Listen
October 10, 2008
“John used to tell me how to listen to the music, so that I could get the most out of it. He would say things to me like, ‘You listen to a song five times, Cecilia. Listen to it instrument by instrument. Play that song and listen to the bass all the way through. Listen to it again, and listen to the saxophone. Don’t just listen to it once and then attempt to give it a critique.‘”
John Coltrane’s advice to Cecilia Foster, (Elvin Jones’s cousin and Frank Foster ’s wife).
A Steely Dan concert is akin to witnessing the passage of a single multiplex vehicle the size of a motorcade or convoy, its various segments comprising limousines, ice-cream wagons, hearses, lunch-carts, ambulances, black marias, and motorcycle outriders, all of it Rolls-grade and lacquered like a tropical beetle. The horns glint, as it rolls majestically past, splendid, a thing of legend, and utterly peculiar unto itself.
William Gibson’s blog
Dock Boggs. From Wikipedia.
When William Gibson released his first novel, Neuromancer, in 1984, he considered opening it with a line from a Velvet Underground song, “Watch out for worlds behind you,” from “Sunday Morning”. In an interview in 1986 he talked about how limiting he found the questions journalists were asking him. They asked only about books that had inspired him, and even more particularly, just science fiction books.
“The trouble with ‘influence’ questions is that they’re usually framed to encourage you to talk about your writing as if you grew up in a world circumscribed by books,” he told Larry McCaffrey. “I’ve been influenced by Lou Reed, for instance, as much as I’ve been by any ‘fiction’ writer.”
William Gibson and Nick Cave have been the two poles of my compass ever since I began reading and hearing their works, from Nick’s first record and Gibson’s first book. What they share is a vision with a level of detail that William Gibson described as ’superspecificity’ and that he learned from Dashiell Hammett.
“I remember being very excited about how he had pushed all of this ordinary stuff until it was different,” he told Larry McCaffrey. “Like American naturalism but cranked up, very intense, almost surreal. You can see this at the beginning of The Maltese Falcon (1930) where he describes all the things in Spade’s office. Hammett may have been the guy who turned me on to the idea of superspecificity, which is largely lacking in most SF description, SF authors tend to use generics.”
Although Gibson is credited with the invention of what we now recognise as the computer era, because he described it so well, and Nick is generally assumed to be inventing scenarios around Old Testament parables, what draws me to their perspectives is how vividly they describe worlds that that are real, that they see because they’re paying attention. Their artistry comes from combining the observations they’ve made about in unusual ways. Their works resemble nothing we’ve ever seen before, in that way, so it’s assumed they must be inventing comic book futures or transcribing fever dreams.
“I suppose I strive for an argot that seems real, but I don’t invent most of what seems exotic or strange in the dialogue,” William Gibson told Larry McCaffrey, “that’s just more collage. There are so many cultures or subcultures today that if you’re willing to listen, you can pick up different phrases, inflections and metaphors everywhere. I use a lot of phrases that seem exotic to everyone but the people who use them.”
My own interests can be cross-faded with Nick’s and William Gibson’s. I’ve always comprehended that their works lay down on paper (or in music, alive in a stretch of time) the soul’s eternal struggle with itself. It’s the sadness at the heart of what they both create that I’m most drawn to: the sorrow that makes it possible to measure happiness. “We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act,” Nick said in a lecture about love songs. “The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.”
Today a list of William Gibson’s ten favourite songs is published on the New York Times book blog. He mentions a song from The Boatman’s Call among his favourites. On his blog, at the time he published Pattern Recognition he expressed admiration for Nick, saying that he’d like to write a novel as good as The Boatman’s Call. Gibson’s description of a song by Dock Boggs, an early twentieth century Appalachian white bluesman, is exactly the feeling I gained from reading William Faulkner’s novels, after they’d been recommended to me by Nick.
“On finally learning to hear this music, you literally become some different, more primal manner of flesh,” writes Gibson. “There is simply nothing else like it. It is an Ur-thing, sere and terrible, yet capable of profound and paradoxical rescue in the very darkest hour. Dock Boggs lived in Wise County, Virginia, not far from where I grew up. I am haunted by the possibility that someone could have listened to this recording in Paris, in 1927, the year it was released.”
Depth of Field
June 5, 2008
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
William Faulkner. Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. 1949
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform Tupelo in 2008
When I visited Memphis in 1989 I was reading a copy of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. Night was slowly starting to fall as my friend and I left Oxford, Mississippi after visiting the museum that Faulker’s home has become. It looked exactly like the watercolour on the copy of the novel I’d borrowed from the branch of the New York Public Library on Seventh Avenue. Faulkner had written phrases on the walls, from works in progress, and he had many different copies and versions of the Bible and compendiums of Greek myths on the bookshelves in his writing room and study. Faulkner drew up maps of of a fictional territory for his novels but I could see that these were devices for inabiting the real world deeply: physically, mentally and spiritually. His novels were not inventions or diversions from life.
When rain started falling, as we went past the turnoff to Tupelo, Mississippi — the birthplace of Elvis Presly — it sounded like the rainstorm at the beginning of Nick Cave’s song, “Tupelo”, which fuses the life of Elvis with the story of Christ. I was gradually coming to understand how vital music can be, a force of life and nature and that there need be no difference between a great novel, myth, or piece of contemporary music. I grasped that Nick inhabited his music as deeply as Faulkner his writing.
I heard Daniel Lanois’s album Acadie around that time. I wasn’t hearing much new music at the time but he was the subject of a feature on a cable channel and his music reeled me in while I was channel surfing. It was deep and soulful, like a Faulkner novel, and he was submerged in shadows in a room in a grand old house while he was talking. I felt as if I’d fallen into a world I could live in. He’s made temporary studios in houses, bringing music into the rhythms of life, but recently he told the New York Times that “the grand rooms, the searching for the right hallway that will have the right sound for the guitar, that’s died out a little bit.”
Daniel Lanois: I’ve always been interested in original ways of building music. The recording studio has acted as my laboratory for ways of providing original expression in works. For the longest time I was satisfied with my originality to exist in the sonics of records I was making for other people. At a pivotal point of travel, ie. I was in New Orleans a lot and also working in Europe a lot, I was able to see my past in Canada as fertile story telling material. That’s when I started writing my songs.
Daniel Lanois. “The Maker”
Q: Your work is often seen as atmospheric – do you agree with that – and what are you aiming for in that atmosphere?
Daniel Lanois: Early on my atmospheres were largely ethereal as can be heard for example on Brian Eno’s Apollo record. It’s easy to spot the atmospheres in my work of that time. The term atmosphere has changed for me, creating an atmosphere now means setting a mood or tone. You can think of it like preparing a room for a toast, the clinking of a glass, offering tranquility or preparing your canvas for that one bold stroke that will allow the moment to be a standout. Atmosphere no longer means texture.
Miles Salter. Music News. April10 2008
Daniel Lanois made a movie over the course of a year, circa 2007, about record production. In this trailer you can hear him say: “I’m trying to make a film that’s beautiful in itself. About beauty. About the source of the art, rather than everything that surrounds the art.”
A term Mr. Lanois often uses in discussing music is ”depth of field,” and this perfectly describes the way his productions, both for himself and others, blend sonic clarity and murkiness. ”I Love You,” the opening song on ”Shine,” for example, inhabits at least three separate aural dimensions. The backing vocal by Ms. Harris is so dry and crisp that the singer seems to be just inches from the listener’s ear. Mr. Lanois’s own voice, by contrast, is encased in a protective halo of reverb that distances it from that of Ms. Harris. Even further in the background is the fragmented electric guitar part at the song’s core, which sounds as if it were recorded underwater several generations ago.
Mac Randall. New York Times. May 18 2003
I imagine that the first example of Lanois’s production for other musicians that I heard was the U2 album The Joshua Tree. Its beauty felt familiar to me. I had a frame-of-reference for the way it evoked the desert. I grew up in a sere, remote part of Australia and as a child remember hearing Roy Orbison’s angelic voice floating in the air while it was so hot that everything on the horizon was bent and misshapen in the heat haze.
Roy Orbison performs “Crying” on the Johnny Cash show in 1969
Roy Orbison and k d lang. "Crying". 1987.
