Just don’t call it post-rock. “Post-” as in, the thing that came after rock? That doesn’t make sense. Nobody is singing most of the time, but if anything, this is heavier than most of the other rock you can think of. It’s moodier and, in some places, more daring than King Crimson’s proggiest instrumental meander-tracks. It’s more serious than Iron Maiden’s vocal-less stunts, like “Transylvania”, which should soundtrack footage of Conan the Barbarian sprinting across the trackless wastes. Some moments share a little bit in common with Black Sabbath’s “Orchid”, but “Orchid” is deeply creepy music for Halloween. When Godspeed You! Black Emperor play music without words; you don’t see Conan.
You see emaciated figures using trash bags for rain ponchos stumbling down Wall Street at three o’clock in the morning, and no light graces the scene. You see a room full of exhausted punks with their arms in the air despite a world contrived to erase them. This isn’t the music that comes after rock. This is music that we’ve been building towards since the day Bob Dylan plugged in a Stratocaster and announced that he was leaving Maggie’s Farm. If drums and guitars (and strings, and horns, and tape loops, and field recordings) ever combined a state of disaffection and a plea for deliverance, they did so on a double LP called Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven.
What if “post-” refers to a more ironic disposition towards the matter at hand, as in the spiraling and labyrinthine novels of the postmodern tradition? We don’t know what we think we know; objectivity is another word for power. Here, again, I don’t think the term really applies. Sure, the music on Lift Your Skinny Fists leaves much room for interpretation because, most of the time, nobody is singing along and telling you what you’re supposed to think. But it is also really difficult to listen to any of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s work without hearing a fiery plea for compassionate anarchy and a distortion-laden rejection of the sociopolitical status quo.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2012, the band as a collective entity responds to the question of whether or not political music changes anything: “But fuck us; we make instrumental music…we have to work hard at creating a context that fucks with the document and points in the general direction of resistance and freedom. Otherwise, it’s just pretty noise saddled to whatever horse comes along.”
That doesn’t sound like ironic postmodern detachment to me, nor does it sound like post-rock. Explosions in the Sky craft twinkly, reverb-laden anthems that I used to listen to on the way to a hike, because their music reminded me vaguely of good weather. Tortoise make shimmering jazz-infused trick shots that skitter along gleefully behind a bike ride or a coffee date. It’s thoughtful, technically challenging music, but I’m the one making the meaning; I’m subjectively saddling the horse. Every note on Lift Your Skinny Fists rings objectively of protest. Godspeed You! Black Emperor make sincerity sound meaningful. If postmodern malaise had truly won the day, a band named after an obscure Japanese motorcycle documentary that plays loud instrumental protest music and tours with a film projectionist would have been among the first to founder on the rocks of their own candor. But they didn’t—they haven’t—because punk will always have a place for a Jeremiah, a weeping prophet who guilelessly tells the truth.
This is pretty wild because this album came out in the year 2000. You could still show up at an airport and just walk onto a plane. A new craze known as the “cell phone” was beginning to look like it was here to stay. The FCC defined anything over 200 kbps as a high-speed internet line. We survived the fatal counting error that was supposed to happen when the 1990s flipped into Y2K. On 9 October, when Lift Your Skinny Fists first dropped, I was probably hard at work shaping a cardboard box and dryer duct tubing into a Halloween costume so that I could be a Lego man. I’m not saying that 2000 was the rosiest moment in history—I just can’t help feeling that a band making music as furious as Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s a quarter of a century ago must have been responding both to the present and the probability of a way worse future on the horizon. The fact that the album’s US release on Kranky fell on the day after the US election that would eventually put George W. Bush in office only adds to its ominous sense of prescience.
At the time, Godspeed You! Black Emperor had gathered—without necessarily cultivating it intentionally—a mythos of mysterious untouchability. Their best-known press photo obscured their faces. They played sitting down. They had a reputation for avoiding interviews, although they gave quite a few more of those than that reputation might lead you to believe. Their music feels like such an organic expression of protest that it could almost have sprung sui generis from the dust of subsistence capitalism, but it didn’t. A guy named Efrim and a guy named Mauro made a tape in 1994, and then they brought their friend Moya along for their first show, opening for a Montreal band called Steak 72. As Efrim says in a 2000 interview with The Wire’s David Keenan, the “band” had a week to rehearse before the show, and they “figured the easiest thing to do would be to play one note for half an hour”. Whether this is a cheeky understatement or not, the concept of playing droning, long-form tracks with friends was born.
