According to the film of the same name, David’s Moore’s, Hitting the Ground, the fundamental law of the universe is that entropy increases. And whilst it’s a fiendishly conceived paradox, it really doesn’t explain the plot.
Howard (Neal Huff) is a photographer for the local college newspaper. One day, while shooting random pictures on campus, he photographs a girl taking a fatal leap out her dormitory window. Howard’s film becomes a hot property, but whilst everyone is concerned about getting the negative, no one cares about the trauma felt by the young man himself, who is now faithfully unwilling to release the negatives to the media.
Bearing in mind that it’s very nearly the anniversary of the ‘September incident’, this album nor this film could not have come at a better time: there was life in dem there tower-blocks, something no image could ever really bare witness to.
But what has all this got to do with the album? Everything, perhaps, and nothing. A soundtrack album, an album fittingly cast with a dozen or so notable eccentrics on vocals, including Lou Reed, John Cale, PJ Harvey, Frank Black, They Might be Giants and Martha Wainwright (sister of Rufus) – an album of extremes – an album of extreme (if not always consistent) pleasures.
Someone once said that power circulates in instantaneous images and each track on Gordon Gano’s soundtrack album, Hitting The Ground is a perfectly defined, self-contained and instantaneous ‘image’; a near momentary depiction of an emotion at it’s most profound. At points brutal and uncompromising (Hitting The Ground, Make It Happen) at points unapologetically tender (as in Linda Perry’s beautiful rendering of the unimaginable, in So It Goes, and They Might Be Giant’s declaration of intent, Darlin’ Allison) and at all points eccentric and witty – the songs each arrive and burn with the intensity of a small terrestrial star; arresting time, arresting development.
The simple, earnest and skeletal 50’s production – stripping the songs down to their most potent and simplex forms – only serves to magnify the joy and the pain, providing as it does, a simple concentrate of experience. And against the backdrop of the film’s college campus, it’s a near perfect representation of imperfect and mythical youth: callow, over eager and ever so likely to crash and burn before the age of 23.
It’s a kind of live fast, die young, rage, rage against the dying of the light kind of thing, and who better qualified to perpetuate the myth than Violent Femme’s Gordon Gano?
If you like your musical cornflakes covered with a light sprinkling of David Lynch go out and buy it. If on the otherhand you’re looking for something easy and uncomplicated, forget it. And as for the media? Well let me say this. If over the next fortnight you get increasingly bombarded with tragic images and begin to get desensitised to it – stop looking at the pictures – they’re both a gateway and a smokescreen to the event as it really unfolded, and to the life as it was lost.
Best moments in this picture? The bit where Gordon gets together with his sister, Cynthia on Merry Xmas Brother and Martha Wainwright on It’s Money, the bit where Frank Black just goes bonkers, as well as that really surprising twist halfway through when Linda Perry gets up and does So It Goes.
Surprised me at least.