Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot) Hell is other people (No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre) A Review of Get Set Go’s Sunshine, Joy and Happiness Get Set Go’s latest release, Sunshine, Joy and Happiness is for people for whom these things remain elusive. Think of this CD as an existentialist manifesto for people who chose to be losers in a world that continues to bewilder them. I have been told that I am a “Lyric Whore,” and I suspect that Mike TV, lead singer and lyricist for the band, is as well. Get Set Go continues with this CD to combine “pop” sound (albeit with the unusual and haunting addition of a cello) with lyrics that usually remain just at the edge of a suicide note. Sunshine, Joy and Happiness articulates the confusion and despair of people who love and think intensely, but who always remain observers – both tangled up in love, desire, fear and hate – whilst simultaneously, acutely aware that they play “a part in murdering the couple that we used to be” (Crazy Over You). If this band has a problem, it is the inescapable problem of the intellectual, of “someone whose mind watches itself” (Camus). One feels, but one cannot stop thinking. The person is always aware of himself/herself as a player on the world’s stage – and feels compelled to sing about it. No song articulates this dilemma better than Hell On Earth which opens with the sounds of a busy schoolyard – something that will send the true Get Set Go fan into a tizzy of nostalgic despair (as Faulkner says, “the past ....is not even the past”). Clearly echoing Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side, Hell On Earth celebrates more ordinary outcasts like “Suzy [who] thought she was ugly/And Harold [who] knew that he smelled strange.” Here, the band reminds us that all there is, is here, and here: You will be made to suffer And that they will treat you rougher And you will learn That you were made to burn And you like it rougher Because it makes you tougher. Any listener who grew up intelligent and alone will recognize him/herself in this song. But lest we feel too proud of our outcast status, the band reminds us in another song reminiscent of schoolyard nursery rhymes, that “Everyone’s a liar” (You’ll Look Beautiful As You Burn). To tell one’s story, according to Get Set Go, is to lie. Few people want to understand this. I tend to listen to Get Set Go while drinking alone in my kitchen, and I know the band would understand perfectly. After all, I would like a drink To keep me from thinking Of all the things that I once had But oh its that drink I think that is what made All of these things turn from good to bad. (The Trouble With Being Poor) Addiction, failure, deranged love affairs, suicide – this is Get Set Go’s milieu. To understand them, one must understand what it is to love those whom one should not love, to desire what one knows one should not desire, to long for all that one despises, to try to escape what one cannot forget. Or, in other words, one must possess the kind of intelligence that F. Scott Fitzgerald defined as “the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (The Crack-Up). Today’s world does not encourage this kind of intelligence; I am not sure that any society ever has. And this is why, perhaps, that Get Set Go remains on the margins of success. It is a mark of their genius, and of their pilgrim souls, that they continue to remain there. Blythe Tellefsen