On The Moral Stance Of Spiritualized’s “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space”
Longtime readers of Tulip Frenzy may know that we don’t think the glorification of heroin by rock bands is cool. We love Wilco, but we’ve never been sure whether Jeff Tweedy is trying to praise smack or bury it, before it buries him. So how, you may ask, can we believe, as we do, that Spiritualized’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is one of the great albums of the ’90s, worthy of its recent multi-CD relaunch? After all, doesn’t its greatest song, “I Think I’m Falling In Love,” play as one long, enticing nod?
“Sun so bright that I’m nearly blind
Cool cos I’m wired and I’m out of my mind
Warms the dope running down my spine
But I don’t care ’bout you and I’ve got nothing to do
Free as the warmth in the air that I breathe
Even freer than dmt
Feel the warmth of the sun in me
But I don’t care ’bout you and I’ve got nothing to do
Love in the middle of the afternoon
Just me, my spike in my arm and my spoon
Feel the warmth of the sun in the room
But I don’t care ’bout you
And I’ve got nothin’ ”
Well, maybe. “Cop Shoot Cop” begins with the lyrics, “There’s a hole in my arm where the money goes.” And when listened to as a whole, the album is one of the most devastating portraits of the dislocation and loss that comes from chemical dependency I can think of. There’s the vertiginous feel of someone about to plunge off the bridge, life over, nothing left. It does not paint a warm picture of junkiedom.
In fact, one of the reasons it’s so powerful is because of the lack of ambiguity about smack. Jason Pierce is as famously louche as Keith Richards, without the latter’s Devil-sold constitution, but in this regard he is more of an object lesson than an exemplar. Whereas when Tweedy sings, and all the kids singalong, “All I need is a shot in the arm,” and “There’s something in my veins/bloodier than blood,” I’m not sure the audience gets that this is not a good thing.
Why is the official moral stance of Tulip Frenzy to condemn ambiguity about heroin use? Well, we’ve never forgotten our friend Byron Coley’s letter to the paper we worked for, The Soho Weekly News, when around August 1979 it showed a young blond woman on the cover with a straw and a line of white powder and the headline, “Now Heroin.” And Byron wrote in a letter to the editor words to the effect of, “Your audience doesn’t have the critical sensibility of, say, readers of Foreign Affairs, and when they see you holding out heroin as chic, they may take the bait. And this is what happened to Charlie Parker and others, some of whom died, and the rest got buried.”
Fans of hip British rock bands do not necessarily have the sensibilities of readers of Foreign Affairs. Ambiguity about heroin can send exactly the wrong message to the vulnerable. Spiritualized’s epic album may, to some, send a signal that heroin is cool. I actually think it is a glorious, beautiful reminder that it just completely isn’t, that squalor ensues, that raggedness and a loss of humanity proceed the reckoning, if you’re lucky enough to survive and have one.
Tulip Frenzy 
February 6, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Thoughtful post. Thank you.
July 29, 2010 at 1:16 am
[…] been? How did we not know this and make the according plans. While we have previously expressed concerns about the moral stance of Spiritualized’s epic — possibly the greatest album of the 1990s, certainly one of […]
April 16, 2012 at 5:39 pm
[…] the way we do, as we’ve been critical of anything that smacks of heroin chic. But some years ago we clarified that we view Jason Pierce as nothing so much as an anti-heroin morality play. His greatest work […]