As they continued to play the local scene, they befriended the founders of Constellation Records, who released Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s first full-length album, f# a# ∞, three haunting tracks that summoned visions of deserted streets and periurban decay. If you’ve heard the opener “Dead Flag Blues”, you’ll never forget the way that mysterious, gravely voice intones the opening monologue: “The car’s on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel, and the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides, and a dark wind blows.”
The critical success of f# a# ∞ catapulted Godspeed You! Black Emperor to a degree of fame and notoriety that, based on interviews from the time, was not always easy for a bunch of anarcho-punk introverts to manage. You can hear some of that malaise in the following shorter album, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada, which has the Hebrew characters for “formless and void” on the cover—a reference to Genesis and, yes, Jeremiah. Slow Riot relies heavily on a sample of a man who called himself Blaise Bailey Finnegan III fighting a parking ticket and reciting the lyrics to “Virus” by Iron Maiden. (The more famous Blaze Bayley sang for Iron Maiden in the 1990s.)
It is a slow riot indeed; the two tracks are brooding, ominous numbers that eventually explode like the Molotov featured on the back cover, over ten and 17 minutes, respectively. With the benefit of hindsight, Slow Riot’s half an hourfeels like a bridge between the first and second full-length records. The full, double-album follow-up to f# a# ∞ would come two years later and would be named like a mantra or a mandate—the kind of onus that a group might lay on their audience after several years on the road: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. It’s like you’re trying to pick up some long-lost, ever-weakening signal from somebody up there. If our skinny fists are indeed raised in supplication to some spectral and receding divinity, then the title resonates with the other album that Godspeed You! Black Emperor members Efrim and Thierry released in 2000 as A Silver Mount Zion, He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corners of Our Rooms…
For such a monumental piece of music, Lift Your Skinny Fists begins almost tentatively, with major key guitar tones and gently droning horns. A four-note string part slowly weaves its way between the guitars, and then the drums hit with a martial intensity that feels like a call to arms. There’s no hanging dead flag here; instead, as the guitars’ treble tones rise in intensity, the opening title track could be a soaring anthem for statelessness until the crescendo resolves into soft drones and a hymn-like melody that a guitar and a violin play in counterpoint. The album is divided into four movements that correspond to the four sides of the double LP; the first is called “Storm”. These movements are split into shorter sections, the names of which are charted out in a time-stamped graph on the inside of the LP cover.
In “Gathering Storm”, the next part of the first movement, Godspeed You! Black Emperor display their ability to slowly build a crescendo with relatively little percussion as the string section weaves in and out of dissonance. When the drums finally come all the way back into the mix, and the track’s opening motif rings back into the fray, the listener can feel and hear the breaking of the storm in an abbreviated version of what Boris would accomplish in December of 2000 with the release of their diluvian record Flood. However, at the close of “Il Pleut à Mourir [+Clatters Like Worry]”, the section that leads to a pause in the storm, you’re left with the sense that this may not have been a cleansing deluge of the sort that Boris had in mind. “Il Pleut à Mourir” translates literally to something like “It’s Raining to Death” in English, and it is the title of a 1989 song by Quebecois country singer Patrick Norman, a ballad about acid rain. “L’avenir dira non à tout espoir,” Norman sings. “The future will say no to all hope.”