I was living in New York when The Joshua Tree became a monster hit, reading William Faulkner’s and John Steinbeck’s novels. And I was listening to the music that had been the foundation of rock and roll, having had the extraordinary experience of Roy Orbison as my tutor in this subject. (When I interviewed him just before his death I was the recipient of the gratitude he felt for all Australians for continuing to buy his records and go to his concerts during the time when his career was in the wilderness.) I was discovering a mythic America while writing about Donald Trump’s new eponymous gilded tower for Blueprint magazine and reading in the New York Times about Oliver North and Manuel Noriega. Although I was listening to almost nothing but jazz at the time, with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and Bill Evans on my walkman as I discovered Manhattan, The Joshua Tree was everywhere and it‘s what comes to mind when I think back to that time.
Edge: Bono had been reading Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote, I was reading Norman Mailer and Raymond Carver. We had all fallen under the spell of America, not the TV reality but the dream, the version of America that Martin Luther King spoke about.
Bono: I’d been travelling widely, so travel was a huge theme. I’d been listening to the blues, and immersing myself in American writers, from native American writing through to black writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and poets and playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepard, Charles Bukowski. I had this love affair with American literature happening at the same time as I became aware of how dangerous American foreign policy could be in the countries around it, with the brutal crushing of the Sandinistas. I started to see two Americas, the mythic America and the real America. It was an age of greed, Wall Street, button down, win, win, win, no time for losers. New York was bankrupt. There was a harsh reality to America as well as the dream. So I started working on something which in my own mind was going to be called The Two Americas. I wanted to describe this era of prosperity and Savings and Loans scandals as a spiritual drought. I started thinking about the desert and what came together was quite a clear picture of where I was at, as a person a little off-kilter in my emotional life, but very much waking up as a writer and as a commentator on what I saw around me, my love of America and my fear of what America could become.
From U2 by U2
Bono and Roy Orbison talking about and recording "Mystery Girl"
Robert Forster. The Evangelist
May 25, 2008
‘Goin’ No Place’ Photograph by Soffia Gisladottir
”Its real theme is loss and the idea that things happen in life that you have no explanation for. The story is made up of memories and fragments of memories, and the feeling I got from it is that you can never figure out what they all mean until you stop trying, and then you just remember the essences of people — and of the time when they were suddenly gone and how it changed everything.”
Sofia Coppola talking about her movie adaptation of The Virgin Suicides
While Grant McLennan’s family was packing up his possessions, after his death, Robert Forster asked if he could have Grant’s song-writing notebook. “We had started on our 10th album,” Robert wrote in The Times of London. “It had begun the same way as all the others. I went over to his place during the day and we’d play the songs each of us had written. I’d find him in either of two locations: pottering around the kitchen or lying on his bed, reading. The first 10 minutes would always be a little tetchy. Although we’d known each other for almost 30 years and worked closely together for a good half of that time, he’d be a little gruff; it was as if, each time I saw him, he had to get to know me again. So, he’d make coffee and I’d sit in a chair in the kitchen and pepper him with questions in an attempt to bring him around to good humour. This is where having known him for such a long time helped, because I knew the buttons to push, the silly things to say, the cheeky remark about an album he liked, the films of a certain actor I’d know he’d trash, a bit of local rock-scene gossip. Anything really, and after 10 minutes, he’d be the person I’d always known. Then we’d play guitar together: his new songs and mine, which built a world we’d then shape, record and send out to those who loved or liked what we did. It was the 10th album we were shooting for. We were just two months into it, eight songs written, when he died.”
Robert found fragments for ‘Demon Days’, ‘Let Your Light In, Babe’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy’ in the notebook, and he finished and recorded them for his new solo album, The Evangelist. “The reason The Evangelist exists is partly due to my determination to record ‘Demon Days’ and bring it to the world,” Robert wrote. “There were other great songs he had, two of which I took for the album. Our collaboration went on after his passing in that he had not finished the lyrics to any of those three songs. ‘Demon Days’ was the most complete, with a chorus and five lines written of the first verse; the other two songs, ‘Let Your Light In, Babe’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy‘, had chorus lyrics only. ‘For Let Your Light In‘, I constructed a narrative that had come to me after reading a 19th-century poem of erotic romance set in a church. ‘It Ain’t Easy’ was harder to write. I settled on a portrait of him, something detailed that played off against the quick pop feel of the melody. I wrote eight verses before I hit one that started ‘And a river ran, and a train ran, and a dream ran through everything that he did‘. I liked this. So I started the song with it.”
Robert went to London with Glenn Thompson and Adele Pickvance, who’d been in the last line-up of the Go Betweens, and recorded The Evangelist in the same studio where their previous album, Oceans Away, had been recorded in 2005. “That decision worked,” wrote Robert. “We recorded together knowing a piece was missing, but that we were all happy working together on the thing that happened after the piece went missing. Grant’s ghost was there, but there weren’t too many sad moments. Process, and the day-to-day work that goes into making an album, robbed us of too much reflection. His amp was set up and a guitar of his stood on a stand. We all had to work a bit faster because Grant’s turn to sing or play never came around. Through it all, though, we knew we were honouring him by making a great record in a place that he knew.”
When Grant had first played ‘Demon Days’ to Robert he mentioned asking Audrey Riley, who’d done the string arrangements for the fourth Go Betweens album, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, recorded in 1985. “Three of the quartet (including Audrey) had played on Liberty Belle 22 years ago. Circles were being completed. Grant had been close and then far away through the recording. As we heard the gorgeous flowing lines that Audrey had written, at that moment, bows on strings, strings on wood, he was right there in the room.”
U2: Art and Technology
April 20, 2008
In its praise of U2’s 3D movie The New York Times review spoke of the “multiple planes of information” in the movie: a combination of shots of the audience with high definition surveillance cameras, monster-size projections of the band members, digital artworks and light sequences. Encoded into these planes seems to be fragments of the history of the moving image and allusions to the creation myths of the digital age.
”The State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson’s own writing about the ‘Spiral Jetty’ and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebith, rot and permanence. The sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,” said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. “He didn’t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.”
Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.
In the “Vertigo” video the spirals collapse in what looks like an inverted telescopic lens from a camera.
William Gibson reviewed the Vancouver and Seattle shows on the Vertigo tour for Wired. He wrote that the screens behind the band are “12,000 individual spheres of the LED backdrop: daisy-chained pixel units that have unreeled from above while the chaff storm distracted us. Hanging behind and to either side of the band, these seven curtains can be retracted and lowered as needed, throughout the performance. They have a soft, slightly slinky, nicely organic look as they descend, the individual strands suggesting the bioluminescence of deep-sea fish.” Sprockets run along the bottom of the screen directly behind the band, giving the impression of being a frame from a piece of film. The buffalos from the cover of the Greatest Hits album and the “One” video move on this simulacrum of old-fashioned film like a film-motion study by Edward Muybridge, who was an early user of multiple cameras to capture motion. He also invented a zoopraxiscope that projected motion pictures earlier than the celluloid film strip.
Edward Muybridge Buffalo footage
U2 video for “One”
The buffalo image for the “One” video was taken from a still by artist David Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992).
Buffalo Falling by David Wojnarowicz
A characteristic of Julian Opie’s work is that he reduces details on humans to abstract graphics: a dash across a circle to stand in for a head and its facial features, and he represents ordinary human activities – the walking sequence that appears behind the band while they perform “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own“.
Run Wrake’s movie Run Rabbit is a gory story reminiscent of the horrors of Grimm’s Folk Tales. A young girl and boy capture a rabbit and kill and skin it to make a muff, but they discover a guru in it’s belly. The story ends badly and is a cautionary tale about the consequences of greed. His inspiration was picture cards for children with words written on them, from the Dick and Jane educational series.
In the book of interviews, U2 by U2, Bono talks about finding the image COEXIST. “A friend of mine, Emily B.,” he said, “had stumbled upon this piece of graffiti, COEXIST, with the Islamic moon as the C, the Star of David as the X and the Christian cross as the T. It turns out that it was the brainchild of a Polish artist, Piotor Mlodozeniec. It seemed such a powerful symbol of tolerance.”
Photo by Isc-Hernandez at Flickr.
Bono also has it written on a revolutionary warrior-style headband.
