On Terror In Music

One often hears films or novels referred to as "terrifying."  The word is more rarely used in reference to music, and it is even rarer still to find musical artists that utilize terror in the fabric of their work.  I don't mean the terror that attacks a middle-aged suburban housewife if by some strange chance she happens upon a Tyler, The Creator track.  And I don't mean the limpid, stylized fear-mongering so prevalent in certain goth and industrial scenes.  What I mean, frankly, is Icelandic sound sculpturist Ben Frost.

There are a number of ways to come across terror in recorded music, from a listener's perspective.  There is the experience of being confronted with something so far outside your comfort zones - be they for lyrical decency, tolerance for noise and volume, or taste for speed and aggression - that it is shocking.  That would be the housewife's reaction to violent hip-hop.  There is also the experience of having one's expectations confounded, of realizing that something which you thought you had all sussed out can also come at you from a whole different angle.  I vividly recall the first time I heard The Beatles' "Helter Skelter," on headphones, with high volume, in the middle of some strange 1970s compilation cassette with a haphazard and bizarre tracklisting.  My image of the Beatles - a particular image drawn mostly from their sheer cultural prevalence and a teenager's attitude which derided the group as "parents music," - was shattered by the emergence, seemingly our of the ether, of such a damaged, deranged - possibly evil - song.  It was frightening.

But when it comes down to it, the only really unnerving part of "Helter Skelter" is the coda, which fades out in the traditional manner, only to fade back in malevolently.  Its a simple but effective warping of listener expectations, as the brief respite only seems to heighten the madness of the song's jammed-out ending, which pushes insistently forward, which feels very much as if its coming at you, before it disintegrates completely and the stereo pans and fades follow suit, sounds and instruments dropping in and out and around the mix, until finally Ringo Starr, sounding absolutely unhinged, lets out the scream about blisters on his fingers and it abruptly fades out again with one last bit of guitar abuse.  It has never surprised me that Charles Manson chose this song as the soundtrack for his own personal apocalypse.

Ben Frost's album By The Throat takes the ambience of the "Helter Skelter" coda and stretches it for 45 minutes.  This is music designed specifically to unnerve, to frighten, to provoke anxiety.  And here is the key difference, alluded to earlier, between various aspects of terror in music.  This is not the anxiety provoked by the unknown or unfamiliar, or by a sudden curveball thrown at you from previously safe and reliable sources.  Those reactions hinge mostly on listener expectations.  This is music that makes terror its very sonic template and emotional palette, music that sets out to make panic aural.  The album, taken as a whole, establishes a mood of tension which is never resolved.  The tension, in fact, seems to cycle back on itself, amplify itself in a mobius strip of anxiety, as the album ends with the same hovering cloud of atonal violins first heard in track number one.  Clinically, anxiety is both cyclical and self-amplifying, and I have never come across a better sonic representation than Ben Frost's achievement here.  The appropriate parallel is the "Grief" section of Lars Von Trier's masterful Antichrist.

Not, then, music for a sunny day.  But not all music is about reassurance and comfort, and very little music goes to these places and burrows into them as deeply as By The Throat.

ADDENDUM

 The four specific instances I can recall being frightened by a piece of (pop) music:

1.  The Beatles, "Helter Skelter."  Already covered that.

2.  Sonic Youth w/ Lydia Lunch, "Death Valley '69."  Lunch's untethered expression of carnality and incipient violence was scary (and arousing) for a teenage boy.

3.  Joy Division, "Decades."  The last song on Closer.  Something in the sound of that rattling percussion - like wasps swarming at a funeral - is deeply unsettling.

4.  Ben Frost, "Killshot."  The first song on By The Throat begins on familiar enough ambient electronic ground... and then the massive bass pad drops in, the sonic realization of spine shivers, and you start looking over your shoulder for the person that is out to get you.

Interpolation/Cross-Pollination - John Lennon/Arthur Alexander

As is well known, the first few Beatles records were blends of original Lennon/McCartney compositions padded out with cover versions of songs mostly taken from the American R&B catalog. A particular favorite cover version of mine is "Anna (Go To Him)", an Arthur Alexander original covered on "Please Please Me," with John Lennon taking the lead vocal.
What your hearing is John Lennon coming into his own as a vocalist. This is a 22-year-old man emerging as one of the best singers to ever live. Listening to this song on headphones via the 2009 remastered edition of "Please Please Me," (which retains the original mono mix, so the vocals are all in the right channel), is a wondrous thing - you can hear every nuance of Lennon's phrasing, every tear in his vocal cords when he really belts it out, and the ebb and flow of emotion in the performance is displayed with perfect clarity. In short; it's fucking great. Now a funny thing happens when you listen to Arthur Alexander's original and compare:
In general, Alexander's vocal is much more restrained than Lennon's, his delivery smoother, he lays just a bit behind the beat, taking his time enunciating the lyrics (it should be pointed out that, a rarity in early 60s R&B, Arthur Alexander wrote his own songs - he's singing his own words here).

