The impact will blow trees back and crack statues

My favorite era in rap music was roughly ’94 to ’98, when East Coast hardcore was at its height. I loved the gritty, verbose, cryptic, violent sound of the Wu Tang Clan, Gravediggaz, Mobb Deep, the Boot Camp Clik and related groups. It was dense, paranoid and clanking music best suited for headphones on the subway.

Hip hop didn’t get any more anti-commercial than the GZA, who epitomized the cold world of the mid-’90s’ stern, Biblical-prophet wordplay, while his groupmate ODB rapped like a street-corner drunk a few seconds from toppling over, crooning and ranting at passing cars. Somewhere between those two poles, between sesquipedalian urban Jeremiads and raving homicidal lunacy, lay the essence of the Wu era’s greatness, and it was all set to great beats from the likes of the RZA, DJ Premier, Havoc, 4th Disciple and Da Beatminerz.

For a few years, it seemed as if everyone was weaving dense lyrical webs of comic-book, kung-fu, Scarface and militant Five Percenter references over ominous beats. It all came to an end sometime before the turn of the century, when, to make a long story short, a shrewd buffoon named Puff Daddy dominated an era of dumber, openly superficial, radio-friendly rap which increasingly incorporated baleful R&B caterwauling (the kiss of death as far as I was concerned).

Things got even worse as Nelly-style silly sing-song cadences and lyrically vacant Southern rap started to catch on in the ensuing years. Instead of lyrics like Deck’s superb alliterative/assonant “Poisonous paragraphs smash ya phonograph in half / It be the Inspectah Deck on the warpath / First class leavin mics with a cast / Causin ruckus like the aftermath when guns blast / Run fast, here comes the verbal assaulta / Rhymes runnin wild like a child in a walker”, we had “It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes”. Mo’ money, mo’ problems, indeed.

I thought for a few years there that hardcore hip hop was dead. As usual, I just wasn’t looking in the right places. People like Jedi Mind Tricks and M.F. DOOM were keeping the torch lit, and the web made it possible to find those few groups who were still putting out quality music. But for the past few years it’s usually been a depressing trickle rather than a steady stream of new stuff, and my old favorites seemed to have run out of steam.

Then, over the last couple of months, two albums from old favorites dropped which together have resuscitated my faith in hip hop. Heltah Skeltah, always the standouts in the Boot Camp roster, had been absent for almost ten years. Half of the duo, the hilarious Sean Price, had been putting out solid stuff, but it just wasn’t the same. Now there’s a new Heltah Skeltah album out, and it’s great. Don’t judge the following track by its slightly comical intro - things really get rolling around 0:30.



In addition, a great collaboration album between two of my favorite artists, one which plays to both of their strengths, recently came out. While they usually outshine anyone they share a track with, on their own solo albums, Killah Priest and Chief Kamachi can both be monotonous (Priest’s problem being a sometimes low-energy delivery and Kamachi’s Achilles heel being repetitive spoken hooks). The perfect solution was to have them combine forces on a tag-team album, and the result is electrifying. These elder statesmen of mythological-themed hip hop rap with infectious urgency, as if someone’s just slapped new batteries in their backs.



That’s all I wanted to say - I was worried there for a few years but clearly hardcore hip hop is back from the dead, and if you liked any earlier works from these artists, check out the new albums today.

Late Bloomers and Slow Burners

Two things coincided today which had me thinking about Yeats’s ferociously powerful late-period poetry, and about one of the greatest fruits of that elderly incandescence, his “Among School Children” with its memorable chestnut tree (not pictured), the great-rooted blossomer which is leaf, blossom and bole at once.

The first was a touching article in the New Yorker which dwells on the work of an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson, who has been trying to study whether artistic genius and precocity are really as linked as we think. It turns out, to my great personal relief, that there are artists who try to “find”, and artists who try to “search”, and that the searching kind of art can take decades and decades before coming to fruition. The article’s story about the author Ben Fountain, and the years it took for him to gain success as a writer, and the support he got from his family, actually had me kvelling at work.

The second thing which set me thinking today was my absurdly delayed appreciation of most recent album by my favorite band, Sigur Rós. Without exaggeration, I’d say the first fifteen or twenty times I listened to the album, it left me cold. True, the first time I heard the new album was unfortunately in an airplane, and I missed half of what was going on because of the ambient engine noise, but still, I felt like my favorite group had let me down. It seemed like a barren, repetitive album.

Then, about two weeks ago, something clicked, and I swayed to music with brightening glance. I was listening listlessly to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust or, as I think of it because my bad German is better than my atrocious Icelandic, Mit (einen) Summen in (unsren) Ohren spielen wir endlos on my way to work, and the October sun lined up perfectly with the east-west grid of my neighborhood in Bangkok, and shone pinkly through the mist between the skyscrapers, and the entire world seemed to be singing out to me in joyful harmony through my iPod. I suddenly realized that the album was f*cking brilliant from start to finish, that it was one of the best albums I’d ever heard bar none, and for the third time in my life my daily commute made my day. (The first time involved a hot summer day, Weezer’s Pinkerton, a malfunctioning Honda Accord, and Route 6 in Connecticut, the second time involved Sigur Rós’s “Vaka”, a snowy winter morning, and Munich’s Tram 17.) Here is a picture of me this morning striding sweatfully yet manfully down Soi 51 on my way to work, in silent awe at the musical genius of Iceland’s finest.

