head + wall, 2 ways

Sometimes listening to music makes me feel like a schizo.

I fell in love with Black Flag (and Henry Rollins) when I heard this song. What it had anything to do with a fifteen-year-old suburban white girl is absolutely nothing, which meant absolutely everything as to why I fell so hard for it. None of the punk I had heard - not even the Sex Pistols, who were too entrenched in their theatricality and their Dadaistic nihilism, or the Ramones, who were really playing straight-up bubblegum pop with some of the edges torn off - had come close to this kind of rage, this auditory equivalent of ripping out your own stitches, of pouring vinegar into an open wound. This music freaked me out, and I didn't know what to do with it, so I kept listening.

But at the same time I discovered Elliott Smith, the posthumous hero of the melancholy, and listening to him just made me cry and want to write poetry or something, but I knew that nothing I would write could ever come close to the near-holy fragility of this song. Elliott Smith, to me, was the embodiment of everything beautiful, and everything sad, and everything that needed to be fixed but probably never would be.

And then, four years later, I discovered that Heatmiser, Elliott Smith's band before he went solo, had a song called "Rest My Head Against the Wall," which made me seriously excited, because guess what? Black Flag has this crazy song called "Beat My Head Against the Wall"! It was like the angry youth and the depressive, which had both somehow weaseled their way inside of me, had found common ground through the shared activity of doing things to walls with your head.

I can't find a video of "Beat My Head Against the Wall," but assuming you watched the "Rise Above" video, it should be easy for you to imagine Henry Rollins not only singing/yelling about beating his head against a wall, but actually doing it, probably quite frequently.

But here's the Heatmiser video. This song, to me, is absolutely perfect. Nothing better embodies that apathetic '90s languidness that just makes you wanna rock a crushed velvet slip dress and a leather choker and some pleather platform boots.

So actually, it's kind of a revealing psychological assessment. Are you a Head Beater or a Head Rester?  Leather or plaid? Straight edge or Vicodin? Take your pick.