But pay particular attention to the choruses in the two versions, beginning with the lines "All of my life.." Lennon really lets it rip here. Alexander hold back. Why do I point out this difference? Well, I think it demonstrates something interesting about musical cross-pollination and the influences are absorbed and interpreted across cultural, generational, national, and racial boundaries.

John Lennon, as a white boy from a broken home in a hardscrabble dockworker's town, takes his source of influence, Arthur Alexander (always cited by Lennon, throughout his life, as one of his all-time favorite artists), and uses it to channel desperation. His chorus is the sound of a pained man transmuting the pain of another man, a pain in which he finds shared emotional resonance, and emerging with something new, namely Pop Music, or Rock, or whatever you want to call the global phenomenon that the Beatles kicked off.

But there's another thing at play here. This is the short story of the birth of Rock/Pop: white British, obsessed with black American music, adapt (not to say "steal") the stylistic underpinnings of black American music, and come out with something new that conquers the world. But these kids, these Brits, the Jaggers, the Richards, the Lennons and McCartneys, were completely, naively sincere in their love of black American music. They wanted to be just like their heroes. Lennon desperately wants to be as good as Arthur Alexander, and you can hear it, loud and clear. Lennon's chorus on "Anna" is the sound of a man trying to live up to an idol. In the process he created something new, and kicked a pop-cultural dialogue into motion, a motion that continues to this day.

How I Won The War

How I Won The War is a curious movie. Any lasting notoriety it has most likely stems from John Lennon's presence in the cast. It was his only non-Beatles film role, and the story goes that he composed "Strawberry Fields Forever" on set in Spain, in between takes. Roger Ebert gave it a fairly vicious negative review upon its release in 1968 and apparently never felt it was worth revisiting at any time since.

Ebert's review is typically attentive and well-reasoned, and some parts I find hard to disagree with, but I think the film is worth much more than he gives it credit for.

Two immediate touchstones came to mind upon first viewing - Catch-22 and Gravity's Rainbow. Mike Nichols' 1971 film version of Catch-22 can't quite nail the nifty, daring leaps between comedy and tragedy that epitomize Joseph Heller's novel. Nichols' plays his film as slapstick which suddenly gives way to nightmarish horror in its final third, and while that structure offers its own rewards (and that final third is truly brutal), How I Won The War is far more nimble in it's melding of absurdity and carnage, and thus in a strange way watching it evokes the same feeling of displacement one gets from reading the Heller novel.

Catch-22 the novel was long-published when How I Won The War was made, but Gravity's Rainbow was pretty far in the future. I'm not one to blithely assign influence where it's not readily apparent, but it did occur to me watching How I Won The War that director Richard Lester might be Thomas Pynchon's closest corollary in the film world. The relentlessly tangential structure of the film's narrative, and the near-constant diversions into the back stories of its minor characters are devices Pynchon utilizes frequently, and nowhere more luminously than in Gravity's Rainbow. Aside from a World War II setting, the two works also share certain meta-textual preoccupations, and both can sometimes come off as a barrage of meta-narrative techniques, something with which Ebert certainly takes umbrage in his review. His main gripe is that How I Won The War is too flashy with it's storytelling devices and in his view this focus on fractured narrative makes the film's dips into pathos ring hollow. I tend to disagree, as I do think the meta-structures align for a singular meta-purpose - the framing device of the film is a bunch of English blokes reminiscing about their wartime days over a pint, and this idea of a story being told by people all too aware of their own (often inconsequential) place within the story is what lends the film it's deeper sense of tragedy. The players know their parts, and they know how it ends, and they follow through on their destinies, some with resignation, some with lunacy, some with bitterness and rage. But there's a helplessness, an inability, in the end, to change anything at all, that ultimately evokes a remarkable feeling of desolation.

Ebert makes on point that is irrefutable. How I Won The War is a resolutely British film, and I too had trouble at times even understanding what was being said, and the British cultural references and lapses into vaudeville were way over my head. Ebert's reaction to this is so violent as to almost come off as bigoted. I, for one, think that despite the insularity of the film's cultural landscape, the meaning of these references and vaudevillian asides is quite clear - it's all about what they mean to the characters, and in that regard they serve to reinforce the theme of stories told by self-aware storytellers, who despite their awareness are powerless before the arc of the story, and end up crushed by the march of history.