I’ve listened to the album almost nonstop, over and over again, every chance I’ve gotten since. And not just certain tracks - I’m talking front to back. But - and here’s the point - it took me at least twenty listens before I had the “damn dawg this is a great album” epiphany. This is my favorite band we’re talking about here, and it still took months for their album to grow on me.

What happened to cause me to suddenly appreciate this music so deeply? Was it because the album is more subtle than their previous work? Is it just something that takes a while to become comfortable with? Or had I changed in the interim? Or was it the setting in which I heard it, riding the BTS above Bangkok at dawn, which caused everything to come together? How can we know, as Yeats asked, the dancer from the dance (or in this case, the music from the listener from the surroundings)?

Whatever happened, I wonder about the other things in life which I’ve been exposed to and been left cold by 19 times... just waiting for that magic number 20 to click. Imagine the authors whose work I would love if I read one or two more books. I can only hope I am lucky enough to have enough time on this planet to appreciate more of the masterpieces which I’ve overlooked in the past.

Use Your Allusion

This painting is of Dante and Virgil, strolling through Hell’s lobby, bumping into Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. This sort of pow-wow, I understand, used to happen all the time.

There is an entire category of enjoyment which has recently all but vanished from my life.

I refer to the belatedly recognized allusion.

A slow-fuze ticking time bomb in the brain that explodes into kaleidoscopic bunga-bunga api of awareness and delight. The independent discovery of something in one artwork which was inspired by another, and which in turn transforms one’s appreciation of both works. The countless matryoschka-embedded Fabergé “Easter eggs” squatting complacently behind the trompe-l’œil Potemkin-village façade of every great work of art. Note that France and Russia appear to be the birthplaces of all artistic deception or concealment.

Anyway, in other words, I miss the nice feeling you get when you hear or read something and then later find out that it was a quote from somewhere else.

Why is this feeling scarce of late? Wikipedia. Google. Etc. Whenever I get that mental twinge which tells me I’ve heard something before, within seconds I can now find out exactly where I’ve heard it before. My mom used to tell me that instant gratification was a bad thing. I still don’t see her point of view at all, but I’m closer to it than before.


What am I blathering about? Well, one of my very favorite albums of the past several years, and of all time, really, is White Chalk by PJ Harvey. One of its best tracks is “When Under Ether”, a mesmerizing, haunting song sung by someone etherized on a table, watching the ceiling move, with hints that some disturbing medical procedure has just taken place. Here is the song.



Here are the lyrics (emphasis mine).

The ceiling is moving
Moving in time
Like a conveyor belt
Above my eyes

When under ether
The mind comes alive
But conscious of nothing
But the will to survive

I lay on the bed
Waist down undressed
Look up at the ceiling
Feeling happiness
Human kindness

The woman beside me
Is holding my hand
I point at the ceiling
She smiles so kind

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
One world to the next
Human kindness

On first hearing, the song instantly made me think of “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I wasn’t born yesterday, after all) and of a couple of Harvey’s previous songs which seemed to deal with abortion or the death of a child (come back here, man, gimme my daughter, etc.). But there was something else about the song’s lyrics which sparked a fire within my head, and my dull, slow brain was unsatisfied for about a year. Until a rainy Sunday afternoon last week, when I happened to be re-reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in particular “East Coker”. What did I see but some lines I’d read 15 years ago in high school or college, but half-forgotten (emphasis mine):

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

Harvey’s customary brilliance at visceral allusion, which started with the brutal Biblical tales of her first album Dry, and only got more complex from there, should have prepared me, as this was not her first exercise in dredging up a great English(-language) poet in an odd place - there was, for example, her unexpected Yeats homage B-side “The Northwood” - but I nevertheless, as I scanned Eliot’s lines, felt a quick cold satisfaction of awareness. Art had spoken to art across the decades, and my brain had traced the thread between the two without recourse to any crude series of tubes. I had found and enjoyed an allusion, and its path from my ears (when I heard the song) to my eyes (when, a year later, I re-read the poem) didn’t involve anyone but the artists and me, and for an instant I felt as if we three, the great poet, the great musician, and the listener/reader, were one. A Hermetic trinity, as it were, of artistic appreciation.

