Stutter

One of the reasons The Who’s “My Generation” is so memorable is, of course, because of Roger Daltrey’s distinctive delivery—his stuttering: “Why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away!” I’ve read a few accounts as to why he stutters, one version averring the song began as a “talking blues” number without the stutter, but having been inspired by John Lee Hooker’s “Stuttering Blues” (1953), Pete Townshend was compelled to include it. A competing version is based on Daltrey’s claim that his stuttering came about as the result of his having failed to learn the lyrics prior to rehearsing it, and hence the stuttering was a consequence of his inability to read the lyrics on the lyric sheet correctly—in other words, the stuttering was a “happy accident.” Whatever the reason—now a part of rock legend—the stuttering is significant, and I suspect it is connected to the issue of “noise” in rock music that I’ve written about previously.

Most certainly “My Generation” wasn’t the first popular song featuring stuttering. “K-K-K-Katy,” a song featuring a stutter that was a huge hit during the First World War, was performed by Billy Murray, the most popular singer in America prior to Al Jolson. A few years later, in 1922, Murray recorded “You Tell Her, I Stutter,” about a young man who desperately wants to propose marriage, but because he stutters, he asks his sweetheart’s brother to do the proposing for him. Blues musician John Lee Hooker stuttered, the motive behind his recording of “Stuttering Blues.” Stuttering or stammering is commonly understood as a speech disorder in which speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds or syllables, and involuntary silent pauses—blocks—during which the stutterer is unable to make any sound at all. While stuttering in the popular imagination is associated with the involuntary repetition of sounds (as in “My Generation”), it is also characterized by long, involuntary pauses and the prolongation of certain sounds. Joseph Sheehan, a speech pathologist, compares stuttering to an iceberg—referred to here as the “iceberg theory”—with the manifest or phenomenal features of stuttering (speech) the part above the waterline, with the larger mass of negative emotions associated with stuttering remaining hidden:

. . . the majority of the behaviour associated it [stuttering] lies beneath the surface. What lies above the surface are the visible symptoms of stuttering: blocked speech, repetition of syllables, disjointed speech, facial grimaces, blushing, visible tension in the face and neck, etc. However, Sheehan sees the greater problem with the effects of stuttering that other people cannot see: this includes shame, embarrassment (in addition to that embarrassment which is physically visible), guilt, avoidance of situations, substitution of words and other tricks, etc. There can be some argument about what exactly these covert symptoms are, and they tend to vary from person to person, but it is quite evident that such behavioural symptoms do exist and they contribute significantly to the overall problem of stuttering.

Herman Melville’s Billy Budd stuttered and stammered, primarily when he was placed under stress, but he didn’t repeat syllables so much as suffer from blocked speech: in the face of gross injustice, he was mute. I think Ken Kesey had Billy Budd in mind when he created his character of Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who exhibited the same behavior when faced with injustice and flagrant misuse of power (Nurse Ratched). In these instances involuntary silence is metaphorically associated with the slave, as in Hegel’s asymmetrical power relationship represented by his famous master-slave dialectic.

What is interesting, however, is the fact that many of the individuals who stutter or stammer do not do so while singing—the aforementioned John Lee Hooker comes to mind, as does country singer Mel Tillis. At least one popular musician who stuttered as a child, Carly Simon, used musical rhythm to help overcome her disability (listen to her fascinating discussion here), explaining her love of music. Hence, while it would seem the predictable regularity that is characteristic of music helps certain individuals use a rhythmic pattern in order to help overcome their stuttering, popular music does just the opposite, (re)inscribing stuttering into the song itself, meaning that its use is an affectation, a form of artifice—a code. In “My Generation,” the stuttering is used as a coded substitution, signaling that the singer really means “fuck off” rather than “fade away,” the former usage proscribed by the apparatus of state censorship. In contrast, in George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” since the song is rather shamelessly lifted from Bo Diddley’s “I’m A Man,” the repetition of “b-b-b-b-bad” seems linked to the way Diddley emphasizes the “m” in the spelling of M-A-N by prolonging its sound, a code for masculine prowess.

I find this topic a subject for further research, particularly the use of stuttering in rock music, so I’m not in a position to present a fully formulated theory yet. And there’s at least one web site devoted to stuttering songs, revealing an interest in the connection between stuttering and popular music that long precedes my own.

