OKAY

'Okay' by the J. Arthur Keenes Band. The really quite wonderful solo-project of Canada's Daniel McLay, whose previous album, Computer Savvy, is probably the best thing 8-bit Peoples ever put out, can also be listened to on the bandcamp linked to. Best two from Savvy are 'Water2 (wetter)' and 'Foe Paw,' whose 10-hook a minute extroversion is your new best friend you don't want to tell anyone about, but I think 2012's The World's Smallest Violin raises the stakes in terms of the songwriting and musicianship: witness the sheer clarity of cascade and interpolation in 'Okay,' the lyrical matter harmoniously orchestrated, rather than ebulliently jostled about, the nonchalant melodious enticement, it's alright. In 'Okay' the ironic affirmation of mediocrity gradually becomes the more profoundly moving affirmation of mediocrity's negation in favour, or in fact, of the slow and steady progress of happiness. Hardly the labour of the concept, but something like it, while you get yourself back together. It is a weirdly moving song; I don't hear it as supercilious, more quietly heroic, self-help for tyrants, the schizophrenic apostrophe of lyric self-regard.

Although I'm quite fond of the transcription of the words into regular quatrains, it doesn't do justice to the eerie concatenation-effect of the eponymous lyric, especially the in last two verses. There, 'Okay' shimmers in Janus-faced oscillation between lines, belligerently refusing to sound like it will start something new, but equally unwilling to mop up after itself: neither resignation nor acceptance, those syllables register the information they subsume under their own metrical progression the only way they know how, sort of gleefully wallowing in "the element of tragedy that lies in the very fact of frequency." The hanging coda of the last line's upshot sounds less hopeful, to these ears, than all those authentically disabled false starts.



Okay, I talked to you all day
The things some people say
I wish you'd go away
Find somewhere else to stay

Okay, I threw my phone away
And learned where not to lay
You just won't stow away
I have to pay and pay

Is this some fantasy of yours
Always knocking at my door
I've got things to do I swear
I have to wallow in despair
I have to shave off all my hair

Okay, I talked to you all day
The things some people say
I wish you'd go away
Find somewhere else to stay
And never meet my day

Okay, I read you loud and clear
Okay, this road is ending near
Someday, I will forget my fear
Someday, it could take years and years

Okay, I'll be the hand that steers
Away, I'm smiling ear to ear
Someday, I will forget my fear
Someday, I will get out of here