Rock and Roll

After just finishing an article about Kings of Leon in Rolling Stone, I find a music video of theirs among the free offerings in the airplane music fare. It is called “Use Somebody” and the song, along with the music video, is raw grit.
The vocals start with reluctance, almost as though the words are too painful for Caleb to say. And yet, he fights himself to say them, as the rising guitar echo the duality of his reluctance and his driving need to say what he must. Caleb’s voice is desperate, and the rock and roll gravel simultaneously tears you to shreds and raises you high, a veritable crowd surf of vocal emotion. The guitar hooks, the bass and drum combo dare your heart to beat out of their relentless rhythm.
The rawness of their music is perhaps best reflected in this song and video. In this song, besides the grunting rawness of rock and roll grunge, is genuine pain in the juxtaposing images of them on tour, running the gamut of their brutal life, with the more mundane images of them playing pool, getting stoned, being stoned. But the song’s desperation give the quick shots the fire of tequila, the slow smoky ones the sensual headiness of scotch. The relentless fervor of mindless pushups, showering off post concert grime, memories of performance. Quiet moments of prayer, arms encircling one another.
The potency of the contrasting images pummel you with the reminders of the power of rock and roll. The hook-line-and-sinker pull of this fantastical hedonism is that it has a dark side, and the most frightening things about it is its ability to beckon nonetheless. It is the siren’s song: pleasure and pain inextricably intertwined.
Kings of Leon achieve that in this song: the pleasure-pain, the dark underbelly of loving, longing, destroying yourself in the process. The demons they’re outrunning might destroy them, and perhaps you in the process. If not for the honest moments of pure heartbreak. Those, my friend, will save your soul.

See also: Almost Famous