Extreme Consistency: The Complete Lungfish by Grant Maierhofer

It’s a pickle: being a writer and writing about another writer’s writing. When said writing is itself about another writer’s writing can be heartening somewhat, though I must admit feeling a bit presumptuous inserting myself into this conversation in particular. 

Grant Maierhofer’s new book The Compleat Lungfish—out now from Apocalypse Party—is nominally about post-hardcore Baltimore stalwarts Lungfish, but like its inspiration Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, is not precisely music writing, like Lungfish is not precisely a rock band. “Post-hardcore” (and indeed “music writing”) is by now meaningless, a hyphenated neologism that connoted specific qualities of certain sounds made during a certain timeframe by certain people in certain places that wouldn’t otherwise be connoted by any of the myriad extant qualifiers. Inevitably, these labels become limiting factors instead of helpful categorizations. In an epigram, Maierhofer calls the book “a work of imagination and description,” and I defer to him.

The Compleat Lungfish is an essayistic though not necessarily nonfictional meditation on artistic pursuits—especially music and writing—the band’s namesake African lungfish, the individual’s relationship to nature, the similarities and differences between that and the collective’s relationship to nature, the individual’s relationship to the collective, the African lungfish’s relationship to its environment, previous generations’ relationships with theirs, existentialism, transcendentalism, sobriety, inebriation, life, death, et al.

Lungfish is, superficially speaking, a good sonic fit for Dischord Records. They played similar equipment, recorded and produced using similar methods to their labelmates. However, whereas Fugazi (perhaps the prototypical Dischord band) songs are tight, staccato, and lyrically prescriptive, Lungfish songs undulate in the air, repetitions of ringing open notes wavering over cryptic lyrics. Whereas the volume and speed of hardcore, the attitude with which it was performed encouraged an aggressive communal experience live, Lungfish took a different tack. 

When your music is based on the interplay of repetition and variation, at some point you begin to play, instead of notes, time. The power of accumulating notes over time coupled with the esoteric lyrical content creates a more monastic, though no less intense vibe than a Dag Nasty or Minor Threat. 

Lungfish’s recursive, meditative riffing is a perfect match for Maierhofer’s prose. Maierhofer has always been fixated on the sentence as a self-sufficient unit of meaning (before he deleted, Maierhofer’s was on Twitter @machsentence). This is hardly unique, but instead of customary Lishian terseness, Maierhofer repeats phrases, tweaking and refining, synthesizing the repetitions into new meanings. It’s like a mathematician encouraging us to check their work. There’s an imperfection, like a hint of feedback the sound guy can’t quite mix out of a guitar signal, that makes Maierhofer’s work organic and intimate:

No working. No more working. No more working you. No more working for you. No more working here for you. No more working here for you anymore. No more working here for you anymore. No more dogshit working here for you anymore. No more dogshit working here for you anymore. That’s it. That’s the end of it. That’s the end of it now.

Maierhofer isn’t interested in Lungfish’s musical or lyrical qualities, per se. Individual members are sparingly named. No tall tales from life on the road appear in this book. Maierhofer is fascinated by the structure of their songs, their process for songwriting and playing live, and what they represented then and now.

The cycling movement of hands on top of a guitar. The guitar is cheap, or maybe it isn't. The goal isn't typical. There's such a reliance on repeating, of using this instrument to repeat something, to continue doing something until it isn't like you're continuing… He's engaged in something that only he can really understand, and he keeps moving in sequence around its surface over and over and over again… The content changes and shifts, the guitar repeats, but it's more pronounced, it registers more quickly than the rest of it, and it's clear what's happening is serious… The stakes are high because they're removed. The person doing this work on this machine is doing it for a purpose that only he understands, and that's how it should be. He holds the stakes of it within himself, and thus they're as high as they can be because if he fails it is him. If this fails it is not because of an imperfect note, it's because of a fault of seriousness… Trying to communicate in this way, through abstraction, through indirection, through repeated illustration of something that isn't exactly the same, but which repeats nevertheless, is a near impossibility… 

Though repetition is perhaps the best word for this shared quality, it might be more helpful for the reader to think of it as iterative, process-based art, akin to Brian Eno’s conception of ambient and generative music.

