Social Studies
A Human Condition Whipping Ahead
Jan 23, 2010
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Live For Today
unreleased
The song resonates with me as a celebration of impulsive decision-making, love despite calamity and the tangibility of simple pleasures in a world dominated by long-term endorphin denial. If you live long enough, you lose friends, you lose lovers, it becomes clear that nothing is guaranteed. But sometimes the world offers you moments of blissful simplicity and this euphoria is life's zenith. Let's live for today.
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Mad Decent
unreleased
This is the newest song we've written, and has yet to be recorded for an album. It's about the American ideology of manifest destiny, and the goals of the first European settlers here. I think it's creepy the way America is so sure of itself, unwilling to admit mistakes, and unwilling to admit we don't know everything. It's even creepier that we have built this entire western way of life on the graves of all the people who lived here before us, and we still refuse to fully acknowledge or take responsibility for this sordid part of our past, even as the legacy of our genocide still exists. I've been very obsessed with time, and the inevitability of repeating the same mistakes over and over as part of the human condition.
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Drag A Rake
unreleased
This is about the death of someone very close to me. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer on my birthday, they gave him a couple months to live, and he died two months later. It wasn't one of those deaths where you see it really far in advance and have time to come to terms, or a death that isn't foreseen so that he didn't have a chance to be scared. He wasn't ready to die, and was trying to prevent it up to the very end. I wrote this song about my struggle to try to understand how to be there for him, and come to terms with the entire experience.
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Sparrow
original version appears on This Is The World's Biggest Hammer
This song is about Amelia Earhart. I love to write songs about historical events, especially ones that are deeply rooted in the American subconscious. I think the Amelia Earhart story is especially close to me because I relate to her struggle to succeed (or even be allowed to try) in a male dominated field. I'm also terribly drawn to the tragedy of her story, and how fucked up it is that you have to be lost at sea to be remembered (like how musicians have to die to have their music considered meaningful). It's this weird psychology where horrible awful stories are so much easier to remember than wonderful ones, and how someone's entire life can be boiled down to a bulleted fact sheet.
Where does a band like San Francisco's Social Studies come from and why has it stayed so well hidden? It's probably a mystery that has very little answer, but the sinewy and rich verve that seems to snake through its confident and affected sound is ripe for easy exploration and fanfare. It's a band that believes in great heights and believes that those heights are somewhat scary, but still it leaps off from them without double-checking to see if it's packed a chute. There's not a net below it, but the wind whipping through its head in the fall is enough to make whatever happens next - whether that's the natural progression of growing older or a succinct end to a short existence - just what happens next and nothing to be too worked up over. The wind is glorious enough for it. It's as if we're able to hear salty sea swells in their every movement and we're able to feel the buzz of a good getting' drunk night in Natalia Rogouin's rainy wet singing and the quaint whispers of the passage of time in the melodies and stories. The back story that the band provides for "Mad Decent," a brand new song that is debuting in recorded form here, is a glimpse at the towering thoughts and ideas that she's pressed with when she writes, giving us more than just pithy and sleepy sentiments that offer little depth or meaningfulness. She says of the song, "It's about the American ideology of manifest destiny, and the goals of the first European settlers here. I think it's creepy the way America is so sure of itself, unwilling to admit mistakes, and unwilling to admit we don't know everything. It's even creepier that we have built this entire western way of life on the graves of all the people who lived here before us, and we still refuse to fully acknowledge or take responsibility for this sordid part of our past, even as the legacy of our genocide still exists. I've been very obsessed with time, and the inevitability of repeating the same mistakes over and over as part of the human condition." Within it the song, which carries a pesky synth progression, a gloomy bass line that seems to be looking out over a landscape of broken herds, homes torn to shreds and wooly carcasses lying there rotting after a needless kill, is a line about progress and where we've come as a country, with Rogouin singing, "These dreams are built on old bones." It's a frank reminder of then and now and it's the observational aspect of her unassuming words that showcases the true power of this band - giving us so much substance and a mood to enjoy it within. It feels like a version of the 1960s mod world, slick and handsome, but rebellious and steeped in more contextual graces than is normal. It pulls us to explore further and it pulls us into leaping from great heights as well, liking the trip downward, to land in a crystal blue lake with little splash and hardly any dangerous shock to the system. It all just feels right and exhilarating. Then we towel off and head back up to the cliff and press play before the next fall.
Social Studies Official Site