Photo by M3iLI55@ at Flickr
The human elements of the concert play against the technology. While Julian Opie’s nondescript man trundles along Bono has taken off his glasses to sing the song he wrote for his father and sang at his funeral. But he doesn’t make eye contact with the camera, remaining downcast and privately grieving as he sings of being unable to make a connection with his father while he was alive. The radioactive green ectoplasm of the warmth emitted by living objects through night vision glasses begins a battle song, and fighter planes are seen flying low across the screen. But Bono sings beside Larry Mullen playing a stand up drum like the drummer boy from a military band. The combination of traditional human elements and technology is powerfully affecting. But it’s just as effective in low tech. The National Theatre of Scotland showed night-battle footage on a small low-resolution television screen and marched to regimental martial music played by a bagpiper. A few centuries of war imagery were compressed into a few symbols and tore at your heart.
The movie was released by National Geographic using technology that’s mostly been used for nature movies. A trailer for a 3D version of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth preceded U23D. In Paris in the Twentieth Century, written at the turn of the twentieth century,
Verne predicted many of the technologies we’re now living with, and many of their negative social effects. But his epic novels, and those of H. G. Wells, were known as “scientific romances”. While Wells was sending humankind into space and backwards and forwards through time, Verne was making symbolic journeys into the centre of the earth and below the ocean. Dr. Robert Ballard is an explorer-in-residence with National Geographic and is most famous for finding the ship-wreck of The Titanic. His branch of technology is telepresence, sending his robots deep into the ocean where humans can’t physically go, and monitoring them, now over the internet, at a distance. He’s brought up close to the action through the images the robots send to him. The images he’s sent from the submersible robots can be accessed in 3D. “Well, basically, when you’re working closely with a wreck, it’s very easy to get entangled,” he said. “It’s very easy to get in trouble. So the Voyager the Perry Tritech submersible, had stereo eyes provided by NASA Ames. And with this vehicle system you could put on your stereo glasses and all of a sudden you could see in three dimensions, which made it possible to navigate through the wreckage. And it was just like the difference between having one or two eyes. You see depth perception, which is very important in dangerous settings. It made it infinitely easy to manoeuvere.”
Video footage from Robert Ballard's return to the Titanic in 2004, twenty years after he discovered the wreck.
Every journey outwards is also a journey inwards, as Verne suggested, and Dr Ballard was inspired by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as he was growing up. He’s also been inspired by Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey, being curious and open-hearted enough to go into unexplored spiritual territory. He quotes Campbell saying life is an act of becoming, we never arrive.
Ken Goldberg is an artist and scientist who also works in the field of telepresence. He created the first telerobotic art project on the internet, which was a series of artefacts from Journey to the Centre of the Earth buried in a sandbox. People could operate a blower over the internet to blow sand away from the objects, and then try to identify them in a forum. His next project was the Telegarden, a robot arm that could be controlled over the internet to plant seeds, water, and weed a garden plot. Many of his other projects also have a direct connection to land art. Mori is a monitoring of the seismic activity of the Hayward Fault that runs under San Francisco turned into sound and organised into a form of music. For the hundredth anniversary of the 1904 earthquake in San Francisco a principal dancer from the San Francisco Ballet improvised a dance in real-time to the sound from the fault.
Mori Installation. Ken Goldberg, Artwork.
Other, more recent projects, look at the implications of surveillance technology. One mimicking John Baldessari’s bubbles of colour obscuring the faces of people in photographs with live surveillance footage. And a robotic camera intended to be set in remote areas for researchers to monitor wildlife collaboratively from their separate universities, was set up on the back deck of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s house at the edge of the Sutro Forest in San Francisco and a community of users identified birds caught on the video footage.
In concert U2 uses surveillance camera footage, described by William Gibson in his Wired review.
Willie Williams is this show’s Man Behind the Curtain. Everyone tells me I have to see him, especially his collection of screengrabs from the remote-control surveillance cameras he’s built into the Vertigo node to provide images for the giant scrim screens. … From Yorkshire by way of London punk, he met U2 in 1982, and the rest is entertainment history. His innovations have become industry standard. His cameras, he tells me, are capable of picking out eyelashes – in the dark.
“It’s only about a week ago that I’ve started doing this,” says Williams modestly as we watch a slide show of gorgeously lo-res surveillance stills on his PowerBook. “I’m trying not to be self-conscious about it. To begin with I was just playing, really. And they’re quite difficult to control with a little PlayStation set, but that’s all part of the joy of it. I’m trying not to overthink it.” He had a PlayStation handset modified to allow him to control a number of small, infrared, black-and-white cameras, originally intending to use them to obtain covert imagery of the crowd, which he then mixes for display on the various screens above the stage. Mind you don’t pick your nose at a U2 concert. Williams quickly discovered that his cameras offered him extraordinary views of the band in performance, and he’s been happily collecting these at every show. “It’s a great way of involving the audience. The physical nature of the set uses the fact that the audience wants to be part of the show.”
Reminding him of his punk past, I ask where he sees this sort of technology going. “What I’m enjoying,” Williams tells me, “is that the technology is becoming affordable enough that younger bands are interested in doing something with it. At the end of the ’90s, the live-music industry was dividing. There was the large-show, big-ticket nostalgia bands, the Eagles or whatever, but it wasn’t anything to do with a rock show. That was where the production values were. The younger bands had no interest. Starting with Radiohead, though, I’m now seeing younger bands who are interested in the technology and where it can go. It’s part of their language, really.” He smiles. “When you’ve got cell phones that can make movies, it’s suddenly not so gauche to put some energy into your visual presentation.” Williams leans back in his chair and grins. “We’re thinking of webcasting concerts through U2.com, but part of the deal would be that subscribers could only watch us if we can watch them, through their home webcams, and then we’d all get to watch those images ”
U2 Virtually Real in 3D
April 20, 2008
U2 at the screening of their 3D movie at Sundance. Photo by MyBono at Flickr.
At the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century I wrote a magazine article about the launch of the Next computer, which Steve Jobs created while he was briefly exiled from Apple. It was a phenomenally powerful machine which anticipated the silky, dense imagery-driven capabilities of today’s computers. It was expensive and pitched to the thinkers, poets, mathematicians and artists creating and researching within universities. Steve Jobs had positioned the computer as another artist’s tool, that a new generation of aspiring Michelangelo’s might use to re-tell the timeless stories that our cultures are built upon. The article was illustrated with a detail from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco where God reaches out and sparks life in Adam who is reaching out to him, but in this instance Adam‘s hand is emerging from the Next computer screen.
That illustration came to mind when I went to see the U2 digital 3D concert movie this week and Bono reached out his hand, seeming so present and alive in front of me that I reflexively reached out my own hand to him. This is William Gibson’s vision of virtual reality completely realised, an additional layer of experience that naturally melds with your material existence. The digital 3D movie was shot on the South American leg of U2’s Vertigo tour. William Gibson wrote about the Seattle and Vancouver concerts of that tour in Wired.
“My wife and I stand in Seattle’s Key Arena, noses level with the lower swoop of what U2 calls the Ellipse, the elevated stage loop the band traverses in performance. We’re here because U2 is the early 21st century’s biggest – and arguably most technologically innovative – touring group, the one that continues to define and redefine the spectacle that is arena rock. For more than a decade, they’ve been driving both the technology and the form of the megatour while providing huge audiences with a powerful yet intricately managed sense of intimacy.”
William Gibson. U2’s City of Blinding Lights: 12,000 daisy-chained LEDs. Spycams controlled bya PlayStation. The Vertigo tour is a monster concert machine – and the ultimate rock-and-roll R&D lab.
The band’s conceptual mastery of the technology and the movie’s polish made the 3D effect seem natural and inevitable and instantly familiar. Gibson asked The Edge about the technological artworks displayed during the concerts and the band’s collaboration with artists. “It’s a co-op,” replied The Edge. “It’s finding like-minded people who have something to contribute. Ever since ZooTV, we’ve found people who’ve got stuff, and we go delving through their collection of images. But in the end, all of the imagery is there to underscore what the music is already saying. It’s a way to shed light from another angle.” One form of light they deal with is spiritual, and the Christian symbols in Bono’s lyrics are given a context, in 3D, that makes it apparent that the songs are animated with the same kind of urge to ponder the human relationship with God that underpins religious art, with an intimacy that’s profoundly new.