Just A Few Of The Songs Featuring Stuttering and Stammering:
Bachman-Turner Overdrive – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
The Beastie Boys – Ch-Check It Out
David Bowie – Changes
Elton John – Bennie And The Jets
Guns N’ Roses – Welcome to the Jungle
The Knack – My Sharona
Huey Lewis and The News – The Heart of Rock and Roll
Bob Seger – Katmandu
George Thorogood and the Destroyers – Bad to the Bone
The Who – My Generation

White Black Singers, Part II

Yesterday I discussed the way white male rockers have appropriated codes of black masculinity to define their identities. In the study I mentioned, Krin Gabbard’s Black Magic, Gabbard has relied in part on the work of Eric Lott, particularly an essay titled “Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” that can be found in Simon During, Ed., The Cultural Studies Reader, Second Edition. Lott argues that whites perform “whiteness” in many ways, and that these performances are addressed, not necessarily explicitly, to blacks. As part of his analysis, Lott explores one form of white impersonation of blackness, what is known historically as “blackface,” which Lott interprets as perhaps more significant than whites merely “pretending” to be black, but in fact an illustration of a deep desire in white performers to be black. My point yesterday simply was to observe that the most obvious cultural activity in which whites have expressed their fascination with black culture (at least since the rise of Elvis Presley) is rock ‘n’ roll.

I assume it is widely known, though perhaps the point needs to be reiterated, that Elvis was so “controversial” at the time he burst on the scene in the 1950s was because his stage persona was so obviously modeled on black codes of masculinity: his greased and oiled hair, for instance, and his vocal style, borrowed from Otis Blackwell and other rhythm and blues singers of the 1940s and 50s. Consider this information, taken from Greil Marcus’s book Dead Elvis, quoting Robert Henry, a Beale Street promoter: “…he [Elvis] would watch the colored singers, understand me, and then he got to doing it the same way as them. He got that shaking, that wiggle, from Charlie Burse, Ukelele Ike we called him, right there at the Gray Mule on Beale. Elvis, he wasn’t doing nothing but what the colored people had been doing for the last hundred years. But people . . . people went wild over him” (p. 57). Marcus also quotes Nat D. Williams, “the unofficial mayor of Beale Street”: “We had a lot of fun with him [Elvis]. Elvis Presley on Beale Street when he first started out was a favorite man. When they saw him coming out, the audience always gave him as much recognition as they gave any musician—black. He had a way of singing the blues that was distinctive. He could sing ‘em not necessarily like a Negro, but he didn’t sing ‘em altogether like a typical white musician. He had something in between that made the blues sort of different . . . . Always he had that certain humanness about him that Negroes like to put in their songs. So when he had a show down there at the Palace, everybody got ready for something good. Yeah. They were crazy about Presley” (p. 57). I should add that Henry and Williams are talking about events before Elvis ever showed up at Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, when Elvis, then a teenager, was also spending time in Memphis’s black neighborhoods having sex with young black girls. (See McKee and Chisenhall’s Beale Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America’s Main Street (1981).

What I failed to mention in yesterday’s post, however, is that white rock ‘n’ roll performers may reflect the “withering-away” of blackface. As John Szwed has observed, “The fact that, say, a Mick Jagger can today perform in the [blackface] tradition without blackface simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost full absorption of a black tradition into white culture” (qtd. in Lott, “Racial Cross-Dressing,” p. 243). Perhaps there is no better way to illustrate the sort of performance of “whiteness” that is derived from black masculine codes than to see it. I’ve provided a link here to a performance of “Spill the Wine” by Eric Burdon and War, an interracial group that made some fine music integrating Latin rhythms, rhythm and blues, rock, and funk into a highly distinctive mixture. Eric Burdon is to be included among those white rockers (many of them from a working class background, as he is) that I mentioned yesterday, who always expressed great love of the blues; he also happened to be a good friend of the late blues great John Lee Hooker. I see a bit of Mick Jagger in Burdon’s performance as captured in this video, but then, as I mentioned above, Jagger himself has so thoroughly internalized blackface style that he is no longer even aware of it. I should also add that when I die and am reincarnated, I want to come back able to sing like Eric Burdon.

