Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly love St. Vincent’s torrid (as rendered by her video for it) “Fast Slow Disco” even more, she goes and releases yet another version of it–“Slow Slow Disco”–this one all stripped back and lackadaisically paced with a greater emphasis on piano notes.
Originally produced by Lana Del Rey’s new go-to, Jack Antonoff, St. Vincent already gave the track (called simply “Slow Disco”) the unplugged treatment in acoustic form in late 2017 as the first reworked version to the album’s original. This, evidently, opened the floodgates for the even better “Fast Slow Disco,” offering just the sort of sweaty, sweltering backbeat that made it ideal for filming the video at a gay club during Pride Month in New York. And yet, St. Vincent, blatant artistic genius that she is (even if she is on that “fluid” gravy train that not so secretly stems from a lack of viable male options), could not be sated with two incarnations of such a wondrous and philosophical song, asking the question, “Am I thinking what everybody’s thinking: I’m so glad I came, but I can’t wait to leave?” Summarily, St. Vincent speaks for us all when questioning whether or not she’s the only one who feels this fucking dissociated and alone. Naturally, she does not, but still, solipsism is a real bitch with regard to making us believe no one else on this earth could possibly be as depressed or anxiety-ridden.
Upon speaking of the shape the lyrical content of the song took after coming up with the aforementioned line while working with Joy Williams on it when it was still a song intended for her solo album, St. Vincent remarked, “…it’s about how the life you’re actually living and the life that you should be living are running parallel, and how one haunts the other.” Among all the eerie words that have been spoken of late, these are perhaps the most distressing in their veracity (whereas other words–or word salads–of late have been distressing because of their lack thereof). Because yes, so much of the existence we fall into for the sake of feeding into the “surrender Dorothy” mantra is just only slightly off from being closer to what and how we should actually be living if only initiative or a stronger will to be happy were at play (but like Clive Owen says in Closer, “They want to be unhappy to confirm their depression. If they were happy, they couldn’t be depressed anymore. They’d have to go out into the world and live, which can be depressing”).
And what plays into this aspect of accepted monotony more than a relationship that has run its course yet is still being relied upon for some form of “contentment?” Thus, St. Vincent finally takes the plunge, describing it as letting go of her partner in a slow dance turned macabre (even when fast slow): “Slip my hand from your hand/Leave you dancin’ with a ghost.” Sure, it might seem cruel, but, “Don’t it beat a slow dance to death?”
In one way repurposing beating a dead horse to death with beating a slow dance to death, St. Vincent makes the query that her own companion could not, and asserts the initiative it will take for her to lead that parallel life that has been haunting the one she’s been living concurrently. So yeah, basically, of course this song would need to be restructured and revisited in multiple manifestations both live and recorded in order to really execute the point in various worthy, parallel fashions. Hence, St. Vincent ironically does the very thing she speaks of in perpetually revisiting–living–this song in different ways. Then again, what artist does not revisit the same variations on a theme again and again in their work as the sole viable means to grasping trauma both specific to their own experience and general to the human one?
And with this exploration, now, because of the compulsive perfectionism of artists like St. Vincent seeking to get it “just right” in their art in a way that they’ll never be able to in life (no matter which plane of existence it is on), there is a “Slow Disco” for every occasion and mood.