In the same week I saw excerpts from the video imagery that Bill Viola created for the staging ofWagner’Tristan and Isolde by the L.A. Philharmonic, and I heard him speak at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Bill Viola talked about developing as an artist while video technology was also developing, that he studied engineering alongside art in order to have a hand in creating the tools he needed to realize his vision. With high definition video he said he now feels that he has a full palette of tools. He showed an excerpt from his new work, Ocean Without a Shore. A black and white surveillance video camera from the 1970’s filmed people walking towards an invisible wall of water. As the actors broke through the wall (a laminar flow that takes three days to calibrate) they became ultra-real, shot in the kind of high-definition digital colour video cameras that George Lucas shoots movies with. The work ponders the way that the dead, or how they remain spiritually with us, ebbs and flows.
Bill Viola said of the exquisite, lifelike detail in Northern European Renaissance painting, “that’s HD.” We can now take technology for granted and see the common spirit in works created in different media, in different ages, and we can concentrate on the experience of the works. Bill Viola’s parents have died in the last few years and he recalled being at a gallery and standing in front of a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary and beginning to weep. He wasn’t an artist considering the technique and materials and concept of an artwork but a human being taking his cares and troubles to Mother Mary, he said. U2 are unavoidable but I’ve never really paid close attention to them, and in the few days since I’ve seen the movie I’ve looked up videos of their songs on YouTube. Bono has performed new lyrics he’s written for Ave Maria, alongside Luciano Pavarotti singing the traditional, ancient hymn-version. Bono takes his cares and troubles to Mother Mary. “Where is the justice in this world,” he asks her. “The wicked make so much noise, Mother. The righteous stay oddly still. With no wisdom all the riches in the world leave us poor tonight.”
It’s taken all of this endlessly perfect digital technology to remind us how human the members of U2 are. In the regular world their technological inventiveness can seem tricky and trendy self-promotion. But this says more about marketing than U2. Recorded music has always had a dual identity, singles and albums played on radio and music videos are simultaneously artworks and advertisements for the artworks. In William Gibson’s twenty-first century novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, the prime villain is Hubertus Bigend, the Belgian owner of a global advertising agency. He creates an ethically dubious form of viral marketing by having people in bars covertly recommend products during the course of normal conversations. And he tries to find a marketing advantage in he way that most inventive applications of new technologies are created by either artists or the military.
On the ZOO TV tour U2 played in front of television footage pulled in from satellite dishes they brought to the arenas with them. “We’ve spent a crazy time dissecting TV and adverts to make a parody of the chaos they cause,” Bono said at the time. “The irony is that ZOO TV has now been taken over by the advertising world and at the moment there are three or four international campaigns inspired by what we did.”
U2 seem sincere, close-up in 3D, in a way that minimizes the marketing aspect. They can seem bombastic and cartoonishly oversize in the regular world, but within the infinite vista and scalelessness of the digital realm, in 3D, are just life size. “Saint” Bono’s concerns, that can seem self-aggrandizing and overwrought in their global scope, within the digital world, with its natural tendency to create links and form clusters is heartfelt, inclusive and far-sighted. In 3D why they write their music becomes apparent. They were once four young men growing up in a country torn apart by war and terrorism, where the symbols of love and peace, from the Bible, had been turned into the instruments of war. It seems remarkable that armed with only drums, guitar and voice they dreamed of making those symbols stand for peace again.
The larger than life symbol in the concert is the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr. In 2004 King’s widow Coretta Scott King, acknowledged Bono’s humanitarian work.
At the event, Bono became emotional as he discussed the impact Dr. King had on him growing up in Ireland during that country’s civil war, according to the Associated Press. He said, “We despaired for the lack of vision of the kind Dr. King gave to people in the South,” and added that he wrote the 1984 hit “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” based on King’s teachings. Bono also said, “When Dr. King spoke about having a dream, he wasn’t just talking about an American dream. It can be an African dream, an Irish dream. That’s why I’m excited to be here.”
U2 performs “Pride” in Brazil, on the Vertigo tour.
US Senator Barack Obama, campaigning to become President, uses U2’s song “City of Blinding Lights” in his appearances. It’s not a stirring anthem but a quiet musing about the alienating quality of contemporary urban life. It presents uncertainty. He made a speech at the groundbreaking ceremony for a memorial to Dr King in 2006 that dwelt on triumphing over uncertainty and flaws.
By his own accounts, he was a man frequently racked with doubt, a man not without flaws, a man who, like Moses before him, more than once questioned why he had been chosen for so arduous a task – the task of leading a people to freedom, the task of healing the festering wounds of a nation’s original sin.
And yet lead a nation he did. Through words he gave voice to the voiceless. Through deeds he gave courage to the faint of heart. By dint of vision, and determination, and most of all faith in the redeeming power of love, he endured the humiliation of arrest, the loneliness of a prison cell, the constant threats to his life, until he finally inspired a nation to transform itself, and begin to live up to the meaning of its creed.
Like Moses before him, he would never live to see the Promised Land. But from the mountain top, he pointed the way for us – a land no longer torn asunder with racial hatred and ethnic strife, a land that measured itself by how it treats the least of these, a land in which strength is defined not simply by the capacity to wage war but by the determination to forge peace – a land in which all of God’s children might come together in a spirit of brotherhood.
We have not yet arrived at this longed for place. For all the progress we have made, there are times when the land of our dreams recedes from us – when we are lost, wandering spirits, content with our suspicions and our angers, our long-held grudges and petty disputes, our frantic diversions and tribal allegiances.
Filming the movie at concerts in Buenos Aires, Santiago, Mexico City and Sao Paulo emphasized the connection U2 feels to those who are struggling, worldwide. The South American countries have fiery and exuberant, warm cultures, Bono said, that he identifies with. And, like Ireland, these countries have experienced the furious passion of religious conflicts, terrorism, war and poverty. I was surprised to read a description of religions as “spiritual technologies” in Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, a study of the age in which the compassionate responses of Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism developed in a savage and violent world. But in William Gibson’s science fiction novels of the twentieth century, those who pursue the magical new technologies in hope of attaining power, immortality and riches seem limited and lacking in character, while the seemingly less fortunate characters have an inner dimension, unquestioningly linking up older spiritual systems with new technologies. Christian motifs already intermingled with Cuban voodoo, co-exist with synthetic realities. In Buddhism all is illusory. The wholly digital Japanese Idoru evokes the practical mysticism of Tibetan Buddhists, seeing nothing contradictory in believing in seemingly arcane magic but willingly adapting and giving up beliefs if science proves them untenable. The Latin cultures already have a form of virtual reality that requires no digital equipment, in the magical realism of their literature. In an interview I read with Gabriel Garcia Marquez he said that the realism in his novels isn’t “magical” but that all of the fantastic events in One Hundred Years of Solitude are absolutely real.
“It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination….[The tone] was based on the way my Grandmother used to tell her stories. She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness. “
Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Paris Review.
Towards the end of the movie the digital effects appear to be suffering from vertigo, slogans, then individual words, then just letters, in English and Spanish, rushing then subsiding until the band is alone onstage. There is no heart-stopping finale that induces euphoria, just something that’s more in line with the resolute calm that I experienced at the end of hearing the Dalai Lama speak (as a human being, not within a religious ceremony) at a crammed sports arena in Melbourne.
When I came out of the cinema Keanu Reeves was arriving for the premiere of his new James Ellroy police drama, Street Kings, in the same cinema complex. The actual, flesh-and-blood Keanu Reeves seemed less real than the digital Bono. People pushed and shoved behind the barricade of a shabby red carpet, to take photos of him with their mobile phones. It was a diminished and tacky approximation of the old-fashioned heady glamour that the ritual of a premiere is supposed to invoke. The closeness and warmth of 3D redefines intimacy. We no longer need to parade the actual human beings in front of the film in order to feel a genuine connection to them. As Neo in The Matrix Keanu Reeves questioned the nature of reality and human life experience. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote that The Matrix “spoke to an old nightmare. The basic conceit of The Matrix – the notion that the material world is a malevolent delusion, designed by the forces of evil with the purpose of keeping people in a state of slavery, has a history. It is most famous as the belief for which the medieval Christian sect known as the Cathars fought and died, and in great numbers too. The Cathars were sure that the material world was a phantasm created by Satan, and that Jesus of Nazareth – their Neo – had shown mankind a way beyond that matrix by standing outside it and seeing through it. The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.”