As I said above, this is a particular type of joyous recognition which I experience less and less frequently lately, and which I feel future generations will probably not be able to experience at all, because any snippet of text is now able to be checked against all of humankind’s previous snippets of text, and every allusion can be instantly deciphered via online search. I’m sure future generations will develop ever-more-subtle and relevant and intricate types of artistic expression and reference, so there’s really nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but I’d like to take a moment of silent mourning for the loss of my dear, old friend, the belatedly recognized allusion, and for the demotion of our human brains, which were once our primary means of remembrance, to second fiddle after the omnipresent, pan-memorious Spiritus Mundi of the Internet.

Constant Dreams that I’m Constantine

Telekinesis, I see through dreams
A conqueror of all the world like the Hebrew kings
I’m David, reincarnated over again
A gladiator of the universe, a soldier of men
A warlord across the field, returnin from battle
With blood upon my shield with an arm full of arrows
I’m a warrior, elephants kneel as I pass
Holdin skeletons of the soldiers that I killed in my path
With the heads of their leaders still in my hands
Hold it up, lightning strikes, brightens the night
Turns my hair white like Christ, then flash out of sight
Head back to the cemetery, my job is done
Volume One, Priest, Part Two is when God will come

-Killah Priest, from “The Law”, off the album Priesthood

Killah Priest has been pretty much my favorite rapper (hip hop artist, whatever) for about ten years now. He started off with some unremarkable verses on early Wu-Tang albums, then emerged as the most talented lyricist in the Wu-affiliated Sunz of Man, then finally dropped the amazing, instant-classic album Heavy Mental in 1998.

No other rapper (or recording artist of any kind, really) has ever combined mythological references, vivid description and flat-out weirdness like Priest. He’s like a Brundel/Fly combination of John of Patmos, William S. Burroughs and Erich von Daeniken. His most impressive moments on the first album include ... well, never mind. I just spent about 20 minutes looking for lyrics to quote, but the problem is that the people who have nothing better to do than type in rap lyrics are not the sharpest pencils in the box. I haven’t listened to some of those tracks for years but I can tell that the online lyrics are horribly garbled, game-of-telephone style. “The Iron Sheik” becomes “dying sheep” and so on.

Anyway, K.P. has a dense, dazzling, versatile-yet-consistent style whereby standard rap subjects like the plight of ghetto dwellers or battling one’s enemies are elaborated upon with blizzards of mind-blowing apocalyptic, hellish and messianic allusions. The unrelenting paranoia, horror and madness are balanced out by stunning poetic descriptions and occasional moments of humor or optimism. However, it’s usually pretty grim, heavy stuff. Sometimes Priest’s sanity itself is in doubt - Does he really think he’s “The One”? A magnificent yet disturbingly megalomaniacal verse about his own birth, from Black August:

They knew the time and the date of my arrival
Doctors and preachers opening bibles
Philosophers stood wondering
The sky thundering
Inhaling, old widows wailing
Windows open
Wind blowing, curtains across my head forming a turban
Do not disturb him, a stranger said
Standing at the side of my bed, placed a crown upon my head
My eyes were black pearls staring at the map of the world
Born to conquer, the angel then handed me my armor
Kneeled in my honor, revealed to me where I should wander
Until time to take over
Y’all reigns, been great but now it’s over
Now I lounge in castles surrounded by Greek statues

As a listener this sort of thing sets up a strange tension for me: Is this just a cinematically-described messianic spin on the standard rap boasting, or is this guy genuinely deranged? All I know is, either way he’s great at describing whatever he sets his mind to describe, however outlandish it may be.

Priest’s second album, A View from Masada, disappointed me both in terms of production and lyrical content, but after that slight misstep he’s been getting steadily better and better or, as I think I read on an interview with him somewhere, he feels he’s growing “younger and wiser”. He’s consistently honed his flow, broadened and deepened his themes, and gotten more judicious in his choice of tracks and collaborators. In fact, he has gone from being a neglected offshoot of the Wu-Tang empire who seemed doomed to wander in the wilderness of the deeply weird to a consistent and prolific veteran who can confidently mastermind cohesive group albums, including the stellar Black Market Militia.

Killah Priest’s work has in itself matured and gained substance over the years, but it’s also fair to say that since 2001 his strange preoccupations have been granted a great deal of legitimacy and urgency by outside events. Back in the mid-90s a rapper obsessed with Biblical warfare seemed merely quirky. But in many people’s eyes the real world has actually morphed into the sort of paranoid nightmare Priest has been describing all along, with Americans actually engaging in ghastly warfare in the Holy Land and Bush looking more and more like a many-headed Beast of Babylon. In other words, the vivid imagination that made him seem so odd in 1998 seems much more like prophecies of daily life in 2008. Of course, he wasn’t the only 90s rapper with pre-millenium tension and conspiracy theories, by far, but he was certainly the best at it, and he’s only gotten better.