Maierhofer’s writing has always been a high wire act balancing abstraction and sincerity, finding means of communication more truthful than conventional grammar and syntax permit. He shares this authenticity with the Dischord roster, especially Lungfish. Seminal punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones were known for their sneers, whereas hardcore bands like Black Flag and Husker Du were emotive and impassioned. Maierhofer elaborates on this cultural moment:

There’s a sort of position that firmed itself up with the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, where a kind of earnestness in music got to exist amid all the cynicism in the world…

Miserable skinny people in rooms together trying to really say something that mattered, to do something that mattered, to run that risk. That’s the thing of it, the risk, the vulnerability. The willingness to stand up in the face of a deeply ironized system and to just exist in all of your pathetic human gestures… The communion there, it matters.

The question is what they (Lungfish & Maierhofer) are being sincere about, though I’m only discussing Maierhofer. Maierhofer begins to consider the African lungish, the band’s namesake. He admires the lungfish, its resilience and adaptability. Maierhofer sees the inhospitable mudbanks of Sierra Leone in his anxieties about the future of the planet, and envies the African lungfish for its ability to suspend its life functions as its environment necessitates:

[the lungfish] persisted while these impossibly long stretches of time have fought to turn the earth to pits, the little snaky thing there within the swamp continuing on within the drought coming for the world. The drought has come. The drought is there. The drought is arriving, coming. People aren't prepared for drought. The people within the earth are not prepared for the drought. The water is going. The ground looks like scales. The cities are spreading thin…

The African lungfish developed to “breathe” air through millions of years of natural selection, yet another iterative process, though on a far larger scale. Over time, whatever the African lungfish once was changed or didn’t, and it will continue to change, or not, as long as it can in pursuit of survival. 

A similar continuous becoming is present in Maierhofer’s writing about sobriety—the counting of time in days, the resilience against unrelenting ambient adversity. 

Walking a lot. Walking and moving and trying not to let myself get caught up in the thinking. Not getting caught up with myself. Learning to be some different way. Going off the medication. Going back on the medication. Getting angry or miserable. Trying to fight with people. Trying to think of ways to kill myself. Trying to think of ways of maybe just cutting off a finger, or a hand, or a leg. Thinking of these things while being in rooms filled with people. Going to AA. Praying. Walking. Apologizing. Trying to walk into my past and fix it. Being the boy in The Shining. Being this failure. Failing myself but going. Failing myself but in living going. Trying to move, trying to figure something out, never letting it entirely happen.

Maierhofer peppers quotations throughout from Lungfish lyrics, and Ivan Turgenev, Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, and Izaak Walton’s 1635 guide The Compleat Angler, one of the most reprinted books in English.

These quotations stand in for transcendental impulses of several (western) traditions of thought, from Metaphysics, Romanticism, realism, up through modernism. While they appreciate the natural world in wildly different ways, these schools of thought shared a lack of concern with the apocalypse in a practical sense, beyond what Christ’s unspecified timeframe might be, if He’d be returning at all, and what circumstances could be enacted to speed things along. When Izaak Walton transcribes seaman’s tales of mile-wide monster fish that lurked in the terrifying expanses of ocean, the idea that Earth could be both explored and exhausted was anathema. 

Yet another similarity between The Compleat Lungfish and Lungfish and the African lungfish, I fear, is one cannot dissect it without killing it. In The Compleat Lungfish, all these strands of thought, all this history, collapse into one autodidactic dispatch, and it goes down smooth, too. It is not a “difficult” book, contrary to what the above might lead you to believe. Maierhofer dexterously flits from one train of thought to another—you’re so caught up in the elegance and the precision of the language, you hardly notice the transitions. Do not be deterred from picking this up if you’re unfamiliar with Lungfish or Maierhofer. This is a superlative introduction to both.

Alex Kies is a writer from the Twin Cities. He's appeared in ExPat, Paper Darts, and Rain Taxi. He's left handed and an Eagle Scout. Check him out at @al3xki35 on Twitter or @alexvkies on Instagram.