Cat People

There is a famous quotation attributed to Albert Schweitzer, “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” If you have to ask what Schweitzer means, to lift a phrase from Louis Armstrong, you’ll never know. At the conclusion of his Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss speaks of the human experience of nature, referring to “the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity, and spiritual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one sometimes exchanges with a cat.” If only one could approach the vicissitudes of life with the calmness and serenity of a cat.

While it is not precisely clear when the word “cat” began to used to refer to another person, most certainly it emerged from American jazz culture. Bob Yurochko observes:

Another phenomenon that rose from bebop [in the 1940s] was a new language or slang used by musicians called “bop talk.” Musicians communicated with each other with words like “hip,” “cool,” “man,” “cat,” or “dig” to form their own lexicon, which became part of the jazz musician’s heritage. Boppers became so aloof that many of their social and musical antics were largely exaggerated, finding much disfavor elsewhere in musical circles. (A Short History of Jazz 103)

To be fair, many of these words were probably invented or perhaps popularized by Louis Armstrong, as Gary Giddens observes in his book Satchmo. To call someone a “cool cat” became a statement of approbation. (Incidentally, a “hepcat,” in Forties bebop culture, was any person who admired, or perhaps played, jazz and swing.) Robert S. Gold calls the word “cool” the “most protean of jazz slang terms” and meant, among other things, “convenient . . . off dope . . . on dope, comfortable, respectable, perceptive, shrewd—virtually anything favorably regarded by the speaker” (A Jazz Lexicon, 65). Since the word “cat” was so strongly associated with jazz culture, as well as the expression “cool cats,” there developed, in comics and cartoons, the practice of using anthropomorphized cats as symbols of jazz musicians. Bob Clampett’s cartoon “Tin Pan Alley Cats” (1943), for instance, features a caricature of jazz musician Fats Waller as a cat – see a discussion of the cartoon here.

Hence it follows that not every song about a cat (or kitten, or pussycat) is really about a cat of the feline sort.

Some Cat (As Opposed To Scat) Tunes:

The Beatles – Leave My Kitten Alone
Bent Fabric [Bent Fabricius-Bjerre] and His Piano – Alley Cat
David Bowie – Cat People (Putting Out Fire)
Harry Chapin – Cat’s in the Cradle
Petula Clark – The Cat in the Window (The Bird in the Sky)
The Coasters – Three Cool Cats
Elton John – Honky Cat
The Grateful Dead – China Cat Sunflower
Tom Jones – What’s New Pussycat?
The Kinks – Phenomenal Cat
The Lovin’ Spoonful – Nashville Cats
Ted Nugent – Cat Scratch Fever
The Rolling Stones – Stray Cat Blues
Al Stewart – Year of the Cat
The Stray Cats – Stray Cat Strut
Norma Tanega – Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog

Love is the Drug

For Georges Bataille, who thought a great deal about what constitutes human pleasure, for pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limit of what is perceived as “wholesome” or “healthy”—it must be transgressive. The demands of pleasure (as opposed to, say, mere “happiness” or “contentment”) force us to confront the limits of our being. One way to exceed or surpass this limit is through chemical prosthesis—the use of drugs. Indeed, “addiction” is a common idiom for the way our culture perceives any excessive pursuit of pleasure, whether that be “sex addiction,” “shopping addiction,” or “drug addiction.” Our colloquialisms, however, also reflect the double nature of pleasure: we don’t “enjoy” or “really like” something—we “love” it, or perhaps “crave” it. When something strikes deeply in our being, it is “stunning.” “You send me,” Sam Cooke sang decades ago, employing a quaint metaphor of being sent into orbit, by which he meant, “You send me off the planet,” synonymous with the expression, “out of this world.” But since pleasure is also structured as destructive excess, we can also say we are “blown away,” or “knocked out,” or “floored.” “It stoned me,” Van Morrison sang, but he might just as easily have sung, “It almost killed me.”

Our popular music, particularly jazz and rock, traces the double nature of pleasure as excess. “Within jazz mythology,” writes Michael Jarrett, “drugs corroborate an ideology of control: playing one’s body as if it were a horn. Within the realm of rock, the reverse obtains. Drugs underwrite an ideology of freedom; they promise loss of control—the bliss of one’s body played as if it were a horn” (248). In effect, one’s self is either pumped up, or depleted, by chemical prosthesis: the limits to the self are surpassed either by the illusion of omnipotence or by the illusion of possession by an ego alien.

