Low Interlude

I've called these last two blogs 'interludes,' promising I'll get back on topic with the next entries: a blog on late 60s Lennon (some comments I wish I had put in my Beatles chapter in British Rock Modernism) and John Sinclair and the politics of post-scarcity. 

However, I just heard C'mon, the new record by Duluth's own, Low. I think its my Record of the Year so far: and  here's my favorite song from it, "Especially Me": 

It's hard to believe that this is the same band I saw play fifteen years ago now ("the passage of time, and all its sickening crimes," etc.) at the Blind Pig in Champaign-Urbana. I don't recall much about the show, except that it was the first concert I had ever seen where the crowd at the bar was louder than the band onstage (Iron and Wine would be the second). The only other things I recall was Mimi Parker playing a stripped down drum-kit, mainly using brushes, and the encore that night: Joy Division's "Transformer," slowed down to a crawl. I recall thinking that the Joy Division cover was both hilarious, and a little bit terrifying.
    Flash forward, fifteen years, to "Especially Me." They're still morose, but now there's swelling strings and a lush sound. The songs build; they're not embarrassed about being emotional either. More suprising, Mimi Parker has become a Torch Singer (the opening line, alluding to another torch song,"Cry Me a River," the pop standard sung by Julie London and countless others, gives that away). I would never have guessed the band I saw those many years ago had this in them. 
     For me, the heart of the song is in the cold curse of the chorus, the song's punchline: "Cause if we knew where we belong/There'd be no doubt where we're from/But as it stands, we don't have a clue/Especially me--and probably you."

Flaubert Interlude

I'm reading Flaubert's Sentimental Education, with great pleasure (nothing fancy: the Robert Baldick translation, Penguin ed.) A friend warned me that this will soon pass, and I'll become bored, as he is finally, with all Flaubert's novels. Of course, my friend also admitted that he would rather read Pierre Bourdieu on SE to reading the novel, preferring in true postmodern (or is it Hegelian?) fashion, the explanation of art to the artwork itself. 

Dear Blog Reader, I guess I'm not postmodern; my pleasures are simple. I enjoy deadpan ironic narrators, who cast scorn on the dreams and aspirations of their characters (characters aren't real people, so it's all right to treat them ironically).  I enjoy it when the narrator pokes fun at his hero, Frederic Moreau, in his self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and prideful moments, as in this passage, when Fredric returns to his first dinner at Chez Arnoux in the presence of his beloved Madame Arnoux. Frederic comes home and catches a glance at the mirror: "His own face presented itself to him in the mirror. He liked the look of it, and remained there for a minute gazing at himself." 

And this dramatic oration proclaimed at the Arnoux table, by bohemian painter Pellerin: "I don't want any of your hideous reality!What do you mean by reality anyway? ...There's nothing less natural than Michelangelo, and nothing more powerful. The cult of external truth reveals the vulgarity of our times; and if things go on in this way; art is going to become a sort of bad joke inferior to religion in poetry and inferior to politics in interest. ...Look at Bassolier's pictures,...Solicitors pay twenty thousand francs for them, and there isn't tuppence-worth of ideas in them; but without ideas, there is no grandeur, and without grandeur there is no beauty! Olympus is a mountain. The proudest of all monuments will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste, the desert is better than a pavement, and a savage is better than a barber!" 
As my friend Jackie said, give or take a phrase here, and this might be the late Malcolm McLaren.  

Political Interlude

Cultural prophecy from one of the first and best rock critics, Ellen Willis. Willis was a great radical political writer as well: "American conservatives' success in weakening the federal government and starving it of funds will not lead to a dispersal of power to local governments closer to the people; it will merely accelerate the process of consolidating economic power on the transnational level." 

(from Don't Think, Smile!, Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). 

Closer to the Bone

I mentioned the Stones' "Coming Down Again" in my last post, as a memorable musical slice of junkie ennui; "Downtown" from Crazy Horse (I couldn't find the studio version from their debut record on You Tube, and went with a live version with Neil Young) cuts closer to the bone. "Sure enough they'll be selling stuff when the moon begins to rise/Pretty bad when you're dealing with The Man/And the light shines in your eyes": tough stuff from the late Danny Whitten. Compared to both the Stones and Crazy Horse, the Velvets' "Heroin," as great as it is, reveals itself to be an Art Rock-Statement-About-Drugs instead.

