onlytheantscansaveusnow

‘i am invincible in these‘ features me doing some improv in a pair of sunglasses while a loop from Sunglasses by Black Country, New Road plays. 

AN INTERPRETATION

(Please do have a listen/read to the track here for context. This is the album version, the single version is quite different.)

The song in my interpretation, describes a meeting between the narrator and his girlfriends father. The narrator describes his ‘in-laws’ as wealthy, middle-upper class, and conservative (‘Mother is juicing watermelons on the breakfast island/And with frail hands she grips the NutriBullet’), all of which is initially recognised as being alien to the narrator. The narrator sits with his girlfriend’s father and we glimpse snapshots of the patriarch’s ideology through talk of ‘mediocre theatre in the daytime / And ice in single malt whiskey at night / Of rising skirt hems and lowering IQs / And things just aren’t built like they used to be’. We might be able to surmise the patriarch’s persona as bourgeois, conservative, reactionary, traditional, nationalistic.¹ Through this opening chunk, the band is sonically luxurious but careful and considered, the vocals and strings cautious and trembling as the narrator discovers more about the man, rising to a crescendo on the threatening ‘The absolute pinnacle of British engineering.’

For, perhaps in spite of himself, the narrator seems entranced by this patriarch and his accompanying worldview – indeed during a dreamlike break where the instrumental slows to a revolving crawl, (‘I’m so ignorant now with all that I’ve learned‘) it seems that the narrator’s actualisation and acceptance of this ideology is achieved by the donning of the father’s sunglasses² (‘a high-tech, wraparound, translucent, blue-tinted fortress’).

Now, the instrumental is drastically different – the intimidating staccato dissonant march that I looped for the experiment – and in this part of the song, the narrator yelps out furious one-liners of narcissistic machismo (‘I am the Fonz, I am the Jack of Hearts’…’I am ‘modern-Scott Walker’ / I am a surprisingly smooth talker / And I am invincible in these sunglasses’) as well as hinting at an agoraphobic, aging, reactionary fear (‘I wish all my kids would stop dressing up like Richard Hell’ … ‘Cars are going “beep, beep, beep”’ … ‘And there are so many roadmen on this street / And they cannot tell that I am scared’).

As the song moves toward its end, the rhythm of the march is echoed by strings and a saxophone – an oppressive, threatening, unified front. The triumph of the ‘sunglasses guy’ has faded away, and the vocalist is left screaming painfully about a more destructive and bleak side of the bourgeois lifestyle he chased his girlfriend’s father for. (‘I’m more than adequate / Leave my Daddy’s job out of this / Leave your Sertraline in the cabinet / And burn what’s left of all the cards you kept’).

¹Also, note the absence of much interest in the girlfriend, instead seeking out association with father as a way to access that patriarchal domination.

²Interesting to think of these sunglasses almost as a perversion of the ‘ideology sunglasses’ in John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) – there, they are tools to reveal the consumerist ideology underneath society, and reveal the ‘truth’ that the bourgeois class, the media and the state are in fact zombie demons as a result of this ideology. Here, however, the sunglasses are an inevitable personification of that ideology, and wearing them binds you to only seeing the world through them.

KEY IDEAS FROM THIS ANALYSIS

1. The sense of transfixion with fascistic ideology, and the inevitability of donning the sunglasses
2. The quality of the instrumental in this section – rhythmic, enforced, strict, abrasive, dissonant, uncomfortable, abrupt, ugly, repetetive, maddening.
3. The characterisation of this ‘sunglasses guy’ as narcissistic, violent and macho while crucially also paranoid, reactionary and fearful.