Pere Ubu "Flames Over Nebraska"

If you wanna read some jabberwocky from Pere Ubu’s David Thomas where he tries to academically defend the title of his new album, read that jabberwocky here. It doesn’t explain much, but it doesn’t really need to, you see. Because the simple act of Thomas even writing an addendum to an album that attempts to preemptively theoretically dissect that same album does enough. It’s not exactly a “First, I want to thank God” sort of liner note, you know? It’s a dry, almost curmudgeonly move that, at the least, shows that Thomas knows his audience pretty well. Shit, I read it. But the good thing is that he can also translate that deconstructive impulse to a more creative endeavor, like his lyrics, which are also printed on the site (here, scroll down). And reading along with the intimate, specific detail of “Flames Over Nebraska” (mp3) allows for a pretty radically different interpretation of the song than just listening to it. The lyrics are like extracting lines at random from a newspaper, making new contexts for them, and then comparing them to what happened in the real story. In the song, Thomas takes on the character of a traveler—a normal guy, maybe a salesman but definitely not a creepy loner—who’s been driving a bit too long, to the point where just sitting in a hotel room is a somewhat bewildering experience. And he has to keep repeating “I know what I know,” to stay level, like he’s trying to channel Descartes or David Byrne or something and start from the bottom, recognizing who he is, where he is, probably why and how he is too (and maybe why he’s so ironically hostile toward the opposite sex). It’s about as close as Thomas gets to real feelings, I’m supposing.

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