Listening deeply

 

While I was waiting for my appointment at the Apple Genius Bar factoids were flashed on screens. You could drive from New York to San Francisco twenty five times with a 32 gigabyte ipod and never hear the same song twice, one suggested. This made me incredibly sad. As time goes on I find the patina building up on certain songs, and albums, that hearing them often (though not carelessly, as the aural wallpaper that obliterates silence in almost every public space) is a powerful and wonderful experience. The songs sink more deeply into my soul. I’m finding that about a week’s worth of music, total, is as much as I have room for in my heart.

 

When I was driving around with Nick Cave in Sydney last year, listening to the new Bad Seeds album, DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! I talked about encountering his songs as they popped up in shuffle mode in my itunes library. He mentioned finding it distressing that albums aren’t listened to in their entirety, in the order that the artist intended, at least some of the time. I saw the “shuffle” phenomenon from his point of view and I’ve made it a point to listen more discerningly to records, to pay more attention. The first sample bibliostructure in my new range is an homage to Nick’s album Nocturama. The play count feature in itunes shows that in the two years I’ve had my computer I’ve listened to Nocturama and the Grinderman album all the way through more often than any other albums. (Nitin Sawhney’s Beyond Skin, Everybody Digs Bill Evans and Bruce Springsteen’s Devils and Dust and Magic are high on the list, too.)

“I have always regarded music with lyrics as a species of fiction.” William Gibson

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.”

More News From Nowhere

Q: You believe that there are areas where epic and tragic forms intersect?

Robert Fagles: Yes. I and others like to read the Iliad as the first tragedy we have.

Q: And the Odyssey as its comedic counterpart?

RF: Comedic, but not necessarily in the funny sense, though the poem has its sneezes, puns, and fools. Rather in Dante’s sense of a commedia, a struggle against adversity to reach a state of equilibrium and harmony.

Robert Fagles. Translator of Homer and Virgil.

Today I’m going to the Kings Cross library to borrow the Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s Odyssey.  He died in March of this year and the New York Times obituary attributed the success of his translations to the vividness of his writing. “While faithful to the spirit and intent of the original, his translations were remarkable for their narrative energy and verve. His “Iliad” and “Odyssey” had a Homeric swagger, said the poet Paul Muldoon, a colleague at Princeton, who also compared Mr. Fagles’s epic vision to that of film directors like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.”

There are references to the Odyssey running all the way through the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds single, “More News From Nowhere”, and I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve picked up enough of the highlights enough to recognise them in the song: The “friends in high places” might be the Gods who intervened to allow Odysseus to escape from the clutches of the “nubian princess” Calypso, who imprisoned Odysseus. Nick is tempted by sirens. There’s a detour into Hades. And Nick has already visited the Land of the Lotus Eaters in an earlier song on DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! He battles the Cyclops, blinds him, and escapes disguised in a sheepskin, telling the Cyclops that “nobody” has wounded him.

Timeless stories maintain their power by being retold in the language of each new generation. Nick’s Odyssey comes twelve years after the publication of the Robert Fagles translation. Fagles  “…was not an exactingly literal translator but rather one who sought to reinterpret the classics in a contemporary idiom,” said the New York Times. “He once compared his job to writing Braille for the blind, and said that he imagined in a generation or two that someone would have to come along and re-Braille it.” The Odyssey is being used today by an American psychologist to help soldiers readjust to civilian life after the psychological traumas they suffered in Iraq, but I wonder if Nick might be alluding to another aspect of the Odyssey. As a musician he spends much of his life on journeys away from his wife and sons and the refrain of “More News From Nowhere” is “don’t it make you want to get right on home.” Maybe it feels, sometimes, that Nick has been away so long that everyone gives him up for dead, but Nick’s wife and sons never give up on him and know he’ll always return. Robert Fagles described the Odyssey as  “… a poem about family values, and where families are of value, and the families don’t always get along so well. There’s a lot of irritation and abrasion, as well as deep affiliation and affection that finally wins out.” 

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Please read something for us.

ROBERT FAGLES: I’d love to. This is the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope after 20 years of warfaring and wayfaring. “He wept as he held the wife he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last. Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel when they catch sight of land. Poseidon has struck their well rigged ship on the open sea, with gale winds and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shores; their bodies crusted with salt, but buoyed up with joy as they planted their feet on solid ground again, spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her, the sight of her husband vivid in her gaze, that her white arms embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go.”

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It’s beautiful. What kind of problems did you face in translating this passage? And how were you different from other translators?

ROBERT FAGLES: I can’t quote the other translators, but I’ll tell you one problem that came to mind immediately. The line “would never for a moment let him go”–in Greek that’s opo pompon–which is an awkward kind of phrase. It means “not yet completely would she let him go.” And I wanted a phrase that could remind us that it took 20 years of longing for each other, and finally in one embrace, that one moment of embrace, their remarriage is sealed, and from it comes a kind of long life and, indeed, the longest kind of life because we’re still reading about these people. The sight of her husband vivid in her gaze, that her arms embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go. That’s just one of many.

There’s a book by William Morris called News From Nowhere. I know that the cover for the More News From Nowhere single is a schematic for an electronic sign by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, but the drawing looks a little like a map of a park to me, a natural domain, the territory of Morris’s book, rather than something electronic.

News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator, WIlliam Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

From Wikipedia

In his personal history of the communications revolution, Arthur C. Clarke noted that William Morris, who he described as “the leader of the romantic back-to-the-Middle-Ages revival” lived in a house that was once occupied by Sir Francis Ronald, the creator of a telegraphy system that pre-dated Samuel Morse’s. Morris “could hardly have felt a great deal of sympathy for an invention which was to do so much to sweep mankind into a strange and tumultuous future,” wrote Clarke.  

Digging Lazarus !!!

Nick Cave’s albums operate as a Zen paradox for me. As soon as I stop listening to them I start hearing them. Not the songs themselves, exactly, but the atmosphere of the songs. It will seem as if the world is illustrating Nick’s songs rather than the reverse. I’ve just submitted the final draft of an essay on the mythological symbols in his songs to Karen Welberry, who is co-editing a collection of studies of Nick’s songs that’s being published later this year by the academic publisher, Ashgate. I’d been working on it for twelve years, from the Let Love In album to DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! As soon as I hit ‘send’ on the document it felt as if the floor opened up and I was hurtled into Lazarus-world, that the essay was just beginning rather than finished.

Love of the Common People.

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.

Love Songs for the 21st Century

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, now

Nature 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.