| But Finn’s narrator will make no such climb. He is a liar. (So were our friends, probably, though we don’t like to admit it.) “When classes start i'll quit this/this is just some summer slippage,” he says, but we would do well to remember the condition he’s in (the song’s third line: “Haven’t been as high as this since the night I burned my lips”) and the nature of most promises made in such a condition. We are listening, I mean, to the empty pledges and elaborate fantasies of a very convincing narrator whose vivid memories of his drug use are his most treasured possessions, and whose mournful melody pretends to say goodbye to his lost summer even as the lyric makes plain his plans to hold on to its worst excesses. The continual downward-fall of the bass and guitar lines tell the true story, while the narrator flatters himself about how he, in his condition, looks to others: “Coming down too quick/My own private apocalypse,” he says, and his repetitive melody is so convincing that we believe what all dope fiends want us to believe of them: that while all junkies are the same, this one is special, and is deserving of our pity, support, love, respect, money, car, and anything else he might need from us. |