As the acid rain peters out, Lift Your Skinny Fists’ first field recording comes into focus. It’s a message played overhead at a gas station outside LAX, read in both Spanish and English in the chipper and efficient type of voice that now warns us to “say something” if we “see something” at bus stops and airports: “Welcome to ARCO AM/PM mini market. We would like to advise our customers that any individual who offers to pump gas, wash windows, or solicit products is not employed by or associated with this facility. We discourage any contact with these individuals and ask that you report any problems to uniformed personnel inside. Thank you for shopping at ARCO AM/PM, and have a pleasant day.” The voice disappears into distortion, a dissonant drone, and a slightly out-of-tune piano—a dirge for the ground of unsanctioned labor from which the gig economy would one day sprout its tangle of briars. “Cancer Towers on Holy Road Hi-Way”, the closing section of the “Storm”, features a heavily distorted voice yelling passionately—probably through a megaphone—about something that is difficult to make out: a testament, perhaps, to the incantatory power of wordless protest.
The next movement, “Static”, begins as mournfully as “Storm” begins triumphant, a series of hushed and hollow, meandering notes. They could theoretically be guitars and run through enough pedals, but I’ve listened to enough William Basinski and Stars of the Lid to guess that they are probably tape loops. The track is called “Terrible Canyons of Static”, and shares with the LP’s title the sense of reaching for a transmission that never resolves into a clear image. An atomic clock ominously states the time (3:21), and Godspeed You! Black Emperor play behind one of their more frightening and transcendent recordings, more challenging than Blaise Bailey Finnegan’s ranting. A woman’s voice, slowed down until it deepens and slurs, intones a sermon on the numinous nature of divinity: “When you penetrate to the most high god, you will believe you’re mad, you will believe you’ve gone insane.”
The fact that internet sleuths have identified this voice as plausibly belonging to a radio preacher named Helen (or Helene) DeBoe does nothing to detract from its creeping urgency; if anything, it simply clarifies “Chart #3” in its relationship to the album’s preoccupation with receivers and antennas. “World Police and Friendly Fire” builds to the first and only explosive crescendo on “Static”, as the strings and guitars repeatedly play the same minor key motif, swirling through a dizzying series of tempo changes like a spreading fire. The movement peters out with “[…+the buildings they are sleeping now]”, a series of metallic drones that evoke the desolation of an abandoned city. The album is halfway over. If you don’t feel devastated, you haven’t been listening.
“Sleep”, the third movement, begins with one of Lift Your Skinny Fist’s best-known moments, a short monologue by a man named Murray Ostril bemoaning the loss of Coney Island’s glory days. “Sleep” is actually about not sleeping, as in, “They don’t sleep anymore on the beach.” In the transition between this recording and the long, mournful “Monheim”, the fact that people no longer camp out on the Coney Island beach comes to stand as a metonym for a global loss of innocence. “Monheim” swells and meanders through an almost bluesy chord progression before cresting its wave of sound, transforming into a snare-driven march beneath a high-pitched, wailing drone.
After nearly a quarter of a century, it is still not clear whether the next part of “Sleep” is called “3rd Part” or “Broken Windows, Locks of Love pt. III”, or both, since both names are printed on the inside of the LP sleeve. A pair of notes circles each other, the clouds part, and the melody modulates from the minor into the major key as the strings and guitars bring the long night of insomnia to a close with a restless dream. A little hint of a stomp-clap rhythm, borrowed from gospel, country, and bluegrass, rounds out the last few seconds with something like hope.
At the beginning of the album’s final movement, “Antennas to Heaven…”, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have a quick singer-songwriter moment in which Moya plays guitar and sings by himself, an eerie little tune about throwing a baby in a hayloft. Sound collage chaos ensues, from the harsh whispering static of “Edgyswingsetacid” to “[glockenspiel duet recorded on a campsite in Rhinebeck, N.Y.]” and the sound of a group of children chatting and singing in French (“Attention…Mon ami… Fa-lala-lala-la-la… [55-St. Laurent]”). The 55 bus stops at the Boulevard St. Laurent in Montreal; whether this was also the case in 2000 or has any significance for this quickly captured sing-along will be up to the listener to decide.
“She Dreamt She Was a Bulldozer, She Dreamt She Was Alone in an Empty Field” is one of Lift Your Skinny Fist’s most endearing sections because it does not bother with the well-known Godspeed You! Black Emperor crescendo at all; it blasts directly from a single warbling guitar to a short, ecstatic chorus, then it backs down again into an Ennio Morricone guitar part that wouldn’t feel out of place if played by Dylan Carlson on an Earth album.
