The Magnetic Fields - Take Ecstasy With Me
Final track from “Holiday” (1994)
Stephin Merritt – The Magnetic Fields’ founder, songwriter, primary instrumentalist and gravitational center – has made a career of treating pop music as an object of study, an end in itself. Thus many of the group’s releases are concept albums of sorts, albeit ones that play with the language of genre, song structures and thematic clichés: a synth-based country record about travel (The Charm of the Highway Strip), an EP consisting exclusively of songs built on tape loops (The House of Tomorrow), a box set devoted to myriad types of love song performed in as many different styles (69 Love Songs). Occasionally, this fixation on form and concept over emotional expression can read as gimmicky, particularly when the song’s whole raison d’être seems to be a joke at its own expense. But at their best, The Magnetic Fields subvert pop conventions while embracing the efficacy of those same conventions to elicit a genuine emotional response.
The theme running through Holiday (1994) is getting away, and thus it’s often partnered with The Charm of the Highway Strip, released the same year. But while Charm is fairly literal in its depiction of travel (songs about roads, songs about trains), Merritt’s idea of what constitutes a “holiday” is more wide-ranging. There are a few ventures to pleasure trip locales – Coney Island and Las Vegas in “Strange Powers,” a fantasy beach in “Desert Island” – but most of the album uses “holiday” to stand for less pleasurable escapes. “The Trouble I’ve Been Looking For” is about alleviating boredom through a slumming fling; the narrator of “Swinging London” deludes himself that his partner’s departure is only temporary. The type of getaway that Merritt returns to most often, however, is a desperate mental retreat from a painful existence – as “In My Car” puts it, “a ride to somewhere inside/ Where you never left and I never cried.”
It’s this last kind of “holiday” that informs the album’s closing track, “Take Ecstasy With Me.” In the first verse, Merritt details an almost cartoonishly idyllic childhood (or childish adulthood): “You used to slide down the carpeted stairs/ Or down the banister/ … You used to make gingerbread houses/ We used to have taffy pulls.” Even the other character’s stutter is described as “like a kaleidoscope” and given a silly explanation (“’cause you knew too many words”). It’s the stuff of a midcentury TV series or an old-fashioned novel, not your usual synth-pop song. The verse is followed by the simple chorus of “Take ecstasy with me/ Baby / Take ecstasy with me.” It’s typical Merritt wry humor: the juxtaposition of the first verse’s naïveté with an invitation to do drugs, particularly one that acts as a sort of aphrodisiac.
In the second verse, however, the joke mutates into something darker. At first, Merritt seems to be describing a romantic trip in the country: “You had a black snowmobile/ We drove out under the Northern Lights.” Then, in two lines, Merritt sketches the portrait of a hate crime: “A vodka bottle gave you those raccoon eyes/ We got beat up just for holding hands.” Suddenly, it’s painfully aware why the phrase “used to” was so prevalent in the first verse: they’ll never be that innocent and carefree again. The refrain “take ecstasy with me” has now become a joyless plea for the only escape they have. Like all holidays, though, it’s only a temporary break from reality.
But for all its bleakness and violence, “Take Ecstasy With Me” ends Holiday on a hopeful note. Unlike most of the characters populating Holiday, the couple in “Ecstasy” doesn’t have to face their misery alone. If anything, their shared trials have drawn them closer together. Merritt’s characteristically detached vocals emphasize the characters’ numbness, but there’s also a hint of vibrato at the end of each line, as if proving that something still stir inside them. An acoustic guitar winds through the verses, adding a strand of gentle warmth, while a recurring sound like chirping crickets signifies an air of bucolic calm. Even when the bottom drops out of the second chorus, there’s still the faint but steady stutter of the drum machine and a yearning synth riff straining upwards, gathering power through repetition until it finally outdoes even the earlier verses’ dense knot of instrumentation. The song ends with a gong’s crash, a reassurance that the lovers have achieved a state of ecstasy, even if only for a little while. “Take Ecstasy With Me” may have started off seemingly tongue-in-cheek, but the reversal of expectations has transformed it into something transcendent. Thus, “Take Ecstasy With Me” is not only a summation of Holiday’s themes but a map of the borderland where The Magnetic Fields dwell, where the lines blur between acoustic and electronic, irony and sincerity, misery and ecstasy.
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