Do You Mind? (4:07)
Punchy. Forced. Thoroughly insipid. Trying a bit too hard. You know your track’s in trouble when the electric guitar is the most endurable part of it.
In short, yes, I do mind.
(This has been an installment of Track by Track.)
Album rank so far:
Ray Anderson had a company; it made carpets. Manufacturing these carpets required using large amounts of petroleum in a way that was destructive to the surrounding environment (“in short: digging up the earth and converting it to pollution”, according to Ray). For this, he was called out in a book called The Ecology of Commerce.
There are two things that impresses me about Ray. He reacted to criticism by actually reading the book and looking into the criticism to see if it was true and what he could do about it. And he turned his company around completely to the benefit of every single party involved. And Ray’s not a poser — he started this work in 1994, long before “sustainability” became a buzzword, and he’s taking his sweet time getting it done, as opposed to thinking that if we just swap some light bulbs and pay people not to fly, we’ve done all we could and should.
It’s so cheap nowadays for people in Ray’s position to lean in this direction without meaning it that it’s difficult to understand the sort of character that it must take to come to that conclusion while being attacked about it publicly, before people didn’t think as much of it as they do now. I wish such patience and willingness wasn’t in such low demand.
Blasphemy (4:20)
Calm, collected, quirky, well sung. The perfect apology for the previous track. So full of interesting lyrics I’m just going to quote it.
“The cellophane around my mouth stops the anger seeping out.” “Bite your tongue, the torrid weapon, you could learn a useful lesson.” “Words cut like a knife through vaseline, you can’t really mean what you mean when you say what you say, Tourette’s make them come out that way.” “What’s so great about the Great Depression? Is it a blast for you? Cause it’s blasphemy.”
(This has been an installment of Track by Track.)
Album rank so far:
Terahertz waves might tear apart DNA strands. So yeah, I’m voting no.