While he is probably my favorite rapper of all time (or maybe tied with MF DOOM, although they’re like apples and oranges), I find I have to be in the right mood to really sit down and listen to Killah Priest’s albums, because they’re so dense and paranoid. Luckily, I now have an hour-long bus commute twice a day, which is perfect for catching up on the hip hop I’ve missed in recent years. I hate to admit it but, because I didn’t have a morning commute for three years I really hadn’t been sitting down and listening to new music as often as I used to. I actually hadn’t heard Priest’s most recent album, The Offering, all the way through, and I can’t believe what I was missing out on. He’s got a new album coming out next week called Behind the Stained Glass, and I will unhesitatingly get it (and I mean buy it, using real money, not... er, acquire it elsewise) the instant it drops.

Two highly recommended artists on a similar vibe are Priest’s long-time groupmate Hell Razah, who has really elevated himself to a powerful and intelligent solo artist over the past couple of years, and Chief Kamachi, whose excellent posse album Black Candles is probably tied with Priest’s Black Market Militia for my favorite hip hop album of 2005.

By the way, the post title is one of my favorite Priest couplets, from a track called “Think Market”. I would guess that the Constantine referred to is the exorcist character from the Keanu Reeves movie and not the Roman emperor, although with Killah Priest they’d both be equally possible, which frankly is why I like his work so much. I don’t have the track with me to check that these lyrics are absolutely accurate, but it’s something like:

I’m having constant dreams that I’m Constantine
Surrounded by demons, angels with armored wings

1998 all over again

I have only ever liked three musical groups enough to consistently buy their CD singles when I come across them (a measure of high respect if there ever was one): PJ Harvey, Radiohead, and Sigur Rós. Two of these groups released my favorite albums from them in 1997-98: Radiohead’s OK Computer and Harvey’s Is This Desire? Along with other, similarly haunting albums like the second Portishead album, 1998 was probably my best year in terms of atmospheric music for fall. As October arrived, I had plenty of melancholy, stirring music to listen to as I drove through the bleak Connecticut countryside.

In fact, the years around this time were probably my best falls per se overall, by which I mean that I was old enough to appreciate the beauty of the New England foliage, had a car in which to zip past the pumpkin patches and whatnot, and a good stock of music and literature to form the gloomy mental backdrop to how I saw everything. You’d think that being in Munich for five falls would have topped that, what with the Oktoberfest and it being the home of Rilke and Orff and everything, but in retrospect, Connecticut was the most autumnally satisfying place I’ve lived. As I discovered to my dismay, in Germany, the leaves don’t really all turn colors and fall, like they do in New England. They sort of individually rot and gradually surrender over the course of several months. It’s not particularly picturesque.

Anyway, my pleasant seasonal moods have taken a serious hit in the last few years, because I live in the frigging tropical rain forest. It’s hard to work up a real “halloweeny” feeling when you’re sweating like a pig in a Thai swamp. But luckily, two albums have just arrived that have saved my season: PJ Harvey’s White Chalk and Radiohead’s In Rainbows. To be honest I could have illegally downloaded both of them, but seeing that these are two of my very favorite artists, whose singles I’ve even gone to the trouble of buying, I paid to download the albums. They are both good, but the Harvey in particular is incredible.

It’s one of those old-fashioned, cohesive vinyl-LP sort of albums that barely goes over the 30-minute mark, but when it’s done, you can’t help pressing play again. Like a Beatles album or whatever. I have no words to describe how good White Chalk is. It’s precisely what the cover photo suggests: PJ Harvey channeling Emily Dickenson, or the protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Most of the songs have rather quiet piano or dulcimer or whatever backing, and sound as if they were recorded on wax cylinders by some Victorian madwoman. There’s one particular line on the album that gives me chills every time I hear it. I won’t demean it by telling you which one it is. And so - and this is the point I’ve been laboriously leading up to - thanks to the ineffably great talents of the unfathomably great PJ Harvey, I have for the last two days sat here in sultry Bangkok feeling perfectly, exquisitely, joyfully “halloweeny”. The depth of my gratitude is inexpressible.

The Meme Stops Here

I’ve been “tagged” with a “meme” by Kimbo. While this sort of thing can be fun, I am still a little grumpy about the term meme. I liked it better back in my college days when the word meant “speech virus”, not “unpleasant public blogsturbation”, but oh well. That crotchety reluctance of mine to let go of the past will surely make this trip down memory lane a particularly pungent and festering one.

1. Go to www.popculturemadness.com
2. Pick the year you turned 18
3. Get yourself nostalgic over the songs of the year
4. Write something about how the song affected you
5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

I will not do all these things. I refuse, on the grounds that I could never select only five friends to share this joy with. Please understand that I have far too many friends to ever narrow it down. I will, however, attempt the first four. Here goes.

November 29, 1992 - March 5, 1993: I Will Always Love You - Whitney Houston
The reaction of space aliens to this hideous shrieking in an episode of Futurama pretty much says it all: “The humans are attacking! Pluck the lower horn and let’s get out of here!”

March 6 - March 12: A Whole New World (Aladdin's Theme) - Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle
After the relative high points of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, I was pretty disappointed in the corny superficiality of Aladdin and that includes this song. One of my least favorite of all crappy movie cliches is having a corny R&B song play over the end credits, especially when the movie is set in a time or place where violently sh*tty R&B songs like this are mercifully unknown.

