#18: Everyone's Exhausting (Except for You) / Palo Alto (to Pretoria)
More stuff about Elon Musk. Great. Alright, no more about that crank from here on out.
These are the third and fourth songs on the 2024 EP The Freest Speech Ever Attempted Without Disintegrating. They are two sides of the same coin, so I’ll write about them as such. Or I won’t. I can probably just explain why in a couple of sentences and not write an entire Substack post about it. Yeah. I’ll do that. No. Wait. I don’t want to do that. I like writing these for some reason. Okay. I’ll write a Substack post instead.
I’ve gotten really uneasy saying this EP is explicitly written about Elon Musk’s gradual descent into madness out of feeling like a Pez dispenser that spits out tiny rectangular chalk bits of Asperger’s. But that’s what it is.
I started writing and recording this one after reading that Walter Isaacson book about Musk and seeing a bunch of erratic clips of him shedding his altruistic Silicon Valley visionary skin into some sort of post-society Curtis Yarvin-fuck who thought poor people’s blood and organs should be harvested so he and his contemporaries could one day have an immortal ketamine binge in the caldera of Olympus Mons. Not much other information was dug up. Everything was just kind of winged from there.
That blurry process of guessed details always makes me laugh. It’s been done a million times, but I first became interested in it when this band called Dirty Projectors recreated Black Flag’s legendary 1981 record Damaged from a faded, half-fucked teenage memory in 2007. That record has spawned a million bands and flophouse stick-and-poke tattoos. The amount of irreverence needed to pull that off is very entertaining.
Even better is that the Dirty Projectors result is a Polaroid of peak Williamsburg hipster bullshit standing in strict defiance of some Huntington Beach punk club in 1982, where Henry Rollins is arm-barring a skinhead while shirtless and covered in the audience’s spit. You can imagine it being played over an episode of that HBO show where Lena Dunham forgot there were Black people in New York City.
To make matters worse, I don’t really know the version of Damaged that Dirty Projectors put out, and even less about the rest of their catalog. I just liked the idea, listened to their version of “Rise Above,” and never listened to the rest of the record. It’s like a Christopher Nolan movie about being an ill-researched asshole. I’m listening now. It’s pretty good.
That blurry tongue kept showing up in a lot of Musk’s philosophies and statements as well, though through a lack of honesty or ulterior motives instead of a creative choice.
“Humanity should go to Mars” means “only I get to go to Mars while all you peasants left behind will be turned into food.”
“Humans will one day live forever” means that he will maybe one day live for centuries through a process of experimental and inhumane medical procedures. Most of the Earth’s population will die of unimagined and excruciating alien ailments at 25 from mining lithium in the Kuiper Belt in exchange for payment in the form of an unvalued shitcoin of Musk as a caveman discovering fire.
And freedom of speech? No one knows what that means and probably never has. Even the smartest man in the world apparently.
Getting a gauge on who he actually is flips and contorts like a shape-shifting lizard trying to maintain its human disguise. Even the basis of Isaacson’s book is built on some shoddy, grotesque façade of the previous biography he wrote on Steve Jobs.
Musk tries to graft all of Jobs’ innovation and bullshit hippie altruism onto his mousy, apartheid-stained being, but lacks the bravado or straight-up good looks to pull it off. He comes across as an asshole. A grifter. A man uncomfortable in his own skin, white-knuckling sanity to keep the complete chaos he wants to unleash upon the world at bay.
“Everyone’s Exhausting” is what I imagined to be his last moments of feeling anything remotely human before the descent into his final and inevitable form on “Palo Alto (to Pretoria).” Before the amphetamine-fueled rants, before the dead-eyed 3 a.m. plans of bureaucratic slaughter, before the full-body surrender to whatever happens when the richest guy in the world realizes nobody can make him log off.
The tune is really just a love song for Lindsay under the hood. I wanted to write a pretty song for her and lean into it without finding some other confusing angle to enter from, like I pretend is clever and have been using as a songwriting device for twenty years. Loving someone else is probably the most human thing you can do, so I started there and walked backwards toward some guy thinking that calling the pope “r*tarded” on X is the modern-day march on Selma.
There must have been some point in his life before the mental breakdown where he felt human. There must have been some point where he said, “fuck it,” turned off his phone, picked up his wife, and headed north from the Tesla factory in Fremont to some easier version of himself.
Everybody in the Bay Area knows that dynamic at some point. Get in a car. Cross the Golden Gate Bridge, the Carquinez Bridge, or the Richmond Bridge, and keep going to either feel like a wine snob or a small-town bumpkin, depending on how far you want to temporarily drive into a different life.
Another break in the self-diagnosed autistic supervillain bullshit sitting dormant at the back of his head was his obsession with the movies of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Musk was supposedly hipped to them by his ex-wife sometime around 2016, and they became a grain of sand in the ocean of obsessive talking points he’s maintained since first being entertained by his own voice.
Rogers and Astaire movies are these syrupy-sweet, effervescent daydreams that were designed to shock and awe the American public away from the Great Depression’s chokehold on imagination. Soot-covered orphans would sit wide-eyed in front of the big screen and forget about how Ma and Pa were carried off by a tornadey, and some German fellow was going to give Poland an awful beatin’ posthaste.
