I went to see Pere Ubu’s play, performance art, thing Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi (based in spirit and general plot on the band’s namesake, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi) last night, and it was good. The music was at times exciting, and at times not so much, wavering into territory where the music is there to further the story and not to be a song in and of itself. Cool — that’s what musical theater is about and as fucked up as Ubu Roi is, it’s still musical theater. Remarkable for me, as someone who doesn’t know too much about Pere Ubu and had never seen them live in any form before, was David Thomas’s volatility as a performer. He yelled at the band, who admittedly did make some mistakes, and at times it was hard to tell what was him and what was Pere Ubu. It makes for good theater. Add to that, though, his paean to the crowd following the conclusion of the play which basically amounted to “hey all you old decaying used to be punk rockers – I am one of you and doesn’t it suck let’s live out this shit together while acknowledging our obsolescence and trying to enjoy something again”, and I was made to feel relatively alienated from the proceedings. David Thomas is not very much like me.

Which is why, when they played “Final Solution” it hit so hard. Thomas may be a bunch older than me, a bunch angrier and last night certainly a bunch drunker (though if he’d caught me the night before, different story), but he’s also from the midwest, he also plays punk rock, he’s also a white dude. There are some fundamental things we share in common, and there are some fundamental things that everyone shares in common. I’m not going to try and say that “Final Solution” is a universal song, but sometimes it seems like it could be. It’s not intensely specific or personal — it gets to the heart of what being a anxious teenager in the Midwest is like. And not only from a lyrical perspective: my mom was always fine with my ill fitting pants. The sound of it.

Any number of songs do the quiet bit during the singing, loud crazy noise bit, more singing build into the chorus and erupt in a singalong sort of thing. It’s a great formula. But “Final Solution” does it better than pretty much anything else. It’s tense, vaguely funky (there were people trying to straight up dance to the thing last night, which seemed ill advised but what the hell), and just cathartic enough. It even has a part where everything drops out for four beats. It’s the sound of tension and sort of release, and a bunch of nothingness at either end. It’s the sound of respiration. It’s a perfect song.

I do wonder what it’s like for Thomas to be singing it at his age, theoretically at least miles away from the person he was when he wrote it. Then again, part of the tension in the song is that he’s asking for so much, and you basically know he’s never going to get it. The cure is easy — you grow up, your zits disappear and you eventually meet a girl that will do something for you. Anything beyond that, though buddy, you’re on your own. He hasn’t found the solution, and neither have you, probably. In that sense, this song is for everyone.