In a completely unseasonal move, not too long ago I read two cultural histories of Halloween — Nicolas Rogers’ Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night and David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday. Both books look at the grab bag of vaguely Anglo-Celtic traditions that merged with American-style commercialism, graphic design, mass media, and vandalism to produce the current late-October retail juggernaut. Along the way, both authors provide refreshers on bonfire night, Old World recreational fortune-telling practices, queer appropriations of Halloween masking, poison candy urban legends, and the like. If, like me, you’re a long time Halloween nerd, none of this is uncharted territory. One thing that did “click” for me was that (and I believe the Rogers book pointed this out) the festival from whence Halloween came (Hallowtide) was actually the beginning of Christmastide. Of course, the old timey Anglo-Celtic Christmas season was quite a different celebration than our current partly-Victorian-inspired carnival of wholesome consumerism.
Christmas, once upon a time, involved a lot more pranking, public rowdiness, and general transgressing than today’s “traditional” time of family get-togethers and material displays of affection. Various house-visiting practices and charity/begging took place across this long post-harvest holiday season. Souling and wassailing practices are often seen as the origins of modern trick-or-treating and caroling traditions. These now exotic traditions highlighted the places where the liturgical and agricultural calendars intersect. In today’s culture of commerce and Pop-focused mass media, “traditions” are usually just wholesome veneers constructed to support consumer practices. Any deep-rooted symbolism is often obscured by images and stories originating in cola advertisements or department store promotions.
Frost and Fire is an interesting collection, focusing as it does on the “Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs” that was used to commemorate traditional seasonal celebrations. Of course, this album is a product of ‘60s “folk revival” tastes and ‘60s ideas about “authenticity.” I’m not really purist on these matters and certainly not an expert on British folk music/revival. What is appealing about this collection for me is that, to my rock/pop ears, the unaccompanied, roughish vocal harmonies singing of birds and wine and such sounds exactly how I imagine my beloved imaginary past to sound. It’s very “Olde England,” but unpretentiously without the curlicues and sonic adornments that connote Renaissance Fair. The overall effect is sort of a Plastic Ono Band version of medieval-ish ritual – a “Strange, Fey England” counterpart to the “Old, Weird America” found on the Anthology of American Folk Music and re-imagined by Dylan and his Band on the Basement Tapes.
I suppose that it’s fitting that these songs harkening back to liminal-season rituals also suggest the transition from a world where unique pre-industrial European and American traditional/regional practices existed in isolated pockets to a world where almost everything (including “tradition”) is mediated (by electronics, expectations, pop stardom, hype, etc.) such that entertainment and ritual are influenced by a commercial monoculture. I’m not lamenting the passing of some purer, simpler time – an era which likely never existed (or if it did exist was probably a trifle inconvenient and not nearly as quaint as I imagine it). Rather, I am interested in the ways which historical or traditional cultural memes mutate and live on. The self-consciously rustic Frost and Fire helps to organize ideas about seasons and traditional celebrations so that listeners can understand what they mean and how they function – much in the same way that Halloween helps Americans organize and understand immigrant traditions and pranking traditions and “fancy dress” parties that gave rise to the very American modern Halloween holiday.
I’ve listened to this album a lot since I bought it last year. Still, I can’t quite make sense of it or boil it down like I’d normally do with a record by a pop/rock group. I keep going back to it. Perhaps I’m being sentimental and don’t want to have at something that “seems timeless” or whatever. There’s a clarity to this album and to the nasal ring of the Watersons’ co-mingling voices.
I have a soft spot for phony records — what I like to call “false rock.” I’ve thrown this term around for a few years without ever defining it. Wimpily, I usually fell back on the “I know it when I hear it” excuse whenever anyone has asked me what exactly I meant by “false rock.” For instance, Ryan Adams’ Rock’N’Roll is a false rock record. R.E.M.’s Monster, too. And U2’s Zooropa. T. Rex’s Electric Warrior might be as well.
Before anyone gets in a huff, please note that I desperately love these records. They’re some of my very favorite records. They’re near perfect. They contain an entire WORLD within them, or rather they contain an entire set where you might film a movie about a totally artificial and fantastic world populated by robots and laser mice and witty holograms. What I’d say these albums have in common is their obvious, intentional bigness. Also, they’re not “serious” records in terms being overly concerned with songcraft per se. These records have some very good songs on them, but they don’t strike me as fussy, over-considered songs. Rather these “false rock” records strike me as inspired elaborations on a conceptualized sound. They seem like pop art experiments in a way, attempts to make something both shockingly individual and fully commercial. Just consider the boldness of the titles and the album covers. They’re very direct. Iconic almost. Like a cereal box or pop can.
