Critics Who Know Jack Page 8

  There were many other books that came about. Wonderful ones that weighed more heavily on the content of the rock artists’ works rather than on the aspect of their celebrity. Young men and women who were studying journalism or in some cases graduate journalism courses or journalism dropouts. Writing criticism on the tunes of the day and their cultural effect. Yet these young critics had no gain in mind except the sharing of insight and realization that the songs of the period were pulling on cultural manifestations that existed long before the Les Paul, Stratocaster, Rickenbacker, Martin, Gibson and Guild fell into the hands of Eric Clapton, Dave Davies, Roger McGuinn, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa.

  These young critics actually understood that when Ray Davies led The Kinks with his song Dedicated Follower of Fashion, with the words: They seek him here. They seek him there. . ., he was pulling a reference out from The Scarlet Pimpernel published in 1905, written by transplanted Hungarian Baroness Emma Orczy, about a dandy highwaymanish English fop who masked himself in dual identity. They knew there was a lineage being formed from Emerson and Whitman to Kerouac and Ginsberg and The Beats to Robert Bobby Zimmerman Dylan.

  They knew Syd Barrett and the rest of Pink Floyd had a raw yet keen sense of art and architecture and applied it to soundscaping some of their finer albums.

  They knew Zappa pulled his satirical constructs into full bloom by listening to the modernist Edgard Varèse and guessed that Procol Harum’s lyricist Keith Reid probably dropped acid reading Chaucer’s Tales before sitting down and hitting the track Whiter Shade of Pale.

  But for a handful of self-important types such as Greil Marcus and Robert Christgau at The Voice, the love of the “newness in word to song” and its relationship to the past in literature, music and art in general, created a groundwork for the fusion of what we call today, the marriage of high art to popular culture.

  So why did this marriage occur? Art school pimple-headed teenagers tired of ‘O’ levels and toothy teen idols? Somewhat, yet how did the writers of the songs shift the music industry paradigm from propping up made-up pre-karaoke-doll boy or girl singers to actually writing, composing, producing, recording and performing “their own work”?

  Well, one could say literature and the arts lay sleeping in academe and the music of the ‘50s was “lying” about the real spirit of expression. With the early sixties, the line shifted to the writers of songs expressing their own work as opposed to interpretation of their work by others. A big shift in originality of song to the voice of its creator(s).

  The Stephen Foster mould formed in the 19th century where the first real American songwriter with a sustained body of work, having his material sold to minstrel show producers for measly sums and over-produced gloss distortions of his beautiful Schubertian and post-colonial melodies with words of celebration and tragedy, was finally broken.

  One point rarely discussed in the wonder of the time in which The Beatles, Bob Z Dylan, The Rolling Stones and others created their work was the issue of creative power. And given the political intensity of the time, power became central to most of these artists as they moved along into the teeth of the music industry. What gave them a ‘core’ power as a result of performing their own work was recognition and the growing degree of $$$ that royalties spawned.

  Because the royalties and performing rights increased (though there were vultures at every turn) the power of identity could not be denied. The power of “who it was that was saying what.” The power of this self-expression on such a mass and media-propulsed scale inspired the world on a grand and accessible level. Being an artist with something to say meant something out there.

  And so even to a greater degree, today the artist has become relatively independent from the control mechanisms challenging his or her creative power. Still, the question of standards remains. The open market of independency in all the arts brings back to focus the value of expertise regarding editing and other aspects of broker-ship in the arts across the board. But the impulse for artists to develop and perform original work is greater, not only in numbers but in part as a result of the “artistic and cultural” creators going to deeper aesthetic ground. Though some of its members have gone to the lightness of corporate mega-musicals and New Age simpledom.

  And there are many examples where artists, once at the forefront, have made of themselves corporate entities. Point to one Paul McCartney who in the 1990s released a book of poetry Blackbird Singing. With the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion writing the preface, the Liverpool Knight fundamentally “bought” his way to aesthetic high ground. It seems that in McCartney’s case the richness of his song lyric was either under the influence of John Lennon or an innovation in songwriting that was of a time and that even if T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings were to come back from the dead and write accolades about his attempt to write serious verse, even they, with their poetic range and acumen, would never find in McCartney’s serious poetry attempt, the rich originality and aesthetic intrigue than they would in the highly crafted work of this once Beatle’s song lyric.