March 13 - April 30: Informer - Snow
I assumed that this guy was another Vanilla Ice and never paid it any attention. Later, my black friend said this Snow character was actually OK and semi-respected in dancehall circles. At the time I was confused. Now I just don’t care either way.

May 1 - May 14: Freak Me - Silk
No.

May 15 - July 9: That's The Way Love Goes - Janet Jackson
God, no.

July 10 - July 23: Weak - SWV (Sisters With Voices)
Oh for Christ’s sake.

July 24 - September 11: I Can't Help Falling In Love - UB40
Ah, the band that singlehandedly turned reggae into flaccid elevator music, although to be fair the Police did pave the way. Eat sh*t and die, UB40, wherever you are.

September 11 - November 5: Dreamlover - Mariah Carey
What the f*ck? Simon Cowell must have blown a load in his little British boxers every four to five minutes throughout 1993, because damn this year seems to have sucked with an unfathomable, golden-age sort of Biblical suckitude that American Idol only dreams of.

November 6 - December 10: I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That) - Meat Loaf
The second most unintentionally homosexual song ever recorded, right after “I Want It That Way”.

December 11 - December 24: Again - Janet Jackson
Again? Her? W, as they say, TF?

December 25 - January 21: Hero - Mariah Carey
I feel like killing myself. Somewhere, Simon Cowell’s giant, crimson, Frankenstein-rectangular head is cackling maniacally at me.

The fact that someone has saved that list and posted it on the internet is, to me, conclusive proof that there is no God.

What was I actually listening to in 1993? I was not very musically sophisticated in high school. I liked rock, and that’s it. Our family had just barely moved from records and tapes to CDs, and I mainly listened to tapes I made of “classic rock” radio and the emerging stirrings of grunge. Zeppelin. Cream. Hendrix. Pearl Jam. Stone Temple Pilots. I bought the first Rage Against the Machine album around this time, but not because I particularly liked hip hop (I didn’t, yet) but because aside from the vocals it sounded like the kind of rock music I liked. I tried to appreciate some classical music, but I only liked the kind with loud noises at the end, like Beethoven’s odd-numbered symphonies or the 1812 Overture. Classical music that sounded as much like classic rock as possible, in other words.

Then I went to college, and several things changed. I was quite lonely my entire freshman year. I had almost no friends and no car. But I had some leftover scholarship money, and walking down to the record store was one of the only things that cheered me up. Aside from the obligatory Bob Marley and Cypress Hill CDs that every college student is issued at the door, I bought many CDs in the second half of 1993 and the first half of 1994, including:

Pearl Jam, Vs.
Soundgarden, Superunknown
Counting Crows, August and Everything After
Lizst, A Faust Symphony
Beethoven’s Complete Symphonies, Solti
Holst, The Planets
Morricone, The Mission Soundtrack
Orff, Carmina Burana
Monty Python, The Final Rip-Off
PJ Harvey, Rid of Me
Wu Tang Clan, Enter the 36 Chambers

I’m the most proud of the last two, which I bought on whims after seeing like 20 seconds of their respective videos somewhere. Wu Tang opened up a world of new music to me, and Harvey’s has turned out to be the only CD out of all those which I still play regularly and her subsequent albums have been the soundtrack to a lot of my life. As you’ll notice, otherwise these albums were not much of a departure from my previous rock and rock-like-classical tastes, but the extra scholarship cash enabled me to branch out a bit into slightly uncharted waters. One thing I realize now, thinking back on that year, is how isolated I was. This was (I think) before you could “search for related music” on Amazon, and you basically still had to listen to the radio, or your friends, or read magazine reviews, to figure out what music to like. In lieu of friends, I had only the radio, and I only had two or three rock stations I listened to.

So I arrived at college pretty much only having heard whatever they played during “two-fer Tuesday” on Rock 105.9 or whatever. For a brief while there in college, I was physically around people who were actually playing and discussing music, which was new to me, and my tastes changed immensely based solely on what I heard on my dorm floor, the concerts I tagged along to, and so on.

That didn’t last and now, I’m physically and socially more or less just as isolated as I was back in high school, but here’s the thing: I don’t feel that way, because of the Web. I feel as if I’m almost as connected to new and exciting music, if not more connected, than I was in college, but it’s all happening online. Interesting. This is why record companies shouldn’t fear online piracy – nobody buys varied albums as foolishly and frequently as college students, and online we’re all basically living together in one big virtual dorm. If they’d lowered the price of albums to $1-$5 each, they’d probably have made way more money from CDs over the last few years than ever because everyone is all hopped up on recommendations from the web. Oh well.

Haiku Week, Day 6

Resonating tones
In a hollow wood chamber;
Ribcage and heartbeats.

Haiku Week, Day 3

Flames dancing on sand
God’s voice, madness or mirage?
Same thing in the end.