White Black Singers

Although the subject of his book, Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture, is the racial appropriation of black culture in white American film, Krin Gabbard discusses the way white male performers of Rhythm & Blues (and the music derived from it, Rock ‘n’ Roll) have appropriated black masculinity to define their identities. Quoting John Gennari, Gabbard observes that white male appropriation of black masculinity

operates through gender displacement, i.e., sexual freedom and carefree abandon were expressed through feminized gestures (emotion, flamboyance, etc.) that, paradoxically, end up coded as masculine. I think here of Elvis’s hair styling, his obsession with pink, etc.; of Mick Jagger’s striptease; the spandex, long-hair, girlish torsos of the cock rockers. To try to get this point across to my students, I show footage of . . . Robert Plant and Jimmy Page talking about how everything they did came out of Willie Dixon and other macho black bluesmen. Then you see them aggressively pelvic thrusting through “Whole Lotta Love,” looking like Cher and Twiggy on speed. (Gabbard, p. 33)

Eric Lott has argued that Elvis imitators play out their fascination with black male sexuality (safely) by becoming a simulacrum of Elvis as he appeared in the 1950s, “as though such performance were a sort of second-order blackface, in which, blackface having for the most part disappeared, the figure of Elvis himself is now the apparently still necessary signifier of white ventures into black culture . . .” (p. 36). The appropriation of black masculinity by white performers, in which black masculinity is (paradoxically) displayed by androgynous display, in the form of sexual freedom and abandon, flamboyant dress (including the wearing of ornate jewelry), and also by feminine coding (long hair, make-up, etc.) can be seen in, for instance, Transformer-era Lou Reed; Alice Cooper; Tommy Bolin; the New York Dolls; Kiss; and figures such as the Cramps’ Lux Interior. Gennari’s insight, quoted above, also explains the seeming paradox of why so many cock rockers, all of whom had an expressed love of black blues records, have always had such girlish figures and feminized mannerisms: Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, T. Rex, Allen Collins (of Lynyrd Skynyrd), and those “second generation” rockers who consciously inherited these mannerisms, such as Mötley Crüe (former band member Tommy Lee is pictured), Ratt, and Poison.

In Vino Veritas

There is a long tradition in the Western world of likening the effects of alcohol to the ecstatic frenzy of divine possession. Socrates likened poets to bacchants, the followers of Bacchus or Dionysus, god of wine and inspired madness, that is, giddy intoxication and frenzied hysteria. Country music came to employ the pedal steel guitar as the musical equivalent of drunken self-pity and indulgence, and many a country song has been written on the self-pitying drunk’s best friend, Jack Daniels. By getting drunk, one seeks the pleasure principle. But when booze doesn’t work, as in Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” it forces the singer to confront the harsh reality principle, allowing old memories (of love) to “come around.” Hence drunkenness in popular music is frequently sought as a way to achieve drug-induced amnesia, a way to escape the terrible realities of existence, most often heartbreak. As Samuel Johnson observed, “He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Hard whiskey, however, is a double-edged sword, because its effects are unpredictable: it may allow the drinker to escape acute self-consciousness, or do just the opposite, bring about a state of hyper self-awareness, and only exacerbate one’s crippling misery. Wine is often perceived to be a safer path to drunken self-indulgence than hard whiskey: wine is perceived to be a more benign, slower, and pleasurable--mellower--path to inebriation than the drastic measure of being knocked to your knees with just a few shots.

Here Are A Few Instances Of The Veritas In Vino:
Eric Clapton – Bottle of Red Wine
Cream – Sweet Wine
The Electric Flag – Wine
David Frizzell – I’m Going To Hire a Wino (To Decorate Our Home)
Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers Band – Midnight Choir (Mogen David)
George Jones – Wine Colored Roses
Jimmy Gilmer & the Fireballs – Bottle of Wine
Tommy James & the Shondells – Sweet Cherry Wine
Jerry Lee Lewis – Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee
Henry Mancini – Days of Wine and Roses
Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – Summer Wine
Eric Burdon & War – Spill the Wine
J. Frank Wilson & The Cavaliers – Wine, Wine, Wine
Faron Young – Wine Me Up

Here are three versions of “Red Red Wine” I have. Take your pick, as all of them are good:
Neil Diamond – Red Red Wine
Tee-Set (“Ma Belle Amie” ) – Red Red Wine
UB40 – Red Red Wine

Originally written and recorded by Neil Diamond in 1968, “Red Red Wine” was soon covered by Tony Tribe, a Jamaican rocksteady singer, who recorded a reggae-influenced version. Tony Tribe’s version in turn influenced UB40’s later, 1983 cover of the song—I suspect UB40 band members may never even have heard Neil Diamond’s version when they recorded their hit version.

