C'mon: A tribute to Mimi Parker and yet another complaint about eulogies
Mimi Parker, R.I.P.
I don’t know, man, maybe I’m just a contrarian, but I hated Pitchfork’s Mimi Parker obituary.
Mimi was the drummer and one half of the creative force behind Low, along with her husband Alan Sparhawk. All of Low’s music feels personal. Certainly, the volume of most of it helps (slowcore is quiet). It’s hard not to feel like someone is singing just to you when they’re practically whispering. But it’s more than that. Their songs reckon with belief, doubt, love, intimacy, and commitment. “I have slept beside you now for what seems a thousand years” sang as a statement of fact, not a complaint? That’s the kind of gesture they were whipping out constantly. Of course Low is personal.
Mimi was 55, and she died of cancer. It’s horrible.
My current opinion is that, when a creative person dies, one of the best things you can do is spread their work, so more people can spend time living with them. The closest I have to a unique take on Mimi is that she was funny, and that observation is less important than offering up an example conversation people can enjoy.
As one of the only persons living who’s been the subject of online eulogies, I have opinions about them. And I get the irony of making other people’s eulogies about me when one of the biggest critiques of public eulogies is that they’re performative and more about the person posting than the deceased (spoiler: that’s true of all of them and ultimately harmless). But I have a specific bone to pick with the Pitchfork piece, and it’s not a particularly nuanced point.
The point is this: “Mimi Parker Was Indie Rock’s Guardian Angel”? No, she wasn’t. I understand how metaphors work, but you gotta be careful with them in a eulogy. Mimi was a person. Is a person. So much personality-flattening happens in eulogies. Even flattering portraits are just paint on paper. These comparisons diminish a person, despite attempting the opposite.
Here’s how the piece ends:
When I heard the news of Parker’s passing, I had just boarded an airplane. The shock should have numbed me, but tears kept welling in my eyes. It wasn’t until the plane was at its peak altitude, thousands of miles in the sky, that a sense of acceptance settled in. For nearly three hours, I looked out at a thick layer of cumulus clouds floating below, pressed up against one another like a conveyor belt of cotton balls. This is it, I thought. She was singing to us from here all this time.
WHAT?! Are you fucking kidding me? I’m a sucker for a gut-punch ending, but ew, this is not that. I love Low’s music, and I’m honestly worried I’m disrespecting Mimi’s memory with all this, but Mimi Parker was not singing to us from the fucking clouds.
She sang into microphones. She sang sitting and standing at the drums. She sang as a mother. She sang as a lover, of Alan and of Christmas. She sang as a believer and a doubter. We do her and ourselves a disservice when we mythologize each other.
She wasn’t a fucking celestial being. She was a baker.
THIS IS MY PODCAST, THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE
Franco Danger is a superb standup I met when he opened for Chris Gethard, and we immediately hit it off. That energy—and a jaw-dropping Relive 1 Memory segment—translates into one of the funniest conversations ever on the podcast.
There’s also a brief tribute to Mimi Parker at the beginning.
Content warning: anxiety, Catholic guilt, Edinburgh Fringe, food poisoning, God is a single dad, multiverse reincarnation.
Listen:
READ, WATCH, DO
Something light. I can’t believe all I knew of James Acaster’s appearance on Celebrity Bake Off was the meme and his brilliant bit from Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999. The actual footage is wall-to-wall laughs, as you can tell from this highlights package. I know it was genuinely traumatizing for him, but I hope he’s able to smile now as much as I did watching this. There’s something existentially relatable about, “C’mon, be magically done.”
I found a lot of inspiration in Mimi and Alan’s appearance on the Life of the Record podcast about their generally acknowledged masterpiece album, Things We Lost in the Fire. The specifics of their process, the frustration of trying to write great songs without realizing they were succeeding at the time, and the things they still don’t understand (e.g. the meaning of the phrase “Dinosaur Act” or what the laser beam in “Laser Beam” is) are all instructive.
MAY I PLAY YOU A SOUND?
For Low newbies, here’s a playlist I made a while back to accompany their appearance on This Is Your Afterlife. It’s sequenced to flow together (except for a new favorite I tacked onto the end this week), but feel free to shuffle.
If you want to dive straight into albums, my current favorite is Double Negative. HEY WHAT is similar-sounding and also a five-star record. Things We Lost in the Fire is beloved for a reason, and it’s another favorite of mine. A slept-on one from the earlier, slow/quieter days is Trust.
More or less,
DM