The Delete BinListen to this track by jangly and bookish power pop should-have-beens Game Theory. It’s “24”, a cut from the band’s second full-length record, 1985’s Real Nighttime. Produced by Mitch Easter who in addition to being head songwriter of similarly-jangly Let’s Active, also occupied the producer’s chair for R.E.M’s early albums and singles. That same sound certainly translates here on a song that, in a parallel universe, was at least as big as “Don’t Go Back to Rockville”.
Game Theory was led by songwriter, guitarist, singer, and one-time college radio DJ Scott Miller, who would be the only consistent member of the group during its run between 1982 and 1990. This was before Miller packed it in to start yet another band The Loud Family in the new decade. Under the Game Theory band name by the mid-Eighties with the aesthetics of the Paisley Underground in place throughout, Miller had been swimming against the currents in terms of mainstream appeal. This was in the days before R.E.M and The Bangles began to seriously dent the charts with a similar brand of Sixties-influenced jangle-pop.
What was the difference between success and obscurity? It wasn’t as if Game Theory were making uncommercial music. Many factors were likely in play to make that question ultimately unanswerable. But one thing is observable: Scott Miller had an unconventional approach to writing lyrics and arranging music. This song, “24”, is a good example of that on a few fronts.
First, let’s consider the extended intro that breaks the rules of pop immediacy as far as songs one heard on the radio in 1985. It’s as if Miller had written an instrumental break meant for the middle-eight section of the song, a gambit common to a lot of pop songs to give the listener some wordless space to contemplate what’s been said in the first two verses and the chorus. But here, and very unconventionally, that section kicks the whole thing off right at the beginning before anything’s been said.
And second, what of the lyrics? They have been described as “opaque”, a criticism that’s hard to argue with. Some of the lines are certainly that, making one wonder what they mean if they mean anything at all.
“I’m in the sweetest way misled
Growing my hair in bed
Coffee or beer
These are a year’s component thread”
– “24”, Game Theory
What is Miller attempting to communicate here? Do these lyrics work in tandem with the unconventional arrangement and presentation of the song in some way? Absolutely, yes. There is a distinct method to his musical madness here that makes this song something of a lost generational anthem, the snippet of Jimmy Page’s riff from “Stairway to Heaven” in the fade-out inclusive.
This brings us to a third point about “24” being a departure from the usual pop radio fare of the time. It’s not meant to be understood line by line. It’s meant to be identified with – to be felt. On the lyrical front, trying to interpret the words literally is bound to lead nowhere. This song isn’t about words as the primary conveyors of literal meaning. It’s about feelings coming from a narrator (and possibly its writer) who finds that words are inadequate as vehicles for conveying what’s happening in their life. The song is predicated on a catch-22 that way; you can’t understand it because you can’t feel it, and you can’t feel it because you’re trying to understand it.
As for the extended intro, these emotional and instinctual elements serve the very same purpose; to communicate the feeling of what it’s like to experience a big build up, perhaps one that stretches over years of following a prescribed path, only to be led to a place that one never expected to end up, or to no discernable place at all. That’s when the lyrics take the lead in a series of suggestions and images that hint at emotional states rather than intellectually understood realizations about what it means to feel like you’ve reached a dead end and not knowing what to do about it.
Game Theory; the band as they were in 1983 with this image as the proposed cover to their 1985 record, Real Nighttime. Creative head Scott Miller is pictured with 12-string guitar. (image: Robert Toren, Public Domain)***
This is a song about reaching a point when it’s expected that one has figured out a direction for themselves, while not even being close to doing that. It suggests the feeling of knowing that one is likely squandering one’s time too late in the day, without knowing how not to do that. In essence, this was a Gen X slacker anthem put out a few years too early and before this state of mind was identified as any kind of defined social phenomenon. As can be understood here, this state of mind and being had in fact pre-dated its definition all along. There just wasn’t language to describe it. That principle applies to a great many things in the human experience, of course.
Scott Miller’s songwriting excelled in a number of areas, with this attention to existential detail being a tremendous strength, and possibly serving as a detriment to achieving an appeal in the mainstream. Despite the tremendous respect Miller won from his fellow musicians, Game Theory never really caught on as a charting rock band. In fact, there came a point when their records were out of print, not even preserved for posterity. It was as if the fears suggested by this very song had come true – that everything would come to a dead end. But of course, that’s not where the story ultimately led.
Scott Miller was a dedicated songwriter, musician, and music fan with an extensive body of work across Game Theory and Loud Family releases. He eventually branched out as a writer of music criticism, authoring a book about what he loved about his favourite songs in a volume called Music: What Happened?
He died in 2013 at the age of 53.
This was a period when he was working on a new Game Theory record. That album was released posthumously in 2017 as Supercalifragile. In the intervening years, Game Theory’s records have been re-issued, complete with bonus tracks, thanks to Omnivore records.
You can find out more about Scott Miller, get a PDF of his book, and even download music from his years in Game Theory at loudfamily.com.
Enjoy!
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Rob