“Here Is Gone” by The Goo Goo Dolls, Monday, September 12, 2022 (Updated Repost)
The Goo Goo Dolls’ 1998 album Dizzy Up the Girl encapsulates the acoustic alt-rock sound that listeners can instantly identify late '90s rock. The follow up to their massive 4x platinum record released four years later, Gutterflower, charted higher than their previous records, but ultimately sold much less than Dizzy. The band continues to release music from time to time, including this year's Chaos in Bloom,
but their heyday remains in 1998.
Gutterflower is a fine record and “Here Is Gone” is a fine song. But the acoustic rock band from Buffalo, NY had been there and done that, and the 2002 music scene was moving past pop rock aimed at adult contemporary radio.
I WAS NOT THE ANSWER SO FORGET IT WAS EVER ME. Johnny Rzeznik has said that the music video for "Here Is Gone," which features some of the time film tricks, sped up footage of several scenes, cost more to produce than the entire album. The video at youth counterculture in what looks like urban decay. The youth show aggression toward symbols of cultural establishment. It's kind of an odd video for a an adult contemporary band to make. The song itself is about a break up, about "want[ing] to be free." The idea that "somehow here is gone" recalls the end of a relationship when a partner is simply going through the motions, often before even realizing that he or she is unhappy. The other partner may be happy and savoring the moments, living in the here and now. However, when faced with the reality of the relationship's demise, what the other thought was here is actually not real. The moment passed. "Here Is Gone" could apply to any passing trend. It could apply to the world we live in now, which is rapidly changing. How the standard of living you thought you can and should achieve when you were young is seemingly out of reach and perhaps the wrong goal. It could be the pulse of a political trend, one side is grasping for power in what seems to be effective, but it turns out that that ideology is actually in the minority and the people will not tolerate it in the long term. Somehow we hit the target, but the arrow stuck only for a minute before falling onto the ground. This is what became of the Goo Goo Dolls post-Dizzy Up the Girl.
SOMEHOW HERE IS GONE. This twenty-year-old song brings back so many memories of late middle school and early high school. I was thinking the other day that you can truly feel old when you can remember 20 years with no problem, and this 2002 hit makes me feel both old and young. Of course, this was kind of the last attempt for aging rockers, The Goo Goo Dolls, to write a "cool" pop song that breeched the monoculture of MTV's TRL, or it may have just been on VH1 or MTV2, when we switched the channels after school because there was nothing on MTV. This song reminds me of going to my friend Michael's house after schools some days. We had started a band and wrote some pretty amateur songs and practiced them until Robby, Michael's mom's boyfriend, a musician himself, suggested we learn to play covers of the classics like Tom Petty, The Doobie Brothers, and other '70s and '80s groups. Learning to play simple older songs would have helped us learn to play better, but the band was short lived as Mike couldn't get along with other kids we brought in to fill out the band, and eventually, I was also out of the band. This was around the time that Mike started dating my sister and things were kind of weird. Somehow here is gone.
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