Return Of The Record

According to this article from today’s L. A. Times, there’s been a “mini-boom” of neighborhood record stores in the Los Angeles area. Sales figures indicate that sales of vinyl LPs were up 89% in 2008, signaling a renewed interest in the venerable musical storage medium. According to the article,

Between 2003 and last year, more than 3,000 record stores closed in the U.S., including such Los Angeles landmarks as Tower Records on the Sunset Strip. Independent shops such as Rhino Westwood and Aron’s Records in Hollywood accounted for nearly half the losses, according to the Almighty Institute of Music Retail, a database and marketing firm. Today, there are 185 record stores in the L.A. area, down from 259 at the beginning of 2007.

Several factors are cited for the resurgence of interest in the decades-old format, among them the assertion by audiophiles that a vinyl record sounds better than a compact disc. Even if that were indisputably true (and it may be), I would argue that a major factor accounting for interest in the format is the appeal of an album’s artwork over that of a CD—a CD booklet simply can’t compete with the visual and tactile appeal of a vinyl LP cover. Additionally, the vinyl LP has an aura of historicity about it that a CD doesn’t. The L. A. Times article cites Marc Weinstein, founder of Amoeba Music, the chain whose Hollywood venue is among the largest independent retail record stores in the country. He is quoted as saying, “I’ve always marveled at every new generation of 15-year-old boys who go to the Doors vinyl section and say, ‘Wow, an original Doors LP!’” I would argue that their fascination lies in the fact that the record was issued when the Doors were still actually recording and performing, a tangible connection to that era, unlike a later CD reissue.

Whether the vinyl LP “mini-boom” will continue in its present robust fashion is hard to say, although it’s worth pointing out that the introduction of television didn’t render the radio obsolete, no more than the Internet has displaced television. As Marshall McLuhan observed, the content of the new media is the old media: digital downloading of classic movies and television shows is an illustration of McLuhan’s point. Digital downloading of music is yet another illustration of his point. But since the record is the basic material artifact of rock culture, integral to its initial manner of distribution and consumption, it is no wonder that the vinyl record’s appeal has not entirely disappeared.

The Hunger Artists

Etymologically, the word hunger derives from the Old English hungor, akin to the Old High German hungar, and is related to the Lithuanian word kanka, “torture.” To be hungry means to have an urgent need for food or some other special form of nutrition, but by metaphorical elaboration, hunger has come to refer to any strong desire—“a hunger for success,” for instance, or, as is quite common, hunger for another, an expression of strong sexual desire. “For always roaming with a hungry heart/Much have I seen and known,” wrote Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his poem about the mythic hero Ulysses, although in his poem about the heroic figure, Tennyson invented survivors in addition to Ulysses after the end of the Odyssey as recorded by Homer. Hence hunger refers not only to an urgent need for “food,” as in nourishment, but also to appetite, an appetite that can never be satisfied or satiated. What Tennyson’s Ulysses craves is experience itself, and since experience is boundless, what Ulysses wants is the impossible—that which can never be satisfied. His desire to know is apparently boundless, without limits.

In the same way, sexual desire can never be sated; it is a thirst that can never be quenched. Desire can be understood as a quest, a search or hunt that never ends: “Mouth is alive with juices like wine/And I’m hungry like the wolf,” sings Duran Duran in “Hungry Like the Wolf.” Since hunger is recurring, insistent, and never-ending, the singer speaks of a desire that is “hungry like the wolf”—always and forever seeking more and more, insatiable—no wonder that the word hunger is related to the word torture.

