Beyond control
Pedro the Lion or British Sea Power? A minor booking conflict affords the writer an opportunity to go autobiographical.

By Duncan Scott Davidson

DESPITE THE QUIRKS of quantum mechanics, wherein electrons and cats can be in a superposition of states, the average indie rock fan can't be in two places at once. When it comes to Noise Pop, this presents a serious problem, specifically to me on Feb. 27. That Friday night Pedro the Lion headline Great American Music Hall, while the Bottom of the Hill will be awash in the glorious squall of British Sea Power.

The last record put out by Pedro the Lion, i.e., David Bazan and guests, 2002's Control (Jade Tree), was a monument to messy breakups and the emotional chaos that attends them. "Control?" Eugene Cash, a Buddhist teacher, said during a talk recently. "Name one thing you can control." And that's what the album is about, from the gentle guitar slides of the opener, "Options" – "So I told her I loved her / And she told me she loved me / And I must have believed her / And she must have believed me" – to the broken-down strum of the final track, "Rejoice," which asks, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if everything were meaningless?" Control is an illusion – in relationships, in life. Listening to Control is akin to reading a sonnet cycle or a Greek tragedy: The construction is so tight, with every syllable in perfect position, it's rock in iambics. The emotional effect, the ultimate catharsis, is palpable. British Sea Power's rapt guitar prayers on The Decline of British Sea Power (Rough Trade) have a similar impact, though thematically the record is a rumination on death and the nature of the self, and more specifically, death as the disappearance of the self.

These albums are the Rock and Roll of Ages. If your ship's going to wreck, you hope they'll be nearby, so you have something to cleave to amid the swirling abyss. They've been there for me through dark times. And they were there for me last week, when I tested positive for HIV.

"Jesus Fucking Christ, Oh God No."

So opens the British Sea Power song "Carrion," and I'm sure something similar must've come to my lips as I heard the words "preliminary positive," while sitting on a vinyl stool at the Larkin Street Clinic, before I folded forward, head in hands.

The situation, in brief: I fell in love. Don't all tragedies start the same way? Shortly thereafter, the girl I fell in love with, who I'll call "J" – simply to be needlessly cryptic – was given reason to believe she'd been exposed to HIV. On a Friday, hyperventilating and in tears, she sped off to take a blood test, the results of which wouldn't come back for a week. On Monday she went to the Larkin Street Clinic to get an OraQuick test, from which the results are available in 20 minutes. I came along for moral support and to get tested myself. She went in first, to have a single droplet pricked from her thumb, while I sat in the lobby, raking sand and rearranging pebbles in a miniature Zen rock garden. I couldn't seem to form a pleasing arrangement.

Situations like this come down to odds: Duncan Scott Davidson, this is the lottery of your life. J's blood came back negative. My ex-girlfriend tested negative. The windows shut on all possible "window periods," until my positive status came down to one condomless encounter. The odds of a male contracting HIV in a single encounter with a positive female are 1 in 5,000. The odds of a false positive on the OraQuick are 4 in 1,000, or 20 in 5,000, if you want to find the lowest-common denominator – which comes natural to me: the woman happened to have a boyfriend. "This is how we multiply," Pedro the Lion's "Rapture" begins, "Pity that she's not my wife.... This is how bodies move / With everything that we could lose / Pushing us deeper still / The sheets and the sweat / The seed and the spill / The bitter pill yet undiscovered." Payback is a bitch, sure, but is karma really that brutal? I had the rest of my foreshortened life to consider another Control lyric, this time from "Magazine":

Oh, look you've earned your wings

Are you an angel now

Or a vulture

Constantly hovering over

Waiting for the big mistake

Oh my God, what have I done?

Oh my God, what have I done?

Ping-Pong with Godot

Everyone was quick to deliver the "wonderful drugs and treatments" spiel: with modern advancements, you can live 20 or 30 years; it's not like it would've been being diagnosed HIV positive in 1980. All of this silver lining hoo-ha was crapping on my right to a bad mood. It was as if I'd had both legs amputated and then was forced to endure people sitting by my hospital bedside telling me that if I'd prop myself up with a few telephone books, I could become a really ripping Ping-Pong player. Another "Magazine" lyric: "I feel the darkness growing stronger / As you cram light down my throat /... Healthy skin, perfect teeth / Designed to hide what lies beneath." "What lies beneath" wasn't a terminal illness, but a predisposition toward death, which, after all, is an unfortunate side effect of birth. "You're gonna die," the priest in PTL's "Priests and Paramedics" says. "We're all gonna die / Could be twenty years / Could be tonight." But I wasn't dying – actively – I was merely waiting for Godot. I was Schroedinger's cat – in a superposition of states inside that box, both alive and dead. At a time when I'd wanted to bask in the radiance of love, I was forced to take an honest stare into the void.

