News article: http://www.mlive.com/news/grandrapids/index.ssf/2008/09/another_family_is_hurting_afte.html
Song: https://soundcloud.com/marlou_collaert/la-dispute-king-park
While it certainly takes awhile to get used to the grating vocals and rough guitar riffs, La Dispute
is a band worth wading through dissonance to find the unimaginable beauty tucked inside each
song—“King Park” is no different. The vocalist takes a local news story from his hometown,
which has been consumed by gang violence, and gives it the time it deserves. In our current
world, it is all-too-easy to simply gloss over local stories such as these due to their high
frequency, but La Dispute wants to be a part of it—to live it, breathe it, and study it. To answer
the question simply, yes, I do enjoy this song; however, for the purpose of this assignment, as
well as my own curiosity, I wish to dive deeper into my reasoning and discover every feeling I
have while listening to each part of the track.
The track immediately begins with rough, broken yelling; I write “yelling” because the vocals do
not quite fit the standard variations of hardcore “screaming” in most music, and yelling sounds
more applicable. Vocalist Dreyer’s voice rises and falls, cracking. It is what I often describe as
“raw” vocals, not overly-produced. Once Dreyer sets the scene with the background information,
at the 0:52 mark the instruments slow, his voice lightens into more of a softer spoken-word
style, and I feel like I can breathe easier, although I quickly realize it’s a trick because at 1:03 I
find that Dreyer still has a heavy message to send as his voice rises during the last line of “I
want to know what it felt like”. This continues into 1:45, when suddenly I feel strange—for the
first time in the track, we hear no other instrument and no voice except a single guitar producing
a light rhythm. It makes me feel lost for a moment, unsure of what to expect next. I do not feel
relaxed, because the entire beginning of the track has already potentially foreshadowed heavier
dissonance between chords and rough, heavy vocals; and as they say, there is always a calm
before the storm. This keeps me on guard during the track.
At 1:55 Dreyer enters again with spoken-word, setting the new scene, as he has now
done the impossible; he has disintegrated, only a spirit now, has gone back in time to the scene
of the crime he discusses in the beginning, and “floats along police lines” listening to the gossip
of the neighbors until he moves back further into time and floats above their houses, seeing the
victim and attacker as children playing. It is at this point in the song that I finally let my guard
down, I am gradually entranced in the beautiful storytelling of the lyrics, and I am no longer truly
conscious of myself; I am merely tuned into the song’s lyrics, completely and utterly a slave to
the rollercoaster I know I am strapped into and cannot escape, yet I do not even care anymore. I
must listen. I must find out more about what happened. I must hear how things end. 2:56 hits
and suddenly the tension is building, I feel anxious and my heartbeat quickens. Dreyer’s voice
rises but it does so in the middle of a sentence unexpectedly, and the instruments begin
quickening the pace to which my heart matches. 3:08 begins Dreyer’s sentence “And cruelly I
recall why I have come: To find a reason. But there cannot be a reason, not for death, not like
this. Not like this”, which he gradually increases his volume to the point of yelling again for the
repetitious “Not like this”. Suddenly everything quiets except that same guitar strumming a slow
and sad chord. The tension that came did not fully explode once again; I feel teased, but I like it.
My heartbeat slows, and a dreary, broken-sounding Dreyer returns with lyrics discussing the
victim’s family making funeral plans: “Three days later, a mother had to bury her son”. Only the
guitar playing the same sad notes is heard, and I feel sad myself. At 4:37 Dreyer returns to set
the new, third, and final scene; his voice returns to the storytelling. 5:12 hits, and it is obvious
the tension about to build up right now is the tension building up to the final climax at last! The
guitar abruptly stops its note and switches to a rapidly quickened pace; 5:20 the beginning of
the end is apparent from both the guitar and bass complementing each other with still quickened
paces and with Dreyer’s lyrics. As I follow the narrator building tension at the scene of the hotel
with the cops closing in, I feel trapped as well. I almost feel as though I am the fugitive running
from the police.
When the narrator floats up to the window, hovers in the hallway and listens in to the
police “trying to reason, get him to open the door”, and the fugitive’s uncle “begging and
pleading, half-collapsed to the floor”, my body reacts with physical goosebumps—I am
completely and utterly absorbed in the song and I could not possibly care less about the outside
world anymore; I must know what happens. My heart is pounding and I feel incredibly anxious.
Dreyer ends this passage with thoughts of slipping through the door to the other side, but is too
hesitant, the burden too great; “I felt the burden of murder, it shook the earth to its core. Felt like
the world was collapsing”. My body can hardly take much more of the tension. Suddenly,
everything changes. Dreyer says, “Then we heard him speak”. A crushing question emerges
from the fugitive’s lips, and my goosebumps either return or are now wildly out of control (I am
not sure because I have no longer been able to keep track of my body’s reactions in order to tell
whether the goosebumps ever left in the first place). Dreyer yells with raw, pure emotion, “Can I
still get into heaven if I kill myself?”, repeating it twice, and that is it—I am completely gone at
this point. I have chills, my heart is pounding, I am not physically sweating but feel like I am; and
on the third time, he yells, “Can I ever be forgiven ‘cause I killed that kid?”. Dreyer continues
speaking through the fugitive, still yelling with rough, almost hard-to-bear vocals, “And if I turn it
on me; if I even it out; can I still get in? Or will they send me to Hell?”.
Finally, with a mere three seconds left on the track, everything abruptly ends. Dreyer,
now the narrator again, explains in one simple, raw sentence, “I left the hotel behind; don’t want
to know how it ends”, as the drums match the beat of his words, pounding. And it is over. I feel a
mixed bag of emotions. My heart is still pounding; I still feel anxious. I feel angry that I did not
get the closure I had been waiting for, and I feel a bit deceived. However, I slowly realize I am
mad at myself, because it is only a song, and I made the conscious decision to get absorbed
into it; or did I? At what point during the track did I consciously think to myself, “Okay, I will now
give myself completely over to the raw rollercoaster ride of emotions La Dispute is inviting me
on”? Did I ever truly do that of my own accord, or did I merely feel compelled to do so and could
not stop myself? One thing is for certain; I loved the hell out of the song.
Using Mindful Awareness, I found that within “King Park” there was a point where I had
no choice other than completely giving myself over to the song; the song practically forced
“mindful awareness” onto me. I believe this point occurred at different sections throughout the
song, but the most obvious one to me was where I mentioned above—from 5:20 to the end of
the song, the final tension is building up into the climax. Upon further listening, my emotional
reactions changed frequently throughout the track, as there were some points in the beginning
of simple intrigue in the story but a bit of a push-back from the dissonance Dreyer’s rough
vocals create, which then moved on to bouts of anxiety through the fluctuations of tensionbuildup and then let down in a cyclical motion, with a sad moment when the narrator
disintegrates into just his spirit and becomes invisible, allowing him to hover around and see,
hear, taste, and feel things as the events unraveled, until finally the climax hit me hard. As for
physical reactions, as mentioned I had many moments of increased heartbeat and anxiety, my
skin produced goosebumps at a certain point (either twice or they never truly went away), and I
had a feeling of sweating but was not actually sweating. In regards to intellectual feelings, where
on earth do I begin? This song’s lyrics are what truly absorbed me whole; the instruments were
merely there to grab hold of me and toy with both my physical and emotional reactions once the
lyrics caught my attention and the storytelling unfolded. I was hooked. This song took what is
usually a thirty-second local news story and made it into a hauntingly beautiful piece now given
the time and attention it truly deserved. Finally, some terms/words/thoughts I associate with this
song are “tragedy”, “trauma”, “politics”, “law”, “religion”, and “morality”.