42. Sun Kil Moon - “Philadelphia Cop”
Sun Kil Moon is back yet again with another one of his meandering verbal diatribes. This one is more incisive than the others, almost as if Kozelek woke up upon the wrong side of the bed and just decided to eviscerate whatever topic came to mind (albeit in a somewhat playful and sarcastic fashion). He covers everything from murder and politics to social media and album reviews. However, there are two unifying themes that he continuously returns to throughout. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon in this era of doom and destruction. After all, we live in an era of stark contrast, and so its only natural that our inner worlds should mirror our outer worlds.
All of us know what it’s like to become consumed by certain things, focusing upon them with such intensity that they for some reason or another all of a sudden swell in significance, growing larger and larger until its hard to consider or even think about anything else. These thoughts gain a gravity of their own, bringing seemingly unrelated thoughts into their orbit and manipulating them in the process. For Kozelek these thoughts involve two separate and seemingly unrelated images – one of David Bowie dying in a hospital bed and another of El Chapo shaking hands with Sean Penn. These images become intertwined within a single point of perseveration. He can’t shake them. One represents everything that’s wrong with the world – a unique, gift of a human being losing vitality and drifting away from life. While the other represents everything that’s wrong with the world – power and devastation coinciding to create a perverse and egotistical sense of importance that lacks any sense of empathy or self-reflection. These thoughts are like two poles of intense and opposing emotions, and together they form a current within which all of Kozelek’s other thoughts and memories mix and interact.
We all have our own poles, and it’s that sense of connection that makes Kozelek’s songs so infectious. We can relate to the sensation even if the thoughts and memories are completely foreign to our own experience. It’s entertainment, but it’s also art in its truest sense, meeting us in the middle and allowing us to insert and reflect upon our own thoughts and memories in the process.