  Fastforward >> So Eminem. Letters backwards. Feel like I want to listen to what he says. Rap. Secret societies. Codes of language. Good luck breaking them and admire, admire, admire. The old aesthetic versus meaning argument. But he’s talking lots. Lyric driven! Words make Music!!!!

  Rock & roll has done one thing for certain. It has made kings of clowns. The courts are upside down and have been for some time. Witness Bono and his sitting with Heads of State and to us the clown is the Head of State, not the clown. And good luck getting in. It’s a dirty old Nick Caraway world where you see the thing bought and bought and bought. But maybe a clown? Maybe a Bono? Maybe a Springsteen? An Eminem with the e backwards is the result of the lyric. The integrity of the lyric. The composition of word as much as music? And that turns the political cranks of the mega music giants and the wanters of association to the freedom the lyric expresses.

  Yes there has always been a place for poets but one must remember Bob Robert Zimmerman’s offering that “poets drown in lakes.”

  Or Bob! THEY PUT A GUN TO THEIR HEADS. — COBAIN.

  Expression through words and music is some powerful stuff! It might just show you what you didn’t want to know more than showing anything to anyone on the outside listening. Then you throw it back to Chuck Berry and Little Richard. It’s always good to be a pioneer. Seems you have an in-built sense of struggle and take the road as it comes without the self-destruct. MAKE THE ROAD and sing happy and pretty into kingdom come!

  TATTOOS

  But that which was most remarkable in the appearance of this splendid islander was the elaborate tattooing displayed on every noble limb. So Herman Melville writes as Ishmael narrates his introduction to the character Queequeg in Moby Dick’s opening chapters. Tattoos have long served humans. From fashionable henna to drunken ruddy sailors, back to fashion again, there are few symbols or signs that are permanent and open to interpretation, no matter how clear the wearer was when he or she had the work done.

  Is it a peculiar thing to mark one’s skin? Is there a sense of Eros in the titillating needle buzz that is almost a sort of injection rub? A high and an escape from the skin you are born with? Or a deep externalization of your within becoming without (in the Hindi sense)?

  My father had a tattoo. Actually had two but the one that you couldn’t miss was the one you would see at family picnics. The lady on his chest. She must have been put on before he met my mother who I’m certain would have stopped him from doing it. The lady looked like a bad version of a One-Eyed-Jack, head sideways and even more one-dimensional. Little expression on her face and pretty tough-looking. She was not a pin-up by any means. Perhaps the submarine tattoo artist was drunk and he had another guy pose for the work? That said and guessed at, my dad had her all his life. Jiggling when he took a shower or swam and getting partly tanned in summer when he wore a low V-neck T-shirt.

  The more interesting tattoo was the one on his right hand. Three dots. I always
thought it might have been a die face as my dad did like to gamble. What I liked about it is that I had no idea (but guessing) at what it really symbolized. They were not three in a row on a diagonal like it would be on a die. They were more triangular. Maybe the three corners of the Sicilian island close to his hometown in southern Italy? Maybe they were practice dots that the artist put there to see if my dad liked his work before he inked the big girl on his chest? Could it be a secret membership? Was it he and his two brothers? What were these marking on his right hand between the forefinger and thumb?

  I think of those dots when I walk along the streets of my neigh­bourhood and see the florid and grotesque markings a younger generation has chosen. I also think of Bruce Dern’s madness in the film Tattoo where he drugs Maude Adams after kidnapping her and tattoos her as she sleeps. Needless to say, she is a touch horrified in the morning when she awakens to hear him speak of the brilliance of his art. The perfection of his art on her smooth white body. Then there are the tattoos from the Nazi concentra­tion camps. Markings of a paranoid yet deliberate madness. A branding that has left its mark on human nature for time immemorial.

