Music Choices

Courtney Barnett's "Nameless, Faceless" so timely you might regret calling Tomi Lahren "fucking brain-dead"

by Mike Usinger on February 15th, 2018 at 3:17 PM
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      Here’s an interesting question: what would happen if everyone in this increasingly angry world starting taking the high road instead of shitting all over their fellow human beings on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Instagram. and MyLittleBlog.org?

      Give massive props to Australia’s ever-awesome Courtney Barnett for taking a huge step in the right direction with “Nameless, Faceless”, the first single off her upcoming full-length Tell Me How You Really Feel (due out May 18).

      Famous for her lyrically complex indie-rock opuses, Barnett isn’t without bite on the track; consider the chorus (cribbed from no less than Margaret Atwood) where she sings, “I wanna walk through the park in the dark/Men are afraid that women will laugh at them....women are afraid that men will kill them.”

      At the same time, she’s evidently decided to do something more productive with her time than sit there online getting into shit-flinging matches with the world’s endless legion of faceless and nameless subhuman miscreants.

      “Nameless, Faceless” starts with Barnett asking “Don’t you have anything better to do?/I wish that someone could hug you”, that followed by “Must be lonely being angry, feeling overlooked”.

      We’re going to assume that the singer is drawing from real-life cyber experience later when she delivers the line “He said ‘I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you'”. After a gentle admonition that, as much as we all like to think the world revolves around us it doesn’t, she offers some kindness with “I’m really sorry about whatever happened to you.”

      The best part of “Nameless, Faceless” is that Barnett does actually sound sorry for those who find themselves sitting at home embittered in the dark, spewing nonstop bile at people they’ve never met.

      Consider it a well-timed and much-needed plea for a return to something approaching civility in this world—a missive potent and genuine enough that I’m now totally regretting breaking my own house-rules earlier today by going on Twitter to tell shiny happy right-wing poster-girl Tomi Lahren that’s she seems to be fucking brain-dead.

      Dear Tomi: I’m sorry (even though you did kind of start it by suggesting that America doesn't need gun control, it needs more alert grandmothers). 

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