In 2019, Random Still Rules
David Berman in 1998. (Drag City/Brent Stewart)
Content Warning: Suicide Mention
When thinking of the song most deserving of the title “Song of the Year,” some criteria come to mind fairly immediately: the song should reflect the contemporary state of music and society at large, or, at the very least, it should have been released in that year. For this past year, a few songs are just as quickly summoned: Lana Del Rey’s “The Greatest”; Jamila Woods’s “BALDWIN”; JPEGMAFIA’s “Jesus Forgive Me, I Am A Thot.” The former is a boomer-esque yet deeply moving mourning of the Death Of America; the second forcefully and graciously condemns white America’s apathy towards black voices; the last is the most irreverent and well-crafted manifestation of meme culture ever committed to tape.
Although each of these songs is inextricably linked to America’s socio-cultural landscape in the year 2019, none is the song that, to me, best represents this past year. That honor goes to “Random Rules,” the opener to Silver Jews’ 1998 masterpiece American Water. Released 21 years ago into a markedly different America by a band whose front man is now dead, “Random Rules” could never be more important than it is today.
“In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” the song opens. I’m willing to bet that among the niche community of indie rock poets, this line—a skyscraper-sized declaration of ironic braggadocio and world-weariness and loss made microscopic—is the one most often quoted. Name-checking George Orwell’s dystopian novel (or Van Halen’s jock-rock touchstone) could be mere coincidence, but I think it’s a knowing wink. For even the least superstitious among us, there is something deeply reassuring that 1984 has come and gone without us all having been submitted to the will of Big Brother. The control we feel—the control David Berman felt in 1998—is instead something perhaps more insidious: an absurd, random control that seeps into the most humorous of lines muttered by the most slack-seeming of stoics.
The song’s ostensible chorus, which offhandedly declares that “there’s no guidance when random rules,” plays over a horn far too rusty to be majestic, while David Berman summons the verses—ruminations, wandering and longing—in a throaty murmur as guitars ramble alongside him. The song is never outwardly remarkable or astounding or even attention-grabbing. “Random Rules” and the worlds it contains could easily be dismissed as another country-tinged, slowed-down jangle pop track—that is, until its understatedly sublime slide guitar and those imperfect horns and David Berman’s unique register envelop you in all their uncertainty and beauty and you never want to leave, uneasy as you may be.
On August 7, 2019, David Berman committed suicide. A poet, a genius, a human being died because the burden of living was too great to bear. In July, Berman had reinserted himself into indie music’s collective consciousness with the release of the gorgeous and aching Purple Mountains, the eponymous debut of his newly minted band. He died less than a month later. After having disbanded Silver Jews in 2009 he adopted a policy of relative radio silence until late 2018, when it was announced he would release a new album with a new band. (On the possibility of using his own name to release music, David Berman said earlier this year, “I can’t imagine putting my name on a t-shirt. Me?”)
Artists with mystique are no new phenomenon—even Frank Ocean’s long-winded silence after Channel Orange was just another entry in a time-honored tradition of musicians wrapping themselves (intentionally or not) in a near-occult identity. But David Berman’s self-imposed solitude felt incomparable to those acts of mythos-building; despite the magic of the words that poured out of his lips, David Berman’s character was never one of mystique.
Rather than myth, we saw strife. Berman often described his depression as “treatment-resistant”; his tendencies towards harsh self-evaluation are well documented; he was only “100% sober” for one of his albums. Immediately after breaking up Silver Jews, David Berman revealed the identity of his father, Richard Berman, a “despicable man” (in David Berman’s words) whose livelihood comprises tearing down life-protecting regulations in order to pave the way for corporations. In the same announcement, the younger Berman made it a point of his to “undo a millionth of all the harm [his father] has caused,” a goal he saw as unachievable while making music. None of these struggles defines David Berman, but they all have informed his music from the start. “Random Rules” is no exception.
Why is this all so important? Why, in the year 2019, when album releases are extraordinary spectacles and Frank Ocean is actually steeped in mystique, should we care about the humble and anachronistic “Random Rules”? First, the easy answer: the song asks the same questions, comes up with the same non-answers, that have rattled in America’s mind since November 8, 2016. What do we do when the world around us seems—is—random, when everything feels on the verge of collapse and there is no one to guide us? “Broken and smokin' where the infrared deer plunge in the digital snake,” the song’s ridiculous third line, somehow predicts the incessant, nonsensical stream of tweets and fake news that has glued Americans to their screens (where the infrared deer plunge in the digital snake), only to find themselves no better (broken and smokin’) for it. “Random Rules” reflects the current cultural moment in a way that only a song made outside of that moment could—its awareness of and its distance from the issues of 2019 are inextricably linked to one another, both produced by observing the slow descent into 2019 rather than the events of the past year itself.