  Dad’s now passed away. I regret never taking a photograph of “his lady.” Ones of him with my mother must suffice.

  MARGINALIA

  Sounds like a type of bug disease? Look at your daily papers and then your internet adverts and see how much is not the main news of the day? Even if the Middle East is burning and the Arabic world is lighting up with revolt, the almost dominant feature in most papers either via net or print is the cacophony of ads ads ads that fill in the sides and bottoms and tops and windows inside windows of pages selling and alerting you of the nothings that want your every attention.

  Is it so desperate a situation that we need to be bombarded and then set up fire-walls and spam filters to get away from the dredge and glut? Why such an un-holistic environment through which to experience word and image and the pleasure of knowledge and opinion? Ads sell newspapers and online services. And you pay for the distraction? And then you choose the route of selectivity yet by the time you have done this, it may be true you have filtered much out but your fatigue from the effort leaves you little juice to enjoy what you thought you were pursuing. Intelligent, un-gossipy story lines and information about the world around you.

  Remember Mad Magazine and cartoonist Sergio Aragones’ little off-beat drawings in the margins? How you read the main satirical take on the latest movie and then your eyes wandered to the margins and saw little men falling off ladders into vats of sharks with American flags (a satire on Iwo Jima)?

  This is not to argue that The New York Times or other dailies of that substantial ilk carry only dregs. This is to argue that what is valid and intriguing in reportage is watered-down to a fashion and “fatted-cow-ness” culture that tries to evoke in you domestic needs beyond your needs and even more succinctly, means. Try something to get this point across. Take the Bible, any version. Set the stories of the Old and then New Testaments on pages with enough room for the selling of jewellery and vacuum cleaners and TVs and the like in the margins. Let all the stories of joy and horror sit along the trivial mechanisms of the sales machinery. Try staying focused, as in Revelations the Horsemen of the Apocalypse come down in a rain of fire, and not see the sparkling diamond on a well-toned ankle leading to a fascinating knee and high skirt-line in the margins. Do you at this point think of Sodom and Gomorrah or can you read on about what each of the Four Horsemen actually do? Would there be greater clarity (less distraction) in a Catholic catechism, though generalist, still morally more “pure” and honest?

  Some would argue we are already in Sodom and Gomorrah and waiting for the salt and crash of our great capitalist edifices. The Moloch of ancient Sanskrit literature (the god that devoured the young) as referenced in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

  Recently I had the joy of meeting up with an old ball-hockey pal. He has always been sporty and a great hockey goalie though his dreams of the professional life of an athlete did not come to fruition. Instead he became a tool-dyer’s assistant, never really learning the trade but choosing instead to live a small town life and rediscover the words of the Bible which he was introduced to at a young age. He now believes we are in the “end times” and disses the days he listened with intrigue to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

  That is all now “devil stuff” and he watches videos of modern day pseudo-prophets telling of the evils all around us. He believes Stairway to Heaven to be hedonistic and born of the influence of Satan. His anti-capitalist stance is interesting. However, for him it requires narrowing down his fields of education and exploration of the differences within most people. He now has set his target and belief that all energy must be directed to God, yet when I saw him last he wore a Bob Marley T-shirt. I dared not ask him about his understanding or knowledge of Rastafarian culture and religion. I dared not ask because I feared the total loss of one of our true connections — the joy of rock & roll music. I found though that he was willing to talk of Bob Marley and the lyrics in his songs. He didn’t offer that Marley’s religious beliefs were a distraction and a movement away from God.

  Sometimes you sense when not to go into certain subject matter. Open though the person you might have contention with might seem, you may be better off talking hockey scores. The changes in people you love can be devastating. By the end of our day together, he insisted that his mind was now clear and that each man, woman or child is “free” to choose their belief systems but that the God he believed in was the only right path. That we were born with free will but in no way was that will ever right in believing in a greater spirit unless it was the Christian God of the Bible. The Christ. The Nazarene. The Jewish prophet who confronted his own people, because as my pal said: Christ’s people (the Jews) were wrong.

