Six Shot Morning: Fontaines D.C., Screens, and the Sad Promise of Always
“Six Shot Morning” opens Fontaines D.C.’s fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, released October 16 on XL Recordings. Grian Chatten has described the whole record as the chamber itself: you step inside, and the band tests mood-altering pieces of music on you. If that’s right, this song is the door. And the first thing it says, over and over, is that it’s a beautiful world.
What is “Six Shot Morning” about?
A six-shot revolver has six chambers. I can’t prove the pun is intended, but I can’t unhear it. I hear a song about living on a screen. The narrator drifts through a half-dreamed landscape: a weeping sky, weary streets, fame by private plane, Silicon Valley taking a photograph, a film full of sad faces. The coverage points the same way. Reviewers note the album’s nods to Silicon Valley and its fatigue at living in a photograph and an always-on life, and Chatten has called it grotesque that we can self-prescribe dopamine through our phones.
Two things keep returning: the claim that it’s a beautiful world, and a single word, “Always.” One sounds like a statement; the other, like a vow. Neither sounds fully believed. That’s what makes it spiritual for me. It isn’t an answer. It’s a stance.
Can you call the world beautiful when you can’t feel it?
The sky is crying, and the narrator says the world is beautiful anyway. He isn’t denying the weeping. He’s declining to let it settle the question.
I wrote about something close in The Greatest Show on Earth: Love, Faith, and What Doesn’t Last: faith isn’t certainty; it’s what you do in its absence. This is the same idea turned on the world itself. Saying it’s beautiful isn’t reporting a feeling. It’s a practice. Meditation doesn’t ask whether you feel anything. You sit, and you see what happens.
There’s a darker reading, and it’s just as available. The line can be numbness with good manners. I asked this about “just another day” in [Just Another Day: Brian Eno, Impermanence, and Contentment], and it comes back here. Is the repetition a way of opening to the world or a way of not feeling it? The song leaves it open, and I’d rather it did.
What happens when sadness becomes content?
The wordplay near the end is the heart of it. “Melancholy hearts in a motion film” keeps slipping into “emotion filming.” Motion, emotion. Sadness filmed for the world to see.
I think that’s the song’s real target, and the album’s: how we turn private feeling into public footage. Silicon Valley has already taken a photograph. The narrator makes himself known, living a life that looks, on screen, like a dream.
Then comes the flash of violence, aimed at those performed melancholy hearts. I hear disgust, and I hear envy, and I’m not sure he can tell them apart. Performed sadness is easier to watch than real sadness, and easier to love. Real sadness is slow, quiet, and it doesn’t photograph well.
Sitting with yourself, feelings and emotions, is the opposite practice. You feel what you feel with no audience and no caption. Online, a feeling can exist only if someone sees it, the dopamine chamber at its quietest. The reward doesn’t come from the sadness. It comes from being seen to have it.
What does “always” promise?
Living for a million years is the oldest lover’s hope. For a filmed life, it’s nearly literal. What gets posted doesn’t age or fade, and the digital self never gets to grow old. Once on the internet, it never completely goes away.
Every contemplative tradition I know says the opposite: everything arises and passes, and clinging to permanence is the root of suffering. The internet sells, or at least produces, permanence as a feature.
“Always” is the product.
The irony is what lasts. It isn’t the person. It’s the performance of melancholy, preserved while the heart behind it goes on changing. Where the Eno song imagines putting it all behind us, this one has made that impossible. You can't put anything behind you when it’s still on the feed.
What’s left in the morning?
The morning. Six shots or none. A sky doing whatever it’s doing over a world that’s beautiful whether or not we feel it, or anyone is watching.
So if you couldn’t feel that it’s a beautiful world, would you say it anyway, with no one watching?
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