We all love Thanksgiving. Kind of. We all like overeating, though your mileage may vary when it comes to traditional American-style Thanksgiving-themed foods. Many of us love seeing family, though again, there’s serious issues with diminishing returns when it comes to pressing flesh with countless members of the extended clan. For most people, it’s about the quiet pleasures, like watching lots of DVDs and starting your drinking at lunchtime.
The quintessential Thanksgiving song is, of course, Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” which, don’t worry, I won’t post here because a) it’s twenty minutes long, and b) everybody on The Hype Machine already posted it, I’m sure. It’s a gimme, just like “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” is the quintessential Thanksgiving film. Let’s put that aside, though; I’m looking for the Thanksgiving sound. That’s different. What do you want to hear when you’ve been eating tryptophan for every meal, not smoking for two days, watching football with your uncle, and it’s dark by five o’clock and you have to go to work in a day or two? That’s a long and rambling question, I know, and rather grammatically unsound (frankly this post doesn’t have the best syntax [and now I'm going out of my way to make it unreadable {Sorry, haters!}]) but seriously, what do you want to listen to? For me, I’m looking for something dark and brooding with some lonely, pissed-off guitars. And also, oddly, Austrialian bands seem to have more appeal than usual, though this could be selection bias on my part.
Oh by the way, I’ve had a great Thanksgiving. Homemade everything, and made right, son, for serious. Low-key, immediate family only, watching DVDs with my brother visiting from Mississippi. We watched “Boyz N the Hood,” it was great. Been an awesome Thanksgiving. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to listen to dark, pissed-off music. It makes it all feel more festive somehow. Maybe it’s that Thanksgiving commemorates this one time where a bunch of religious fanatics survived a brutal winter thanks to the kindness of strangers, whom they repaid with smallpox, conquest, and, eventually, casinos.
Don’t give me that look. It’s a vaguely gothic holiday, so you need vaguely gothic music. What, do you listen to Christmas carols or some shit over Thanksgiving dinner? To my mind that’s significantly creepier.
Link Wray and his Wray Men – “Rumble”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – “Do You Love Me”
Sisters of Mercy – “Lucretia My Reflection”