Lights go down, it’s dark
The jungle in your head
A feeling is so much stronger than a thought
Your eyes are wide
And though your soul
It can’t be bought
Your mind can wander
Hello hello
I’m at a place called Vertigo
It’s everything I wish I didn’t know
Except you give me something I can feel, feel
The night is full of holes
As bullets rip the sky
Of ink with gold
They twinkle as the
Boys play rock and roll
U2 Vertigo
Love of the Common People.
February 9, 2008
All of us are born explorers. From the very beginning, as infants and young children, we are a curious species of animal. We observe, reach for, and question everything around us. Many of us carry throughout our lives a series of fundamental questions we seek to answer. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? When we consider the intricate patterns of life on earth – how everything connects with everything else – our questioning becomes all inclusive. Where did the earth, and the life forms on it come from? Where are we going?
Dr. Robert Ballard
Thirteen years ago I mailed Nick a letter that described how I’d begun to recognise symbols from ancient Greek and Roman myths in his songs. I gave it a heading: The Love Songs of Nick Cave. The mythological symbols identified even his darkest, bloodiest songs as love songs for all of humanity, grappling with love as agape, a selfless love of others. It wasn’t yet fashionable to call them love songs. At that time The Murder Ballads album was newly released and Nick was recording the spare, crystalline outlines of the songs for The Boatman’s Call album (which he sent me on cassette).
I was beginning to delve deeply into Buddhism at the time, and the songs on the cassette – those that appeared on The Boatman’s Call and those that emerged later, on the B-Sides and Rarities set – made reference to The Gospel of Thomas, a Christian scripture discovered in 1945 that has parallels with the Buddha’s teachings of inner divinity and a sense of personal responsibility. Elaine Pagels opens her study of The Gospel of Thomas with a quote from the video artist, Bill Viola: ‘It’s an invisible world out there, and we’re living in it.’
I carried around Nick’s songs on my Walkman and they operated as a field guide to this invisible world, through them I could recognise the spirit alive (or not) in the people of the city. When I reached for the words to describe something inexpressible, frequently those words were from Nick’s songs. For instance, young, affluent men in trendy business suits holding fistfuls of hip techno-devices who were sitting on Melbourne’s free City Circle tram, looked straight through a disabled man struggling and lurching as he tried to swing his crutches and himself onto the tram. ‘But watch the one falling in the street,’ Nick sang in ‘As I Sat Sadly By Her Side’. ‘See him gesture to his neighbours. See him trampled beneath their feet.’
And I comprehended the title of the Let Love In album when I saw a blind man with his guide dog busking on Swanston Street in Melbourne. He played a voluptuous acoustic Spanish guitar and wore two hearing aids. His singing had a distant quality, as if he were remembering the music rather than hearing it as he played. His music was magnificently sad, reminiscent of Portuguese fado ballads. At the end of the Eagles song, ‘Desperado‘, after he’d sung the lines ‘you’d better let somebody love you, before it’s too late’ he reached around and stroked the muzzle of his guide dog. It occurred to me that to ‘let love in’ is to be humble enough, to strip away one’s defences enough, to accept love.
I gain insights from Nick’s songs in the same way that he gathers the insights to write them, by bringing them into the life of the city. He drives around, without destination, just listening, soaking in the world around him. I first heard the new Bad Seeds album Dig, Lazarus Dig!!! while Nick was in Sydney for the Grinderman tour in October of 2007, driving around Sydney’s inner city and North Shore with him, along the harbour, on a cool, clear Monday morning. The sounds of the city are in the dazzling beauty of the musical arrangements of the album: temple bells clanking like heavy machinery and a sensual groove, sunshine reflected from the surfaces of buildings and water turned into sound.
Lazarus digs the dark, funky underworld of New York City in the 1970’s. Maybe he’s buying branded ‘blue magic’ heroin supplied by the drug lord from Ridley Scott’s new movie American Gangster, who has it shipped from Vietnam in military coffins with the bodies of soldiers returning home. Lazarus experiences the spiritual sugar-rush of San Francisco in the aftermath of the summer of love. Joan Didion chronicled this time but while readers saw the era’s treacly reaching for peace and love, baby, she was writing about the absence of a core myth to guide people. She saw the coming of an apocalypse that WB Yeats had alluded to in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ in 1919. ’Anarchy has been ‘loosed upon the world’ and ‘the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ Nick’s itinerary for Lazarus includes Los Angeles, probably at the time that Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys crossed paths with Charles Manson. Lazarus may have been in Los Angeles when a musician from a band making music that sounded like sunshine itself crossed paths with a murderous figure with a messiah complex. This allusion is mystifying: are you referring to the Bad Seeds? Please clarify! Lazarus may be brought back from the dead but he isn’t reborn. He falls on hard times, becomes homeless, goes mad and becomes violent. Read the rest of this entry »
Love Songs for the 21st Century
January 28, 2008
Lou Reed performing Berlin, with a children’s choir, in Manchester.
SYDNEY: January 2007.
Bill Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?
Joseph Campbell: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
Bill Moyers: And you’d find?
Joseph Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilised society.
Bill Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. I think of that passage in the first book of Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers
The main event the Sydney Festival this year was Lou Reed performing his Berlin album in a theatrical setting, directed by and with a set by painter and film-maker Julian Schnabel and atmospheric videos by Schnabel’s daughter, Lola, with some of the band he made the album with in 1973, and a children’s choir mixed with the unsettling otherworldly beauty of the voice of Antony that’s pitched somewhere beyond human and not quite angelic. The Sydney Festival had helped put the show together with St. Ann’s Warehouse, in New York, where it premiered.
Lou Reed’s album “Berlin,” a song cycle about a romance doomed by drugs, promiscuity and violence, was one of his career’s grand anomalies when it was released in 1973. Instead of the stripped-down rock that made punk archetypes of Mr. Reed’s best-known songs, the sound of “Berlin” was not primal but theatrical, with strings and horns and touches of cabaret. The album was either dismissed as pretentious and overwrought or hailed for its ambition; it didn’t sell, but it garnered some lifelong fans. After 33 years, it had its first staged performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Thursday night. There, “Berlin” was less startling but no less ambitious or, in the end, touching. …
Mr. Reed wasn’t revisiting his songs as oldies or artifacts; he was reinhabiting them….The core of “Berlin” is the contrast between feelings — love, anger, grief — and the numbness of pills, casual sex and depression. Caroline and Jim, the couple whose story takes place in Berlin, are not particularly sympathetic, even among the many lowlife characters who have populated Mr. Reed’s songs before and since. She toys with him and sleeps around, growing so cool and withdrawn that “her friends call her Alaska.” He’s a speed freak who beats her black and blue. Eventually, after their children are taken from Caroline as an unfit mother, she commits suicide. In the concluding “Sad Song,” Jim shrugs, “I’m gonna stop wastin’ my time/Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.” …
But the lyrics wonder, “How do you think it feels?,” and the music answers. At first, there are sarcastically upbeat horns and swaggering guitars; later, as things spiral downhill, it is pared down to unadorned guitar or piano and a voice that, in Mr. Reed’s deceptive deadpan, sounds as if it’s choking back all its rage and sorrow. In “The Bed,” which recalls Caroline’s suicide, the pure voices of a children’s choir float in to join the singer as he muses, “Oh, oh, oh, what a feeling,” and linger after he’s done in ghostly, wordless swoops of dissonance that met a stunned silence at St. Ann’s.
Jon Pareles. New York Times. December 16, 2006
Rosanne Cash. family photograhphs from her website.
Also at the Sydney Festival was Rosanne Cash’s staging of her Black Cadillac album, which travels across a landscape of grief. It too was incubated at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Rosanne Cash’s stepmother, June Carter Cash, died in May of 2003 then her father, Johnny Cash, four months later. In May of 2005 her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, died. (During that time an aunt and a stepsister also died.) The first song she wrote after her father died was God is in the Roses. During a conversation on National Public Radio Scott Simon said, “There are some wonderful lines in here but the one that I think is going to stop a lot of hearts is ‘they’re falling like petals’…” A rose is at its most beautiful when it’s fully open, the petals completely unfurled, just before the flower dies. Rosanne Cash lost a whole generation at once, all of the petals falling from the stem. “It’s an odd feeling,” she said to Scott Simon, “to become the wall between death and the generation behind you and your children.”