Oh the heavy water how it enfolds

The salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow

Always, always, always the sea

Brilliantine mortality

British Sea Power, "Carrion"

A little fear of drowning

It's a cliché, but so much of life is just showing up. Conversely, so much of death is not showing up. Not being there. An interrupted narrative line. In British Sea Power's "Remember Me," singer-lyricist Yan sings, "Do you worry about your health? / Do you watch it slowly change? / ... And did you notice when you began to disappear? / Was it slowly at first / Until there was nobody really there." What happens when you stop existing in your own mind, what Sartre refers to as being-for-itself, and become merely a reflection in the minds of others, a neuronal pattern spread across a collection of brains – being-for-itself – a recorded artifact of questionable fidelity? This begs the question of just how "real" a self is to begin with. Hindus have two complementary mantras in answer to who we are: "Thou art that" and "Not this, not that." Everything and nothing.

"From the moment that you realize / Most of this isn't real," Yan sings on "Fear of Drowning," "to the moment that you decide / Should we go out tonight / ....And all the money in the world / Won't help you now / The only way is down / And you know from way out here / There is a little fear / A little fear of drowning." You can't take it with you. Money, sure, but more important, personhood or selfhood. There's a common Hindu image for liberation: the small self, the self of the ego, as an individual raindrop, self-contained and self-important, dissolving into the great ocean of being – just as that single, damning droplet of blood was pricked from a greater flow. For me, as I contemplated the interruption of my narrative line, that's what Yan means by that "little fear of drowning." Death doesn't necessarily mean the end of being; it just means the end of personal being. Enlightenment or worms, either way, it's terrifying, the idea of this cozy little construct of me being discontinued without further notice.

Over the phone, Yan humored my reading of The Decline of British Sea Power. When talking about "The Lonely," he said "that is a song, if there is a song on the album, which is saturated in death." It starts like this:

Since I find out that most of this

Is nothing more than emptiness

Filled with impermanence

A guided tour of your deepest fears

Designed to help your vision clear

We'll depart from here

The Good Ship Lollipop

My interview with Yan was awkward because it was unnecessary: I already knew what I wanted to say. "I think you understood something that was kind of intended in the music," he said. "I'm not thinking, 'What the fuck are you on about?' " Nonetheless, if The Decline of British Sea Power were conceptualized as an extended rumination on the masterworks of Shirley Temple and Mr. Bojangles, it wouldn't make a difference. Whether or not I hit on the intentions of the songwriter is superfluous. Good music – great music – takes you somewhere when you throw it in the deck, as you drive between your sister and your mother, bringing each the bad news. Talking to Yan was like seeking out my girlfriend's father to help me understand why I love her so goddamned much – Dad was there at the beginning, but she wasn't about him anymore. I decided to flag the interview with David Bazan.

There it is: I've copped to what readers think is a problem with my writing. "He just writes about himself." Yeah, and? Your point? Yan and Bazan have made their masterpieces. In an age when so much of music journalism is about why Jack White punched the guy from the Von Bondies in the face, I feel obligated to offer up something of myself. Oh, Christ, I can hear you say. Look, it's Jesus, and he's reviewing records for the local weekly. What do you want – a brownie? Take this cup and drink from it, it is my blood ... oh, better not drink that.

Actually, go ahead. I've since had two blood draws, with three separate HIV tests run on each. Negative, every one. I beat the odds again. If I had a roll of lottery tickets coming out of my ass, they'd all be winners. The Decline of British Sea Power starts with a reference to Dostoyevsky in the song "Apologies to Insect Life": "Oh Fyodor you are the most attractive man." Czar Nicholas I stood Dostoyevsky in front of a firing squad. When Dostoyevsky was sure of his death, his sentence was commuted to hard labor in Siberia. We're back to the quiet, spiritually shipwrecked narrator of "Rejoice" at the end of PTL's Control: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if everything were meaningless / But everything is so meaningful / And most everything turns to shit / Rejoice." Most everything. But not everything. There is the possibility of redemption, or, at least, a reprieve. Water turns into wine, and, sometimes, shit turns into Shinola. Rejoice.

Pedro the Lion play Fri/27, 8:30 p.m., Great American Music Hall, 859 O'Farrell, S.F. $12. (415) 621-4455. British Sea Power, with Kaito and Citizens Here and Abroad, play Fri/27, 9 p.m., Bottom of the Hill, 1233 17th St., S.F. $10. (415) 885-0750.