#stole the image off of google for visualization so I remember what the fuck a 'cake mania' is when I look through my blog again later

[jestiamy]

??? just rediscovered cake mania to the max. this, tetris, and pong was like the only thing I did in my spare time as a kid before I got a phone and got like actual hobbies

[pityrodeo]

On “Alcohol”

This is a 2017 adaptation of an introductory essay I wrote in 2015 for a digital publication produced in response to the song “Alcohol” by the trio Sisyphus, and its accompanying music video.

It is significant enough for a song to accomplish all that rhythm, melody, words, and performance can attain when employed together; for a companion video to lend further artistic merit is a triumph of its own. “Alcohol”—the concluding song on Sisyphus, the self-titled LP by the über-collaboration formerly known as s / s / s—is a force, and quite possibly the fiercest piece that David Cohn (as Serengeti), Ryan Lott (of Son Lux), and Sufjan Stevens have made together in their sporadic encounters. By pairing a disturbing electronic sonic palette and relentlessly vulnerable lyrics with an engaging animation of the human experience, Sisyphus achieves an audio and visual construction in “Alcohol” that is uniquely powerful among their respective eclectic catalogues.

Examining the song’s aural makings is a useful place to start. The lyrics contain a deeply distressing admission by the narrator of the trauma he’s endured with his lips at the glass—“The message in question/ Disease in my knees/ Was it alcohol alcohol alcohol alcohol”—especially due to his parents’ tendencies for drinking and addiction (“They were divisible/ Living invisible/ Clinical/ Pivotal/ Biblical/ Medical pinnacle/ Criminal/ Difficult miracle/ Fucking embarrassing”). Phallic bottles churn poison throughout his body, warp his mind, and twist his soul, yet the chronicler can’t resist the resulting comforts, even as he treads the wake of the terrors his family left him in: “I can feel you beside me/ I feel you around me/ Equation is algebra lesson/
Confession/ I need you/ Be near me/ I kill you/ … I want your protection/ ... I wanted to like you.” The music itself is aggressive for the majority of the track: a robotic beat and a dark, descending bass line grip at the listener’s attention, as Serengeti raps a highly in-rhyming ramble, each line punctuated by the repetition of a single word (e.g. “Tylenol,” “Al-Anon,” “protocol,” etc.). Barely a moment is spared from the spoken triplet eighth-note words for the first quarter, but eventually a more charming progression lightens the drum-and-bass pattern for a while and, bookends a smaller pause of static that ends with an amusing “fuck this shit!” by ‘Geti. Indeed, humor is at times the only balm for processing lasting trauma, which Cohn is especially adept at in his previous releases. 

And then, abruptly following the final official lyric, “I’ll suck out your soul with the Devil’s integrity/ I’ll suck at your dick with the Devil’s integrity,” the looping beat takes hold again for just over two whole, stubborn minutes—only to bloom into an incredibly cosmic climax. The soundscape flowing around the drums lands somewhere between the glistening piano-pop of Coldplay’s X&Y and Stevens’ and Son Lux’s electro-symphonic albums The Age of Adz and Lanterns, respectively. Stevens begins to sing with an indiscernible, haunting wail, perhaps the subconscious voice behind the narrator’s monologue at an instant of momentous clarity: “I am not my father/ I am not my mother/ You have to discover/
We are sisters, brothers.”* And then, as suddenly as it started, “Alcohol” concludes with a sustained, synthetic tone, ending the album hesitantly.

Yet the song’s life is two-fold, for the companion lyric video made by John Beeler of Asthmatic Kitty Records, with help from John Gilpin, Grey Gordon, and Hannah Riffe, not only stands for itself for its tantalizing power, but amplifies the evocations already generated by the content and nature of the recording. While trimmed somewhat from the album recording—the isolated beat mid-video doesn’t simmer quite as long—the format is simple: for every beat of the meter, a new image is displayed, for about one third of a second each, in continuous succession. It views like a child swiping through an entire photo library as fast as she can, or a lagging, dissonant animation by someone who stumbled upon leftover prints at a one-hour photo department. The images vary widely in quality and content—some are finely rendered photographs, many appear to be pixelated screenshots of online media or scanned prints from family and friends, and a few fall into far less natural categories. There are three images that are sustained for longer than a beat, including the red-on-white all-caps lyrics, frozen TV static, and melting SMPTE color bars. There is but one duplicate image—curiously, a gas-masked protestor with a smoke canister—though it is cropped slightly closer for its second appearance. In all, there are 619 images presented in the “Alcohol” video. 

