Several years ago, as part of my continuing quest to find Christmas music I don’t hate, I stumbled upon this hidden gem:

Harvey Danger’s “Sometimes You Have To Work On Christmas” just nails the feeling of abject melancholy that comes from, well, having to work on Christmas–a severely under-represented element of the whole Holiday experience (and really, if you’re thinking of, say, going our for dinner and a movie on Christmas day, please think twice; it’s bad enough that the police, EMTs, and other essential service workers have to be on call that day, without a spoiled middle-and-upper-class compounding the yuletide misery of an overworked underclass).^[1]And I swear to God, if you’re one of those assholes who always said that “It’s their choice to work there, if they don’t like it then they should just quit”–only … Continue reading  In the song, the narrator notes the irony of serving movie patrons who come to “spend Christmas alone together”–not to mention the agony of his family being “two time zones away,” while his “vodka and snow is melting/the alcohol isn’t helping.”

That is, I guess he could say that “the agony and irony are killing me.”

Wait, where have we heard that line before?

Don’t even pretend you don’t know the words to Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta,” the perennial late-90s one-hit-wonder to end all late-90s one-hit-wonders–a song still overplayed on the radio to this very day.  It has featured in multiple film soundtracks, British TV shows, Edward Snowden clips, videos of bicyclists beating a minivan, countless karaoke nights, and whatever station your shift manager tuned to in the background at work.  At this point, the question of whether you love, hate, or even feel indifferent towards this song is largely irrelevant; it’s just burrowed too deep into our common cultural consciousness, another tiny part of the air we breath without thinking.

Much like Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,”^[2]“Born down in a deadman’s town/the first kick I took was when I hit the ground”–that is, “Born in the USA” is about the failure of the American dream, the betrayal … Continue reading Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin in the Free World,”^[3]which is also a song about how much America sucks–and written by a Canadian, no less U2’s “With or Without You,”^[4]which is a break-up song–seriously, don’t play this at weddings and The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,”^[5]“every vow you break/every smile you fake” is not the love anthem everyone seems to think it is “Flagpole Sitta” ranks among the most wildly, hilariously misunderstood songs of the American Pop canon–in this case, a sarcastic screed against the empty pretensions of alternative culture (“I want to publish zines, and rage against machines/I wanna pierce my tongue, it doesn’t hurt it feels fine…”) that is persistently misread as a sincere and unabashed homage to the same.  Partly this is the band’s own fault, inasmuch as they wrote an unapologetically joyous earworm of a melody that can’t help–almost in spite of itself–but sound like a celebration of whatever it’s mocking.  Besides, such an ironic misreading seems apropos of a tune that, again, finishes with “the agony and irony are killing me (whoa!)”. 

But enough on a song we’ve all heard a million times already!  For my stumbling upon of “Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas” didn’t just reveal to me that ’90s-trivia-question Harvey Danger actually wrote another song worth listening to (or even another song period), but tripped me down a rabbit hole to discover that, guys–Harvey Danger were actually really good.

For after discovering “Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas” and determining that it needed to be on my Christmas playlist, I quickly learned that the track is available for free download on the band’s own website, as part of a 2009 B-Side and rarities collection called Dead Sea Scrolls (the fact that it wasn’t available for sale anywhere else tells you all you need to know about Harvey Danger’s post-Flagpole-Sitta popularity–though unjustifiably, as you hopefully soon may see).  I downloaded the whole album just to get the one Christmas song; nevertheless, it wasn’t long till my idle curiosity got the best of me, and I gave the other 13 tracks a cursory listen.

How do I describe what happened next?  Did they benefit from my utter lack of expectations?  Is that a back-handed compliment? Or, conversely, does that mean I engaged them with an open mind free of hype?  In any case, from that cursory listen, I suddenly found myself listening to Dead Sea Scrolls with rapt attention from beginning to end–and then again–and again–and again.  It sure didn’t sound like a B-Sides collection, no–it sounded like the best album I’d heard in years.

This is especially important, because I had at the time been catching up with an old college buddy, wherein we lamented about how the perennial experience of our early-20s–that of discovering some gorgeous new album that transports you outside of yourself–was one that neither of us had felt in several years.  Oh sure, we tried to keep up contemporary music when we could; but though we could learn to appreciate much of it, little of it swept us off our feet like when we were just a little younger.  Indeed, we quietly worried that we would never have that experience again, that maybe we couldn’t have it again.^[6]Studies have shown that most people don’t get into anymore new music after the age of 30 Maybe, sadly, we had finally outgrown the possibility of having that experience with music, as our brains slowly calcified into old age.

