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I couldn’t
get enough of Streethawk, really. It was clever, it was melodic,
it had genuine opinions about the relationship(s) between allusion, appropriation,
and theft. Bejar stole not just lines from songs, but whole sections—the
“I’ve got the spirit/but lose the feeling” recognition-of-doom
segment of Joy Division’s “Disorder” became, in Bejar’s
artistic chop shop, “You’ve got the spirit/Don’t lose the
feeling,” the melody transformed from an expression of creeping dread
to a major-key celebration of introspectively false hope. You Manchester
fiends who are cringing at the thought are only encouraging guys like Daniel
Bejar, so you might as well just get with the program. The deeply affecting
melodies that hold up Bejar’s very writerly lyrics lend them an air
of sincerity that they perversely and quite vigorously attack and defend
at the same time. Bejar not only “didn’t mean it”; he didn’t
mean that he didn’t mean that he didn’t mean it. If ever the joys
of postmodernism were spelled out plainly for Doubting Thomases like myself,
it was in Streethawk.
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