Various Hors d’oeuvres:
Eric Clapton – “Hungry,” No Reason to Cry
Deep Purple – “Hungry Daze,” Perfect Strangers
Duran Duran – “Hungry Like the Wolf,” Rio
Merle Haggard – “Hungry Eyes,” Untamed Hawk: The Early Recordings of Merle Haggard
INXS – “Hungry,” Switch
Van Morrison – “Hungry For Your Love,” An Officer and a Gentleman (OST)
Paul Revere & The Raiders – “Hungry,” Greatest Hits
Bruce Springsteen, “Hungry Heart,” The River
Twisted Sister, “Stay Hungry,” Stay Hungry
White Lion – “Hungry,” Pride

Pillow Talk

“Come on baby, I’m tired of talking,” Elvis sings in “A Little Less Conversation” (in Live A Little, Love A Little), telling his baby he wants “A little less conversation/A little more action please/A little more bite and a little less bark/A little less fight and a little more spark/Close your mouth and open up your heart/And baby satisfy me.” We all know what he means by “satisfy me,” in the same way we know what Mick Jagger means when he complains he “can’t get no satisfaction.” Since the articulation of sexual desire was proscribed by the apparatus of censorship when Elvis and Mick sang about wanting to have sex, it seems appropriate that what can be said, and what can’t, is what songs about conversations are all about. That is, conversation songs are not about having a conversation at all: they are about not having a conversation, being forced to converse about things one doesn’t want to converse about, talking “around” an issue. Elvis wants “a little less conversation,” meaning none, and “a little more spark,” meaning he wants her to use her mouth for something other than conversing. “I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for,” Chrissie Hynde sings in “Tattooed Love Boys,” and we all know what she means: she wasn’t having a conversation. There’s talk and there’s conversation—talk is reserved for the pillow, and conservation fills up the time before pillow talk. Hence talk is to fulfillment what conversation is to delay. “Let’s talk about love”—yes, but no one ever wants to have “a conversation” about love—as Elvis so astutely observed.

A Few Songs About (Not Having) A Conversation:
Alesana – This Conversation Is Over (On Frail Wings of Vanity and Wax)
Atlanta Rhythm Section – Conversation (Champagne Jam)
Colin Hay – Conversation (Peaks & Valleys)
Simon and Garfunkel – The Dangling Conversation (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)
Elvis – A Little Less Conversation (Live A Little, Love A Little)
Lyle Lovett – Private Conversation (The Road to Ensenada)
Joni Mitchell – Conversation (Ladies of the Canyon)
Jason Mraz – Conversation With Myself (Live & Acoustic)
Gary Numan – Conversation (The Pleasure Principle)
Lou Reed – New York Telephone Conversation (Transformer)
Hank Williams, Jr. with Waylon Jennings – The Conversation (Whiskey Bent And Hell Bound)

April In Paris

Since April is National Poetry Month, why not talk about music and poetry? After all, the month of April figures rather significantly in a famous Modernist poem from the early 20th century, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Eliot’s poem begins with a famous sentence, composed of four lines: “April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain.” Most scholars agree that these lines from Eliot are intertextually linked to the first lines of the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour . . .

(When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower . . .)

According to Answers.com, the derivation of the name (Latin Aprilis) is uncertain. The traditional etymology from the Latin aperire, “to open,” in allusion to its being the season when trees and flowers begin to “open,” is supported by comparison with the modern Greek use of ἁνοιξις (opening) for spring. Since most of the Roman months were named in honor of divinities, and as April was sacred to Venus, the Festum Veneris et Fortunae Virilis being held on the first day, it has been suggested that Aprilis was originally her month Aphrilis, from her Greek name Aphrodite (Aphros), or from the Etruscan name Apru.

Thus, while for Eliot (who apparently would prefer the oblivion of winter) April is the cruelest month, for the vast majority of poets April is a month to celebrate. If indeed it is the month honoring Venus, the goddess of Love, then it is also the month of rebirth, renewal and discovery, the month celebrating love and lovers. I know of two bands named after the month of April, April Wine (“Say Hello”) and Making April, but there have been many songs written in homage to April as well.

