Thoughts On the Books’ “Smells Like Content”

I wrote this a year ago or so for Swoon, rediscovered it wanted to give it a home.

It’s easy to take on a new relationship with a song like “Smells Like Content” after watching it performed: the projector displayed behind The Books (Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto) flashing key words as they play, like a 21st century “Mediate” for geeks; complete with found music and the subtle hint of a swirling hiss of sound escaping hearing range behind the words.

Books “Smells Like Content”

This, combined with what those words actually say throughout the course of the song, is enough to make “Smells Like Content” one of the most intriguing and relevant songs in terms of the human experience. Not only does the gentle hush of the composition contain a sort of stark, digitized progression planted alongside a lone guitar climbing an awkward scale, it reflects the disparate relationship between the physical world and our minds, our language and the things it tries to represent. In this case, we’re given a hint at the outset: “Balance, repetition, composition … Mirrors”. These words are spoken in sequence as if they all mean the same thing, and in some way, the song teaches us that they do.

Care to indulge me while I parse it?

Right off the bat, we know we’re talking about words. Meaning. The relationship between the individual mind forming sentences and the collective subconscious that accepts different languages, inadequate descriptions and slang as being equally valid in terms of communication. The “over-arching paradigm” is comforting, because it means that despite the fact that we’re usually only describing parts, we’re still communicating meaning. This is true whether or not we consider this whenever we are talking to someone - it fits together even if we don’t “perceive of it as such”.

Ever so briefly, we touch on the notion that understanding the world in terms of our relationship to it, even if it is just by a simple consideration of the way we understand each other, generally leads to more complicated issues. In an instant, the comfort of the paradigm is taken away from us, as we try to imagine something like infinity (”the world without end”), a concept that no human mind can truly fathom, the soul (if it exists, a logical and emotional concept tied closely to our fear of the unknown), and perhaps even the chaos that must reign when we attempt to comprehend it, describe it, understand it. We’ve now seen both sides of the same coin, a sort of balance of the scales (taking us back to the opening remark), a mirror: Yes, there is some universal way in which the human experience is common, and language is a crucial part of that truth, yet for all our gifts to each other and all our complex systems of description and communication and knowledge, there are roads for the mind that tangle and bewilder. We are not free, even in thought, when principles that evade the human experience need explaining.

Sure, we can be talking about God, or timelessness, or souls colliding in an alternate universe to become one ethereal being which transcends all comprehension. Or we could be talking about statues bleeding green. The funny thing about the point made in the second verse is that while we can not ever truly describe things that are not a part of the human experience, we can indeed construct them. It would be just as meaningful for me to say “The world is endless, we are merely a speck, no, let’s not even discuss discernible parts, for no part is small enough to help you fathom limitlessness” as it would be for me to say, “Statues are bleeding green.” Personal opinions on the nature of the universe aside, both statements carry some sort of meaning because we understand the words individually, but neither is anything our minds will ever truly conceive of - it seems impossible to conceive of something that our minds can not duplicate or witness. At the very least, we can not describe those things, since it seems clear that we describe experience, not unknowns. We speculate on unknowns, never describe them. The universe is an unknown in many respects, though we recognize a painting of the solar system, stars, meteors: we recognize parts. We recognize, in our mind’s eye, a statue oozing some sort of liquid, the liquid is green. We recognize the parts of that scenario, not the experience of it, since there are no bleeding statues in our experiences.

At this point it’s worth mentioning that there are looming indications of the complexity of the author’s personal relationship to these ideas. ” … With ever increasing faith we decided to go ahead … ” and ” … Like gears inside the head of some omniscient engineer …” will strike a listener as indications of what might perhaps be a mental frustration at the limits of the mind, a hope that there is some grand design that mirrors the composition that is the human experience. While this may or may not be true, at the very least, the songwriter is balancing the existence of the mind and its determination of its experience against the seeming chaos of the world it aches to understand.

As another Chomsky reference (”Meanwhile, we’re furiously sleeping green”) leads us into the next verse and mental transition poetically, it becomes clear that we’re probably in need of some thought on the shout-out. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is Chomsky’s famous attempt to demonstrate language’s lack of a reliable grammatical structure. He claimed that though grammatically correct, the sentence was meaningless, therefore proof that proper grammar does not ensure meaning, and though he hoped for a less probabilistic approach to structure, he ultimately discovered exactly what he hoped to defy: the mind’s ability to find meaning in the meaningless. Countless scholars and — by now — college students have created meaning from his sentence. Some meanings are only expressive to poets and metaphorical minds, some are stretches that begin to wear on the patience: how hard should we have to work to create meaning where there is none? Or does that miss the point entirely? Couldn’t the communication of a seemingly meaningless or non-existent experience still carry some sort of weight in the mind? Surely it can, as Chomsky proved, perhaps by accident. Though the experience of it is absent, it still means something. Not unlike our continual use of words like “God”, “infinite” and “heaven”. They are all outside the human experience, just as bleeding statues are, but the mind is capable of discussing plenty of things it hasn’t known. What they mean is another question entirely.

In the context of the song, Chomsky’s sentence has meaning outside of its combination of words, too. Here, we find Chomsky’s meaninglessness alive with implication and descriptiveness. Here it is, an example of vacancy used to describe a mind’s relationship to its experience. Here is the world’s example of nonsense steeped in implications and placed in the heart of a song that describes the mind. I’m not sure how much more perfect language gets after this. Follow the jump for the complete lyrics.

Most of all the world is a place where parts of wholes are described,
In an over-arching paradigm of clarity, accuracy,
The context of which makes possible the underlying sense of the way it all fits together,
Despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such.

But then again, the world without end is a place where souls will combine,
With an overbearing feeling of disparity, disorderliness,
To ignore it is impossible without getting ourselves into all kinds of trouble,
Despite our best intentions not to get entangled with it so much.

Meanwhile, the statues are bleeding green,
And others are saying things much better than we ever could,
As the quiet suddenly becomes verbose.

And the hail is heralding the size of nickels, and the street corners are gnashing together
Like gears inside the head of some omniscient engineer,
And downward flows the garnered wisdom that has never died.

When finally we opened the box we couldn’t find any rules
Our heads were reeling with a glut of possibilities, contingencies
But with ever increasing faith we decided to go ahead and just ignore them
Despite tremendous pressure to capitulate and fade.

So instead we went ahead to fabricate a catalog of unstable elements
And modicums, and particles with non-zero total strangeness
For brief moments which amount to nothing more than tiny fragments of a finger snap.

And meanwhile we’re furiously sleeping green,
And the map has started tearing along it’s creases due to overuse,
When in reality, it’s never needed folds.

And the air’s withholding the sound of its wellspring,
And our heads are approaching a density reminiscent of the connectivity of the center of the sun,
And therein lies the garnered wisdom that has never died.

Expectation leads to disappointment:
If we don’t expect something big, huge, and exciting
Usually, uh
I don’t know, it’s just not as,

It’s still brilliant.