On the one hand, the onslaught of pictures seems random, as if made using automation of some sort; on the other hand, each image had to come from somewhere, ripped from its context, much like a search engine’s results list. Even still, certain themes do appear: glistening newborns, vomiting partiers, portraits with disconcerting facial expressions, Sisyphus paraphernalia, and (most predictably) those engaged in drinking the many forms of the song’s namesake—everyone from animals, to college kids, to the famous actors, presidents, and Internet memes of the modern world, all engaged in toasting, drinking, or making a mess of alcoholic beverages. Despite these few commonalities, the variety of imagery presented throughout the video is overwhelming, to say the least, and part of its emotional impact derives from that pictorial enormity.

Not much is clear about the film’s genesis, what motivated its form and content, or why perennial fashion magazine Vogue debuted the off-putting video on Valentine’s Day, 2014. But most mysterious is the way it manages to produce both immense anxiety and peace during a screening, all at once. The formation of the Sisyphus trio and their work hints at a model they have perfected, with Stevens describing that “the attribution gets blurry from the start. You might think I wrote the hook, but I probably stole it from ’Geti. And you might think ’Geti wrote the rap, but he probably stole it from Ryan.” The filmmakers took perhaps a similar approach, trawling social media or Google. The multi-dimensional nausea and tranquility the film provides with each viewing is real, and it feels original each time—a result of its visual structure.

The video for “Alcohol” is a curated stream, but not an overthought one. It is impulsive, and paced like the memory reel one experiences while drunk: half-second glances, ideas, and feelings flow with less and less connection (or a diminishing willingness to bother connecting) with every additional sip. In both visual and aural forms, the work acknowledges that in these extreme states—depression, drunkenness, euphoria, mania—you may uncover certain truths, some simple and some life altering, but all long sought after. The only risk is that by the time you balance out, sober up, or “calm it down,” you just may not remember them anymore, having slipped through them so freely. 

Perhaps that’s where Sisyphus comes in—as “three friends in a room having fun and permitting one another the freedom to get smart and get stupid”: “Alcohol” is their reminder that everyone has to learn these truths for themselves: none of us are our fathers or mothers, who even with the best intentions or resources cannot pass all lessons on to us. Nor can our siblings, lovers, friends, mentors, or passing acquaintances, though they too can be potent sources. That the images embody such a thorough chunk of the human condition and creation is significant in showing how we discover the same truths over and over as the centuries roll on. And in a perfect paradox, these truths both weigh each of us down as heavy stones to hold up unaided, yet strengthen us on our very own feet—all at once. 

*The final lyrics presented here are guesswork: nowhere on video, LP print media, nor the wide trove of information that is the Internet was anything other than the suggestion that the ending lyric is “I am not my father” repeated over and over—which is clearly not true, though the third line is indeed far from clear. In any case, these were determined from limited consonant clarity, and slight intuition.

Works Cited

“Alcohol Lyrics.” Genius, 15 Feb. 2014, www.genius.com/Sisyphus-alcohol-lyrics/. Accessed 9 Aug. 2016.

La Force, Thessaly. “Artist Jim Hodges Collaborates with Musicians Sisyphus for His New Survey at the Walker Art Center.” Vogue, 14 Feb. 2014, www.vogue.com/872645/artist-jim-hodges-collaborates-with-musicians-sisyphus-for-his-new-survey-at-the-walker-art-center/. Accessed 13 May 2015.

Lott, Ryan. Interview by Andrew Hannah. “Son Lux on Sisyphus.” The Line of Best Fit. 7 Apr. 2014, www.thelineofbestfit.com/features/lists/son-lux-on-sisyphus-it-sounds-to-me-like-three-friends-in-a-room-having-fun-and-permitting-one-other-the-freedom-to-get-smart-and-get-stupid-148788/. Accessed 13 May 2015. 

“Sisyphus - Alcohol (Lyric Video).” Vimeo, uploaded by Sisyphus, 5 Feb. 2014, www.vimeo.com/85938454/. Accessed 13 May 2015.

“Sisyphus - Calm It Down (Lyric Video).” YouTube. uploaded by SisyphusVEVO, 19 Dec. 2013, https://youtu.be/dVVvgFWn14c/. Accessed 13 May 2015.

Stevens, Sufjan. Interview by Dan Johnson, Paul Schmelzer. “On Sisyphus: Sufjan Stevens discusses Jim Hodges’ art and the new name for his S/S/S trio.” Walker Magazine, Walker Art Museum, 19 Dec. 2013, www.walkerart.org/magazine/2013/sufjan-stevens-sisyphus-jim-hodges/. Accessed 13 May 2015.