When Ms. Cash was making her album Black Cadillac (Capitol), she ended up thinking not just about them, but also about the long line of her family and a musical heritage that reaches back through country to Celtic music. On Thursday night at St. Ann’s Warehouse, she introduced Black Cadillac in Concert, a performance interspersed with video and ostensibly narration. It looked back to William Cash, a Scottish sailor who came to the United States in 1653; there were recurring images of rivers and oceans. And it dipped into a list of 100 essential country songs her father made for her. With video images of waves overhead, her recorded voice said, “I am at the congruence of sea and dirt, and it becomes a song.” What could have been pretentious was calmly moving….
From her father’s list, she chose the Don Gibson hit “Sea of Heartbreak,” revealing both the plain-spoken sadness and the stoicism. The kinship with her own songs was in the directness, not the twang. She finished the concert with her father’s “Big River,” introducing it as “another water song.” Her father had brought wry amusement to its tale of chasing an unforgettable woman who was always a few cities ahead of him. But when Ms. Cash sang “Big River,” pursuing “that man” instead of “that woman,” she found both the humor and something else her father had written in: the loss of someone truly gone, never to return.
Jon Pareles. New York Times. May 6, 2006
The whole Sydney Festival was embraced by the city and was the most successful on record, the shows sold out, the free events attracted huge crowds. The Festival’s director, Fergus Linehan, said “it broke through to a broader consciousness; the overall event just seemed to be really well loved, people were almost affectionate towards it”. The sorrow and pain and suffering in Lou Reed’s and Rosanne Cash’s performances were received exultantly by the audiences. It was clear that Lou Reed wasn’t being ironic, ten years ago or perhaps more, when in an introduction to a book of his lyrics he described his songs as “compassionate”. His songs are so devoid of opinion and judgement and sentiment that we can see the whole world, how these people were shaped by their circumstances and we can ’suffer with’ them. The Sydney Festival programme quotes David Bowie saying, “He supplied us with the street and landscape. And we peopled it.” In Rosanne Cash’s concert the redemptive quality of sadness became evident, that it’s through sadness we appreciate the fleeting beauty of life and can value it more. “Loss is cumulative,” she writes on her website. “But so is poetry, and art, and faith, and Love. I know now that what survives of my parents, what is truly mine, are their best qualities, which I am free to adopt, and the accumulation of their millions of acts of service to me.”
The Sydney Festival has been instrumental in recognising that a generation of rock musicians, now mature, is engaging the world and the community, and that their music deserves a reflective hearing: something that brings out its symbolism, not treating it as prose or a verb, not treating it as a barely disguised narration of actual events in a performer’s life. The Sydney Festival also presents how dance relates differently to the music being made by these performers, that it’s through dance (or the ritual movement in some abstract theatre pieces) that the symbolic qualities of the music are most clearly and profoundly evident. The Sydney Festival had a great number of dance performances this year: two of them, Zero Degrees by Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, and our brief eternity by The Holy Body Tattoo, from dancers who create powerful collaborations with rock and roll musicians and bring the music fully alive not by acting out a story but showing how our movements, how we move through life, marks us and affects the communities we live in.
The Holy Body Tattoo’s our brief eternity, with pounding musical noise by Jean Yves Theriault that is immersive and inescapable (like the sounds that surround us in cities). It’s a question about compassion framed by the test in Bladerunner that suggests that robots can intellectually appreciate the notion of compassion, but in their eyes it shows that they can’t really feel the emotion. The people in our brief eternity are driven by machines and their movements become machine-like. A ritual bow of respect becomes rote and stripped of meaning by speeding it up and repeating it over-and-over. The question is answered in a text by the science fiction writer William Gibson and Christopher Halcrow, which finds human qualities re-asserting themselves. The text begins and circles around to end with: ‘Somehow, continue:”
Zero Degrees
Zero Degrees is the point where states that are each other’s polar opposite meet. The programme lists ‘birth/death, light/dark, chaos/order’. The music is by the sublime Nitin Sawhney whose own albums are assembled from the meeting points between many different cultures and traditions, ancient and contemporary.
In Zero Degrees he combines cello and violin with the Brazilian surdo drum and the voice of Pakistani-trained Faheem Mazhar. It narrates a train journey from Bangladesh to Calcutta, in which Akram Khan’s dancer is harassed by border guards and finds himself sharing a carriage with a corpse. The piece premiered last year only days after 7/7, the day of the London bombings. “It seemed incredibly in tune with the times,” Sawhney says. “There was the resonance of a dead person on the train, and the growing paranoia that people are quick to exploit. It’s a given that we should be protective of national borders. But why? I’m more interested in humanity than nationality.”
Nitin Sawhney interviewed in The Guardian. April 1, 2006
Nitin Sawhney’s album Beyond Skin exists in the same territory as Zero Degrees. The album stands creation and destruction next to one another, and peace and war, and harmony and social unrest. It begins with a fragment of archival audio, India’s Prime Minister, the leader of a nation that developed Buddhism — an enduring spiritual system stressing non-violence — announcing that it’s conducted tests of a nuclear bomb. The album closes with the leader of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Hindu Scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, in response to the first successful test of an atomic bomb: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
There’s no simple way to encapsulate what these musicians are doing. Their musical styles are too various, the themes of their music too broad and diverse. The most useful way to group them is by intent: their music is partly the general definition of folk music as being ‘by and for the common people.’ It’s easier to say what this music isn’t. Although it beats with a similar heart it isn’t the same as the concerts that have grouped musicians together in response to cataclysms: George Harrison’s Bangladesh, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid, Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid, Al Gore’s recently announced Live Earth, a global twenty four hour concert to be staged in July. And it isn’t sympathy for issues, the concerns of the non-musical humanitarian projects of celebrity musicians for debt relief in third world countries or to prevent A.I.D.S. It isn’t essays of a situation: Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, a portrait of the Vietnam War and the state of the world at that time, or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s re-interpretation of that album in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devestation of New Orleans.
What’s different in the symbolic rock and roll is the scale of the topic — everyday, ordinary moments in life that are the same whether you are a globally famous rock and roll musician or a poor citizen of a besieged nation — and the scale and position of the musicians, who depict themselves standing among people, beside them, with them, not as figures whose celebrity have them looming larger than the population as a focus and a rallying point. Of Black Cadillac Rosanne Cash said, “My hope is that people bring their own lives to it, that they’re not just hung up on the back story.” The song that draws the perspective for this symbolic music is Nick Cave’s As I Sat Sadly By Her Side. It seems like one of those Renaissance perspective judging devices. The co-ordinates given are universal, as though we’re viewing the song from the position that the Apollo 8 astronauts had, looking back at the earth and seeing one world, undivided. The song is a conversation between a man and a woman, God and humanity, Nick and himself, Nick and his audience, as each of these figures sits beside one another, describing what they see out in the world and in their own hearts. The song has the rhythm of a strong heartbeat and advocates not looking and thinking and talking about the world, but moving out into the world, walking among people.
Collectively the music of Nick Cave, and Lou Reed, and Rosanne Cash, and Nitin Sawhney, and those who share their perspective, addresses the spirit and has some of the beauty of the group of voices speaking in the common language of the day that made the King James Edition of the Bible, when spoken aloud, such glorious music. Nick Cave and Lou Reed have both used gospel gospel choirs at recent concerts and this is an especially powerful symbol.
Gospel music bears witness to extreme human suffering but the response to this suffering isn’t despair and devestation, souls are inevitably lifted up, as the voices are raised up in praise, the eyes are lifted up towards the Heavens. There is ultimately hope. The double album that Nick Cave made with a gospel choir, The Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus, has a blossom on the cover, being pollinated by a bird, seen from the vantage of point of someone who is looking up toward the sky.
Nick Cave’s double album Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus is a two part question on the origin of beauty in music. Is it the outcome of a pact made with the devil, a transaction conducted at a deserted back road intersection on a moonless midnight (the moon is a symbol for the death and resurrection of Christ)? Or a gift from the Gods, the lyre given to Orpheus and the supernatural power of his music to move inanimate objects, soothe savage beasts and to reverse death? The answer is neither. The language of the albums is a communal one, gospel, a music that is an acknowledgement of the pain and darkness in life itself, that finds solace in love: love of god, love of others. A kind of love, Dr. Martin Luther King said, that causes you to love even those whose deeds one hates. “You’ve got to love.”The imagery of springtime is in many of the songs on these double albums, but it’s not the outside world, I think, that Nick’s describing. It’s not as though we’ve suddenly reversed the climate change and flowers bloom again. It’s a flowering of hope in the heart that acknowledges suffering and finds beauty in small communal acts.
