In The Kills’ “Tape Song,” there is enjoyment, but enjoyment of a peculiar kind, enjoyment that doesn’t come from aiming at enjoyment, but enjoyment that is simply picked up, assumed along the way, in the very act of roaming, of extending the roaming without destination. The act stretches itself out, jagged, uneven, careless. And this roaming is sustained by the anonymity of the abandoned road. The road without people, emptied, tips over, with the sharpness of a chemical reaction just waiting for the spark, into abundance. A space opens where I can walk, run, stumble, dance, to my heart’s will. The heart beats with no goal other than the absence of goals. The road is stripped of specificity, stripped of “this” or “that,” but in that stripping it fills itself with everything, with the pure anonymity of anything whatsoever.
That anonymity condenses in the toy teeth. Teeth detached from a body, teeth that belong to no one in particular, teeth manufactured for anyone and therefore for no one. Their toyness attests to their generality, their belonging to the abstract processes of production and circulation. They are not used for biting or chewing, but played with, almost childishly, for the sheer joy of their manufacturedness. The video shows this: adult hands moving the teeth in stutters, vibrating them as if the movement itself were the point. The same with the guns. No bullets fired, no targets hit. Instead, the guns are spun, twirled, tossed from finger to finger, while the faces remain covered, the eyes hidden, the directed use blocked. The gun is displaced from its function, reduced to its bare manufacturedness, which is also humanity’s own essence, the essence of making, of producing, of manufacturing without end.
Then comes the skull. Death itself, but animated against its solemnity. The jaw wagging, comically, absurdly. Death mocked by the living hands that pull it into silly chatter. The skull babbles. It doesn’t testify, it doesn’t return from the grave to speak with authority; it gossips like a drunk, like a fool. And it is not enthroned in a tomb, it is not preserved in glass, it lies casually on the arm of a sofa. Next to the guitar player. Does the skull listen to the music? Maybe. Maybe it tries to tune in to the rhythm of life again.
The sofa, too, becomes a figure of life, but a tired life, a life bent and slouched. The sofa does not sculpt the body into elegance. It does not discipline posture into uprightness or monumentality. It receives only as surface, as fabric stretched over cushioning, as a flat depth that welcomes collapse. The sofa holds the weight of exhaustion. and in holding it, the sofa itself sags, becomes slouched, softened, given over to the imprint of tired bodies. Two bodies sink into it, disappear into the cushions. They do not sit. They collapse. They fold inward, their spines curved, their heads slack. They are worn out.
This tiredness is not mere lack. It is a mode of being. To slump is to live without ceremony. To collapse is to affirm that life persists even when the upright form has failed. Life continues in droop, in slouch, in bent form. A sofa body is not the heroic body of the dancer poised upright on stage, nor the disciplined body of the worker trained to stand and perform. It is the sagged body, the body given to gravity, the body that releases itself from tasks.
Life here is slump, life as what remains after aimless wandering. The body, dragged through streets, crawling on floors, roaming without destination, finally falls into the sofa. The sofa is not salvation, not transcendence. It is the soft limit of roaming, the place where purposeless wandering finds its own weight again. Tiredness becomes an affirmation: that to be alive is to wear oneself down, to slowly eat away at the body with one’s own aimless persistence.
The sofa teaches another physicality. Instead of straight lines, it produces curves. Instead of strides, it produces slouches. Instead of the monumental verticality of human posture, it produces the horizontality of slackened limbs. A sweet exhaustion, not in the sense of resolution, but in the sense of continuing to exist in fatigue. The sofa life is a tired life, and yet precisely in this tiredness something lingers: a tenderness for the body that survives without purpose, a dignity in collapse.
The body sprawls across the cushions, leaking outward, limbs dangling, head drooping. This sprawl refuses symmetry, refuses elegance. It insists that life does not require an upright pose to be affirmed. The sofa is thus not the holder of the sculpted body but the stage of another physicality altogether: the stage of tiredness, of collapse, of life stretched thin and yet still persisting.
This exhaustion appears in dancing too, but this dancing is never a spectacle, never a choreography. It is clumsy, stumbling, swaying as if drunk, almost indistinguishable from walking or running. A body drags itself into rhythm, then out of rhythm, then forgets rhythm entirely. The body exercises itself without plan, without rehearsal, without fixed occasion. It just moves, because to be alive is already to move. The movement has no purpose, no goal, it is the sheer expenditure of limbs, the spilling of energy, the wasting of breath. Outside on the street, under the burning sun, inside on bare floors, the body dances, though what is called dancing is hardly different from a stagger, a shuffle, a lurch.
At one moment a woman drags a man across the ground. The floor, usually the platform for upright movement, usually the stage for vertical display, becomes instead the surface of dragging, of collapse. The floor is no longer support, it is the medium of exhaustion. The dragging body is not monumental; it is heavy, lumpish, rotten, aimless. Flesh scraping on wood or cement is itself the choreography. Dragging becomes the form of intimacy: one body hauling another, weight against weight, like the dead carried by the living, like burdens pulled along.