“Deathkamp Drone” hums and whispers its way toward the album’s conclusion, but it is not precisely as desolate as its title might lead you to believe. There are echoes of something a lot like a human voice buried beneath those layers of reverb, and their song is more angelic than doom-laden. The album’s final two minutes could almost have fit onto The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, but the echoing canyon of sound has a few jagged edges to throw at you before leaving you alone with your thoughts. For the closing section of such a long album, the “Antennas to Heaven…” movement flies by quickly as it flits between sonic ideas. You may need to cancel your plans for the rest of the day; you’re definitely going to need to go for a walk.
There’s something a little obscene about pinning this music down to any narrow interpretation because it operates on so many registers: generalized rage at the rise of global corpo-industrial capitalism, a bacchanal for weirdo outsiders and sidewalk prophets, an ominous portent of the horrible decades to come, a travelogue for a collective of young people who delighted in collecting new sounds on the road. Even though it’s important not to tar Lift Your Skinny Fists with too broad of an interpretive brush, the fact that it is mostly instrumental calls for close attention to the album’s accompanying artwork, especially since that work was provided by Will Schaff, the artist who created iconic covers for Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy and Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co, among many other projects.
Schaff created a zine entitled “Notes to a Friend; Silently Listening 2″, a record of his challenges as a young artist who had to pay the bills with dumb jobs. As for anyone who desires to reject the basic tenets of subsistence capitalism, this acquiescence to financial need felt like a loss of artistic autonomy. In the image that graces the album sleeve for the “Sleep”/“Antennas to Heaven…” LP, Schaff is signing a lease as a skull-faced Benjamin Franklin from the $100 bill cuts off his hands—the tools of his art—with a long pair of shears. On the other album sleeve, a helpless Schaff with his wrists wrapped in bandages watches as Franklin and Washington force a woman he loves into similarly fruitless labor, zealously waving a pantsuit in her face as she shrinks from their glares. The hands that grace the now-famous cover of the record are not, in fact, balled up in fists. They are in the exact shape and position as the hands that the illustrated Schaff lost when he signed the lease.
It is unsurprising that a band catapulted to unexpected fame like Godspeed You! Black Emperor would see their experience reflected in these drawings. A deeper fear is at play here than any puerile concern about “selling out” or losing a cool sense of authenticity. I am talking about the lie that dogs all of us, the insidious perfidy that tells you that you are worthless if you are not productive. This is the group of people who wrote to The Wire: “Listen… we all stop paying rent tomorrow and have a meeting somewhere, all the millions of us who lose everyday and know that things are fucked and know that we’re fucked and that mostly we’re powerless to change it.”
This is also a band who, because their moral commitments are at the front and center of their art, probably felt some pretty serious ambiguity about the perception that they had “made it”, because the harder you try to stand outside of any brutal economic structure, the more you start to feel like Archimedes looking for an impossible foothold in outer space from which he could move the world. But the portrait of the artist as a young man with his hands cut off is reserved for the inside of the packaging; the hands on the album cover are somehow severed from their lifeblood yet still raised triumphantly in the air. As the scrawled and typewritten note from the band on the other side of that album sleeve says, these songs are “more awkward pirouettes in the general direction of hope + joy”, “a tentative stagger towards the pale&holy FADING light”.
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven is dedicated to prisoners, to “quiet refusals, loud refusals, and sad refusals”. Drums and guitars and strings and horns and tape loops aren’t going to singlehandedly overturn our globally comorbid state of affairs. After 24 years, though, they still offer an 87-minute respite that we need now as much as we ever needed it then. “What does anyone want,” the members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor ask, in the final line on the album sleeve, “But to feel a little more free?”
Works Cited
Costa, Maddy. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – the full transcript. The Guardian, 2012.
Keenan, David. Interview in The Wire, May 2000. The Wire, archived by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, 2000.
Kleinbard, David. Broadband access surges. CNN, 2000.
Schaff, William. Notes to a friend; Silently listening #2. Instagram, 2023.