A Playlist Of Songs Featuring April:
Pat Boone – April Love
Deep Purple – April
Ella Fitzgerald – April in Paris
Ian Moore – April
The Jesus and Mary Chain – April Skies
John Phillips – April Anne
Prince – Sometimes It Snows In April
Ron Sexsmith – April After All
Simon and Garfunkel – April Come She Will
Three Dog Night – Pieces of April

Bristlecone Pine

I feel a slight bit of guilt in recycling a blog entry from last year, but then again, since today is Earth Day 2009, I think recycling is entirely appropriate. Last year, I wrote in honor of North America's oldest known living tree, the Methuselah Tree, a bristlecone pine estimated to be near 5,000 years old (not the one pictured, although the picture is of a bristlecone pine). I first heard of the bristlecone pine through a song I heard performed by Jim Salestrom about a decade or so ago. In case you didn't know, Jim--originally from Kearney, Nebraska--formed in the mid-1970s a band called Timberline which had a Top 10 chart hit in 1976 entitled "Timberline," a John Denverish-sounding tune about the beauty of the mountains. After Timberline broke up a few years later--I actually had a former member of the band in an English class of mine in the fall of 1982--Jim became a solo artist. Among his many fine albums is The Messenger, which contains "Bristlecone Pine," which I must say is one of the most sublimely beautiful, which is to say, haunting, songs I've ever heard. The song is available on iTunes, with versions by Michael Johnson, Pat Surface, and Nancy Cook, but I guess I prefer Jim's rendition to theirs.

Way up in the mountains on a high timberline
There's a twisted old tree called the bristlecone pine
The wind there is bitter; it cuts like a knife
It keeps that tree holding on for dear life

But hold on it does, standing its ground
Standing as empires rise and fall down
When Jesus was gathering lambs to his fold
The tree was already a thousand years old

Now the way I have lived there ain't no way to tell
When I die if I'm going to heaven or hell
So when I'm laid to rest it would suit me just fine
To sleep at the feet of the bristlecone pine

And as I would slowly return to this earth
What little this body of mine might be worth
Would soon start to nourish the roots of that tree
And it would partake of the essence of me

And who knows what's found as the centuries turn
A small spark of me might continue to burn
As long as the sun does continue to shine
Down on the limbs of the bristlecone pine

Now the way I have lived there ain't no way to tell
When I die if I'm going to heaven or hell
When I'm laid to rest it would suit me just fine
To sleep at the feet of the bristlecone pine
To sleep at the feet of the bristlecone pine

Music and Lyrics by Hugh Prestwood
© Hugh Prestwood Music

I love the image of the bristlecone pine, an utterly pagan conception of eternity, and the way the singer imagines himself achieving eternal life through his body's nourishing of that astonishingly old, gnarled tree. What I also like about the song is the way it enacts a sort of Nietzschean, pre-Christian, concept of religious thought, of a religion that imagines both the soul and eternity, or eternal life, as a part of a natural process, with the images of eternity found in nature itself.

Scientists have refused to disclose the precise location of California's Methuselah Tree, fearing acts of vandalism. I have no trouble with this policy, primarily because the potential vandals are surely misguided, and not for the obvious reasons: they have imagined their relationship with the tree totally backwards. The point is not to take apart the tree, and hence have a sterile piece of eternity; the point is to partake of the tree's existence, to nourish the tree with one's own body, and achieve eternity thereby.

Today marks the third day this week my wife Becky and I have conducted all of our errands by walking; I intend to walk with her when leaves to teach her class in about an hour. I know our acts don't in themselves amount to much, but it's a litte something to do in honor of Earth Day. That, and acknowledge the world's oldest known living organism.

Scene Of The Accident

The recent (April 15) ninety-seventh anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic reminded me of the many popular songs written about disasters. There’s a long tradition in popular music of disaster songs, in which the terrible event serves as a sort of cautionary fable, having a homiletic value (“the story teaches us that…”). I can’t say definitively how many songs have been written over the years about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, probably over two dozen, but the Titanic event became indelibly associated in the popular imagination with industrial or “man-made” disasters of all kinds—songs about shipwrecks, plane crashes, automobile accidents, and derailed trains, all of which comprise a long precession of misfortune and disaster. And, of course, there are songs about so-called “natural” disasters, such as floods, droughts (Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads), hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Probably one ought to include as well the many murder ballads (“Tom Dooley” being a famous example) among disaster songs.