From These Flames No Light

From These Flames No Light

Against the U.S. Election Spectacle

Consumption of industrially produced commodities is no necessary adjunct to or true ornament of life, in advanced capitalist societies especially, but rather the invention of a barbarous age, used to obscure wretched matters.  Neutered antagonisms – of Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola or Romney vs. Obama – likewise are manufactured consumer commodities, blessed as they are by the powerful, the famous, the holy.

That few people, in the United States or elsewhere, believe that these antagonisms actually accomplish much less change anything more substantial than the window dressing of power is a banality as obvious as it is wearying.

Nonetheless the people’s consumption continues, carried out as if some ancient custom, a vain, futile holocaust the flames of which produce no light.  The practitioners of this rite are granted nothing but vexation, hindrance, and constraint for their efforts. 

Not without cause then, do Republicans and Democrats alike urge the populace to vote.  Participation in the ritual, even if only by blind habit, grants legitimacy to the system of modern bondage that both parties preside over in tandem.

Though expressing this obvious fact is deemed vulgar and troublesome, a few judicious ears have long since rejected the trivial pleasures of eloquent oratory and the jingling sound of false victories.  We recognize there is no true musical delight here, just the hollow thunder of order applauding itself.

Zero Sum

October 2012

In all am I scattered

I stood on a lofty mountain and saw a gigantic man, and another, a dwarf; and I heard as it were a voice of thunder, and drew nigh for to hear; and He spake unto me and said: I am thou, and thou art I; and wheresoever thou mayest be I am there. In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me, thou gatherest Thyself.

—From the Gospel of Eve, quoted by Epiphanius, Hæres., xxvi. 3

And all of this...

The black dog (Churchill), the heaviness (Dangerfield).  To be always clawing out or sinking in.  The only real feeling involved is exhaustion, that and boredom, which is not really a feeling at all but rather the negative space around feeling, or the drapes that shut tight around a window and can't, for some reason, be opened.  It becomes difficult: to live, to work, to love, to be loved.  Thoughts slip away.  The mind lacks incisiveness.  In the trench with slight dementia, amnesia, synaesthesia, whatever.  And all I ask is: what to do?

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room

100 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 85 84 83 82 81 80 79 78 77 76 75 74 73 72 71 70 69 68 67 66 65 64 63 62 61 60 59 58 57 56 55 54 53 52 51 50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

It’s strange to be in an ER in the daytime.  They seem like such nighttime places.

1000 999 998 997 996 995 994 993 992 991 990 989 [Ed.’s note – cut short in the interest of brevity]

                             Look at all these numbers!  #s!  #s!  #s!  Wonderful!  Counting backwards, it’s a helpful trick, they say.  And actually, it kind of works.

                             It’s all about control.  When I feel like I’m not in control – on a subway stopped between stations, in bed but kept awake by undue awareness of my heartbeat – that’s when I freak out.  But I also understand that letting go of control is a good and pleasurable sensation.  There have been glimpses of it; sex, drink, drugs, music etc.  Maybe it’s an ego thing.  Translation: how to adapt an enjoyment of loss on control into everyday life?  Also: how to learn to relax?

                             The hospital is boring, but surprisingly well-run.  Maybe they’ll give me some meds and I can get on with my day.  An admission of weakness – that’s the first step, isn’t it?

                             If I get home in time I’d really like to shave…

1939 1938 1937 1936 [Ed.’s note – ibid]

Trying to contain my contempt for humanity

I’ve got a letter to mail

General Hospital is up next on TV

Biting my nails

Counting backwards

Expert health care

Prone to infection

Slack-jawed yokels

Do it

Everybody make happy

“Anselmo doesn’t like to kill”

The only worthwhile revolution…

Waiting rooms can be Zen

(for the right frame of mind)

Hospital wristband

Dead letter office

Return to sender

Trip. Slip. Fall.

Undeliverable

Mailer-daemon

Horizon/Verizon

Angry Latinas

News brief

Diplomats, bureaucrats

Violence & tenderness

Short answer: YES

Wake up!

Count slow

Breathe deep

What is not released, returns

Don’t mix yr drinks

Distant relatives

Objective correlative

Gay cowboys

Satire

Be a good straight man

(make a good straight man?)

(play a good straight man?)

Hungry?  Not hungry?

2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1987 1987 1986 1985 1984 1983 1982 1981 1980 1979 [Ed.’s note – ibid.]

“Risked his life to save a stranger”

Montell Williams: grand arbiter of truth

Doctor, doctor

Waiting waiting waiting

Counting backwards, breathing deep

Let it happen.

You can deal.

1521 1520 1519 1518 1517 1516 1515 1514 1513 1512 1511 1510 1509 1508 1507 1506 1505 1504 1503 1502 1501 1500 1499 1498 1497 1496 1495 1494 1493 1492 …

                             They just called my name.  Time to go.