I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don’t look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said, that in the end it is beauty
That is going to save the world, nowNature Boy. Nick Cave
There are no deliberate links between the works of these artists, they just live in the same world, see the same things, question their consciences in ways that line up with one another. A mature artist’s work is inflected to the community and the examination of the community strengthens their work. So the addition of the works of painters, guest musicians, films, in a stage setting, and being part of a festival deepens the appreciation of the works in the way that being a lone focus wouldn’t.
The Cast of Came So Far For Beauty on the steps of the Sydney Opera House.
It was the Sydney Festival’s staging of Came So Far For Beauty in 2005, an appreciation of the songs of Leonard Cohen by a generation of singers and songwriters who’d been inspired by him, that set the ball rolling. The show was produced by Hal Willner, whose albums of interpretations of music by Nino Rota, Thelonious Monk, Harold Arlen, Charles Mingus, and classic Disney Themes re-interpret the standards and bring them alive for a new generation. So many rock and roll musicians in such an intelligent setting, within a sharp arts festival was galvanizing, for the musicians and the audience. It’s only the field of criticism that hasn’t caught on and begun appreciating this mature form of rock and roll music.
Rock and roll was born out of youthful rebellion. There are great numbers of bands and individuals who refuse to grow up, who live in a state of arrested development, perpetually in their early twenties, and another set of bands and individuals reforming or relaunching their careers, in their fifties, to reclaim the success and glory they experienced in their twenties. This has nothing to do with the mature rock and roll artist, whose references have become symbolic and need to be enlivened by the listeners in their own lives, but the music media insists on reading these songs as prose, as literal autobiography rather than as poetry, metaphors. There’s little to be gained, any more, by interviewing musicians and trying to pin autobiographical details onto parts of their songs, by trying to find a thread that links the wildness of youth to the bruised wisdom of the adult. There’s little wonder Nick Cave, though polite, is cold and impatient in interviews, little wonder that Lou Reed loses his temper.
There’s value in hearing an artist talk about their personal reactions to the state of the world: Rosanne Cash collects stories and details that expand our appreciation of their songs.
It’s been a hard summer, all around. The conflict abroad mimics the conflict in my own heart. And vice versa. But what do I have the power to heal, what is within my control? I meditate every single day, and every single day I say, “I surrender my will to the will of the Absolute”. And then I go out and try to inflict my will on every damn thing I cross. Those stones I fill with my heartaches and toss in the ocean come back, as meteors. But. Something is shifting. I feel it. Aren’t you sick to death of waste and misery, violence, hatred and UN-Love?
Rosanne Cash, on her website, August 2, 2006
What the Sydney Festival has done is weave individual voices together, into a conversation.
Tiger Lillies in Melbourne
June 3, 2007
Eindhoven (Sep 05) – The Tiger Lillies, Photograph by Tim George. See his photographs here, on Flickr.
“What I do is against the mainstream in many respects; against daytime TV and the mindless blandity of contemporary, mainstream culture that doesn’t confront issues in any kind of way. It’s all beautiful healthy young people smiling and selling products. It’s all fake. I try and confront things with humour and intelligence, irony and sadness – I’m just trying to look at things and talk about them in interesting ways. I don’t want to have to limit myself to singing about how beautiful this girl is, and what a great pair of tits, or eyes . . .”
Martyn Jacques from the Tiger Lillies, quoted in The Age, February 7, 2007.
Another story from the Age asked him for his definition of happiness.
“To live unattached from all things and in harmony with them.”
On a hellishly hot Saturday night in Melbourne a week ago, the Tiger Lillies performed at the North Melbourne Town Hall. Most of the room was set with tables to sketch the illusion of a cabaret. At 7.30 p.m a shabby crowd wandered in wearing shorts and t-shirts, gardening clothes, what they might have worn to the cricket. They drank beer from bottles. And the Tiger Lillies cast a spell: it became a glamorous, illicit midnight world, created with clarity and precision. It seems perverse to ascribe subtlety and beauty and an aching affection, bordering on sweetness, for the downtrodden to the Tiger Lillies because mostly what’s written about them seems to be a garish sketch of their colourful surfaces, a catalogue of the perversions they list, and a census of the communities that they chronicle, all outcasts and losers and itinerants: pirates, freaks, circus folk. The press is literal, as if the writers believe that the Tiger Lillies really ARE pirates and vagabonds and circus performers who personally practise the perversities they sing of. The press page of the Tiger Lillies website acknowledges this cultivating of surfaces: there’s a list of articles that’s a “convenient collection for busy press people,” and even a page of quick quotes of “praise and damnation.”
The first words of praise are from Alex Kapranos, the singer from Franz Ferdinand,
There is nothing else like them. Any description of them is an injustice – they are completely peerless. – Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand
Alex Kapranos’ book Sound Bites, a collection of essays about places he’s eaten and people he’s met, are illuminating and entertaining observations of the world: “Whether it’s munching donuts with cops in Brooklyn, swallowing bull’s balls with the band in Buenos Aires or queuing for a saveloy in South Shields, these are surprising and vivid snapshots. Funny, poignant, sickening or sexual, depending on the situation.”
“I don’t know how many times Prague has been invaded,” he writes, “but tonight it seems to have been invaded by wankers: British wankers, German wankers, North African wankers and American wankers. A tourist in his early 20s is explaining to another tourist in her early 20s that he is not a tourist: he is a ‘traveller’. They have a tourist map spread on the cafe table in front of them, by the English translation of the menu. He is saying that his experience is richer. He looks, smells and acts like a tourist. I don’t get it.”
“I’m a tourist,” Kapranos continues. “I tour the world. I don’t feel I have to excuse myself.”
Alex Kapranos interviewed at World Hum.com
The Tiger Lillies are constantly in motion too, constantly travelling.
The second item of praise on the list begins “This delicious dark cabaret is Kurt Weill as …” I’m out of my depth writing about theatre and the politically-inflected European musical theatre of the 1920’s and the 1930’s. I feel qualified to write about the Marx Brothers, and I will, but there’s an obvious point to be made: Bertolt Brecht, and his Threepenny Opera, written and staged in Germany just after the end of the First World War, is something the Tiger Lillies constantly refer to. Music writers cite this in their articles as if it’s just another band name, Kurt Weill is just another pop star (a golden oldie, perhaps, but a hitmaker in his day) and the cabaret was just another gig in a rough part of town. The entertainment articles footnote these things unquestioningly. One of the factors that led me to abandon music writing very early on in my career is that I never knew what to make of band names: I was too earnest about finding meaning in them. Google Franz Ferdinand and the Austrian duke whose assassination set in place a chain of events that triggered World War I comes fifth in a list behind websites and citations for the Scottish pop band that’s named for him. But the world in the aftermath of the war following the death of the original Franz Ferdinand is the time when Brecht wrote his Threepenny Opera, an adaptation of the Beggars Opera from 1728, dragging a high art into the street and roughing it up. Read enough of the quick bites for journalists on the Tiger Lillies site and the references are as strongly stressed as if they were flashing on a billboard behind the band. It isn’t enough to note the words (as if they were just decorative and shorn of meaning, as English words sometimes are on t-shirts in Japan). At a site devoted to the history of the Threepenny Opera the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan says “It sets reality to music” and Bob Dylan says “I was aroused straightaway by the raw intensity of the songs.”
By showing with biting humor what the world would be like if it were inhabited by crooks and hypocrites, The Threepenny Opera does more good than all the dreams of noble souls.
