Many people are prone to ask: were Gainesville, FL's I Hate Myself a "joke band"?
Surely any band with such a name that shrieks lines like "60 watts, brighter than my future / An empty forty, fuller than my life" or "I can survive.../ but I don't know / if I want to" had to be making fun of 90's emo bands' penchant for childish melodrama, rather than a sincere expression of such. If he were being earnest, the singer clearly would have offed himself long ago, right?
Or so the line of thinking goes.
This mindset is inherently reductive and useless. To be certain, the band's lyrics were often self-deprecating to the point of being comically over the top. But to suggest that they could only be one of two things, a detached put-on drenched in irony or a sincere cry for help from someone with a major depressive disorder about to blow his head off, betrays a total blindness to the band's modus operandi, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of capital A art.
Any listener worth his salt will realize that I Hate Myself's lyrics are written from a specific narrative voice necessarily distinct from the real life human being who wrote them. This is a voice where fact and fiction are blurred together, where legitimate Bad Feelings and black humor are two necessary sides of the same coin. There is a point deep in the depressive cycle where one realizes that his or her depression is so extreme as to become totally absurd and, in a fucked up sort of way, actually really funny. This is the emotional space from which I Hate Myself send their lyrical dispatches. And to insist on determining their real-world veracity refuses to acknowledge the band as the artists they are. IHM are at once serious and joking, crying and laughing, "real" and "fake". It cannot be otherwise.
Okay, you can now forget about all of that nonsense, because not much of it really applies to the EP in question. Three Songs was I Hate Myself's final recorded output, released well after the rest of their catalog. It makes sense, then, that it is a departure from their earlier work. These three tunes use lightning as a metaphor for the intense power of love and longing, but not in the way you might expect. This is the story of a love affair between a man and a lightning bolt.
Roy Sullivan holds the world record for number of times being struck by lightning. Seven. Seven times (which, once we know he was a veteran park ranger, is only slightly more understandable). And he survived them all. Three Songs'...well, songs... are written within this narrative framework. The lightning, for whatever reason, is romantically attracted to Roy, and he must deal with the destructive consequences of this attraction. IHM handle this concept with lyrical depth and precision, if not subtlety. On the final track, the lightning is given a chance to speak, and simply pines "I love you / Love me too" as the song builds to a crescendo.
But then again, Roy Sullivan himself knew a thing or two about how it feels when someone cannot love you back. At the age of 71, despite surviving more lightning strikes than any human being in recorded history, he chose to end his life over an unrequited love. Go figure.
Is this bliss? (256)
