Coming of Age in Spiderland

I was recently relistening to one of my all-time favorite albums, Spiderland by Slint. This album has set up permanent residence in my skull, and there are probably very few days since I first heard it in high school that it hasn’t come across my mind. Reinterpreting and analyzing my feelings about the album have taught me a lot about what I value in art, since I have officially canonized it in my brain. I want to share here my most recent interpretation of the album: that it is a bildungsroman.

That German word is just a fancy way of saying “coming-of-age story”. Coming-of-age is one of those universal, eternal themes like love and war. It is the process that every adolescent goes through where they begin to see the world “as it truly is”. In telling a tale of this human experience, the author gets to make claims as to what they believe the “true nature” of the world is, and it allows them to explore what it means to accept that reality.

Let me give you a quick anecdote. Probably the most famous bildungsroman is The Catcher in the Rye, which I’ve read twice; once in high school, once in college. It really hit me the second time around, and my mom was inspired to read it once I gushed about it to her. She hated it. Perhaps she was too far removed from adolescence, but her takeaway from the novel stuck with me anyway: “Yeah, life sucks, I know. Get over it.”

Getting over it is no easy feat! This, however, may be why I don’t listen to Spiderland too often anymore despite my opinion of the album remaining high. Its themes are more relevant for a young person than for an adult. 

Let’s get into some lyrical analysis. Obviously, the sound of the record is just as (if not more so) important to its value as a piece of art, but I’ll ignore that with the go-to quote for any lazy music critic: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” We’re going track by track.

The first song on the record is “Breadcrumb Trail”. The title already evokes Hansel & Gretel, that story of unprepared youth venturing into the dark forest, whose thin tie to safety is cut off and the siblings are thus left to fend for themselves. It brings to mind the idea of a point of no return. Hansel & Gretel cannot return unchanged by their experience, and this is exactly what the coming of age process is: a line that can’t be un-crossed.

The song, like many on the record, is a narrative. It tells the story of a young man going to the amusement park. He makes his way to the fortune teller’s tent, and passes the sideshow tent wondering why people would want to wait in line for it. This is an early indication that the narrator is already beginning to notice the world around him and forming his nascent opinions about its state. Why do you need to go out of your way to see weird freaks when they’re all around? It’s nothing special.

The line is crossed for the narrator when he decides to get on the roller coaster with the fortune teller girl. I consider the roller coaster to be a metaphor for one’s first sexual experience, one of the most significant milestones of adulthood. A youth having sex is one of the first things they do totally on their own, with no authority watching. This leads to the realization that in fact there is no authority. “I shouted, and searched the sky for a friend / I heard the fortune teller screaming back at me.” You may be scared and want someone above to tell you what to do, what is right, but all we have are the other people around us who are going through the same things and have the same doubts.

Track 2 is “Nosferatu Man”, which boasts the catchiest riff you’ll ever hear in 5/4. The theme in this track is violence rather than sex, hence the vampire-horror title and lyrics. Notably, this song is told from the point of view of the vampire. 

The lyrics of this song are much less direct than Breadcrumb Trail, they’re more impressionistic. They grapple less with the concept of being the victim of violence, but being its perpetrator. This is most clear in the final two verses, when his “teeth touched her skin” and subsequently his “queen is lying in her early grave”. As a young man becomes independent, he must be careful to not become a monster.

“Don Aman” brings us back to reality, and is probably the most easily relatable song on the album. Don is our character in this one, and he’s at a party that he doesn’t feel welcome at. His social anxiety is getting the better of him. “He thought of something he had just said, and how stupid it had sounded.” 

The guitar is slow and plodding in the opening, but anxious strumming starts up as he steps back into the house. Don sees “malice” and judgement in the eyes of the partygoers, and sees “the couples romancing, so natural”, implying he thinks that he could never be a natural lover. He compares the feeling of being at the party to “swimming underwater in the darkness”. 

After Don leaves the party he laughs at himself, and the tension finally releases with some distortion added to the guitar strumming. We return to the same slow riff as the intro, and next morning: “In the mirror, he saw his friend”. I see this as Don coming to terms with the fact that needing the approval of others is the real cause of his anxiety the previous night. He actually truly loves himself, and doesn’t need approval from others as long as he is “responsible” for his own decisions.

Side 2 of the LP starts with “Washer”, a dirge with some truly beautiful guitar arpeggios. The lyrics are again quite cryptic, more Nosferatu Man than Breadcrumb Trail. However, I share the common opinion that this song is essentially a suicide note. I’ve heard others say that Don’s resolution at the end of Side 1 is to kill himself, but I don’t see that from the lyrics, though it would segue nicely into this more direct statement of intent.

Evidence for the suicidal intent of the song would be the narrator’s statement that he “won’t be back here, though we may meet again” and “embracing thoughts of tonight’s dreamless sleep.” However, the resolve is not fully there. The narrator begs the listener to “promise me the sun will rise again.” This is the weakest voice that Brian McMahan squeezes out on the whole record, and shows the depths of despair that adulthood provides.

After the instrumental “For Dinner…”, we arrive at the grand finale of “Good Morning, Captain”. It tells the story of a naval captain who is the sole survivor of the destruction of his ship, who must beg for shelter after the disaster. When he awakes, he sees a child and says “help me”, only to be left in an empty house.

The lyrics of this song are my favorite on the album, as they perfectly border the direct storytelling of Breadcrumb Trail or Don Aman with the more vague Nosferatu Man and Washer. The setup is clear, but who the child is and what the captain wants from him is a mystery. I have a theory though: the child is the captain himself as a boy. After being thrown into the world, put through the wringer, then spit back onto land, the captain wishes to be cleansed of the knowledge of the horrors of the world. He’s sorry for what the boy will have to learn, and he misses the innocence of youth badly. 

In fact, “I miss you” is the climax of not only the song, but of the whole album. The narrator mourns the childhood that will never come back. The child will learn of sex, violence, death, and the hell of other people, and be left alone in the world as a result. This is what Slint is trying to say is the reality of the world with this album, and it had a profound effect on me as a young man. This may be true, but as I got older I realized it’s actually pretty nice and also possible to connect with other people, and I don’t really need to hear this lesson these days. However, it’s a powerful sentiment and told masterfully through the music. Give it a listen if you haven’t, especially if you’re like 16-22 years old.