Mick Jagger in his Perfect State of Being

Erika Elder (of MV and EE & the Golden Road) on Jagger and the Stones' Goats Head Soup (1973), in the always wonderful fanzine,  Galactic Zoo Dossier: "I think GH Soup is Mick Jagger's Perfect State of Being. He's so loose like a Gospel Singer--I get the feeling that its exactly what he's meant to do." 
  That's very funny, but I know what she means; you can hear it in the vocals for songs like "100 Years Ago" or "Hide Your Love."  Spontaneous, and seemingly casual, these are among Jagger's most expressive vocals.

I've always considered this Stones' record and the next, as Jagger's peak moments as a singer (as opposed to front man). I never especially liked the mix on It's Only Rock'n'roll, the first record produced by Jagger and Richards themselves: it's too clean, especially compared with the moody, murky depths of Goats Head. (produced by Jimmy Miller, who got the sack immediately after this record).   
  Anyway, GHS is Jagger's record, although Keith has one golden moment: 

"Coming Down Again" represents Keith at his absolute laziest as a songwriter, but it hardly matters: 5:56 of languorous junkie sloth, it's graced by a sax solo from Bobby Keys that's as warm and wet as amniotic fluid (not that I recall anything about the womb, I just want to sound more like Greil Marcus). 

Delaney and Bonnie, "Coming Home"

I certainly hope that my blog on the paradoxes of Delaney and Bonnie and Friends won't keep people who haven't heard this music from checking it out! Here's a live clip (also with George Harrison).  Clapton was one of the most restless, and therefore interesting, guitar players in rock at the time. 

Phil Ochs, Our Gramsci

I was lucky enough to see the recent documentary film on folk singer/agitator Phil Ochs in Tallahassee (Phil Ochs-There But for Fortune, dir. Kenneth Bowser, 2010) my home town (thank you, Tallahassee Film Society!) It's a sad film: a far too familiar story about American dreaming gone wrong, and the smack down of utopian hope by reality.  

I also gained new respect for Phil Ochs; we know that he was a folk singer committed to radical political change. What I didn’t know was that he had a decidedly conceptual grasp of pop culture. It reminded me of Mick Farren and Malcolm McLaren, two other politically minded artists who developed a decidedly post-hippie approach to media and pop culture, within the rock field.

I had known that Ochs was involved in Yippie: what I didn’t realize was that, after the bloody confrontation between protesters and the Chicago police at the Democratic convention in 1968, and especially after Nixon’s re-election, Ochs effectively renounced Yippie. He understood that Nixon had won mostly by running against the media spectacle of hippies running wild in the streets of Chicago, with an election campaign that pointed to the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and said, “See? Elect me, or these guys will take over." Thus Nixon won the hearts and minds of the electorate, including many working-class voters.

Nixon surmised the Gramscian lesson that politics is the art of manufacturing consent, and those who wish to gain power must master that art. I don't know whether Ochs read Gramsci, but he recognized that the same shock tactics that made the Yippies' so successful in getting screen time on the nightly TV news also resulted in Nixon’s election triumph. 

Ochs’ response to these bitter lessons was to rethink his view of the relations between politics and popular culture, specifically popular music. What progressives needed was not what they wanted: not charismatic spokespersons for an alternative culture and lifestyle, polarizers like the Yippies, but consensus builders. What they needed above all, was a New Elvis: this time, Ochs added, with the politics of Che Guevara. Ochs' dream of another Elvis was built on his deep respect for the first Elvis, whom Ochs revered not only for his music, but as a genuine, organic revolutionary. Presley represented the de facto integrated music culture of the South of his day, and thus a potent crux of progressive change. 

Ochs thought about pop music in instrumental ways, as a political tool: but also organically, hoping to build on what Elvis and first wave Rock had already accomplished. He was interested in what music could do for the Revolution; at the same time, he thought within the grain of popular culture. Ochs believed popular music could create new liberal consensus to counter native conservativism, building on the progressive aspects of actually-existing working class culture.