Since yesterday’s post partially involved me poking fun at avant-garde music, I thought I’d show I’m not a complete Philistine by mentioning that I really like Moses und Aron, an unfinished modern opera by Schoenberg that I recently acquired. The music is very atonal and strange, and the opera’s subject is a tough one to wrestle with, but I definitely like it.

The opera is about Moses (obviously) and how the Burning Bush, when it’s giving him his mission, suggests that his brother Aron be his mouthpiece. The opera’s Moses is a real puritan, and knows that his God can’t be portrayed in pictures or described fully in words. So the paradox of trying to convert the Hebrews to an invisible God he can’t talk about without diluting the message really messes with his mind. His brother Aron, on the other hand, has no trouble giving the people what they want, via magic tricks and fancy speeches (well, singing), and eventually he and they are worshipping the Golden Calf while Moses is away.

Moses comes down from Mount Sinai tablets in hand, furiously confronts Aron, and when Aron points out that the Ten Commandments are also nothing more than a graven image themselves, Moses smashes them in frustration and cries out “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, which is more or less “O word, you word I lack!” He can’t figure out how to convey his message, and the opera cuts off there, unfinished after the end of Act II.



The compelling thing about this words-versus-ideals version of the Moses story for me is that it’s such a strange mix of old and modern concepts, and a weird jumble of ideas which I admire and things which I am a bit wary of.

I’m not sure whether Schoenberg’s Moses is more like a brave modern artist or intellectual, trying to create something new but realizing that all messages are distorted by the media they’re portrayed through – or more like a stereotypical religious fanatic, unable to accept any other ideas or thoughts except those he imagines are being beamed into his head directly by the Supreme Being. In the planned (but never composed) ending, Moses triumphs and, flanked by soldiers, scolds Aron for his wickedness, and Aron drops dead. Was Moses a brilliant, principled reformer or the type of guy who would have put a hit out on Salman Rushdie, or both?

I think the composer himself wasn’t sure, and I assume that’s why one of the reasons he stopped working on the opera and never finished it.

Anyway, as another irony for an opera which hinges on communication breakdown and ends with “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!”, I can’t find the text for the opera anywhere online, so my understanding of it is currently fragmentary, based on random summaries I’ve read online and the few words I can understand in the recording. And I guess the final irony is that I was supposed to convey this all through the succinct medium of haiku, and I’ve ended up taking hundreds of words to explain myself. Oh well. I can only imagine how long my version of the Ten Commandments would be.

Haiku Week, Day 2

Screech of angry owls
Under old wooden rafters
Disorients me

Tonight we went to hear some very interesting musical performances at the Central Market Annexe, which is a cool old set of renovated colonial-era buildings with nice wooden rafters. No owls though. The owls are like totally a metaphor for the musicians we heard. Two of the performers were playing their laptops. Here’s the website of one of them. I’m not sure how they did it, but they were sort of looping and reverberating all sorts of recordings and sounds to make a kind of sonic collage. One guy played an electric guitar with a set of screwdrivers.

Unfortunately, while I am all for artistic experimentation, these very interesting concepts often sounded, in execution, like a thousand smoke alarms going off at once while a million kittens were being thrown into the world’s largest blender. For some reason all the acts tended toward high-pitched shrieking feedback tones that physically hurt my ears. Note to free-form jazz musicians and laptop sound pioneers: less high-pitched squealing, please. You can experiment all you want with muffled thumps or dull clicks, really. I’ll sit there for hours enthralled by muffled thumps. Make muffled thumps your main focus. Not ultra-high squeals. Anything but squeals.

However, while I was being tortured by many of the the sounds I was actually very interested in the intensity and obvious creativity the musicians brought to making noise. And who am I, I thought, to judge these guys’ experimental music? I wondered if I were up there deliberately trying not to make sounds that sounded like normal music, what I’d come up with. So I was interested, entranced, bored, confused, excited, physically pained, shamed and made contemplative all within the space of a few minutes. Not bad for a free concert, and I’m glad we were invited.

Leopold! Leopold!

I’ve always been ambivalent about classical music. I’m interested in it, but I feel intimidated, as if it’s beyond me. Some rare and fragile thing which requires a more refined sense than I possess. Like smision. I hesitate to really get into it because it seems like such a vast field of endeavour, and I worry that I will never develop a true appreciation for it no matter how I try. Sort of how I feel about modern art, except that I am almost certain that almost all modern art is ass, while I know that there’s a lot of good classical music out there impatiently awaiting my appreciation.

