Issue 6: What Post-Apocalyptic Superpower Will You Get? / Lemon Demon vs. Unwound: Lifetime Achievement Award

A personality test with narrative. / Battle of the song titles.

The first half of this week's issue is a short fiction piece taking the guise of a personality test, hosted on uQuiz:

Don't forget to comment which power you got, either in the comments on this page or on the JaffeeLabs Instagram when the post comes out!

Lemon Demon vs. Unwound

It's come to my attention that Lemon Demon and Unwound both have (unrelated) songs titled "Lifetime Achievement Award." As they're musically different groups with two very different songwriters, I thought it would be interesting to see how the two songs stack up against each other.

A real-life Lifetime Achievement Award, in case you don't know, is a gift bestowed by certain arts organizations on someone whose body of work (as opposed to one specific work) has made a major contribution to the field - for instance, Louis Armstrong and the Beatles both have them from the Grammy Awards, and Steven Spielberg has one from the American Film Institute. 

Lemon Demon's Neil Cicierega and Unwound's Justin Trosper work on completely different lyrical design philosophies, which leads them to take this prompt in completely different directions. Both songwriters, in this case, go for a generally ironic view of the concept involving the award recipient's death. In brief, Cicierega's recipient is a musician whose "award" is getting resurrected to perform again, while Trosper's recipient was unknown during life and is tragically only appreciated after death.

The Lemon Demon song, the first track on Spirit Phone (2016), begins by detailing the deceased award recipient's popularity, comparing them to Michael Jackson. After a chorus about how their death is "being revised" via some Frankenstein-esque necromancy, the rest of the song details the ultimate purpose of this resurrection: they'll go "from the grave to the stage" and spend eternity making profitable performances and achieving chart success. 

By contrast, Unwound's song, the eighth on Challenge for a Civilized Society (1998), is much simpler, with a singular six-line verse which is repeated once. In typical Unwound fashion, it describes one moment in detail - the recipient's televised posthumous award ceremony, at which "the time has come for all the audience, who don't know who you are, to wish they did." 

The most striking similarity between the two songs is the use of a mysterious, shadowy "we" who bestow the gift for unknown reasons upon a recipient referred to only as "you" with no given personal details or backstory, or indeed any reason why they are receiving the award. However, there's a distinction: Unwound's "we" only bestow the award and detail the reaction to "you," while Lemon Demon's "we" take a much more active role, aiding in "your" resurrection, presumably for financial returns. (Gosh, this is a grammarian's nightmare. Is a poetic character "we" referred to the same way as the actual word we? English teachers, please fill me in on this.)

Probably the most important lyrical difference between the two songs is the levity of the Lemon Demon one. The lyrics are absolutely full of goofy one-liners, like when he says the award recipient has "been gone for way too long / Like half a year, an entire career for some." Cicierega's vocal delivery is also more playful, almost cartoonish, Thriller at one moment and The Mollusk the next. By contrast, Unwound is much more terse and serious. There's a trace of sarcasm in the cynicism, but simply no room for anything more amid the tight guitar-drum interplay and Trosper's sombre, intoned vox. You can practically feel the gloomy PNW rain.

Musically, the songs couldn't be more different. Lemon Demon is and has almost always been a synth-focused band, as it's the solo artist's primary instrument, with guitar only included for texture and occasional solos. This one is no exception - structurally a pop rock tune, it gives the goofy singing an equally playful backing track. The riff is unusually heavy, almost reminiscent of metal. There's a ton of dynamic range, from the quiet ambient intro to the loud distorted vocals just before the first chorus. In fact, you could say the song never sits still or settles into one specific groove.

By contrast, Unwound's song starts with its earworm guitar part and just never stops going with it. The hypnotic pattern evolves and changes chords, but keeps going for basically the whole song. Challenge for a Civilized Society, the album it's from, is one of the band's weirdest, a halfway point between the noisy punk of Repetition (1996) and the chilly psychedelia of Leaves Turn Inside You (2001). They were experimenting with a lot of new sounds alongside producer Steve Fisk, and in this song, their rock trio sound is augmented with a shimmering, noisy keyboard. The song "What Went Wrong," sequenced right after "Lifetime Achievement Award," also includes the keyboard, coming in loud at the same time as the vocals for dramatic effect, but in "Lifetime" it stays in the background, adding a subtly ominous air to the composition. Additionally, Unwound has an instrumental leg up on Lemon Demon by being a trio rather than a solo artist - Sara Lund's drums and Vern Rumsey's bass have much more creative parts than anything a drum machine can come up with.

Finally, one piece of trivia about each song:

-The chant of "Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this record in no way endorses a belief in the occult" at the end of Lemon Demon's song is a tribute to a title card at the start of Michael Jackson's Thriller video.

-The creepy reversed vocals towards the end of Unwound's song are actually sourced from a found tape recording of "Happy Birthday." They come in just after the 1:00 mark in this video:

In the end, I can't say one song is overall better than the other. Lemon Demon's "Lifetime Achievement Award" is more creative and fun, while Unwound's is more atmospheric and emotional - it's like comparing apples and oranges.