Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
Godspeed You! Black Emperor; "Sleep"; from the collection of JK
When and where I was growing up, there were two possible paths for a young man who did not fall into traditional categories of masculinity. You could either be into video games or into music culture. Each path had its own lore, complexities, and trade-offs. Video games came with a side-order of Magic: The Gathering, obscure anime series, and pen-and-paper-RPGs—all things I loved, but didn’t want to be locked into. Music, on the other hand, was less pinned-down, free for exploration, but came with the risk of cliquishness. You had to spend your time with the rock kids, the electro kids; you might be ostracized if you brought the wrong thing back to the wrong group.
I chose music, but there was a short time I attempted to make space for both in my life. And during that window, I spent my time browsing GameFAQs message boards. I was looking for tips about how to get further in Earthbound or Final Fantasy IX, but also to absorb new perspectives and ideas, try on different subcultures for size. It was in the music subsection that I first learned about Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Someone recommended “Lift Yr Skinny Fists…“, and it was my entrée into post rock. Having grown up with Yes and Pink Floyd, I understood the music innately—it was suite-based long song forms, but so much darker or more severe sounding than the proggy stuff I had heard. Like the electronic music I was getting into at the time, there were shortwave radio samples and field recordings and drones. There were violins and cellos and guitars with distortion. It was a new sonic world, replete with dystopian cues—that’s probably why their songs ended up soundtracking 28 Days Later.
And the aesthetics of the record itself! The liner notes had a map of the songs, like a visual score! They had a typewritten web page! The album art looked like it was made of woodblock prints or found images. It gestured at complex, grandiose ideas like anarchism, Qubecois separatism, the record-company-to-military-industrial-complex pipeline. Moreover, their concerts were the stuff of legend, whispered through the corners of the internet—folks who smuggled a camera in never got a good angle, but the sound recordings were choice. I wouldn’t see them until I was in my mid-thirties.
As if the inspiration this record seeded in me wasn’t enough of an important through-line, I’ve got nostalgia for the artifact too. My best friend had the inserts for this album framed on his childhood bedroom wall. Now I have his copy of the record, and I get to think of him each time I take the vinyl out of its sleeve.
Verdict: Keep
If you lifted your skinny fists like antennas to heaven, what would strike them?