Rabid Bits of Time Analysis (Jackpot January #22)

Comment posted underneath 'Rabid Bits of Time' YouTube video

Rabid Bits of Time is the penultimate track on Chad VanGaalen’s third studio album, Soft Airplane. It begins with a slow banjo chord, the song’s central riff. It’s delicate and vulnerable but not alone for long. A long cello note jumps in on the fourth pluck of the banjo, both shortly joined by a horn of some kind (I’m not sure which instrument this is).

In this intro, a bare, tentative melody is thickened by the bass, like a person dragging themself through a wilderness. The banjo is the first sign of life and then, in a strong wind, the world thrusts itself in their face. The low notes deepen the song, they seem to yank the struggling banjo forward, like time does all of us.

Seventeen seconds in, Chad VanGaalen sings:

You’ve been dead for years

But you never knew

Words which only seem to grow more relevant with time. It has taken us years to realise the full extent of what we’ve done, the consequences of our actions. I’m not just talking about politics (again). It’s more like how you finish school or college or uni, then you start working in a job and suddenly things get really serious, so you have to scrape together what you can, laser-focus on the new routine, the last of your energy on those long days spent closing down door after door of opportunity at night as you gradually accept that this schedule is your life now.

Then years pass: five, ten, twenty, however many you like, and you realise you were dead this whole time. You might decide to finally make that change you’ve been ignoring for a long time, to bring yourself back to life.

It’s only after your revival that you realise just how bad things got. All that happened to you and you were unaware, no-one ever is when they’re in the eye of the storm. And when you recognise it, more years may pass before you act on it. For now, you are too exhausted. Hindsight is all we have.

And the rabid bits of time

Have been eating you

The realisation of your dissatisfaction, how it has worn you down, is painful. It does not take place from a distance; it brings you into a sharp closeness with the present, as if all the wounds bloom at once, and every move you make reopens them.

It is agony to realise just how much your circumstances gnaw at you. Picture these rabid bits of time: a cloud of invisible bugs buzzing around you, burrowing into the folds of your skin and deepening them. Your wrinkles are battle scars.

Of course, it is natural to age and growing old need not be cruel. But in this story, where tiny feral flecks accumulate over a lifetime, you realise that your shitty job and this cruel order of things daily leave their marks upon you. Your hair is thinning too fast, your skin shrivels and flakes off; stress has been chewing you up.

Then a little pause, and then:

No-one knows where we go

No-one knows where we go

When we’re dead or when we’re dreaming

A little crack of heady ambiguity. An intoxicating ambivalence.

I can’t tell you if our ignorance is a good thing or a bad thing. All I know is that there is a gap, a blank spot in our comprehension filled with the intensely personal experiences of death and dreams.

Because every death is necessarily personal. Dying is the only universal experience that we cannot possibly describe to one another. Likewise, though we live through sleep, too often our dreams leave us upon waking. We forget most of them and what we remember we struggle to explain. You can’t put either experience into words because no-one knows where you were, not even you yourself.

Maybe this suggests a way out, a path beyond time that saves us from being eaten. To live and to be awake is to consent to being devoured. But you’re not alive, are you? You’ve been dead for years and you never knew – but why? Why didn’t death spare you from the rabid bits of time?

In the song, ‘yours’ is a kind of living, walking death which comes from wilful ignorance of the fragility of life. When we refuse to acknowledge the mysterious, unknowable spaces, we consign ourselves to this living death. We become time food of our own volition.

Or, we free ourselves. We live in constant acknowledgement of the fact that one day we will no longer be. That’s why this chorus feels a little climactic, a little like a release. By reminding ourselves what we don’t know, we are no longer forced to fake a rational, knowledgeable life. We cease to be calculating, economic units and actually become human.

As if to underscore this, Chad VanGaalen repeats the above verse and chorus, this time with acoustic and electric guitar playing treble chords over the top. They are precarious and meandering, they seem to flicker and tremble back and forth.

The primary elements, human and time, are set in motion. The still waters of the first chorus begin to toss and turn as the volume increases. Time’s violent flow pulls the leading instrument, the struggling human, under waves of noise.

And then it stops. We hear nothing but the sound of a train rushing past. It is harsh and heavy, a rusty old freight hauler. Again I think there’s two potential meanings for this sound. Either it signifies death, the triumph of time as it carts the corpse of the human off to the afterlife. Or maybe it is acceptance. The human has stopped struggling and allows the current to take them. They stumble across the train tracks. Maybe then time’ll lose interest. I hope so.