedy, in other words. Then I hear it, though, and it’s just SO cool. The guitar sound is da** near immaculate and Lou Barlow’s voice, though clear and gentle, has enough rustic machismo to lend itself to something amounting to “rock and roll,” a space occupied adeptly by this tune as well as that of “balladry.” So in other words, even though logic, or the “left brain,” denotes that it would not be a good song, its genuineness and uniqueness shine through upon an active listen, leading to a reinvention of the self, of sorts, something the “right brain” would handle.

Part of what I am trying to prove in this post is that a song like “Tree” is not possible to write, record and perform, today, as it was in the 1990s, just as the romantic comedy, too, has phenomenologically fallen by the wayside. This is, of course, notwithstanding various sophomoric claims that Bridesmaids (2011), Knocked up (2007) or one of its contemporaries qualifies as a legitimate romantic comedy. On the press release banner for Bridesmaids it says “Chick flicks don’t have to suck.” And sure, beginning a movie with a sex scene is a great way to attract fray boys and other lowbrow detritus who would be otherwise uninterested in a movie handling unique, sensitive perspectives and personae. Unfortunately, it also disqualifies it from being a romantic comedy, or “chick flick,” if you prefer, as the base, mammalian screenplay obliterates any potential for the fostering of intricacies and uniquenesses prevalent in ironic but memorable social situations. It subverts the essence of the genre, in other words.

So I think all would agree, that the romantic comedy, the likes of Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, As Good as it Gets, Say Anything and High Fidelity, is a relic of a bygone era, a museum exhibit, at this point, as it were. The movie industry today is dominated incredibly by horror and action, the “action” typically amounting to some inane reboot of something that was originally meant for little kids, of course, like Spider-Man or Transformers. Now, this transformation into the simple and even barbaric may have something to do with what astrologers have long marked as the switch from Pisces to Aquarius, in terms of what constellation the sun shines through on its path to earth. According to Nandini Marson of medium.com, the “Age of Pisces,” which “has shaped human history for around 2000 years, and is slowly coming to an end… (was when) human beings engaged more than ever in the matters of the soul.” Marson then goes on to explicate that Aquarius, which according to rough estimates began around 2000 (tellingly the dawn of file sharing in music) and “symbolizes the time of discovery, innovation and progress.” Somewhat problematically, Marson seems to demarcate between “progress” and “the soul,” painting this phantom “soul” element, in turn, as apparently some sort of foolish, ephemeral and unimportant goof-off, as it were. And personally, I don’t even like using the word “soul.” But it can be assimilated with “right brain,” is a sense, in that it fosters rediscoveries of the self and of new meanings in this life — things escaping “logic” in their functions and infrastructures, in other words. Obviously, all of the special effects and portrayed physical achievements in the puerile comic book films would more closely mimic an age of quantitative, tactile “progress” than one which valued spirituality or deep, existential meaning. This current Aquarian age would look down on the Piscean manifestation of the “romantic comedy” as unremarkable in that the functional tenets of the plot are, within its scope, mundane. The erstwhile “art” of two people meeting, interacting and discovering each other in a unique or special way has been rendered mundane by a morphed value system. The new, Aquarian value system dictates a uniformity across all romantic relationships — they are all the same, mean the exact same thing and are composed of the exact same, ostensibly mammalian elements, as it were. This explains the sex scene to open “chick flick” Bridesmaids, something which never could have occurred successfully within Pisces (French Noir might be a notable exception), and that reminds the viewer that, at this point, this is the only aspect of a relationship or of a romance that TRULY matters.

The next, more challenging, necessary point to prove will be that, just as a romantic comedy is impossible in this day and age, at least as we traditionally understood them, so too is Sebadoh’s “Tree” an exercise in futility, temporally speaking, or “anachronistic.” (And in a way it would make sense for the most notable Piscean example of “romantic comedy rock” to occur RIGHT BEFORE the astrological transition, in 1999, as this combustive point within the cosmos would naturally call for a sort of poignancy, or celebration of, the impending death of the present zeitgeist, kind of like the well-lit “event horizon” forming the contours of a black hole.) This will be especially challenging, and even downright problematic, as, in this day and age, it seems the only viable subject matter of a popular rock song IS the romantic relationship. We’re in the age of The Lumineers and Chris Stapleton, after all — probably the two most popular rock musicians on the planet circa 2022, and each beholden pretty much exclusively to songs about romance. It’s like a reduction of a numeral system to “base two” — you’re either with the girl or you’re not. All other facets of existence are rendered moot.

But, ironically, this type of element would also, in a sense, debilitate the synergy of a “romantic comedy,” of the point of a romantic comedy is to enlist ironies and sundry “comedic” entities within a dating or love endeavor (hence potentiating the “comedy” element of the genre’s name). If love between two people is purely mammalian and uniform across all instances, then, there’s no potential for the “black sheep” element of “comedy” — the appeal in the very apparent impossibility of the situation, like the old curmudgeon in As Good as it Gets finding his heart melted, or a janitor in Good Will Hunting attracting an M.I.T. grad student.

We seem to be making progress toward the natural revelation that an element of “comedy” presides in “Tree” (along these lines, comedies themselves seem to have pretty much fallen by the wayside in film, with producers often preferring bastardized sequels to Super Troopers, This is Spinal Tap, Clerks, et. al.). One way in which comedy does manifest in this tune is that, at its core a metaphor is sovereign. He’s obviously singing about a relationship with a girl, yet the song is entitled “Tree,” metaphoric of the relationship’s variant ability to grow and prosper as a phenomenon, in and of itself. At its core, sure, it’s a serious song, but the “Tree” imagery also grants it an artistic, non-logical aspect, and illustrates how romantic love, though apparently uniform in a physical, quantitative sense, can take on multiple meanings, or ulterior identities, in a way that’s vivid and vital. There is also, in “tree,” rampant the idea that the giant plant, with its strong, sturdy trunk and perennial ability to bloom and blossom, is more durable than the average human and will outlive people, and so, ergo, should be consulted as a model of strength and fortitude. Try as we might, in this Aquarian age, we will never become immortal — we’re always subservient to the ephemeral nature of life on this planet, and so it’s sad to see an artistic zeitgeist that values basic, animalistic strength and invincibility, relinquishing what before was the prevalence of comedy in mocking our own prototypical, crushing temporariness.

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