In many ways the flatness, the brightness of the music and packaging of these “false rock” albums seems Warholian to me. It’s overtly Pop stuff. Maybe this is what seems phony or “false” to me, this emphasis on surface and boldness and stylized commerciality.
As sounds, as packages, these big fake albums are big on allusion. On Monster, Stipe throws around references to Dan Rather and Kurt Cobain and finally offers to “be your Iggy Pop” over sound beds obviously cribbed from glam rock and grunge. The title track from Zooropa is lousy with pilfered ad slogans and sounds from Bowie and Eno’s Berlin period. Adams’ Rock’N’Roll is the sound of a once-upon-a-time enfant terrible mimicking the sounds of retro/revivalist bands whose best ideas belong to decades long past. And nevermind that Adams gives a number of his smartipance tracks the same title as established rock classics/hits.
And Electric Warrior – this record could very well be the source of “false rock” with its rockabilly-meets-American-Top-40-meets-Dylanesque-wordplay-meets-psychedelia choogle. It’s a record that is so very much EVERYTHING that it winds up as no one thing in particular. Electric Warrior is a clever album. It challenges you to a game of spot the influences. And it’s a certainly bit camp. I suppose that campiness is something all proper “false rock” albums share. Perhaps “false rock” is merely my own way of talking about records that employ the glam rock techniques established by Electric Warrior (i.e., self-awareness, campiness, lyrical and musical allusiveness, knowing post-modern simplicity/minimalism, etc.) outside of the narrow time and place of glittermania and T.Rextasy as going concerns.
Why all this dilly-dallying? What do these boring old rock records have to do with the Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak and its well-known, oft-reported back-story? Well, I suppose I’m trying to work through my little “false rock” concept because 808s & Heartbreak is, by my reckoning, a “false rock” album much more than it is a forlorn break-up record or a soul-bearing “fucked-up superstar” record. It’s a stylized, Pop Art version of a bleak, sad record. I’m not saying that West wasn’t feeling bad when he made it, but his sad robot music doesn’t have the real emotional fire and sonic raggedness of Joy Division’s Closer or Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Nirvana’s In Utero or Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. Nor does this record have the clarity and bitterness of my very favorite break-up record Blood on the Tracks. West, by my ears, just doesn’t sound at the end of his rope on 808s. He’s simply wearing an expertly-crafted designer mope mask.
One of the reasons why I find Kanye West compelling as a pop star is because he seems to be consciously angling for the role of hip hop’s Elvis Costello – the smart, winking artist with a firm grasp of pop history and a willingness to toy with convention. I like glam and punk because they’re forms based on breaking the fourth wall. And I like West because he’s willing to break mainstream hip hop’s pretentious, cred-obsessed fourth wall.
808s finds West intensifying his expressions of ambivalence towards to the conventions of hip hop boasting and materialism – an ambivalence that has always been part of his shtick. E.g. from “Welcome to Heartbreak”: “My friend shows me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.” Under the usual circumstances of a “typical” Kanye West offering, I’d consider this admission as just another snippet tucked in amongst the party songs and the wild hyperbole as a way to reinforce his image as a self-aware, conflicted artist. But within the context of 808s & Heartbreak’s complete image/sonic overhaul, I find it interesting that the one previously-established element of West’s persona that carries over into this new construction is his vision of himself as isolated superstar, as Midas imprisoned in/by his golden kingdom.
I suppose what put my on the scent of 808s & Heartbreak as a “false rock” record was its being an album-length exercise in image overhaul. Like the previously mentioned albums, 808s finds an established artist remaking himself by picking out new influences and then packaging his new identity for ready consumption. It’s not enough for West to dabble in vintage synths and Daft Punk samples. He has to doll himself up in a little grey New Wave suit and retro glasses.
He’s playing the Sad Black Prince to Bowie’s alienated Thin White Duke. If the dance-inflected mope, wavering vocals, and vaguely post-punk feel of tracks like “Say You Will” and “Love Lockdown” weren’t enough to suggest New Order, West makes his Factory Records influence apparent with an album cover that could comfortably sit on the shelf next to Power, Corruption, and Lies.
