Jezebel by The Drones

It was almost 20 years ago when I first heard this song and the world tilted. I felt it again driving to get coffee. It was the same explosion that happened when I saw my first Tarkovsky. I didn’t know that anyone could do with film what Dostoevsky did. I didn’t know this medium included anything kin to great literature. I was ignorant, uncultured. Its easy to be with the commercials.  

Jezebel by The Drones hit me like that. The first time I heard it I immediately went to the internet (yes, around, but still youngish … lots more written word then). I found an entire essay just on this song. I bet some version of Chrome tied to my email still has it bookmarked. 

Its a long song and it covers a lot. He begins with Strontium90 being pulled out of milk from nuclear testing and goes on from there. But he is able to weave news and history into mundane life - hanging out the washing and the haunting chorus I can never quite figure out is a love song:

I would love to see you again

I would love to see you again

Is it Jezebel he wants to see? The one who is behind all this? Now the grass lies snakes / has crowds of iodine and fire / On Jezebel’s luminescence … 

I think what he is doing here and certainly, this album and the one prior are a harder edge to blues. I think they take the blues into a new area. There are a few blues artist who enter politics (JB Lenoir, Bill Withers) but mainly it doesn’t go there. Punk and hardcore live in politics and anger. But I think what Gareth does here is more of what the blues in general do. Punk and hardcore seem to want to bring change, make the world better through all that anger and calling people out. But in The Drones there is a sadness and despair and really a resignation that there is no undoing death and destruction.

Here in the lyrics we are in the middle east conflict after 9/11 combining what it was like with biblical images:

I rode an Abrams

And we stopped in Bethlehem

They made the answers here

But there weren't so many questions then

And there I shot a womanIn a headscarf with my gun

She said, "Does my bomb look big in this?Am I the only one?"

Then he switches to her perspective, pulling the switch to ride a thunderbolt … Further on in the song, he talks of the journalist captures in 2002 by Islamic militants. 

Yeah, Dan Pearl

They cut your head off on TV

But I am not a camera

A man is not an effigy

These phrases stick with you for years. I am not a camera and man is not an effigy. Seems to challenge a lot. Like other tossed off phrases that stay with me, El-P of Run the Jewels— baby Jesus didn’t kill hitler / just so I’d whisper.

The song is long and the music is so heavy and unhinged. It feels like something keeps crashing, the way the drummer teases out the cymbals every time he brings in the heavy tom. 

And Gareth voice is clearly Ausi. He doesn’t hide where he is from. And he makes his voice big and break and curdle depending on what he is saying. The heaviness of our age grows and grows. 

But still all this horror

Has made a trench out of my soul

I'm gonna have to fall in love with a blind girl

So she will not see the shame that I know

Walker Percy has an essay called Man on a Train. He talks about how a man riding a train is feeling sad. Whether its existential angst or just not having someone to talk with. But in his bag, he has a novel. The novel’s main character is sad. The man on the train, reading the novel finds easy connection with the character and actually doesn’t feel sad … well does, but now feels known and sad. This connection, even with the fictional character, changes the man on the train’s mood. 

I am not sure it is that easy with such a heavy lyric and performance as The Drones put on with Jezebel. But something happens to me when I listen to it and its not only awe at his lyricism. It reminds me of a favorite Dylan lyric:

if the arrow is straight

And the point is slick

It can pierce through dust no matter how thick

So I’ll make my stand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUnQ3F2Rwq4