I imagine that Musk saw them as a respite from the robotic and isolated cage he’d built himself into. His fascination with them is an out-of-character pinhole in the garbage-dick Tony Stark affect he’d built around himself over the years to push any semblance of the frail and insecure software coder from South Africa out of existence.
It would be convenient to believe his affinity for those movies is another module he snapped into the back of his head at some point, along with giving a shit about the LGBTQ community or pretending that founding Tesla was an environmental decision. There is no fun in that. He showed everything that needed to be seen. All that is left unscrubbed on the internet about his millisecond obsession is a tweet and a brief reference in Isaacson’s book about a fleeting sensation that I imagine Musk either wishes he could go back to, or has actively tried to kill.
That was the only entry point of empathy I could find, however small it might be. I could understand the exhaustion of both other people and yourself. The need to push the ejection button and temporarily replace all the clutter and commitments with one other person and a bunch of redwoods. That’s universal whether you’re a trillionaire or some idiot stringing words together behind an Ace Hardware in Jack London Square.
The last line about myself being especially exhausting doesn’t have anything to do with Musk. I can be completely fucking exhausting to others and myself. Neat. The ol’ switcheroo.
The northern daydream evaporates, and reality’s vise begins applying pressure to Musk’s once-clearly-destined-to-be-bald head.
The same pleasant, major-key melody that fluttered around “Everyone’s Exhausting” is altered by a couple of notes and turned into this shitty swarm of yellowjackets that you can’t outrun. I was going to compare them to the “white hat/black hat” trope from Westerns, but that jackass somehow made a more appropriate and corny example of it with his “dark MAGA” bullshit. Whatever.
Here is the “regular MAGA” melody from “Everyone’s Exhausting,” followed by the “dark MAGA” melody from “Palo Alto.”
The chord structure for “Palo Alto” had been kicking around in my head for years and on overly dramatic embarrassing demos that I would prefer to be lit on fire and shot into space than ever coming to light.
It’s in an open D minor tuning that I never use. There aren’t many moves in that one aside from depressing bullshit. The uneasy chromatic jump on the first chord of this song was as close as I could get to anything passable. The entire chord structure makes me anxious and uncomfortable. I’m just glad that it found its grave in a subject and person who makes me equally anxious and uncomfortable. TWIIIIIIIINSSSSSSS.
This song sounded like garbage until Raj gave me the final stereo bounce of his drum track. An invaluable addition to the song, not to mention the entire record, that I affectionately refer to as sounding like the opening rave scene from Blade. Add a bunch of stringed instruments playing sixteenth notes, some iPhone recordings of the shitty piano outside our space, a healthy subconscious dollop of Jagz Kooner’s excellent remix of Primal Scream’s “Swastika Eyes,” and call it a day. Bingo bango.
The final piece was the vocals. I knew I wanted them to sound disjointed and off-time, but every pass I did sounded god-awful. I sounded like Robert Goulet trying to croon over “March of the Pigs” or some shit.
Some time around recording the previous EP Saigon Market, I found out how to process a vocal take through a filter that would turn it into one of thousands of historical figures or celebrities regardless of whether their status was "alive" or "deceased." Here is a full list of everybody who made the cut.
Bad Bunny, Lana Del Rey, Hank Williams Sr., Hank Williams Jr., Serena Williams, William F. Buckley, Will Smith, William Gibson, SpongeBob SquarePants, Elon Musk, Sonic the Hedgehog, Albert Einstein, Nina Hagen, Donald Fagen, John Wayne, Wayne Knight, Mickey Mouse, Donald Rumsfeld, Bart Simpson, James Baldwin, Alec Baldwin, Joe Biden, Joe Rogan, Hulk Hogan, Richard Nixon, Willie Dixon, Angela Merkel, Studs Terkel, Hatsune Miku, Shakira, 21 Savage, and Macho Man Randy Savage
You can clearly hear me singing as Hulk Hogan at 2:11.
The shape-shifting acrobatics of the filters were exactly what I needed to explain Musk’s final descent where words failed. He seemed like he didn’t understand the difference between savior and threat, freedom and authoritarianism, and immortal superhero and the scared boy from Pretoria who hid from his father.
I thought I was exaggerating his heel turn into some kind of David Icke snake person accidentally flashing its reptile tongue while addressing the UN about using mice as the singular world currency. But that seems pedestrian at this point.
Whatever perception I followed while making this record now feels almost quaint. He somehow became more evil, more childish, and more self-obsessed than even my over-bloated and uninformed imagination could predict.
His obsession is what I found funny and tried to recreate on the record and maybe even in this Substack post. I don’t know how funny it is now. You tend to tense up like hearing a window shatter when the most powerful men in the world start talking about the Antichrist or empathy being a “fundamental weakness of Western society.”
Hey, but it’s also 70 degrees and sunny in my stupid little communist port town. I’m going to go outside. Fuck that guy.
Thanks for reading.