808s & Heartbreak
Power, Corruption, and Lies
In short, this album that is being billed as intensely personal and “private” is actually a bit of studied simplicity and artificial sound meant to reimagine the public West as a pop star who has been transformed by personal loss and emotional darkness. It’s a neat trick – making yourself sound cold to appear warmer for having done so. After the first five bleak cuts on 808s, the poppy respite of “Paranoid” and the soaring phony strings and fake-Springsteen xylophone on “Robocop” are wholly refreshing.
By claiming emotional turmoil, West is able to jump genres and become a new pop star unfettered by the expectations of hip hop success/convention. He’s making a bid for art rock cred by making an art rock record that pushes all the right buttons (i.e., the right influences, thematic cohesiveness, personal pain fueling the creative process). If you have any understanding of pop culture, you can see what he’s up to. Still, it’s fun to hear. Perhaps I’m perverse, but I think I enjoy 808s & Heartbreak more for being able to see how it’s put together. I think that’s part of the kick I get out of these “false rock” records – they’re obvious and honest in their obviousness. You can see the artists at work, as they creating a commercial collage without the usual pretense of art being some kind of personal accident born of mysterious specialness.
What’s with all the handsome grandsons in these rockband magazines?
And what have they done with the fat ones, the bald, and the goateed!?
– Silver Jews, “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat”
While unpacking my wife came across some back issues of Venus Zine that we’d not gotten around to reading. Flipping through Issue No. 33 from Fall 2007, I zeroed in on Amy Schroeder’s feature “What Happened to Revolution Girl Style Now?” – a kind of state of the union on women in rock circa these foul years of withering and diminished potential. I was particularly struck by the frankness of Kill Rock Star founder Slim Moon’s assessment of rock in the late aughts; “I think boring bands and artists are dominating the industry, and most of these boring bands and artists are male.”
Lately, I’ve been a bit down on rock and roll as a form that can remain vital and meaningful into the near future. There’s such a business as usual vibe to so much radio programming and rock journalism and band forming. And it’s not just a corporate initiative. Even at the individual amateur musician level, there’s an acceptance of “rules” about the right and wrong way to be in a band. Heck, I’m a fairly obnoxious member of a popular musicians message board, and almost daily I read posts by folks who see rock as this normalized world where one must have a certain look and certain gear and a certain worldview to succeed. Of course some folks are more in favor of the current state of things than others, but no one doubts the “reality” that rock and roll success is for the pretty people who follow the appropriate trends.
One article of faith in the “established view” of rock and roll is that the Rolling Stones are supremely ugly mothers – grizzled zombies hideously deformed by years of drug abuse and R&B jive. You know what I mean – the sorts of Jay Leno monologue crapola about performing in wheelchairs and their tour bus being a gigantic hearse. Basically, the Rolling Stones are treated as a creepy punchline because they haven’t done as expected and grown old gracefully. They helped establish the template for all the “boring bands” that Slim Moon was decrying in the Venus piece, but their very longevity makes them unboring and unsettling.
I think one aspect of the Stones’ growing creepiness (the creepiness that makes rock critics and the audience at large refer to them as undead, leering corpses) is that they are a band whose appeal is rooted in sex. This is, after all, a band who as dirty old men in their twenties gave us the nasty ode to statutory rape that is “Stray Cat Blues.” The Stones catch a lot of flak because they, as unrepentantly gnarled rock and rollers, force us to confront the uncomfortable realities like impending mortality and randy granddads.
Years ago as an undergraduate, my British Romantics professor Dr. Loudon mentioned the Rolling Stones as an example how young artists make their names by celebrating their virility and then spend their middle ages watching that virility slip away. He specifically mentioned the Stones’ best later work being that where they try to once more jumpstart their primal urges for a final go around. (I think he was referring to “Start Me Up.”) I won’t go into the whole romantic sex = death equation here because I caught some blowback regarding my cursory treatment of Blake in the last blog about Dylan and Obama and prophetic speechifying and murder ballads. Still, I think that it’s fair to say that a good deal of the Stones’ later work has been about getting the juices flowing.
The opening shot on Voodoo Lounge is titled “Love is Strong” and kicks things off with the unsubtle
Love is strong
And you’re so sweet
You make me hard
You make me weak
It’s no “Viva Viagra!” but you get the picture. The very next track “You Got Me Rocking” weighs in the power of a particularly vital love object to revive dwindling potential –
I was a hooker
Losing her looks
I was a writer
Can’t write another book
I was all dried up
Dying to get wet
I was a tycoon
Drowning in debt
Hey hey
You got me rockin’ now
The album’s title Voodoo Lounge prompts me to think of totems of potency like the gris-gris bag or the mojo hand or the John the Conqueror root. And given how often the Stones like to reference Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, I’d wager those allusions were lurking somewhere behind their conceptions of “voodoo.” This is a record about reclaiming one’s mojo by any means necessary. Heck, “Suck on the Jugular” even seems to muddy the waters between vampirism and sexual hedonism.