There is a sense in which “Random Rules” is exactly the song we don’t need in 2019. “Random Rules” wades in the strange ebb and flow of the universe, never swimming against the steady but uneasy current. This philosophy, this plaintive sigh of a song, runs counter to the protest, resistance, and anger needed to change the world in which random does in fact rule. “Random Rules” is streaked with dissatisfaction but never takes action against that displeasure. The fractured relationship in the song’s spotlight, for example, is never fully healed; the best David Berman can do is leave us with a sliver of hope. Although the song ends with a chance at reconciliation, the pain of the song’s climax, in which someone from Berman’s past life says, “You look like someone I used to know,” never wholly subsides.
The promise of “Random Rules” is not that everything will be ok—because we have found time and time again that some things won’t be—but that the world can still provide comfort even in the darkest moments. When the Amazon is burning, when schools and mosques and Walmarts are grounds for mass shootings, when fascism and white supremacy become renormalized, random truly does rule. When we are stunned and saddened into silence, we need this comfort.
“Random Rules” could easily be the song of 2019 were David Berman still alive, and his death does not lend any new meaning to his work that hadn’t been there before. But the fact that his unassuming specter now hangs listlessly over the Earth is impossible to ignore. Where there once was a voice to assure us that we weren’t going crazy and that random has ruled for all of eternity, there is now silence. That David Berman died in 2019—the same year he shuffled back into the spotlight and released a new album (an album he calmly iterated was not a suicide note) for the first time in 11 years—is terrifying in a way only made possible by the random that rules this world.
When a loved one dies, we scurry to the corners of our minds, collecting memories of the person that might keep them alive a couple moments longer. Rarely does death announce itself loudly enough for us to know to get a flashlight—more often we are left in the dark, waiting for the pieces of someone’s personhood to appear amidst the rubble. It feels strange to call David Berman’s death the loss of a loved one, but in many ways that is the only way to describe it. His music touched countless lives with its simple and incisive beauty, its ability to transform the world into a wondrous and terrifying place—a place where corduroy suits are made of gutters and a love-struck boyfriend can be hit by a train mid-proposal. Love for David Berman’s music was in many ways love for the artist himself; even though none of his work until Purple Mountains felt truly autobiographical, a piece of him was embedded in every single one of his croaks and couplets and musings on what it means to feel joy and pain.
Love in 2019 is a complicated affair. Tinder constantly reminds us that we could be meeting someone new while divorce statistics tell us there’s probably no point in trying. The institutions of marriage and monogamy at large are being interrogated in new and necessary ways, sparked in part by a growing awareness of the power dynamics that define such relationships. “Random Rules” doesn’t attempt to solve any of these problems, either directly or indirectly; instead, it settles for a startlingly succinct summary of all the anxieties surrounding intimacy. There’s the fear of fucking up (“Maybe I’ve crossed all the wrong rivers and walked down all the wrong halls”), the fear of losing someone forever (“People leave and no highway will bring them back”), the fear that things might actually work out (“We’ve got two lives to give tonight”): these fears are all such immediate and central parts of love in 2019 that “Random Rules” couldn’t possibly be 21 years old.
“Random Rules” is a love letter answered by sobs. It is a eulogy for people who never existed, for people we wish we knew. It is a dull ache and a stabbing pain. It is the humility of living with all of your mistakes, and it is the light at the end of a decades-long tunnel. It grows and it shrinks and it runs for cover and predicts the end of the world and prays that it’s wrong. “Random Rules” contains multitudes in its tininess, a world so small you need to squint just to find it. There are plenty of songs that describe the world we live in, but few songs feel like that world so wholly as “Random Rules.”
In 1998, David Berman seemed aware of an ever-present controlling force, singing, “They make it so you can’t shake hands/When they make your hands shake.” In an interview a decade later, he thought we were in the midst of “some sort of unraveling,” and that by 2019 we’d be witnessing the destruction of a longstanding order. Living in that present, we can only hope the order that is collapsing is what made his hands shake.