Chapter 1 - The Deep Freeze
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If there can be said to be an over-arching feel and image to "Suzanne Vega," it might be of that of "Winter," of glacial blue. There is something arctic, crisp, icy, and stark in "Cracking," from its title, its "brittle branches," the ice, and the "deep freeze" of immobility.
"My worst fear is to be frozen and I mean it in a physical way and also a spiritual way. When I was a child I used to have this state that I would call "hitting the Deep Freeze", which meant that I was paralyzed and I couldn't move." [2]
Also prominent is the image of the fantasist, the narrator lost her thoughts, lost in a reverie who is left "wondering where the hell" she has been. The day dreamer, the image of the narrator lost in thought and memory arises in different ways in so many of Vega's songs that it might be theorized that her music forms a sort of musical alternative reality, an entirely self-contained, self-sufficient world where the artist and audience wander through a promised land of memory, contemplating the self and the past through the devices of metaphor and allegory.
On one level, "Cracking" is a journey through the thoughts and feelings of the narrator as symbolized by a walk through some undefined cityscape. Everywhere there is mystery. While we are acutely aware of what is superficially around us (our "footsteps are ticking like water dripping from a tree") we cannot break through to a deeper understanding of what we see and feel, our hearing is "muffled," we are "blind," and soon every sense will succumb to an existential ice age, the "deep freeze." Everywhere in this song is the contrast between an acute awareness of physical detail ("stepping very carefully") and an inability to comprehend what it means despite repeated viewings. We are invited on a "walk" which the narrator has taken many times before ("It just happens a lot") as someone might do when stubbornly trying to navigate their way out of some maze.
As in "Small Blue Thing," hard-edged images and metaphors take pride-of-place in many of Vega's songs. Things crack, there is an ice-covered sidewalk, and "brittle branches." So too in "Small Blue Thing" do we see "marbles" that are "cool and smooth" as well as ice-like glass.
The tension between the chorus and verses is resolved in the final verse ("The sun/Is blinding/Dizzy golden, dancing green/Through the park in the afternoon/Wondering where the hell/I have been"). Here, for the first and only time in the song, the melody conjoins with the words and song is apparently reconciled. Except that the song leaves us hanging with the line "wondering where the hell I have been," throwing into doubt the reliability of our narrator. Has this person "cracked?" Was it a waking dream? It illustrates one of the important threads running through Vega's work -- the tension between the world of the imagination and "real" world.
It's for this reason that metaphors play such an important role in her technique and any understanding of her music. Through her unusually prominent use of metaphors, Vega is constantly finding ways to link the incorporeal world of her imagination, with the "real" world, to "make real" feelings that are difficult to reconcile in any other way. For the listener, the metaphors have the opposite effect of helping us to enter her inner worlds through the symbols and metaphors.
In this sense, there has probably been no popular writer who has so exposed their inner thoughts to an audience as has Vega, but it is couched in the language of metaphors and symbols, not through direct reference or confession. Because feelings are mediated through symbols, a safe separation is maintained between artist and audience (Vega is both vulnerable and guarded) and between the narrator of the songs and Vega herself. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of Vega's music is that we sense a mystery and secret beneath her songs and her performance. She seems to withhold as much as she gives.
No listener of her music can avoid the sense that her songs are invested with
considerable meaning, yet the code that might unlock them is always just out
of reach. The metaphors provide clues, yet a final conclusive proof of what
her music might mean is impossible. It is through this mechanism that Vega has
become, quite undeliberately, a kind of pop music cipher, an enigmatic, almost
disquieting presence whose work does not fit into any known taxonomy of music.
This is why, for some, she and her work are disturbing and annoying since they
evade the neat resolution so beloved of modern tastes. For them, the language
of metaphor is playing coy; for Vega it is simply a way to better way to communicate.