Thus disaster songs form a rather heterogeneous genre, largely about Fate, and hence really about the human response to adversity: courage and cowardice, the instinct for survival and heroic sacrifice. I’ve listed below a few representative songs, and also the amazing soundtrack to the must-see film ATOMIC CAFÉ (1982), which includes songs such as the Golden Gate Quartet’s “Atom and Evil” and the Slim Gaillard Quartette’s “Atomic Cocktail.” According to information at Conelrad.com on ATOMIC CAFÉ, some songs the producers wanted to include on the soundtrack, but couldn’t find, included “Atomic Polka” and “Atomic Boogie,” and a song titled “Fallout Shelter” in the “Tell Laura I Love Her” vein, a song about a father telling his son that he can’t bring his girlfriend into the family fallout shelter, so the boy and girl abandon the shelter only to die in the streets.

A Lethal Mix Of Disaster Songs:
Atomic Café (Soundtrack)
The Band – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
The Bee Gees – New York Mining Disaster 1941
Bloodrock – D.O.A.
The Buoys – Timothy
Johnny Cash – The Wreck of Old ‘97
David Allan Coe – Widow Maker
Jimmy Dean – Big Bad John
Elvis – In the Ghetto
The Everly Brothers – Ebony Eyes
Lefty Frizzell – Long Black Veil
Jan and Dean – Dead Man’s Curve
The Kinks – Life Goes On
Led Zeppelin – When the Levee Breaks
Gordon Lightfoot – The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Don McLean – American Pie
Randy Newman – Louisiana 1927
Procol Harum – Wreck of the Hesperus
R.E.M. – It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)
Porter Wagoner – The Carroll County Accident
J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers – Last Kiss

To Those Who Live and Die For Rock ‘n’ Roll

Rock music is, and shall always be, a hopelessly overcrowded field, analogous to the Darwinian state of nature, in which only the strongest survive. A recent documentary directed Sacha Gervasi, ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL (2008) – reviewed here by Los Angeles Times’ critic Kenneth Turan – reveals the harsh truth of this reality. Although I only vaguely remember hearing about them, once, apparently – about twenty-six years ago or so – Anvil was the hottest thing in heavy metal. The band never caught on, though, despite making a rather big splash early on in its career, with an album titled Metal on Metal (1982). Turan writes, “Once upon a time, interviews with superstars such as Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, Motorhead’s Lemmy and Guns n’ Roses’ Slash make clear, this Canadian band was the hottest thing in metal, touring with the likes of Whitesnake, Bon Jovi and other groups that ended up selling millions of records.” Yet despite the high praise from peers, and despite the historical significance of Metal on Metal, fame proved elusive for the band. Nonetheless, the band has soldiered on for a quarter century. Kenneth Turan argues that ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL is not so much about the failed career of a metal band as about “eternally hopeful rockers who cling to optimism about a glorious future despite harsh reality’s repeated blows.”

There’s another way to think about the story of Anvil, though, one that seems to me to be about more than bad luck, poor sales, or poor management: it is about the sacrifice made to honor a set of cultural values, in this case, rock ‘n’ roll. Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison – they and many others have sacrificed for it. But what, precisely, does it mean to sacrifice for something? Georges Bataille would say sacrifice is the wasteful expenditure of something to honor a particular set of cultural values. In “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933), Bataille explores what he calls the principle of loss, that is, of extravagant wasteful expenditure. Examples of unproductive, wasteful expenditure include: “luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality) – all these represent activities which . . . have no end beyond themselves.” These activities constitute a group “characterized by the fact that in each case the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning,” that is, a loss that must be both considerable and extravagant. Stated another way: For any cultural activity to have real value, the loss must be maximized – excessive. For example, the value of diamonds to their owner is determined by how great is the loss in terms of financial expenditure: the more unreasonable and extravagant the expenditure, the greater the value of the diamond jewels. Bataille writes: “Jewels must not only be beautiful and dazzling (which would make the substitution of imitations possible): one sacrifices a fortune, preferring a diamond necklace; such a sacrifice is necessary for the constitution of this necklace’s fascinating character.” In other words, if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for something, it isn’t a value at all.