Note: By claiming that modern art possesses a distinctly asseous character I don’t mean Picasso, or whatever no doubt excellent artist you have in mind, I mean post-post-post-modern art or whatever they’ve been doing since around 1960 or so. Whatever they give the Turner Prize to these days. Goat carcases stuffed with the artist’s used tampons or giant crucifixes made of jars of earwax or whatever. Come on, admit it, that stuff sucks. Actually, after I wrote those last couple sentences I went back to find a funny Turner Prize-winning exhibit to link to, and the one I found was way crazier than I could have ever imagined. The guy who won in 2001 apparently got great acclaim for his masterful piece that involved TURNING THE LIGHTS IN AN EMPTY MUSEUM ROOM ON AND OFF AT FIVE SECOND INTERVALS. No joke could top that. In fact, here’s the entire description of this artistic masterwork from the website just so you don’t miss it. It goes beyond humor, beyond insanity into some unimaginable dimension of gibbering art-curator psychosis. I can only hope that the winning artist was actually performing an oral sex act on whoever wrote this at the moment it was written, because honestly I can think of no other reason for writing this orgasmic, mind-blowingly stark raving bonkers description of somebody turning a lightswitch on and off:

Work # 227: The lights going on and off. Nothing is added to the space and nothing is taken away, but at intervals of five seconds the gallery is filled with light and then subsequently thrown into darkness. Realising the premise set out in Work # 232, Creed celebrates the mechanics of the everyday, and in manipulating the gallery's existing light fittings he creates a new and unexpected effect. In the context of Tate Britain, an institution displaying a huge variety of objects, this work challenges the traditional methods of museum display and thus the encounter one would normally expect to have in a gallery. Disrupting the norm, allowing and then denying the lights their function, Creed plays with the viewer's sense of space and time. Our negotiation of the gallery is impeded, yet we become more aware of our own visual sensitivity, the actuality of the space and our own actions within it. We are invited to re-evaluate our relationship to our immediate surroundings, to look again and to question what we are presented with. Responding to the actual condition in which he has been asked to exhibit, Creed exposes rules, conventions and opportunities that are usually overlooked, and in so doing implicates and empowers the viewer.

Holy. Quacking. Mother. Of. God. Words fail me.


Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Classical music has always struck me as something for true connoisseurs, like tasting a sip of wine and being able to detect hints of loganberries, dander, walnuts, Palmolive and pencil shavings, or like watching a fashion show and swooning over the bold use of pleats, or watching people play cricket without wanting to kill yourself. I don’t know if I have the ear.

As I keep saying over and over again as an excuse when I don’t hear something properly: “I am a visual learner”. This sounds so much less humiliating than the actual responses, which would be “I wasn’t listening to a single word you just said because I was mentally going through World 1-1 on Super Mario Brothers,” or “I am only 31 years old but I seem to be going deaf, would you mind repeating that? Perhaps the sound waves have trouble traveling through the thick tufts of hair which have recently been sprouting from my ears.” But I really do, deep down, think I’m a visual learner.

No, that’s wrong – I learn best through reading things. Is there a term for that? I get drawn to things because they’re connected to something I’ve read. If I see a beautiful landscape, chances are I’ll be reminded of some book where someone describes a beautiful landscape. I might even recall the exact words the author used to describe the stupid landscape.

This strange reliance on text is why, in my younger years, I tended to easily fall into the trap of reading a record review and believing that I would like a certain album based on the review. This is of course impossible. No record review in history has accurately described an album. But I keep falling for it. So technically speaking, I’m probably not a visual learner, it’s more that I relate to the world best through remembering facts I’ve read on paper – literature, poems, quotes. Trivia. I would say I’m a trivial learner with krapaesthetic tendencies and good outerspatial relations.

It is therefore with great surprise that I find myself currently listening to all of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies, one after another, although I’m still not sure what I think. But at least I’m listening. And I’ve been going to great lengths to acquire and listen to a lot of other classical music lately. Over the past few months there has been a lot of activity on the classical-music-appreciation front, me-wise. What gives? The reasons are, like certain parts of a car’s engine, manifold.

Reasons Why I am No Longer Intimidated by Classical Music

1) I’m getting very, very old. I hate to say it, but I’m no spring chicken, and as you may have noticed the last time you went to a classical music concert, it’s a genre that has some sort of special appeal to the innermost souls of those wispy-skulled specimens who are teetering over the grave. I think I’m more able to sit for longer periods of time and appreciate subtleties than I used to be. Or perhaps my decades of life lived to the fullest, the constant roiling tumults of fierce passion and sorrow have given me a more complete palette of memories and emotions with which to appreciate the sublime outpourings of some dead guy in a wig.

2) I now have an iPod. Before this summer, if I wanted to listen to a Wagner opera, I had to juggle four CDs. Now I just have to hit a single button. Of course, in either case I fall asleep 15 minutes into the opera, but now I don’t have the theoretical CD-switching looming over me, disturbing my blissful slumbers. It is nice to be able to have long musical works all on one portable device. Even some symphonies, like Beethoven’s Ninth, sometimes come on two CDs, and it used to be a pain to swap them out. And I’m not complaining about the new format – I’m certainly nowhere near being able to discern the fact that MP3s are usually of far lower quality than CDs. Come on. I can barely tell the different notes apart. I don’t give a rat’s ass about sampling quality or whatever. If I can put 20 or 30 CDs worth of music on a flash drive, the world of classical music suddenly seems a lot less like a spinning plates act and more like a pleasant one-button trip to opera-filled slumberland.