This is a record about old men wanting to fuck and be fucked. This is not appropriate or “normal” content in a climate where rock and roll has been reduced to young pretty folks following the rules and building a safe little rock and roll career. This stuff is actually dirty in comparison to the intellectualized toy Satanism Mick et al. were tinkering with in the run up to Altamont. The Stones in their dotage break the fundamental rule that rock and roll is for the young and pretty things. When Jagger snarls “Going to fuck your sweet ass” in “Sparks Will Fly” – or when Dylan lusts after Alicia Keys on Modern Times’ “Thunder on the Mountain” or when Springsteen leers at the “girls in their summer clothes” on his latest Magic – audiences and album reviewers get a little squirmy. It’s one thing to look the other way when confronted with the goatishness of ever-youthful Pan. But when hoary ol’ Zeus and Pluto start changing shape and absconding with the maidens, then rock and roll’s promise of unbridled sexiness seems merely “gross.”
However, believing in a rock and roll where normalcy prevails and prettiness reigns and where children learn of the proper types of rocking via videogame simulations thereof, is ultimately harmful – especially for folks who see creation as a way to harness and cope with “non normal” views and ideas. The pressure to be always young and always vital eats away at folks. Cobain admitted as much in his suicide note. I think rock is a form (and maybe this is just my punk rock sympathies showing) needs to allow for the not normal, the unexpected, the frankly flawed. Without that release, without the ability of rock music’s voodoo powers of regeneration (even in half-measures), we’ve got nothing but death – either by attrition or through the black magic intentionality of suicide.
I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change.
– Bob Dylan
I’ve been a bit concerned with the end of the world lately. I suppose it’s the ramp up in anticipation of Electionmania ’08. I’ve been thinking a bit about what America “means” at the moment – partly because Obama is running on a campaign that (policy aside) is largely based on the oomph that American language can still have despite years of euphemism and empty doublespeak. Obama made his mark with his postmodern mash-up of Lincoln and King Jr. at the 2004 convention. And his riffing on hope and inspiration is in the tradition of soaring American wordslinging. Still, Obama does seem a bit lightweight. Critics have a point when they claim he’s all bunny rabbits and rainbows.
Consider this bit of powerful speechifying from the 2004 keynote address – Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.
I believe that we can give our middle class relief and provide working families with a road to opportunity.
I believe we can provide jobs for the jobless, homes to the homeless, and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair.
I believe that we have a righteous wind at our backs, and that as we stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices and meet the challenges that face us.
This is good stuff, but it lacks that certain something. As much as I enjoy Obama as a political orator, he seems fluffy – like he’s hiding something. I think I’ve figured it out. He’s got a grasp of the America of dreams and prosperous futurism. But he doesn’t really speak the bloody and horrifying language that is also part of the national discourse.
When Obama does address life during wartime in our bellicose republic circa 2004, the best he can muster is some vagaries about services and security –
Now, let me be clear. Let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued. And they must be defeated.
John Kerry knows this. And just as Lieutenant Kerry did not hesitate to risk his life to protect the men who served with him in Vietnam, President Kerry will not hesitate one moment to use our military might to keep America safe and secure.
Lip service in comparison to another great American orator – President Lincoln – when addressing a war that threatened the meaning of America.
From Lincoln’s Second Inaugural – Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
That’s not just “better angels” – that’s the wrath of God smiting the wicked and leaving no man out of that sorry number.
I think there’s a distaste for this kind of strong medicine amongst today’s progressive types. Amongst non-office-holding liberal types whom I know in reality and on the internet, there seems a willingness (and I’ve done this myself) to paint socially conservative voters as “in-bred, backward, hillbilly mouth-breathers” who are thwarting progress by voting for candidates who typically oppose government-controlled health care and stringent environmental regulations while making the world safe for gun owners and religious fundamentalists.
The internet is rife with this sort of thing. Consider the following satirical electoral map that emerged after W’s 2004 win.
For many reasons, progressively-minded Americans align themselves with Europe and Canada (at least in casual political conversations). It seems that “Americanness” is this *other* thing – this unseemly primordial thing. Unsophisticated. Superstitious. Rural.
