No. 075 - Nomeansno’s “Two Lips, Two Lungs And One Tongue” changed my life
Where braggadocio and machismo failed, a musical joke helped Joseph DeSimone feel understood and awakened
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• 5 min read •
My musical taste is, at its heart, a hand-me-down.
My parents set the foundation with a comprehensive soundtrack of their salad days, from Neil Young to Talking Heads (my father has a story he tells, whenever the opportunity arises, of seeing them in college when they were billed as “and special guest” opening for the local rowdy bar band), played often, and loudly. My sister, the oldest sibling of the three of us, began the work of building a music collection in earnest with troves of burned and bootleg indie rock CDs alongside her genuine REM and Metallica albums, all of which could be heard daily through the walls of our house. My brother, a year and a half older than me, then entered his teen years and added onto the collection with a pile of street punk, ska, thrash, hardcore, and even the occasional metal/metalcore albums. Soon after, it was my turn to enter my own moody adolescence.
I began high school a slightly nervous bookworm, then very quickly grew into an anxiety-ridden slacker. Nearly overnight, I moved on from my sister’s burned Postal Service and Broken Social Scene albums straight to the roughest, rowdiest street punk that my brother’s collection had to offer. The music was nutritious for my teenage mind: simple and broad emotional appeals, calls for community and camaraderie, and an anger that often seemed entirely limbic. But my appetite was only growing, and I was finding myself bored of not just the braggadocio and machismo of so much of the music, but also the simple melodies and rote songwriting.
As I matured into a bona fide bespectacled dork, I had begun to wonder: where were all the people like me? All of these punk rockers that I saw strutting around on album covers were fashionable, social creatures, while I was wilting into a hopeless shut-in. Where was the fear, the confusion, the doubt that I felt? Where were the imperfect people, the musicians who wanted to explore and take risks, who wanted to truly share themselves with the world, ugly flaws and all? Though I recognized that I was a white male listening to genres where white males are very majorly overrepresented, why did I still feel like they were always talking to someone else?
In search of answers, I did what any burgeoning recluse would do: I went onto the internet. I would trawl Wikipedia pages for information about foundational bands long gone, I would go on music forums (but not those music forums), all in search of bands that were brave (or brazen) enough to break the mold of this genre that purports to pride itself on its iconoclasm. And I found some: Fugazi, the Minutemen, Television, Big Black, all these bands that existed before their respective scenes and genres ossified. But as for the band Nomeansno, I simply stumbled upon them by accident, just a footnote of a footnote as I scrolled my way down through punk rock history. And so, as was the fashion at the time, I illegally downloaded their entire discography.
“Two Lips, Two Lungs And One Tongue” is one of Nomeansno’s most straight-ahead hardcore punk rock songs: galloping drums, buzzsaw guitars, and shout-sung vocals. But the verses aren’t the kind of passionate bravura that you might expect from the genre; they’re instead delivered like a recitation of a basic, irrefutable fact. Each is a single short couplet, each one presenting a new lonely figure, desperate to be heard and understood by any other. Then comes the chorus: a seventeen-beat-long chant with all three band members delivering the answer to this loneliness: “Only so many songs can be sung with two lips, two lungs, and one tongue.” Verse 1, then chorus, then verse 2, then another chorus.
And then the guitar solo. Everything stops; a roll on the toms gives way to Andy Kerr, Nomeansno’s guitarist (though the guitar player on the album is officially credited as “None of your fucking business”), slowly, glacially, bending one single note up, and then down. And then he does it again, and then again.
A joke! They put a joke right in the middle of the song! The first time I heard it, I could barely breathe. All that aggression, all that anxiety and despair, punctured. In live recordings, they would linger even longer, teasing the crowd with the solo, waiting until the audience was just about to turn on them. And then the song comes barrelling back, ending with the last chorus stripping itself down to bare voices.
Only a handful of songs have ever been as baffling, as magnetic, as this one was to me. Time seemed to warp around that guitar solo. I realized that this was a band that was speaking to me not just in its content, with all its uncertainty and yearning, but in its form. They were breaking through the stifling norms, the unspoken pretenses of songwriting and music-making, urging me to do the same. They were hearing my desperation, understanding it, and then mocking me for it, shaking me awake and showing me just how easy it could be to break out of the propriety that was suffocating me. One musical joke later, and suddenly the world fell away in front of my eyes. And everywhere I looked, I saw people just like me. ◆
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About Joseph
Joseph DeSimone is a singer-songwriter based in Baltimore, Maryland. He has previously released music under his own name and currently performs in the bands Gay Baseball and Burger Monday.
Instagram @musicisjustgaybaseball
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