Of the Blue Colour of the Sky (OK Go)

I’ve been waiting for months—waiting for years—waiting for you to change; but there ain’t much that’s dumber, there ain’t much that’s dumber than pinning your hopes on the change of another. And I still need you, but what good’s that gonna do? Because needing is one thing, but getting, getting’s another.

—from OK Go’s latest album, the pleasingly titled Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, the fourth track and my initial favorite, “Needing/Getting.” Like a lot of their lyrics, they’re clever, and unlike a lot of them, more than a little heartfelt. That seems to be where their latest is aimed, bringing the self-conscious, guiltlessly indulgent brashness of their particular brand of pop towards a place a little more enigmatic. It’s a worthwhile effort, one that even succeeds occasionally, but the problem is that the album equates restraint with sophistication, ambiguity with adulthood. The band distorts their lyrics nearly beyond recognition, a veneer of production—and it does sound very fine more often than not, crackling and crunching in all sorts of shades of white—usurping the feeling the words were meant to betray. The end result isn’t bad, just a little gray, and less saturated than you had hoped. It’s all surface, textured and nuanced but surface nonetheless. And that’s too bad, because what’s there is good enough to make you wish the band had decided to grow up in their own way instead of somebody else’s, forging their own paradigm instead of their idols’.

The album traffics in nostalgia, which is not a surprising move, for them or for us these days. It’s the flipside of that knowing sway, of that determined air that lends a direction to progress, the new adult who’s just a little too old to be young. It’s not a little expected, and because of that, disappointing in equal measure. When things seem as though they’re not working out, the wise choice, the right choice, is acceptance: acceptance without compromise. It’s an admission of fallibility but a wholehearted determination to invention, to moving forward even if it’s a little stupid to do so; because every once in a while a little stupidity is demanded, and never more so than when at the beginning of something. Nostalgia, while lovely and acceptable, is the easy route in a bad way when it constitutes the greater part of your reasoning.

And essentially, that feeling is: being lost. Whether citizens or rock stars, the one thing we can agree on is being stuck in that funk and wanting something to happen. The difficulty results from a plurality of options rather than their dearth, an experience that seems like growing up all over again and is confusing because it’s not. We understand that impulse to action and needing something to happen, and the call to hearken back is understandable but not excusable; there should be leaders, not shepherds, because when you’ve discovered something that feels disconcertingly like youth you’re not ready to be gently guided; you’re ready to be told what to do so that you can joyfully and ecstatically rebel. Moderation only means something in between extremes.

The first side of that equation is securely in hand. We have the brashness of youth underneath our belt, the boom years when everything was a discovery. But now we’re on the verge of finding everything a recapitulation, of letting that luxurious distortion of stored-up knowledge and sound obscure inherent originality. It’s easy to forget that things started in chaos, that seeming atrophy can be at least as much of a spur to newness as can order. You have to reject the false duality of escapism versus realism; there are escapes in this world that involve no compromise. It’s time to move forward.

Before the earth was round, there was no end to things; no one tried to measure what they knew. Everything was warm, and everyone would love, and every contradiction was true. The sun worked twice as hard, and the moon was twice as far, and the sky was still honestly blue. But when the time came, everything spiraled in, and everyone forgot what they knew.
—from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, track nine, “Before the Earth was Round”

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