I think what really gives folks the willies is that Americanness is still tied in with violence on some level. And in American mythology, “the South” is home to violence. The victorious North fought the South bloodily in a self-devouring war. And the gospel of American patriotism cites the South and its violent slave keeping as the reason for this bloodletting. It’s little wonder that the South (along with the other non-urbane American backwaters) is blamed for what progressives see as electoral failures that result in violence at home and abroad. I think that some liberal types like to imagine that violence as consigned to the past – if only the “wrong kind of Americans” would step aside and give the reins over to today’s modern, rational citizenry.
Anyway, given my renewed interest in a very American eschatology, I recently rewatched Southland Tales and gave a first viewing to Masked and Anonymous. Both films are somewhat inscrutable, making sense emotionally and visually rather than according to rules of plot and structure. They’re alternate universe renderings of American passions with the training wheels off. Interestingly, both are meta-dramas – Southland Tales being a story that is foretold by a prophetic, in-movie screenplay, Masked and Anonymous being a “let’s but on a show” yarn steeped in vaudeville motifs and stage metaphors. This self-awareness might hint at how as Americans we’re often vary aware of what Americanness “means” and how we often feel a disconnect between where the country is headed and our dreams for what a just and right America would be.
In addition to these critically-maligned films, an internet compatriot of mine brought to my attention a couple snippets of Lloyd deMause’s psychohistory works. Particularly interesting (to me anyway) was deMause’s treatment of the first Iraq War.
Many reporters recognized the depressive origins of the national mood and even the guilt that engendered it. The Washington Post said that after eight years of optimism, “America is in…an ugly spasm of guilt, dread and nostalgia. Once more, America is depressed.” A columnist accurately diagnosed the mood of America in 1990:
America is like a barroom drunk. One minute it brags about its money and muscle, and then for the next hour it bleats into its beer about failure and hopelessness…America’s depression is not brought on by plague, flood, famine or war…We are guilty, guilty, guilty…depression, decline, depravity, dysphoria, deconstruction, desuetude, dog days, distrust, drugs, despair…”
What deMause gets at (among other things) is the violence lurking in America’s conception of strength and power. He proposes that many presidents cannot resist the call to war making because of developmental issues. War making becomes a way to reconcile childhood weakness and the current vogue for indulging children. It’s not the stuff of “rational” political science, but more a jab at the meaning driving our culture.
This sublimation of personal violence into political violence and political theatre reminds me of the function of fairy stories and bogeymen – to make childlike sense of frightening adults. I’m also reminded (probably because I’m currently reading Olive Woolley Burt’s American Murder Ballads and Their Stories) of the great American folksong tradition with its swindlers, killers, lovers, and thieves – which brings me back to Dylan.
In the liner notes to his collection of traditional songs World Gone Wrong Dylan himself writes –
technology to wipe out truth is now available. not everybody can afford it but it’s available. when the cost comes down lookout! there wont be songs like these anymore. factually there arent any now.
Essentially, Dylan places “progress” in opposition to murder ballads like “Love Henry” and “Stack A Lee.” This weird, unmodern music with it’s sailors, engines, talking birds and hat-related shoot ‘em ups is part of a fast fading America – an America that one could say nurtured Dylan’s gifts and fed his songwriting. I find it no coincidence that following two albums spent with mere “covers” of traditional material, Dylan reemerged once again a powerful songwriter capable of album-length feats of strength like Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times. It seems Dylan’s connection with these timeless songs puts him outside of and beyond the current America. He knows the violence and weirdness and weariness that goes along with all that promise and hope. He knows the gunsmoke and geargrease and gravestones. These seemingly simple songs presented in spare arrangements convey a wisdom and lonesomeness befitting an experienced America.
“World Gone Wrong”
Pack up my suitcase, give me my hat,
No use to ask me, baby, ’cause I’ll never be back.
I can’t be good no more, once like I did before.
I can’t be good, baby,
Honey, because the world’s gone wrong.
In many ways, America is doing battle with a Blakeian innocence v. experience problem. Progressive America, Obama’s America wants the hope and sweetness of unspoiled youth and potential. But somewhere lurking is coal dust and wasted promise and fearsome tigers. You will be bound. Promise is fleeting. The end is quite possibly nigh.
Note: The following books are probably lurking behind this post. I read No Go, the Bogeyman a few years ago. I haven’t read this particular Marcus book, but I saw him speak of it at the Chicago Humanities Festival.
No Go, the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock by Marina Warner The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus
