Have you ever looked around you and felt different on the outside? Have you ever looked around you and felt different on the inside? Or maybe you feel both. One of my first adult realizations was that the cliqueiness of high school never went away; everywhere I went I saw that there were the popular kids and the dorks, that peer pressure was as real amongst adults as it was amongst kids, and that whatever scene I came across had an accepted uniform. That’s part of the reason that the new single from Oakland’s Body Double “The Floating Hand” is resonating with me, that and their addictive, poppy, deadpan post punk aesthetic. They’ve got a great take on it that you can read below and will probably make sense to a lot of you who felt like they’d found their tribe of freaks only to find out they weren’t so different than the normies. “The Floating Hand” is off their forthcoming release Milk Fed that comes out September 18th – you can pre-order it here and here.
“The Floating Hand” is generally about competition, and your options for reacting to it. I grew up in a few different countries because my dad was a Marine, and each move felt interplanetary: the language changed, what was good and bad changed, even the bugs crawling on the ground changed. I felt at odds with conservative military culture and run-of-the-mill high school viciousness, and fantasized about one day finding a safe haven in punk and underground music. It turns out that even amongst weirdos you’ll still see people undercut each other, and you might be a maladjusted alien regardless of scenery. I wrote this song about a musician I thought was particularly nasty, and it ended up being about myself, which is what happens whenever I try to write a dis track.