This principle justifies the inevitable continuation of warfare: as losses, i.e., deaths and maimings, increase, a nation’s stake in a war escalates. As the deaths remorselessly accumulate, the easier it becomes to justify the war’s continuation because the stakes have grown higher. By the continuation of the war, the nation consequently becomes increasingly indebted to those who have died and have been severely maimed in battle; the acknowledgment of this mounting debt ensures that the soldiers’ sacrifices are not in vain – that they will not become non-productive expenditure (that they “died for nothing”). The principle of mounting debt as a justification for continued sacrifice applies to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle all too well – rather like a gambler who cannot quit gambling because that would mean his tremendous financial sacrifice was all for nothing – just non-productive sacrifice (loss).

Comparisons to the mock documentary THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984) are inevitable – in his review, Turan likens ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL to Rob Reiner’s popular pastiche of metal music and musicians – except that the story of Anvil is “real life.” Such a comparison is fine, as long as we recognize that THIS IS SPINAL TAP reveals the way certain cultural values, despite their centrality to the culture, are consistently denied or degraded. In contrast to Reiner’s film, ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL doesn’t deny or degrade the impulse to sacrifice for rock ‘n’ roll, but rather celebrates it, attempting to transform non-productive expenditure into productive sacrifice.

Down To The Last Man

Today’s paper carried the news (news to me) that Billy Bob Thornton’s band, the Boxmasters, canceled the remainder of its Canadian tour, no doubt the result of the damaged relations with audiences that occurred as a consequence of the actor saying during a contentious radio interview on CBC radio’s “Q” program that Canadian fans were “mashed potatoes but no gravy.” The movie star apparently didn’t like the fact that the “Q” program’s interlocutor, Jian Ghomeshi, began the interview with references to his film career, a subject the actor had proscribed as off limits. The actor also took strong offense to Ghomeshi’s question as to whether he was passionate about music, a question which the actor felt, so it would seem, was motivated by the underlying perception that he was nothing but a musical dilettante.

Despite his protestations, though, perhaps he is a dilettante. Movie stars wanting to be pop stars are nothing new, but Thornton’s situation reveals something else about life in Western societies today, true for many, many people as well as the actor, that it is difficult to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one can be deeply passionate. Apparently, in Thornton’s case, he is not deeply passionate about movie acting. Hence he faces a choice many confront today: the choice between leading a comfortable, satisfying life of material wealth and pleasure, and dedicating one’s life to some transcendent Cause – the choice, in other words, between what Friedrich Nietzsche called “passive” and “active” nihilism.

The modern malaise was diagnosed over a century ago by Nietzsche, who observed that Western civilization is moving in the direction of what he called, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “the last man” – an effete, apathetic human being with no great passion or commitment to anything. Weak-willed, filled with ennui, unable to dream, the last man eschews risks and seeks only security and comfort: “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have discovered happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink” (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 130). The last men of today are those who reject all “higher” Causes and choose instead to dedicate their life to the pursuit of narrow, artificially aroused pleasures – like pursuing the life of a pop star, for instance.

As Thornton’s situation reveals – not at all that unusual – the last man does not wish his private fantasies to be disturbed, which is why during the interview he felt he was being “harassed.” His putative “difficulty” during the interview was merely a form of lashing out, a way of condemning the cloying proximity of another human being, with his own interests and desires, his own “agenda” as is sometimes, pejoratively, said. For two issues determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude toward others: an openness toward Otherness (as long as that presence is not intrusive), and an obsessive fear of harassment. In other words, one displays an openness to the Other as long as his or her presence does not spill over into “harassment,” which is not really tolerance of the Other at all: Do not harass others as you would have them not harass you. What his radio interview painfully reveals is that the central “human right” in our society these days is the fundamental right not to be harassed – to be allowed to have safe distance from all others. Today’s form of liberalism, therefore, maintains that the experience of the Other must be deprived of its Otherness. Hence Thornton’s “mashed potatoes” comment is, in fact, disingenuous. He said, “We tend to play places where people throw things at each other. Here [in Canada], they just sort of sit there. And it doesn’t matter what you say to ‘em . . . . It’s mashed potatoes but no gravy.” But the painful reality is, his metaphorical elaboration reveals the way he really wants things to be – for the Other to be devoid of the substance that actually defines it as distinctly Other.