3) Bittorrent. I don’t want to say that I have illegally acquired any music, but I will say that in the past I was a bit hesitant to go out and randomly buy a lot of classical music CDs because of the bewildering variety and high cost. Which conductor should be conducting this piece? Is this a good recording? Is it a good orchestra? Is it digital or analog? I never used to f*#king know, and I still don’t, but now I don’t necessarily have to spend as much as I would have 15 years ago to listen to some things and find out what I like and what I don’t. Back in the day I was always panicked that I’d get home and find out I absolutely hated it, or that I would read something online saying that I’d bought the worst version possible. This leads me to another reason why I feel more confident in liking classical music lately, namely

4) Online research. As I exhaustively described above, I like things more when I have read something on the subject, and thanks to the Internet I can find out crucial information about music without having to hang out with the ponytailed mouthbreathers in the music section of the bookstore. I was able to recently hold a brief conversation about the differences between Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” and “Stalingrad” symphonies, neither of which I’ve ever heard a note of, but I’d picked up the info while randomly reading Wikipedia entries on composers. Again, I would never sit in a bookstore and flip through “Mammoth Biographical Encyclopedia of Great Composers” or whatever, but online I can find out more or less the same stuff in seconds. I try not to base my opinions about music on what I read, but I feel nevertheless that the Internet gives me the initial foothold I need to start really appreciating the hell out of something.

5) I’ve given up on the idea of progress in art. I honestly used to believe that it was somehow wrong to enjoy art from an older and less enlightened time. Let me explain: when I was in high school, all my classes started with people from way back in the past, and ended up with people in the early 20th century. All your classes were probably like this too. History started when a guy invented the wheel, and reached its fullest flowering when Henry Ford invented the Model T. Obviously anyone before Ford was a nobody. Only a moron would be interested in that prehistoric guy’s stone wheel, now that something better had come along. Same with science, philosophy, art, etc. The Renaissance became the Enlightenment became the Industrial Age, and things got better in every way as we went along. The previous people’s inventions and artwork always seemed clearly inferior to the later peoples’ and the implication was that human history had been a pretty much uninterrupted series of bold steps forward. At least that’s the subliminal attitude I somehow absorbed and held while growing up and even into the first year or two of college.

I thought that to appreciate something you had to know its place on the evolutionary scale. This made me feel silly for liking Beethoven, because I assumed that something far better must have been invented since then. Something terribly modern involving twelve tones or polychronous atonality or absolute silence or something. So since I liked Beethoven I decided I had bad taste in classical music, and I sort of gave up for a while. It’s taken a long time, but I think I’ve discarded the whole absurd notion that human history has been one long climb upwards towards perfection. I think the first time this really hit home to me was in an art history class in college, when I realized that I vastly preferred Romanesque architecture to Gothic. But Gothic came later, interrobang!? And then came colossally crappier things like Baroque and Rococo, interrobang!? I finally wrapped my head around the idea that newer was not always better. So now I’m able to listen to Beethoven without feeling a nagging guilt that I should be listening to somebody further down the evolutionary ladder instead. I mean up the ladder. Stupid metaphor getting me all turned around. There is no evolutionary ladder for art. Well, there is, but it has nothing to do with quality. Older things can be better. Same way that cockroaches are more successful than a lot of your fancy modern bugs. By the way, Henry Ford was a complete dickhead.

6) I don’t believe that I’m underqualified to be “cultured” any more, and that takes some of the fear out of certain subjects. I guess growing up in a normal American family I always subconsciously assumed that there was some master race of incredibly sophisticated people lounging around in Europe or somewhere, with perfect taste and an encyclopedic knowledge of the finer things in life, and that I was somehow never going to be in that league. Classical music seemed to be something for those people, whoever and wherever they were. Then I worked with a lot of people who seemed pretty “cultured” in Munich, and I started to realize that everyone’s faking it and that everyone’s utterly full of sh*t. Sure, I’m not perfectly refined. Sure, on a recent trip to the Philharmonic I had to be issued a jacket and shoes by the ushers because my attire was so far, far below the minimal standard of sartorial decency, and then I was so amused by the whole thing that I giggled uncontrollably for the first 10 minutes of the concert. But somehow I’ve made my peace with my level of refinement and damn it I definitely have just as much right to pretend I know something about a pretentious and complicated subject like classical music as any other jerk. So I’m not as intimidated by classical music as I might have been years ago.

So there you have it. I now feel fully qualified to successfully appreciate classical music, whereas I didn’t before. I had no idea I had so much to say on the matter. I guess I haven’t posted here for a while and my blogging mojo must have been building up like a magma pocket under Krakatoa. If you’ve read through this whole thing I apologize from the bottom of my heart and I can only hope that my little jokes here and there made up for the astoundingly boring topic.