“Come Together” Spiritualized (from Ladies and Gentlemen, We are Floating in Space, 1997)
I’ve never tried illegal drugs (not even pot), but I have my addictions. Maybe everyone does - small or large things, beneficial or harmful - to get through another day, for whatever reasons they have. We all have needs and ways to relieve our pains because we’re human (“We all got a space to fill” - Prince, “Pop Life”). But when an addiction overwhelms you because the pain won’t go away, when the need is never met because it grows like a parasite to feed itself, you can end up feeling dead inside.
In “Come Together,” Jason Pierce (aka J. Spaceman) tells the story of Little Johnny, who may very well be the same guy from Television’s first single, only he’s really paying the price now. Over a heavy drum beat, swinging horn line (with some jazzy improv near the end), and monolithic, distorted blues riffs, Pierce relays the aching, sad story of Johnny, who is so desperate to feel that he takes risks without thinking and ends up hopelessly trapped (or, possibly, trapped even further than he was before). The pain is finally gone (sure to come back if he ever sobers up), but so is any other feeling.
Having listened to Spiritualized for years, I think by now I have at least an understanding, if only by proxy, of what abusing hard drugs might be like - if only from a distance and through Pierce’s descriptions. At times, he can relay the experience through his songs with relentless, exhausting detail (try “Don’t Just Do Something” from Let It Come Down - all six-and-change wearying minutes of it. And I love that song, by the way). Spirtualized’s albums can resemble, if only through art, the feel of an addiction - euphoric highs (usually the songs of love and transcendence), and deadening lows (the drug songs), with melancholia, shame and regret mixed in (often, the songs of heartbreak).
Something that fascinates me about Pierce’s music is the suggestion that the songs of love and spirituality might reflect another type of addiction (check “I Think I’m in Love,” the song after this one on the record). Or that the drive to seek love and spiritual relief can become too closely intertwined with an addictive need, until the need exists to feed itself and obliterates the positive emotions, turning a healthy addiction into something monstrous. This frustrates me, as well, if only because I’m afraid of what it says about me that I love and identify with Pierce’s songs, although in the case of the drug songs, it’s the nature of addiction I recognize, not the experience of using (unless coffee qualifies).
Spiritualized’s songs of love and empathy are beautiful things. The songs of drugs and addiction explore the dark reverse of these positive emotions, when negative feelings of pain and loneliness become so strong that the euphoria of your choice (drugs, love, belief, coffee, sports, video games, crossword puzzles - whatever does it for you, though with Pierce’s songs it’s the first three) becomes a way to cope. Only it never lasts very long, and you end up feeling nothing. With Spiritualized’s albums, these states can be closely intertwined.
“Come Together” is a character study (if a brief one) of an addict, but it’s not a moralizing sermon. This is not quite a New Testament story, either - it’s unflattering and harsh. As the title suggests (obliquely), it’s an honest and unflinching depiction of an addict, with an eye of some sort of exasperated empathy - though Pierce leaves out the pain and hurt an addict can inflict on others (he has covered that theme in other songs). And maybe a request for understanding, answering the question of how someone ends up this way.