I hope that gives some context to my hyperbolic statement that to finally have that experience again with Dead Sea Scrolls was a bona fide Christmas miracle for me.

Intrigued at this incredible find, I quickly dug deeper.  On that same free download page, I learned that in 2005–five years after the utter flop of their second album King James Version had sealed their place in the dubious pantheon of one-hit-wonders–Harvey Danger had attempted to embrace this whole newfangled file-sharing thing by offering their third album Little by Little for free online.  Wilco had similarly revived their flagging career in 2001 with the much more renowned Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Radiohead would do the same to even greater acclaim just two years later with 2007’s In Rainbows; by contrast, Harvey Danger’s much more modest success with “over 100,000 downloads” and selling “most of” the ensuing physical copies with bonus tracks, gets understandably overlooked in the history of internet-only releases–which is a shame, because this really is a great album.

I don’t want to oversell this one, it takes at least a couple listens for it to get under your skin; but once it does, you’ll find that “Little Round Mirrors” and “Incommunicado” both sound like songs you’ve always known, that have always existed, and you will be perpetually surprised to realize were only ever released on a largely-forgotten one-hit-wonder’s online crapshoot.  You’ll wonder not only how you ever got along without the de ja vu of these dispatches from some alternate universe Billy Joel, but why on earth they aren’t as much a part of the cultural air we breathe as “Flagpole Sitta.”

And then there’s the album’s masterpiece “Moral Centralia.”

Granted, I’m biased; I went to High School in Centralia, WA, my family moved their when I was 9.  My mother is buried there.  I got an Associates degree there.  I served my mission out of there and reported back to the Stake High Council there. That town is a part of me.  But I left there for college over 15 years ago, and my family moved to Vancouver 10 years ago, thus ensuring that I’ll never live in Centralia again; really, I haven’t given that rundown town much thought since.  But this song revived Centralia within me something fierce; for what Seattle-based Harvey Danger has done is perfectly capture the uncanny feeling that comes from living in a place that is exactly half-way between Seattle and Portland on the I-5–that is, it’s both in the middle of everything and in the middle of nowhere; it is both equally close and equally far from the two most important cities in the Pacific Northwest; the whole world moves right through you while you feel stuck going nowhere when you live in Centralia. You don’t leave Centralia, you escape it.

I had never thought of it this way before, but the town really is the perfect metaphor for that infernal feeling of limbo you feel after a breakup, which Harvey Danger must have felt each time they stopped in Centralia for gas and the bathroom on their way down to Oregon.  “When wicked thoughts come inter alia/You wind up in Centralia, morally” they sing, and that is not a place you want to wind up, I assure you! 

I now had two full albums by a band I thought I would never listen to more than one song by.  I hadn’t felt obsessed, truly and really obsessed, by a band in too long, so I decided it was time to go all in with Harvey Danger.  It won’t surprise you to learn that their “Flagpole Sitta”-featuring debut Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? was available for only a penny on Amazon, and King James Version for not much more, so I easily got my hands on both.^[7]No I did not want to just stream them, I wanted to own them, on CD, like God intended of all ’90s acts!

On KJV: it didn’t take me much googling to find that I of course was never alone in realizing that Harvey Danger was amazing, nor that they had a cult following as passionate as it was small–and that among the faithful, KJV is considered their magnum opus.  The band clearly desired it to be understood that way–like the Bible translation it is named for, KJV is a self-conscious attempt to present the Authoritative Version of the band’s sound, to be the OK Computer to Merrymaker‘s Pablo Honey.

That of course is not what happened; KJV sunk like a stone and got them dropped from their label for good. That’s not to say that KJV isn’t an achievement on its own terms; it has far more ambition than Merrymakers, and far more fully develops their aesthetic that was first introduced by “Flagpole Sitta”: what has often been labeled in certain literary circles as the Post-Ironic. Perhaps KJV‘s “Sad Sweet Heart of the Rodeo” might help illustrate what is meant by Post-Ironic: the lyrics and video tell the story of a city-girl who pines for the wild-life of the rodeo.  The topic of many a Country song, for sure, but this is a Punk anthem by a leftist Seattle-based Indie band, and thus that yearning is written from that distinct perspective–it is a reexamination of rodeo culture by those who are otherwise most suspicious of it.  In the song, she is mockingly lectured by her boyfriend that “The Marlboro Man died of cancer/And he wasn’t a rocket science when he was alive”, to which she responds with a derisive “ha-ha-ha.” 

