Alone In This Vortex

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks “Walk Into The Mirror”

“Walk Into The Mirror” is essentially a post-modern hippie song, but it is not especially snarky or ironic. Instead, the song finds Stephen Malkmus paying tribute to a particular strain of idealistic, optimistic, inclusive sort of rock and roll from the 60s, adapting its language to fit his own concerns, and engaging in a meta-commentary on hippie-dippy aesthetics in the present tense.

The tune starts off with a few lyrics that lay on the flower child vibe thick and heavy, but it’s an intentional cliché, and Malkmus trusts the listener to both recognize the affectation and take its sentiment at face value. Within a few lines, communal creation of music is compared to work songs and spirituals, but through a rather unpretentious allusion to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Only one line later, and the guy is flipping the rosy, nostalgic view of 60s rock established at the start of the song, and bringing up the fact that much of that music was about jilted love, which is of course the primary topic of all pop music.

There is no clear point to be made about the 60s in the song, aside from perhaps acknowledging that the varying conventional wisdom about the era and its music is shaped by hagiography, fiction, commercialism, and kneejerk bias. We definitely need to approach this sort of art with a bit of critical distance if just to avoid getting suckered into drinking Baby Boomer Kool-Aid, but I think the implied argument here is that it’s also okay to engage with this sort of earnest sentiment on its own terms. Its rhetoric still has use, not just on a philosophical level, but as a valid mode of expression in rock and roll.

As much as the verses toy with the idea of “the 60s,” the chorus comes across like an evergreen Malkmus-ism about an escape into the surreal. In context, the notion of walking into the mirror does have something of a hippie flavor, but I think that mostly comes down to the way the song foregrounds the roots of his own lyrical tics. Between the hopeful vibe of the melody and the assertive momentum of its beat, the question asked in the chorus has a very obvious answer: Don’t you want to walk into the mirror? Oh God, yes! I hardly know what it would entail, but I very much would like to walk into the mirror, thanks for asking.

Buy it from Bleep.

A couple months ago I got to interview Stephen Malkmus for Pitchfork, and after a bit of a wait, the feature has been published on the site. I’m very proud of how it came out, and I’m super grateful for the opportunity to do a nice long interview with my favorite musician. The conversation spans his entire career, from the beginning of Pavement on through his current work on the next Jicks album, with a particular focus on Brighten The Corners. We spent a fair chunk of the interview discussing his motives and methods in regards to the songs that never get properly finished, or get cut from the albums, which is something I had been wondering about as a fan for quite some time. If you’ve been curious as to why “Walk Into The Mirror” didn’t make it on to Real Emotional Trash, you’re in luck — I made a point of specifically asking about that song, and he gave a pretty good answer.