Ochs’ other musical and career choices post 68 – releasing a country folk album with radical anti-music industry lyrics, appearing onstage playing folk music in an Elvis-style gold lame suit—made it appear as if the singer was coming unglued (in truth, he was: sliding into a protracted bout of depression that would eventually culminate in suicide):  but these antics, like his post-Yippie musico-political strategy was carefully considered, highly theorized. They were also of a piece with the contemporary absurdist street theater of the San Francisco Diggers (whom Ochs briefly joined) and their gentler mode of provocation. The Diggers for instance, had a solemn funeral procession for the Death of hippie (by media spectacle) in the Haight, at the height of the Summer of Love. Contemporaries Guy Debord and the Situationists demonstrated a similar satirical streak in their 'detourned' comic strips, setting Lukács inspired anti-capitalist discourse in the thought balloons of cowboy cartoon characters; perhaps if Debord, etc. had followed this prankster impulse more often, rather than chase the specter of Theoretical Purity, they might have had more of an impact, and not ended up a footnote to Art History (sorry, Greil). 

What the Left, facing Nixon’s America, needed, Ochs believed, was a Great Clown: the necessary prelude to any real revolution. Always brave, and eager to sacrifice himself to a cause, for a short time before his complete collapse, Ochs volunteered for that thankless role: the part no one else wanted to play.  

PS. Although I find Ochs the pop culture theorist interesting to think about, I admit I don't care much for the music he made during these years; I still prefer the early, explicitly political, folk songs (what his friend Bob Dylan derided as “finger pointing songs”). Pleasures of the Harbor (1967) leaves me cold, although I appreciate that the record is of of a piece with some of the most interesting music being made at that the time: baroque orchestral pop albums like Pet Sounds, Goodbye and Hello (Tim Buckley), Matthew and Son (Cat Stevens),Odyseey and Oracle, even Astral Weeks.  It’s just that I would rather listen to anyone else I just mentioned than Ochs; the vocals don’t work for me in the spotlight that this musical setting places on them. However, the fact Ochs moved in this this musical direction was not only brave, but visionary, given that this subgenre of 60s rock has aged so well.

Sadean Aristocrats, 2000 Light Years from Home

I know, it doesn’t speak well of me that I can still get spooked by the Rolling Stones: but happens.  I was watching vh1classic and stumbled on Sound of the City, a low-budget, lower-tech cut and paste job of mostly live rock concert footage, when the promotional video for the Stones’ “2000 Light Years from Home” (1967) came on.

It scared me: not because the song is spooky (although it certainly is; much maligned, the Stones’ psychedelic-era records still stand up remarkably well, aside from the ‘let’s-sing-this-all-together-we-just-came-back-from-Morocco-and-now-we’re-the Master Musicians of Jajouka’-crap). No, it was the frozen and empty eyes of band members, framed in various close-up shots at the beginning of the clip that unnerved me. You can explain away how scary Brian Jones looked by blaming it on drugs: but the cold, brittle gaze of Watts, Richards, and especially Wyman, is harder to explicate: or forget. These eyes seem capable of gazing at anything, no matter how horrible, with the same unsettling mix of boredom and equanimity.

I recently read Mick Farren’s contemporaneous review of Sticky Fingers (1971), where he observes that the Stones moved in a few short years “from juvenile art student fuck-you-all to a cult of militant decadence that drew on the libertine anarchy of a de Sade nobleman.”  I initially thought the comparison with Sade was far-fetched; now, I’m not so sure.  I could easily imagine Pasolini casting Wyman et al, for the part of the pitiless aristocrats in Salò: voyeur-libertines capable of a malicious fury so molten that it's frozen. 
   The video was made when the band was in pitch battle with the Establishment as represented by the London police. Amazingly, the Establishment caved (John 'Hoppy' Hopkins, the London underground's chief organizer, was not as fortunate), while the Stones didn't appear to as much as flinch. The image in the video is tougher than most rock music of the time, the Stones' music included.