The number of popular songs about chemical prostheses—drugs and alcohol—is vast, so vast and so innumerable that it is impossible to name them all. But here are thirteen more unusual ones outside of the standard playlist that have the virtue of equivocating pleasure and addiction:

“For My Lover” – Tracy Chapman
“Pump It Up” – Elvis Costello & the Attractions
“Emma” – Jonathan Edwards
“Sister Morphine” – Marianne Faithfull
“Gold Dust Woman” – Fleetwood Mac
“White Lightning” – George Jones
“Addicted to Love” – Robert Palmer
“Mary Jane’s Last Dance” – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
“Comfortably Numb” – Pink Floyd
“She’s My Cherry Pie” – Poison
“Something Happened to Me Yesterday” – The Rolling Stones
“Love is the Drug” – Roxy Music
“Carmelita” – Warren Zevon

Groovy

Although the word “groove” is generally understood as a musical term referring to a song’s rhythm—its groove—the word can refer to a number of issues besides rhythm, among them sex, class, and whether you're "high," that is, on drugs. Although the word is strongly associated with the 1960s—The Young Rascals had a #1 hit in 1967, for instance, with “Groovin’,” and there was also a hit song titled “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”—the word dates back to the 1930s, if not earlier. A quick search of the word at answers.com indicates that the origin of the word is 1937, but it is highly likely that the word was introduced (first) into jazz vocabulary by Louis Armstrong—who has been credited for coining and popularizing slang words such as “cool,” “cat,” “pops,” and “daddy”—sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s. One can imagine that, for Armstrong, "to be groovy" meant in the mood to make a record (since all records had grooves), or high, since he was admittedly a life-long user of marijuana (referred to as a "joint" in the 60s, marijuana imbibed in the form of a rolled cigarette was, in jazz culture, referred to as a "viper").

The first to be in the groove were African-American jazz musicians, early in the 1930s. They are no longer around to tell us where this groove came from, but scholars have speculated. Maybe it began with that relatively new invention, the phonograph, whose sound came out right when the needle was in the groove; maybe the musicians—virtually all of them men—were creating yet another metaphor for sex.... “The jazz musicians gave no grandstand performances,” wrote an admiring reviewer in 1933, “they simply got a great burn from playing in the groove.”

Apparently the word was defined in 1937 as meaning a “state of mind which is conducive to good playing,” but by the process of metaphorical elaboration, soon most any pleasant or pleasing activity could be “groovy.”

Before long, there were groovy audiences as well as groovy performers, and by the 1940s things in general could be groovy. Love was groovy, skating was groovy, even pitching a no-hit baseball game was groovy.

In the 1950s the word was adopted by the Beats, whose music of choice was jazz; from jazz culture Beat culture borrowed both a vocabulary and a sensibility (for Beat Jack Kerouac, the preferred form of jazz was “bop”). By the mid-60s, the word was adopted by the rock culture, which borrowed a number of styles, including a strong non-conformist posture, from the earlier jazz culture (the Dionysian one descending from Charlie Parker) including drug use, which presumably put you "in the groove," that is, enhanced your musical creativity.

Groovy was in the air everywhere in the hip, laid-back counterculture of the 1960s, when feeling groovy was the ultimate ambition and praise, as well as the title of a hit song. To groove was “to have fun.” “Life as it is really grooves,” declares a fictional letter from a group of groovy young dropouts in a 1969 short story by John Updike.

By the mid to late 1970s, however, “groovy,” as an indication of approbation, had fallen out of favor. “In the groove” could still refer to musical rhythm (or a great sex life), but no one who wanted to be perceived as “cool” dared use the word “groovy.” Hippies were no longer hip, and if you were “feelin’ groovy” it meant you were decidedly un-hip, an anachronism, déclassé. I suspect that no one born, say, after 1970 ever considers using the word "groovy," although it does crop up occasionally, in pastiches of the 1960s (Austin Powers), for instance, or when used by nerdy protagonists (such as Ash in the Evil Dead films).

