The press I’ve read about Svn Fngrs mentions that the mini-album finds Black Francis using his retro-minded punk rock to relate the story of Irish folk hero Cúchulainn. This Irish folklore angle is what prompted me to pick up this particular record. I suppose that my interest stems from reading a couple anthologies of Irish folktales and taking weekly Irish Gaelic language class.
I also really like the album cover. (Yes, I sometimes impulse buy albums because I like the artwork.)
I’ve always been fond of things like ghost stories, urban legends, and conspiracy theories. These crackpot stories reveal the limits of modernity, the point where sensible understanding and empirically-supported truthiness begins to pixilate and warp. These superstitions and weird tales provide a counter-myth to all of the fact checked cable news concerns of the day. Much like rock and roll culture, this modern day folklore provides a set of values and rules that refracts and frequently upends the views of the sensible, serious-minded establishment. Alien abductions and vanishing hitchhikers and world-spanning cover ups speak to the anxieties and preoccupations of modern life using an outsized imagery that cuts deeper than the sanitized newsiness of many official accounts.
Charles Thompson — as both Frank Black and the Pixies’ Black Francis — has made a career of mixing folkloric gibberish with the basic components of rock and roll. Buddy Holly derived song structures are fused with subculture kink. Beatle-esque melodies prop up tales of UFO sightings. Characters from the Old Testament rub elbows with cowboys and European surrealists — all of them grooving along to the surf rock beat. Black’s sensibility can most easily be called “quirky” — but calling it such seems a tad dismissive, as if anything that is not relentlessly mainstream is nothing more than a cute little oddity.
I suppose I’m nibbling around the edges of the tension between the dominant myths/culture and that same culture’s seedy underbelly. The old timey Irish, for instance, had epic story cycles — some of which concerned a hero who had a few extra fingers and was strong enough to turn a guard dog inside out and defended Ulster in a cattle raid wherein he was fatally wounded. This character reflected the values and preoccupations of the dominant culture. Being of a different time and place, these kinds of stories seem fantastical and strange to us folks who think nothing of bathing daily and banishing the darkness with the flick of a switch.
Surely old timey Ireland had its outsiders and dissenters and quirk merchants, but their stories and preoccupations are lost because they didn’t have the luxury of blogs for all and easy access to high-quality recording techniques. Were the old timey hipsters all like, “Sure The Tain is great and all, but you shoulda heard what Cúchulainn was doing back when no one even knew about him. His early stuff was AWESOME?” Maybe subsistence living makes people happy to hear *any* story, even if it is the big mainstream blockbuster yarn that everyone likes. Maybe we’ll find out first hand when the big darkness comes to the heartland and toil and want fill our cups.
