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Yesterday was Week One of the 2011 NFL season and it was back to work for a whole bunch of offensive men regularly pulling off impressive physical feats, getting plenty of rousing applause and riches for doing them, but wanting, practically needing more for them. They find that the stuffing of a running back at the line of scrimmage for a loss or minimal gain cannot be justified solely by guaranteed money and the adoration of real and fantasy freaks alike, but they should be entitled to something on the top, or on the side, just to stoke their inner cravings a bit more. They do these things when they score touchdowns or when they pop someone a good one. These actions or pantomimes are their caramel and whipped cream toppings, the cherries that they lovingly place on the tops of their Sunday sundaes. There was one grown ass man yesterday who made a nice, but nowhere near impossible tackle on another grown man and, after doing so, quickly got himself to his feet with an agitated look casting out from the eyes snaked back in that helmet of his, and he began to mimic someone devouring a plate of spaghetti with a fork. He was pretending that he was almost cannibalistic, spinning the tackled man’s entrails around the prongs of that imaginary fork and eating them up right there, in the heat of the moment, as the tackled man still laid there below him. It sure would have been something to see from the turf there – a man pretending to eat you with a fork – to delight of tens of thousands of people in attendance and millions more at home. We think that this is something that’s called swagger, a certain confidence in oneself that comes from knowing that you could replicate said feat whenever you desired. The man pretending to do that eating felt that he could tackle that other man a million more times, just like it, and he should get his just desserts for having the skills to do so.
Brooklyn band Javelin has a swagger similar to the one that this gridiron hero had yesterday. It speaks to George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk feeling as if they can turn any second into a super-charged party that’s always got the chance to make you black out from sheer exhaustion and glee. They can turn their love of kitschy IBM and Macintosh computer, salty and sanded ocean-side and street-level hip-hop sounds into these songs that feel like collages of he highlights of a thousand nights that are bound and determined to make it very clear that you are not supposed to be riding the couch that night, but instead losing your mind out in the dark nights, beneath the promising strobe lights. They make songs that are relentlessly buoyant and they find you quickly joining them in the middle, where you’re suddenly just letting everything go. You’ve been brought into those places where the bats fly and where you start losing that moral reflex and you allow yourself to let a little of your own swagger out and you decide that, tonight, you’re going to be a little of someone you’re not usually.