The Metaphysics of The The

Via Wikipedia

Finn Prince

Contributor

What band name grabs your attention more than The The? It’s at once imposing and contemplative. I like to think of it as a nervous stutter: we’re the… the… gosh, I can’t spit it out, chokes frontman Matt Johnson, avoiding eye-contact. On the band’s 1983 debut Soul Mining, Johnson is self-conscious indeed. Anxiety and grief rack his soul. And judging by the cigarette-smoking figure on the cover, his body is in decay too. 

Soul Mining is a fit title. Obviously it’s a clever way to describe Johnson’s introspection. But it also sets you up for the idea that the soul, like your flesh, is something vulnerable to a pickaxe or a drill, and gruesome bodily imagery is all over the record. On the first track, “I’ve Been Waiting For Tomorrow,” Johnson laments being “deformed by emotional scars.” Interesting. A literal scar is usually something tangible. He carries this body-spirit conflation in “Uncertain Smile” on which his soul is declared “broken”. And I’ll never forget the grisly image of heart “chunks” on “The Twilight Hour.” It’s on this track too that Johnson’s emotional need becomes a physical one – he’s “starved of affection.” Clearly, in the metaphysics of Soul Mining the spirit is a part of the body; it can be disfigured and undernourished.

Johnson is so focused on corporal images that he describes his native country, England, as a body; on “The Sinking Feeling” he considers himself a “symptom of the moral decay knowing at [its] heart.” I don’t even think Thomas Hobbes, grandfather of this “commonwealth as a body” idea, took the metaphor so literally. For Johnson, everything is a body. And

“you can scoff, but in his defense, what in his life hasn’t turned either diseased or tired or hungry?”

Not even his consciousness has the benefit of being immaterial. 

It’s funny: the instrumentals on Soul Mining are incongruous with all this doom and gloom. The guitars are optimistic. The drums are sure of themselves. The synthesizers sound like cheap naive things found at the back of the thrift store. Put the album on and you will wonder if this is what the crooks in Home Alone heard when Kevin McCallister’s traps set off; shiny contraptions hide behind every corner and razor-edged doohickeys whizz around your head. Bright pianos, pizzicato strings and mallets make for instrumentation so eclectic it’s silly. Like most of the new wave music of the 80s, Soul Mining is sharp and sanitized, so Johnsons’s lyrics are all the more despairing. 

Do we have to reconcile the liveliness of this album’s music with Johnson’s perspective on the soul? I guess not. If anything, the contrast keeps it all in balance. But it would be satisfying to give the instrumentals a place in Soul Mining’s philosophy, and I think I can: they’re a last bastion of hope. They’re exuberant, they’re sprightly, they’re in tip-top shape. And the melodies are uplifting. They remind you – and probably Johnson too –  that the bodily plane is also that of the discothèque.