  I don’t know why my hockey pal loads his life up with long odds, but loyalty is one of his greatest character traits. Right or wrong — he will always believe in what he chooses to. The lack of challenge and critical thought he has towards his own beliefs, however, is an issue of concern. Fading are his love of hockey statistics and card collecting. He wishes one day to go to Jerusalem. Because Christ worked his missions there. Not because it is the foundational geographic local of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The religions outside of his interpretation of Christianity have been relegated to the margins. Would I had Aragones’ last instalment in Mad. In fact, if I can leave this for a moment, I think I will go to the newsstand and see what I can find.

  LYRIC INTERPRETATION

  (With No Help from My Friends)

  Songs mean something sometimes. And sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the writer intends them to mean something. And often, even if he or she meant something, they don’t feel they should explain the song as much as they might speak of the experience of writing songs per se. This “keeping your cards close to your chest” has caused many a complication in lyric interpretation. It is also often interpreted as obfuscation, which in the end seems pretty harsh judgment by listeners who cannot break the hermetic seal of many a complexly written song.

  I consider as I write this that the least difficult songs to interpret are the campfire songs taught to children (i.e.: One, two three O’Leary . . .), and songs of protest (towards something external, that is). Ones like The boss don’t pay no money . . . type protest songs. Come to think of it. Who was O’Leary? (But I’ll get to that later.)

  One striking example of song interpretation came a few years back at a Festival of World Music. A performer from Latin America was singing a song about burning down a rich man’s house but only Spanish speaking listeners in the audience knew what he was saying. I asked the promoter if he found it strange that people who didn’t understand the song’s intent and meaning were dancing no less than they would to a Beach Boy song (for the fun of the music)? Whether the detachment from the song meaning (both in music and in lyric) made him feel awkward? I suggested he at least have lyrics available as handouts or pu
t a translation on a screen that people could read — almost like a subtitle — to allow for deeper appreciation and understanding of the work.

  He thought it was a good idea yet said there were no more funds for putting a screen up and hiring a translator. Thus what you had in the audience were listeners vacationing to foreign sounds without buying a ticket and getting on a plane. This I always find akin to being in Havana and hearing folks from middle-America enthuse at the five hundredth strain of Guantanamera, the poem by José Martí transposed into an unofficial national anthem. “Oh, listen, they are playing “Cuantammerah,” the lady sipping her mojito insists. “It’s not Cuant-am-mah-er-ah, Mom,” her purple-haired sons corrects. “You don’t even know how to say it!” “Well, you’re the one who dropped out of Spanish class!” she shoots back. “There’s no point in talking to you!” he says, and walks off to the beach in a huff.

  Meanwhile, the mother turns back to a singing quartet and smiles, nodding her head and jostles her shoulders in approval. As she sits there, a white-shirted city local with a moustache and slicked-back hair moves in and says: Dju laike da song — Miss? She hasn’t been called Miss for twenty-five years. And hasn’t been talked to in a charming manner for almost as many. It turns out he’s from Serbia and only a local because he has fled his homeland and is trying to make ends meet by working the streets. He is the Eastern European taken as a Mexican who is really only a Spanish actor like Javier Bardem in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, but he doesn’t know it. There is more music and, as the two swoon over what they don’t know about each other, the boy comes back and yells at his mother: “You’re such a nerd and goof! I’m leaving!” And he does.

  Back to the festival promoter. — “We’ll see if we might get some extra budget funds for the word screen next year. I think they use one in opera, right?” “Yes, they do. Playwright Bertolt Brecht used one for his theatrical presentations but that’s another story. He used it for alienation. To break the proscenium arc of traditional theatre.” “Wow, how do you know that?” “Well, I wasn’t there but there are books and performances of his work . . .” “Yeah, what’s his name again?” “Brecht, B R E C H T — a German Marxist playwright.” “Neat, I’ll look him up,” he responds eagerly, as the Latin American folk-singer yelps another line about taking torches to the dictator’s palace.