The National and Madmen Grow Up

What the National’s new record, High Violet and Madmen have in common

This past May The National released their new, highly anticipated album, High Violet once again impressing critics almost across the board, including The New York Times and Pitchfork (seriously, wow!) The Ohio based-currently-from-Brooklyn-band, has orchestrated some of their darkest music yet, as singer Matt Berninger throats chilling poetic melodies about sorrow, love, and the not-quite-so-darkly-imagined-reality of modern adulthood. “Sorrow found me when I was young,” Berninger writes, “Sorrow waited, sorrow won,” and you get the sense from his loosely flowing images and words that this is a man grappling with something gone wrong. On “Afraid of Everyone” Berninger goes so far as to say that, “I’m afraid of everyone,” and “I don’t have the drugs to sort it out.” On their single, “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” Berninger writes in the chorus that, “I still owe money/to the money/to the money I owe,” lamenting the current financial predicament of modern living. Though it would be foolish to constrain High Violet to a single theme, it would certainly be one concerning grappling with the reality of adulthood.
July 25th is slated to mark the beginning of the fourth season of the also highly critically acclaimed T.V. drama, Madmen. A show that, also based out of New York, gives us a more than terrifying view of what we thought the 50’s/60’s were all about. Shattering our preconceptions of the Cleaver family, what Madmen does great is transcend the boundary from the 60’s to the current, on the one hand making it easy to scoff at the characters misogyny and shortcomings, yet on the other, hitting us where it hurts, because we realize that we are not so different. We may not chain smoke with the tenacity that they do, but our lungs still feel the weight of trying to stay afloat in this world; and we may not have affairs, but it doesn’t mean we don’t think about it, or even act in certain scenarios; and we may not drink whiskey like water, but it doesn’t mean we cope with our problems any better.
Both Madmen and High Violet seem to be expressing characters disillusioned with their situation. It may be their identity, their family life, the stakes at the office, their desire for status or fulfillment; but both are about the hopeless reality of when life doesn’t quite line up like you thought it was going to—and what comes next. The men at Sterling Cooper are not satisfied with their family life, consider work a higher priority, therefore sending them to seek sexual or physical fulfillment elsewhere, leaving their wives emotionally distant, who take it like sick puppies, and man, we have come so far in the past forty years.

So what do these two things, a current album, and a current T.V. show, have to say about the state of the human condition in 2010? Are they both hitting on a dark theme we rarely like to discuss, or bring up? Are our expectations of what we thought the “real world” would be like, slowly crumbling? Have we gotten so independent and idealistic that the very real worlds of bills, parenting, maintaining relationships etc., are not the epic idea of life we had preconditioned ourselves for? Or are these just examples of the rare, and really we are quite content and happy with how things are going?

I think it’s a good possibility. There definitely seems a certain sorrow to it. A certain grappling.