Alcohol by the Barenaked Ladies

Have you ever tried to imagine the first people who discovered alcoholic drinks? There’s some guy in a village who makes a soup out of grains or fruit and then decides, “hey this taste pretty good, why don’t let it sit in a pot and see if it tastes better?” Then a little while later this guy taste his fermented concoction and thinks “man this taste a little weird, but it makes me feel good” and like a mouse pressing a button to get food pellets our oh so smart ancestor probably keep drinking until the momentous event known as the first human pass-out followed by the world’s first hangover. The crazy thing is once he got over his hangover, must have thought “wow, that was bad, but I think I can do better with my new beverage” and proceeded to develop this early type of alcohol through trial and error. (I say “guy” to ease the flow of the writing, I’m sure a girl could have been responsible for this early experimentation though it seems more likely that a guy would be dumb enough to keep at this kind of self-abuse).

My parent when I was growing up would drink wine and beer and I never remember my parents getting wasted, there were some times when they would get silly after drinking but it was never anything negative. I never drank alcohol with my high school friends. I wasn’t really in the social circle that did drink and the idea of having to be secret about it, just kind of seemed silly to me.

College is a time of self-discovery. We find out our strengths, our weaknesses, what we truly care about, what it means to be an adult and just what kind of drunk we really are. People are taught how to drink and my instructors were a couple upperclassmen girls who I met through marching band. Through these ladies who took my under their collective wing, I learned how to take a shot (which was Southern Comfort), got introduced to White Zinfindel as a gateway beverage into the world of wine, explored the world of beer and learned various techniques to fight off the scourge known as the hang-over.

That’s just the thing, there is a specter of darkness that is present whenever alcohol is served. It’s more then just barfing in the bathroom or getting a hangover. It’s losing control, it’s drunk driving and it’s a devastating disease called alcoholism. It seems like a weird joke that something that can make us feel so good can bring out the worst in us. There is no song that I know that captures this sense of irony like “Alcohol” by the Barenaked Ladies.

The Barenaked Ladies sound in some ways like a typical mid-1990s college band. The sound of their music is not necessarily adventurous but their ability to mix catchy well-crafted melodies with clever and insightful lyrics has set them apart from other bands. Their songs tell interesting stories often hold a deeper meaning then the subject of the song initially implies. One of my favorite songs is off their album Maroon titled “Tonight is the Night I fell Asleep at the Wheel” in which the narrator describes getting in a car accident which reveals itself as being an expression of how important a loved one is in his life .

In “Alcohol” the narrator sings to alcohol and as he describes the role alcoholic drinks have had in his life. “Alcohol, my permanent accessory” that’s kind of funny, but also kind of sad, and then when first ends with “Alcohol, alternative to feeling like yourself” it becomes clear that though this song may sound like a joyous celebration of the glory that is booze, but it has a tinge of rather dark self-awareness.

We get the full chorus after the second verse in which we get another view of this conflicted relationship with alcohol.

I love you more than I did the week before
I discovered alcohol
O Alcohol, would you please forgive me?
For while I cannot love myself
I'll use something else.

The way that “I love you” is sung, it can casually be interpreted as the singer saying how much he loves alcohol but then you listen carefully and realize that maybe that’s the booze speaking as he talks to someone he is with. Then the most interesting turn occurs in the song when he asks for forgiveness from alcohol. He describes how he can’t deal with his current situation and uses alcohol as a way to escape.

I’ve been there. Hard day at work, get together with some friends and drink some beers to forget the day and relax. Alcohol is not the only thing people do to get away from themselves. There’s films, television, food, shopping, and in some ways most of what we do in our free can be utilizes as escapism and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What bothers us when alcohol is used this way is that it is slippery slope. If watching television is what you do to escape, you may become a couch potato which is not nearly as frightening as become as becoming an alcoholic.

In the bridge, the Barenaked Ladies explain it perfectly. I used to think that drinking just to get drunk was stupid, but there’s a time and a place for that. Within that activity as is explained in the song we walk a “fine line between self-control and self-abuse.” As the bridge starts, the music becomes a drunken haze. The tempo slows down, people scream in the background, and weird sounds whirl like circus music. Then the music locks back in with the words “self-abuse.”

This captures the joyous parts of drinking alcohol, that feeling of freedom but it also describes that fear inside of us about of what drinking really says about who we are. Drinking is self-abuse. If done responsibility drinking doesn’t really hurt us all that much but it does put our bodies under stress and it’s important that we really think about what alcohol means to us.

I love alcohol but I also fear it. I don’t know how much of this is propaganda and how much of it is based on reality. Would life be simpler (and well cheaper) if I never drank again? Yes, but I’ve had some crazy good times that involved booze and nothing really bad has happened because of my drinking.

Well, nothing really bad has happened . . . yet.

I’ll probably continue drinking in some capacity for the rest of my life but no matter what I do or how much I drink will I ever be free of the fear of what the darkness alcohol can bring. I don’t think that’s a bad thing and it’s a complicated feeling. If we don’t admit this to ourselves and deal with these feelings, we may end of it all begging for forgiveness like at the end of “Alcohol” not from alcohol itself, but from our friends and families, but mostly ourselves.