Videos
The Groove Tube (1974)
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987)
Army of Darkness (1992)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)
The Emperor's New Groove (2000)

Saturday, January 16, 1960: Cult of Bop

That grand wild sound of bop floated
from beer parlors; it mixed medleys
with every kind of cowboy and
boogie-woogie in the American night.
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road

According to Barry Miles' The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 (Grove Press, 2001), on January 16, 1960 William Burroughs (pictured) had been a boarder at the “Beat Hotel” in Paris, a decaying Left Bank rooming house (closed 1963) at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, for precisely two years, having moved there on January 16, 1958. Although it had circulated in various drafts prior to his arrival in Paris (from Tangier) two years before, his major work, Naked Lunch, was essentially finished. By January 1960, the novel had been in print just a few months, having been published in Paris by Olympia Press the late summer of 1959, by which time all the important texts written by the Beats were completed: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), and Gregory Corso’s Bomb (1958) were all in print prior to Naked Lunch, the last of the "Big Four" to see print. Yet unlike the other texts, Naked Lunch is an assemblage of “routines” (Burroughs’ term), meaning it reads more like a codex than a scroll (in contrast to, say, the poems by Ginsburg or Corso, or Kerouac’s On the Road, literally written on a scroll), which is to say Burroughs was open to the creative possibilities made possible through electronic media such as film (the “cut-up” method).

Hence the major works of the Beats were completed or drafted before the popularization of rock and roll (Elvis, 1956) in American culture. The Beats modeled themselves on the post-World World II beboppers or boppers—self-conscious modernists (for a discussion of beboppers as self-conscious modernists, see Chapter 5 of David W. Stowe’s Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America, 1994). Like the expatriate Americans of the 1920s—“the Moderns”—the Beats settled, at least temporarily, in Paris. Since the Beats perceived themselves as representing everything that was modern (“hip”), Kerouac invoked “That grand wild sound of bop” in On the Road (written 1951). (As many scholars have observed, musical discourse has often provided the language for debating issues of American identity; as the above quotation from On the Road reveals, Kerouac uses a musical metaphor to capture the uniqueness of America.) In a sense, Kerouac had to endorse bop, to associate himself with it, in part to allow for the cultural acceptance of his work. As David Stowe explains:

A romance with the symbols of high culture and learning pervaded the bop subculture. . . . Whatever its utilitarian considerations, the bop dress code seemed lifted from the Parisian avant-garde. . . . [Some] learned Arabic in order to study the Koran. In addition to paying homage to avant-garde European composers, the jazz modernists gave their compositions quasi-academic titles like “Epistrophy” and “Ornithology.” Much was made of bop artists’ ability to converse about intellectual matters; one described [Dizzy] Gillespie as “deep,” and [Charlie] Parker as someone who “could converse on any level about anything.” Gillespie recalled lengthy discussions with Parker about philosophy, politics, “the social order,” “life-style,” Marcantonio, and Baudelaire.” (211-12)

Not surprisingly, given the reputation for drug use by highly visible jazz figures such as Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong (although Armstrong’s use of marijuana was hardly a true narcotic such as heroin, to which Parker admitted an addiction), early on bop was linked by the media with vice. Stowe cites a Time magazine article from March 1946 that designated as “’the bigwig of be-bop’ singer Harry ‘The Hipster’ Gibson, who with guitarist Slim Gaillard had recorded such reputed bop anthems as ‘Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?’ (which owed far more to Fats Waller than to bebop)” (207).

Slim Gaillard’s appeal to Beats such as Kerouac was in part due to his skills at verbal improvisation and word play (hence his appeal was much like Neal Cassady’s). His routines often employed nonsensical syllables during stream-of-consciousness rap sessions. Hence it is no wonder that there is an homage to one of Gaillard’s performances in On the Road.

Likewise, the neologisms and the distinctive argot of Naked Lunch owes as much to bop—that is, the post-war jazz subculture—as it does to the drug subculture (the more obvious candidate) that would have been familiar to Burroughs, although the language of the two subcultures overlapped to such an extent that it’s difficult to determine from which domain the words first emerged. Words such as “liquefactionist” and “factualist” as well as proper names such as “Mugwump” all ring of hipster culture. And while Burroughs referred to the various sections making up Naked Lunch as “routines,” he might just as well called them riffs, a musical term etymologically related to riffle, one of the meanings of which means to shuffle or rearrange a deck of cards. Care to cut (up) the deck?