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A Week With TV On The Radio's "Return to Cookie Mountain": Day 3

26 September 2006
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Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Ally Ritchie
This seems like a fine day for bananafish and to write about “Dirtywhirl,” one of the most electrifying tracks from “Return to Cookie Mountain.” A day after the New Orleans Saints reopened the Superdome—a harbor for the stink of death and desparate measures during last year’s Hurricane Katrina catastrophe—with a victory over the Atlanta Falcons, this song about the subject and the wake of it is subtle and sneaky and thankfully contains no lines about a dam or a levy breaking, lowering the bleakness and the scope of this still mystifying disaster to cliches. There are no obvious connections to Katrina and it’s what makes this a song that achieves more. It’s not a “Candle in the Wind” type of a song either, which would make it easily adaptable to Princess Diana’s death or that of Ryan White or whomever tragically passes away. It’s very specific, poignantly identifying that murderous piece of wind and ocean for what it was: a real bitch that brought gloom and chaos the likes of which this country hasn’t arguably seen since the Civil Rights era. When Adebimpe sings, “Oh there is a murderess amongst us/Her love is a violent spiral/Hurling in upon us, conjured up/At the birth of the world,” what can be heard is a suggestion that this was an inevitability that was brought on by our own existence. He calls the dirty little whirlwind a “defender, destroyer” and maybe we are fleas, maybe we’re termites and the earth was using the ocean as a sniper.

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