Sunday's Cool: 20 Years of the Postal Service's 'Give Up'
On the anniversary of 'Give Up,' remembering how Postal Service made room for both sides of the story.
This weekend marks the 20-year anniversary of Give Up, Postal Service’s first and only album. Feel old yet?
I was exactly the right age and type of guy for this sort of thing, inhaling a steady diet of the Saddle Creek bands Omaha was churning out like Marvel movies at the time. Into this obsession came Postal Service, which represented a very real revolution within the scene.
It’s interesting to remember how radical it sounded at the time. Applying electro pop sensibilities to the whole Sub Pop thing represented a real watershed moment in that “indie” world. It’s also interesting how quaint and comforting the whole thing sounds now — a weighted blanket of gooey nostalgia millennials like me can throw on as a background crowd pleaser at a dinner party.
You really have to go back and listen to some of the previous year’s biggest albums to get a sense of just how different Give Up sounded than anything else at the time. Iron and Wine’s dewy cover of “Such Great Heights” is itself a reminder of how cloyingly irritating everything was sounding. But when you listen to Postal Service’s original hit, the production remains genuinely daring, with a prickly guitar solo and just slightly alien drums. As someone who liked but didn’t love Give Up when it first came out, I’m amazed by how well it all holds up, especially in the front half.
But there’s one song that has always stuck with me at a fairly important turning point in my social development. It’s “Nothing Better,” a cutesy back-and-forth between Gibbard and the girl who left him (Jen Wood, in this case). It helped spark a small personal revelation that I think more people — especially guys — could stand to internalize today.
Gibbard’s songwriting strength is selling fortune cookie-level observations with enough earnestness that they pass for profundity. This skill reached its absolute zenith in Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism (which released later in 2003), but it’s all over Give Up too. In this era, Gibbard spent most of his time writing about the constant parade of girls who got away. The Photo Album and We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes were indispensable soundtracks for brokenhearted boys, and Gibbard served a role that rock frontmen from Paul McCartney to Harry Styles have always served, which was to more or less validate our feelings. If you were hurting over a girl who dumped you, these guys were there to confirm what you want to be true: she shouldn’t have left you, was wrong to do so, will definitely regret it, and you deserved better.
This mentality was particularly virulent in the indie rock/pop punk scenes I found myself in, where Fallout Boy and Brand New and Dashboard Confessional would call all sorts of horrible hellfire down on the girls who did them wrong. “Hope you come down with something they can’t diagnose / don’t have a cure for,” sang Brand New’s Jesse Lacey in a line I will absolutely sing along with every time I hear it even though I am one of the good male feminists!!! (Erica West did a great job exploring the scene’s misogyny and its impact on these bands’ women fans in this 2015 feature.)
So, that was the scene at the time. Not great!
And then, here comes Give Up and “Nothing Better,” which starts out with your standard Ben Gibbard plea to a girl who’s on her way out the door. “Just say how to make it right and I swear I'll do my best to comply!” he begs, before offering the sort of sticky sweet promise that would (and literally did!) win Zooey Deschanel’s heart in an early ‘00s rom-com: “Am I right to think there could be nothing better than making you my bride and slowly growing old together?”
At this point, if you were steeped in this sort of music, you think you know where this is going. This cold-hearted strumpet will ignore Gibbard, further confirming that women, whatever they may say, just don’t want a Nice Guy.
But then Gibbard does something unexpected and, in my limited musical experience at the time, unheard of: He gives the girl the floor, and we hear her side of the story.
“You're getting carried away, feeling sorry for yourself with these revisions and gaps in history,” she retorts. “I've made charts and graphs that should finally make it clear, prepared a lecture on why I have to leave.”
Uh-oh. She’s got receipts.
Reading between the lines a little bit here, Jen Wood is accusing Gibbard of a version of what we might now call gaslighting. In her telling, this guy is whitewashing their relationship history. Things weren’t nearly as rosy as he remembers, she can prove this and it’s time to call it: “You’ve had your chance, now say goodbye.”
This was not something guys my age wanted to hear about the girls who walked out, so we were lucky that our chosen music scene was dominated by other guys our age who would never say such a thing. But here was the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, maybe the most successful of That Kind of Band, telling us just that.
So it’s safe to say that this song was helpful for my personal growth. It’s not a particularly profound observation. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. But looking at the state of how men think about women now, you can’t help but get the sense that “Nothing Better” — a song that gives the Heartbreaker in question the dignity of telling her side of the story — is still a rarity.
I thought about it earlier this week while I was writing this piece on all the pastors who love to tell implausible stories about getting hit on by hot women in unlikely areas. These stories, where a pastor proves how godly he is by resisting the voracious sexual appetites of babes who won’t take “no” for an answer, only really work if the women is depicted as “irrationally, chaotically, self-destructively, gleefully evil, just for fun.” The minute you give her a shred of human dignity, the gig is up.
That goes for music too. Obviously, I’m not down on all breakup songs. People will always need their “All Too Well”s and their “Thank U, Next”s and their “Go Your Own Way”s. There were times where I needed Stars’ “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” like oxygen.
But I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the bar should be higher for sermons. Glad Postal Service was around to teach me some of that.
You know that stereotypical image of a struggling writer at his typewriter, ashtray stuffed to the brim with spent cigarettes, wastebasket overflowing with wadded up paper? That’s me with the Asbury Theological Seminary revival. I’ve lost track of how many drafts I’ve trashed on it, working through different angles until I realized I was writing a confused mess that added nothing of value to the conversation. Then here comes Phil Christman, who says just about all I think that needs to be said on the matter.