And then, at another moment, crawling on all fours, laughing madly, the human takes on the form of a dog. The upright figure, which evolution supposedly gave as dignity, is abandoned. Hands and knees dirty themselves, back arches downward, face juts forward. Evolution is mocked in this reversal. To crawl is to betray the history of posture, to let the head sink again toward the earth. And yet in this crawling there is freedom: I walk on all fours because I can. I refuse the obligation of verticality. I refuse the command to rise, to stand, to march. I choose the ground. I choose to return to the low, the dirty, the dog-like.
Roaming is everything. To roam is to reject the itinerary, to squander the path. Roaming means stepping without knowing the destination, wandering until the body itself becomes lost. Roaming even to the point of being dragged, the legs giving out, the arms tugging forward whatever remains of motion. Roaming even to the point of collapse, the sofa absorbing the weight of tired flesh, the ground pressing up against the knees and elbows. To roam is to allow the body to fall into exhaustion, to permit disintegration, to grant oneself the right to sink, crawl, drag, shuffle.
Dancing, dragging, crawling, roaming – they are indistinguishable because they all testify to the same fact: the body is exhausted, rotten, aimless. Yet in exhaustion, in this rottenness, lies a strange liberation. The refusal of posture, the abandonment of form, the mockery of uprightness. To crawl on all fours is to laugh at humanity, to spit at progress, to sabotage the very idea of development. To be dragged across the floor is to relinquish control, to let movement happen without mastery. To dance clumsily is to break dance away from performance, to make it nothing more than a body swaying in time with its own fatigue.
All of it collapses into roaming, roaming without itinerary, roaming without future, roaming until the body itself falls into the position of the dog, panting, tongue out, laughing at the absurdity of ever having stood tall.
The refrain insists: “you have got to go straight ahead.” And this straightness is strange, uncannily strange, because it does not belong to the straightness of divine certitude, the straightness of revelation, the straightness of Islam where the path is already laid out, secured in advance, carried by the singular certainty of tawhid. No, here straightness belongs to another register altogether. It is closer to Descartes, but even Descartes himself trembles before it. Descartes in his Discourse on Method admits, “Likewise, lest I should remain indecisive in my actions while reason obliged me to be so in my judgements, I formed for myself a provisional moral code… [One] maxim was to be as firm and decisive in my actions as I could, and to follow even the most doubtful opinions, once I had adopted them, with no less constancy than if they had been quite certain.” This is already a confession that certainty is absent, that certainty withdraws at the level of judgement, yet the act must nevertheless throw itself forward.
The straightness here is not about discovering the right path but about fabricating a path through movement itself. Descartes imagines the lost traveler in the forest, and he writes: the traveler “should not wander about turning this way and that, and still less stay in one place, but should keep walking as straight as he can in one direction, never changing it for slight reasons even if mere chance made him choose it in the first place; for in this way, even if he does not go exactly where he wishes, he will at least end up in a place where he is likely to be better off than in the middle of a forest.” The traveler is abandoned, cut off from guidance, yet in that abandonment, a strange new orientation takes hold. It is the act of walking straight itself, the rhythm, the commitment, the insistence. that carves out orientation.
What does this mean for desire? It means that desire is not a hunger for an object waiting already in the clearing of the world. It is not the instinctual appetite for food that one already sees, already smells, already grasps. Desire, in this sense, does not pre-exist its own projection. Desire is projection. Desire is the throw itself. To walk straight is to enact desire, even when the path is arbitrary, even when the chosen line is doubtful. And this arbitrariness, this doubt, is not a weakness but the very condition of orientation. Orientation is born not from prior coordinates, not from a pre-marked map, but from the forward propulsion of desire itself.
Hence the traveler does not move toward something certain. He moves because movement itself, walking straight, is the only possible mode of existence. Desire here reveals itself as simultaneously empty and productive, indeterminate and generative. Empty, because it has no fixed object, no goal inscribed in advance. Productive, because it generates direction, it fabricates the sense of purposiveness where none existed before. Descartes himself calls this “a provisional morality,” as if to say: nothing is grounded, nothing is secured, and yet one must go on, one must walk, one must enact a straightness that is straight only because it persists, because it refuses to curve back into paralysis.
So when the song repeats, “you have got to go straight ahead,” it is not offering certainty, it is offering this provisionality, this demand to walk even when no destination is given, even when no path is carved. The straightness is not divine, not transcendent, but mechanical, stubborn, thrown. It is an orientation that does not come from outside, but from the act itself, the insistence of going-on, the insistence of desire that propels itself without guarantee.
Time enters in the same way, but when it enters it does not come politely, it does not slip in like a guest with a gift, it barges, it crashes, it ruptures. The song insists again and again: you will not be “cured,” you will not be “fixed,” you will not be brought back into wholeness by the passage of time. Time does not do the work of mending, it does not tend to wounds like a nurse at the bedside, it does not gather the fragments into a totality, it does not even pretend to. Instead, time strikes. It strikes with a bluntness, with a violence that is without mediation, without justification. Time does not ask. Time “hits”, as the lyrics put it, it smashes into you. Time is not process but blow. Disorder without order, disorder without the horizon of order to redeem it.