—Kurt Weill, from a letter to Lotte Lenya, May 11, 1945Just like two hundred years ago we have a social order in which virtually all levels, albeit in a wide variety of ways, pay respect to moral principles not by leading a moral life but by living off morality. —Bertolt Brecht quoted in an article in Augsburger Neueste Nachrichten, January 9, 1929
Everything about the Tiger Lillies has the appearance of being carefully composed, there isn’t a superfluous gesture, no halting banter, the exclamation marks and props and sound effects and little bits of pantomimery – the clown’s traditional bag of rude tricks – are obvious and well-timed: Yet all of this adds up to a snapshot of the world, as it really is, scrubbed of make-up and without artifice, that could break your heart. The show in Melbourne began with a call to the audience to roll up for the circus, but it was as if the Tiger Lillies music was holding up an enormous mirror pointed at the audience, and reflecting back what it saw there, the animal acts and lewd longings were reportage by the Tiger Lillies, not descriptions of their own activities. The audience laughed at the Tiger Lillies songs and were really laughing at themselves: the court jester was the one who could tell the King the truth without losing his head.
Many of the Tiger Lillies Circus songs do double duty as part of the soundtrack to Circa, a tango-based dance performance that the Tiger Lillies performed with The Holy Body Tattoo.
A celebration of the sensual forces of submission and control. Circa is imbued with the dark beauty of decay and the (unspoken) language of desire. Saturated with smoky tango and cabaret debauchery, it is a raw duet evocative of the tangled rituals of foreplay, unfulfilled desires embraced, the imprints of old lives, and a shadowy yet uncompromising eroticism.
The Holy Body Tattoo website.
Circa is a latin term for an imprecise measuring of a period of time: marked perhaps more by something symbolic, attitudes and philosophies rather than specific events that can be reliably fixed on a calendar. Projected through the performance are images of Paris, where the tango expressed the political unrest and turbulence of Argentina in the 1950’s, and the artform that had emerged from the brothels in Beunos Aires to become a glamorous global phenomenon descended back into the brothels and became marginal, and hidden again.
And then he [Thomas Mann] says, “The writer must be true to truth.” And that’s a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting — the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called “erotic irony,” the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.
The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell.
The Circus Songs and Circa feature a version of Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns. In circus lore the when there’s an accident or disaster the clowns are sent in to distract the audience. In actual circuses the song may also have been used to alert people backstage to the injury of a performer. In the Circus Songs Pretty Lisa is tattooed head-to-toe by her pimp so that he can hit her and the bruises won’t show. When the Tiger Lillies play beauty straight, without the distraction of comedy, and without the colourful images that hide the bruises it’s almost unbearably painful. The second half of the Tiger Lillies performance in Melbourne began with a few quiet songs that Martyn Jacques played on the piano, lilting and slow and crystalline on the surface and bruised underneath, that reminded me of the collaborations between Billie Holiday and Lester Young.
Her bluesy vocal style brought a slow and rough quality to the jazz standards that were often upbeat and light. This combination made for poignant and distinctive renditions of songs that were already standards. By slowing the tone with emotive vocals that reset the timing and rhythm, she added a new dimension to jazz singing. With John Hammond’s support, Holiday spent much of the 1930s working with a range of great jazz musicians, including Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson, Duke Ellington, Ben Webster, and most importantly, the saxophonist Lester Young. Together, Young and Holiday would create some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time. They were close friends throughout their lives—giving each other their now-famous nicknames of “Lady Day” and the “Prez.” Sympathetic to Holiday’s unique style, Young helped her create music that would best highlight her unconventional talents. With songs like “This Year’s Kisses” and “Mean To Me,” the two composed a perfect collaboration.
It was not, however, until 1939, with her song “Strange Fruit,” that Holiday found her real audience. A deeply powerful song about lynching, “Strange Fruit” was a revelation in its disturbing and emotional condemnation of racism. Holiday’s voice could be both quiet and strong at the same time. Songs such as “God Bless the Child” and “Gloomy Sunday” expressed not only her undeniable talent, but her incredible pain as well. Due to constant racial attacks, Holiday had a difficult time touring and spent much of the 1940s working in New York. While her popularity was growing, Holiday’s personal life remained troubled. Though one of the highest paid performers of the time, much of her income went to pay for her serious drug addictions. Though plagued by health problems, bad relationships, and addiction, Holiday remained an unequaled performer.
American Masters. PBS Series.
A hush fell over the audience. Martyn Jacques stood up from the piano and shuffled over to the microphone, strapping on his accordion. He sang a rough, majestic song from the point of view of Heroin, the drug glorifying itself as a king and worshipful figure, revealing that the tragic figures the Tiger Lillies sing about may not be looking for entertainment and an adrenalin rush, for kicks, but just to deaden the pain. Buddhism begins with the premise that all life is suffering and the way to alleviate that suffering is to recognise the suffering of others, to suffer with them, and to alleviate pain where we can. Where there’s no compassion the only way to live with pain may be to dull it, the Tiger Lillies’ presentation of the beguiling sensuality of Heroin’s lure was possibly the most shocking and disturbing part of their show.
Their adaptation of some bits of literary flotsam and jetsam by Edward Gorey who was inspired by Victoriana, set to music with the Kronos Quartet, illustrates what happens when sensuality is denied and demonised as it was in Victorian times. “Moral Puritanism can screw things up” Alex Kapranos said about British food. “Britain‘s cuisine was ruined by the Victorians and their uptight sense of protestant guilt when encountering anything vaguely sensual, including food that tasted stronger than potatoes that had been boiled for six hours.”
Imagine what it was like for Gorey to try to put himself over before he’d become the macabre sensation he is today. Consider the reaction of Robert Gottlieb — then at Simon & Schuster and later the editor of the New Yorker — when Gorey’s agent presented him with “The Loathsome Couple,” a tale based on the story of a British couple who murdered several children, only to be caught when they dropped photographs depicting their handiwork on a crowded bus. (The book’s frontispiece declares, “This book may prove to be its author’s most unpleasant ever.”) Gottlieb rejected the book on the grounds that it wasn’t funny. An astonished Gorey replied, “Well, Bob, it wasn’t supposed to be funny; what a peculiar reaction.”
But, of course, “The Loathsome Couple” is hysterically funny. You will be forgiven for finding the juxtaposition of child murders with helpless laughter outrageously blasphemous. The humor in this story comes from the sheer blandness of it all. Mona and Harold, the hapless villains, move from their dismal childhoods to dismal adulthoods of petty crime, to an unsuccessful union (they “fumble with each other in a cold woodshed” after a crime film, and when they attempt to make love, their “strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing”) to embarking on their “life’s work” — luring small children to their deaths in a rented “remote and undesirable villa.” To celebrate their first kill, Harold and Mona dine on “cornflakes and treacle, turnip sandwiches and artificial grape soda.”
The problem would persist throughout Gorey’s career. Is he writing humor? Are dead people funny? Maybe it’s literature: Gorey’s prose reads by turns like haiku, or Dadaist automatic writing, and employs more words from the OED than Joyce’s does. But his books are illustrated, recalling the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Georges Barbier and Goya. Does that make it art? And they’re small, borrowing the nonsense of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, coupled with the grim infanticides of the Brothers Grimm. Could they be books for children?
Edward Gorey Interview. Salon.com
The Tiger Lillies are true and respectful to the theatrical and musical traditions they spring from but what they are also part of is a mature branch of rock and roll that’s keeping mythological symbols alive and re-interpreting them for our time. These musicians — a group that includes Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Rosanne Cash, Bruce Springsteen — use sadness in a way that’s interpreted too literally by the music press, and the full spectrum of sadness, its redemptive quality, and how it’s only through understanding sadness that we can appreciate happiness, isn’t remarked upon. The Tiger Lillies have the opposite problem: comedy and comic touches in music is perhaps even more misunderstood than sadness, more easily dismissed and its sad touches, the value of the fury and savage deeds that the Tiger Lillies so amusingly portray, isn’t assessed, isn’t something we recognise as a reflection of something inside all of us. The Tiger Lillies are heroes.
“The hero’s journey isn’t to deny reason. To the contrary, by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolises our ability to control the irrational savage within us.” Campbell had lamented on other occasions our failure “to admit within ourselves the carnivorous, lecherous fever” that is endemic to human nature. Now he was describing the hero’s journey not as a courageous act but as a life lived in self-discovery. Ironically, to Campbell the end of the hero’s journey is not the aggrandizement of the hero. “It is,” he said in one of his lectures, “not to identify oneself with any of the figures or powers experienced. The Indian yogi, striving for release, identifies himself with the Light and never returns. But no one with a will to the service of others would permit himself such an escape. The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.” One of hte many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.
The Power of Myth. Bill Moyers with Joseph Campbell.
