Artsculture

David Lynch Is Go

A curious piece of pop music from a singular artist.

By Adrian Mack, 2 Dec 2010, TheTyee.ca

David Lynch

At least it's a good hair day today.

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Outside of the fact that it exists at all, there's nothing too surprising about David Lynch's first solo electronic single, "Good Day Today." He's been at it forever, musically speaking. Lynch is strongly associated with the infernal exotica of his frequent and close collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, while his very first movie Eraserhead featured a painstakingly constructed and widely admired soundtrack by Lynch and Alan Splet that took Fats Waller and ground it into a stomach-churning backdrop of musique concrète. And of course, Eraserhead also had the lady behind the radiator singing "In Heaven, Everything is Fine."

In retrospect, it feels like Lynch's concentrated artistic DNA is revealed in that scene, with its queasy mix of the grotesque and something you might describe as hysterically saccharine. That peculiar binary appears again and again throughout his career. It's there in The Elephant Man's celestial vision of John Merrick's mother, in the goofily mechanical Robin that signals the re-emergence of "normalcy" in Blue Velvet, in Julee Cruise's sickly perfect voice in "Falling," or in the arrival of Glinda the Good Witch in Wild at Heart.

As per so much in the Lynch universe, "Good Day Today" offers an extremely banal sentiment in the shape of Lynch's heavily processed voice pleading to "send me an angel, save me," over a simple but buoyant electronic pulse. Modulating upwards, robo-Lynch goes on to declare, "I wanna have a good day today!" But there's something scratching under the surface; a suspicion supported by blasts of machine gun fire, or the explosive burst of metallic scraping at the very top of the track.

LISTEN TO THIS:

David Lynch -- "Good Day Today"

But it could also mean absolutely nothing. Maybe David Lynch is really just expressing a simple desire. Over at The Guardian, where the song is being hosted, it didn't take long for somebody to ask, "Would we care if it wasn’t David Lynch?" Another argues, "That's the point."

Personally, one listen was enough to get me thinking about how "Good Day Today" compliments the Lynch canon. And I think it contains a sly in-joke. The Guardian mentions a similarity to Crystal Castles, but surely the song's most obvious antecedent is Moby's Twin Peaks-sampling 1991 techno hit, "Go." Others might have missed that, but I wonder if we can say the same for Lynch?  [Tyee]

2  Comments:

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  • comradefrederick

    1 year ago

    Lynch as Sound Designer

    Good article, and thanks for bringing the recording to my attention. You allude to the fact, but it might be worth mentioning explicitly that Lynch has been the sound designer on the majority of his films (though not, interestingly, on Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart). He has also produced albums by Badalamenti, Cruise and others and operates his own record label. So I agree that it's not too surprising that he has issued his own recording. Whether or not it carries the same themes as his other work, i.e., his perverse inclination for stories that are "wild at heart and weird on top," is anybody's guess. But given his predisposition in the last several years toward Transcendental Meditation, perhaps the new record is just his way of offering up a mantra for the beleaguered masses.

  • Adrian Mack

    1 year ago

    Thanks comradefrederick

    "But given his predisposition in the last several years toward Transcendental Meditation, perhaps the new record is just his way of offering up a mantra for the beleaguered masses."

    -- I think you might be onto something with that

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