Of Jeff and Jules

One of the best parts of being a human is experiencing sensation to the extent that you transcend, however fleeting, the experience of the other 23.92 hours of your day. Lots of other living creatures can experience pleasure, so perhaps what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to blog about these sensations.

Anyway, every so often, if you're lucky, you experience a medium, whether human-created or a natural phenomenon, that enables a heightened sense of union with the moment in the world around you, and leaves you wishing you had more ears, or eyes, or hands. That's why we do things like listen to music, isn't it? Under these pretenses, I submit to you the act of experiencing the art of Jeff Lynne, and the not-yet-released solo debut of Julian Casablancas, of Strokes and Lower East Side fame.

Jeff Lynne could be deemed the godfather of modern synth-pop (as opposed to ancient synth-pop). I remember reading one critic's claim that Lynne had all the pop sensibilities of Lennon but "took it to outer space" or something. To the extent that it is true, as he's often associated with Xanadu, which he did the soundtrack for, and other Xanada-esque things of the early 1980s, it's only half-true. I like to think Lynne had "all the pop sensibilities of Lennon" (meaning he could write a decently structured song with a catchy enough hook) and brought it to the basement. As in basement party, with lots of earnest men in yellow plaid wool suits with mischievous glints in their beards, and the sweet-talking women who didn't take any shit, unselfconsciously wearing powder blue dresses they'd sewn themselves. Everyone's drinking the punch and there are drugs rolled, smoked and snorted behind that door over there, and that guy might sled down their stairs in his briefs, but everyone is just wading in that sweet sweet technicolored sea of ELO's combination of strings, Minimoog and beats heavy enough to move a train.

Given that Julian Casablancas is associated more with post-millennial urban ennui than "chill times" per se, he and Jeff "Synth Opera" Lynne may seem like strange conceptual bedfellows. Not so, I assure you. Jules (as he will be referred to henceforth) has a similar knack for carving an immaculate melody from plastic, while bringing it to life with a level of depth of insight and compassion perhaps surprising to those who dismiss Jules and his Strokey cohorts merely as being too preoccupied with "cool" and its leather jacketed conventions. Along those lines, J.C. seems pretty damn self/world aware for a kid who grew up in the midst of the moneyed elite of the Upper West Side.

Jules begins "11th Dimension", the lead single from "Phrazes For The Young":

I just nod, I've never been so good at shaking hands I live on the frozen surface of a fireball Where cities come together, to hate each other in the name of sport [ahem]

before further extrapolating on the nature of the human experience at this point on the post-apocalptic (?) time-space continuum:

No one really cares or wonders why anymore
Oh I got music, coming outta my hands and feet and kisses/
That is how it once was done
All the dreamers on the run



Perhaps what really places Jeff and Jules hand in hand in my mind is not just their love of heavy machinery, but the epiphanies of late youth they place carefully inside the beats and synths. Around age thirty, both come to zen-like, pacifist conclusions about the act of living:

"Your faith has got to be greater than your fear" and "Forgive them even if they are not sorry" from Jules' "11th Dimension" and


"I have fought in the holiest wars,
I have smashed, some of the holiest jaws.
Ive been jailed, been impaled, and been dragged through the world.
One thing, I have learned through these years,
Is that no man, should be stricken with fear.
It should be that he walks with no care in the world.
So my friends, who are gathered today,
Hear this clear, for Ill not further say.
That no man, shall cause me to take up arms again"

from ELO's "Boy Blue", 1976.


If that's not transcendence, I'll still be wishing I had more ears.