sadreads #10: is this the worst it's gonna get?

No, the answer is no.

Recently I finished reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s a depressing page-turner about how one family’s quest for cold hard ca$h fueled an entire epidemic – the opioid one, in case you’re too traumatized by various ‘demics – and about how the members of that family have failed, time and again, to find empathy within themselves when faced with the choice between that empathy and potential money to be made. I read most of this book on an ereader while running (slowly) on a treadmill, which felt like the appropriate speed (pun intended).

One day recently, during the time I was reading this book, but not during the actual reading of it, I decided to put on the 2007 album Red State by the drone-folk band Gowns. This band was Erika M. Anderson’s (aka EMA’s) band before her stunning solo debut Past Life Martyred Saints, which is an album that gives me a genre-transcending feeling of artistic envy. What I mean is this: it’s something I deeply wish I had written, even though I don’t write music very well. Do you know the feeling when something is way beyond your technical expertise, but you still feel a kind of creative kinship with it? Is this total narcissistic bullshit, or is it love? I’m an extremely bad fan in that I find it difficult to commit to purely loving something someone else made, but I have cried to Past Life Martyred Saints more times than I can count because I feel it deep in my metaphysical marrow.

Ok, so I came to the album Red State because I loved EMA’s solo debut so much. My love of EMA meant that when I first listened to the earlier album, I paid way more attention to the Anderson parts than to the parts that were led by the other bandmate, musician/technologist Ezra Buchla. But upon revisiting, I listened to everything very closely, and I realized that this album is not to be taken apart. It is to be consumed whole, and, like a time-release pill of the very Oxycontin that the Sackler-owned Purdue Pharma took such pride in creating, launching, and marketing, you should allow it to work upon you in its own time.

Red State an album about living in a place where everything is so far outside your control that you just stay numb. You are young, full of potential, or so they keep on telling you. But nothing in front of you suggests potential. Everything you see tells you it’s a hard road, if you want to do it right, if you want to do it the way they want you to do it, which you should want to do, or so they say. And you try, though it’s really fucking difficult and draining. But something you can easily do is get high. You can stay up and experience the sunrise as if for the first time, while laughing with your friends, whom you love. And when you do have to sleep, you can do so in your friends’ basement, where there’s an American flag over the window that blocks the sun from hitting you in the eyes. And once you eventually wake up, you can go to work to do the thing you’re supposed to do, and eventually after work, and after you see the people you need to see to fulfill the obligations of your life, you can do everything again, only it’ll be slightly uglier. And this way you watch your life go by. Your money disappears, and your teeth get worse, and everything is a nightmare, though you certainly find beauty where you can. We are tenderhearted creatures; we see beautiful things and we appreciate them. But beauty is not redemptive. It’s not anything. It’s just another moment, dust floating through the air, golden but already gone. And this is what the album is about.

So pairing Red State with Empire Of Pain was an absolutely perfect combination. One is a book about one of the richest families in America profiting off of a number of growing black holes that are fed by a demand of their insanely potent narcotic analgesic, and the other is an album about human beings living inside of one of those black holes. I grew up in Florida, which is a state that's both been run by morons and hit hard by the opioid epidemic. I knew people who got hooked on Oxys and either slowly frittered away their futures, or wrapped their cars around trees driving while oversedated. I watched people nod out on weeknights; I saw a boy light a cigarette, then close his eyes and let it burn to the filter without ever lifting it to his lips again. I've seen the light above me, baby, and the rope, sing Gowns. Something about seeing one’s own beauty and demise at once. Something about the unanswerable call of the void that we nevertheless try to answer with every little self-negating gesture. That’s what the pharma company is selling, and why it should be taken to task.

I don’t have any good lessons to impart, or anything to tell you about the responsibility of the artist outside of a desire to witness, something I feel which is steeped in self-loathing (let’s talk about this privately). But I recommend this pairing very much.