That is, the ironic deconstruction of the rodeo mythos is in turn ironically deconstructed with that laugh. The irony has been ironized. She craves the rodeo life not because she doesn’t understand the irony of it, but precisely because she does, and is tired of it. 

Yet for as much as Harvey Danger sang that “irony is killing me” on their sole hit, they fully understood why irony was so desperately needed in the first place.  KJV‘s opener “Meetings With Remarkable Men” describes a dinner with Jesus Christ himself, who had “two words about inanity/fundamental Christianity,” which was an alarmingly prescient prediction of the havoc that fundamentalist evangelism would wreck upon the U.S. electorate over the course of the new millennium.  That is, Harvey Danger understood the danger of fundamentalism that irony needed to deconstruct, even as they likewise recognized that irony alone is insufficient to create new meaning in its place. (The song is also a prophetic warning against the fetishization of so-called “Great Men,” and all the destruction such uncritical adulation can cause; as they also sing on their standout track “Wooly Muffler,” “If you’ve got greatness in you/why don’t you keep it to yourself “).

Closely related to fundamentalism, the other recurring theme in their oeuvre is cinema: the very first track on their very first album, “Carlotta Valdez,” is a tongue-in-cheek retelling of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film about deconstructing (and then reconstructing) false appearances; on KJV‘s gorgeous centerpiece “Pike St./Park Slope“^[8]a piano ballad that presages Little by Little, and that was covered by fellow free-download pioneers Bomb the Music Industry!, the singer asks his crush “Maybe we could run away and start a little repertory movie house or something;” and of course on “Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas,” the narrator is opening that very repertory movie house on Christmas day.  Like irony, cinema is both the solution and the new cause of all your problems–just as Christmas is both what you need and what hurts you most all at once.

But just where does one find the Post-Ironic, the new sincerity?  I am willing to make the argument that in their very last single, released in 2010 on their free download page a full year after their final show, they find a hard-won resolution.  Almost too on the nose, it is entitled “The Show Must Not Go On.”

This song, by the way, is their best one, and that’s saying something.  Though obviously a final kiss-off to the music industry (if they couldn’t succeed on their own terms, they determined to at least end it on their own), the lyric’s are about finally getting over a long-lost crush–and my goodness, that is a song I could have really used multiple times throughout my teens and 20s.  Even as I am now happily married and my torrential 20s have long faded into the rear-view mirror, this song can’t help but conjure up those old feelings once more: “You can bash your head against a wall for years/The wall is not impressed”; “It’s not hard to see a beautiful girl/And imagine the life that you could have with her”; “So much of what we so grandly call love, is simply in our heads”; and “You can try, try, you’ll never read her mind/Which is fine, fine, cause she cannot read yours”, are all lines I wish someone had once said to me. 

Moreover, that song, I think, is the purest expression of the Post-Ironic ethos: wherein you use irony not to deconstruct others’ illusions, but your own; not to self-detach from life, but to finally reintegrate into it again; not to mock or parody the performance (as they unsuccessfully tried to do in “Flagpole Sitta”), but to end it.  This is not finding escape in either the empty spectacle of rote religious observance or of cinema, but in getting up and leaving the theater altogether for the fresh light of day.  That is how you make it so that “the agony and irony” are no longer killing you.

And that is how you find meaning again, even if you have to work on Christmas–not by ironically mocking or self-detaching from the holiday, but by letting Christmas be meaningful enough to hurt you in the first place.  And because missing Christmas can wound your soul, you now know that you have one, and you can feel again, and feel passionate and ecstatic and free again–as we behold in that wild, wonderful second-half and outro to “Sometimes You Have to Work On Christmas,” where, in spite of all the lyric’s malaise and depression, the band still jams out in joyous celebration…^[9]And if anyone wanted to truly surprise and delight me on Christmas morning, if you could find me a copy of the ultra rare vinyl LP for Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone, it would be enough to make … Continue reading