This blow is not metaphorical in the safe sense, it is literal in its effect, because the hit of time resembles nothing so much as the hit of a drug, the sudden intoxication that leaves you staggering, leaves you unrecognizable even to yourself. The drug hit shatters the coordinates of social legibility: you cannot participate in the smooth circuits of efficiency, you cannot speak in the clean tones of productivity, your language slurs, your gestures stutter. And time is like this: time drags you into uselessness, time abandons you in hallucination, time makes you babble, laugh, cry, without reason, without explanation. Time severs you from participation in the regulated life-world.
And in this strike, in this slap, this smash, this collision, what comes into focus is a kind of obscene truth: that nobody gives a shit about you. Nobody in time cares. Time itself cares even less. Time is not providence, not destiny, not teleology. Time is shit. Time produces shit. Time reveals reality as shit. Shit as the literal discharge of existence, as the excremental remainder that is unavoidable, that stinks, that demands to be ejected. Reality, in this mode, has the status of waste. Shit is the figure of this. Shit is what the body cannot integrate, cannot metabolize, cannot reconcile.
Shit is what must be pushed out, discharged, abandoned. And yet shit is the most real, the most undeniable. One can philosophize endlessly, one can spin metaphysical systems, one can invoke order, logos, telos, but shit still comes, still demands its ejection. Time reveals itself as precisely this: not the gentle unfolding of meaning, but the insistence of excretion, the reminder that being is always accompanied by waste. Time as excremental flow, time as discharge that stains, that soils, that resists assimilation.
And if nobody gives a shit about you, if reality itself is shit, then the truth disclosed by the song is that existence is already excremental. To live in time is to live in waste, to be struck by blows that do not heal but only pile up, to be abandoned by the supposed providence of order, to be hit again and again until one babbles, hallucinates, staggers. The hit of time does not deliver insight in the noble sense, it delivers intoxication, confusion, derangement. And yet this derangement is what reveals the structure: reality as accident, as waste-product.
So when the song says time will not cure you, it does not only deny the therapeutic dream, it announces something darker, more profane: that time itself is the wound, the shit, the hit. Time is not the healer, time is the blow that refuses healing. Time insists as the constant discharge, the never-ending excretion of being itself. And to live in it is to live always already among shit, struck, hit, dragged into uselessness, into the babble that betrays the emptiness of order.
And so the last image: toy teeth inside the skull. Both vibrate purposelessly, both resonate in their manufacturedness, now tangled together. The skull loses its organic dignity when paired with the toy. What had been a figure of nature, of mortality, of seriousness, becomes another cheap contraption, another combinable, distortable, stuttering artifact. The click of the teeth and the hollow of the skull grind against each other, two hollow things echoing with useless repetition. One is mass-produced plastic, the other is the universal emblem of death, and yet once coupled they reduce each other, exposing the artifice at the heart of both. Death too is a toy when it chatters in rhythm with manufactured teeth.
Even the grass on which a woman lies is overrun with blur. Even the sunlight on the walker, that supposed pure light of day, is broken into squares, colored distortions, patches of digital interference. Nature too flickers as if screened, as if simulated. The green is no longer continuous but pixelated, the light no longer streaming but boxed. What was once the given background (grass, sky, sun) now reveals itself as constructed surface, liable to crack, to stutter, to glitch.
Everything is circumscribed by the rough touch of aimless humanity. Wherever the body goes it leaves behind distortions, stains, blurs. To touch is to damage, to smudge, to leave a residue of exhaustion. Aimlessness drags across the surfaces of the world, leaving them worn, patched, tired. And aimlessness itself persists, insisting: you have got to go straight ahead. The command is absurd, because straightness, aheadness, directionality are precisely what collapse in the face of roaming, dragging, crawling. Yet the insistence remains. To go forward, to progress, to keep moving, even when movement is collapse, even when forwardness is indistinguishable from circling back, even when the path is already blurred.
The toy teeth chatter forward, always forward, never knowing where, never stopping. The skull wobbles with them, dragged into their artificial rhythm. The walker in sunlight stumbles straight ahead, though ahead is nothing but more patches of distortion. The woman on the grass turns her face to the sun, but the sun itself is broken into squares, glitched into an exhausted light. To obey the demand to move straight ahead is to fall into the absurd comedy of aimlessness: a progress that knows no destination, a forward motion that arrives only at collapse, a chatter that repeats without meaning.
And so the skull with its toy teeth is the figure of humanity itself: an organic form that once demanded seriousness, paired now with a plastic mechanism that can only stutter forward. Both rattle together, both laugh without purpose, both advance in endless insistence. Aimlessness is the last dignity: to chatter, to drag, to crawl, to blur, to insist, to persist in movement long after meaning has rotted away, when rot itself manufactures and enjoys its rottenness as meaning.
The post The Aesthetics of Insistence in The Kills’ “Tape Song” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Yanis Iqbal.