I came late to Laurie Anderson, but I started listening to her, I listened with a vengeance.
I chilled to the ha-ha-ha-ha of ‘O Superman’, smirked at the line Put your hands on your head/Put your hands on your hips, chanted along with her chants, stretched my neck out and sighed at her serious absurdities. I used lyrics from three of her songs to head up chapters to my dissertation.
Un-hip-ily, my favorite cd is her most accessible, Strange Angels, mainly because of two songs: ‘The Dream Before’ and ‘Ramon’. The first introduced me to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history:
She said, What is History?
He said, History is an angel
Being blown backwards the future
She sung this lightly, sadly. The image isn’t her’s—it’s Benjamin’s—but in this song, it’s her’s, all the same.
Lyrics from ‘Ramon’ made it into my dissertation, a song so odd and, yes, sad and right to the point of it all:
So when you see a man who’s broken
Pick him up and carry him
And when you see a woman who’s broken
Put her all into your arms
Cause we don’t know where we come from
We don’t know what we are
I used this for the last chapter, trying to come up with some way to make sense of what I had just done in trying to make sense of our biology and our technology and our existence, and this lyric, in all its uncertain and unknowing wisdom, seemed to make more sense than everything else.
I don’t always live up to this—I almost never live up to this—but this still seems to make more sense than almost everything else.
~~~
10. Laurie Anderson, Big Science
11. Laurie Anderson, Strange Angels
12. Laurie Anderson, Bright Red
C. told me to rip all of my cds before I got rid of them. If I got rid of them.
I don’t know that I would.
I understand the reason—it’s the same reason that I’m filing away the bibliographic info on all of the printed out scholarly articles I’m going to toss: don’t lose what you have—but there’s something. . . satisfying about an irrevocable purge.
I had tapes of my favorite albums, but I didn’t rush to tape everything else before I got rid of my vinyl. (And I got rid of almost all of my tapes when I left for Montreal.) No, my attitude was what’s done is done, and no use hangin’ on just to hang on. No point in fetishizing the past.
I do that, fetishize objects—most obviously, my books. It’s damned near impossible not to imbue objects which deliver meaning with meaning themselves, and as long as the deliveries retain that meaning, I”m not too worried about my affection for the objects. But when the possession itself becomes the point, well, that’s when I need to rethink matters.
There were a few people who tried to talk me out of getting rid of the albums, certain that I was throwing away irreplaceable treasure (i.e., vinyl), but as I told them: I have a shitty stereo system and I hate it when the needle skips, and I see no particular worth in having to turn the album over after 20 or 25 minutes. Besides, I didn’t really listen to this stuff anymore.
That was the real reason to get rid of the albums: These were singers and groups I’d listened to since I started collecting albums, and my tastes had changed. There were a few albums that I replaced with cds—by Rickie Lee Jones, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, B52’s, Violent Femmes— but most of them? Nope. Done. Goodbye.
I don’t regret it.
Of course, if I really wanted to, I could find clips of those bygone songs online, but I’m fine with leaving them all behind. When something ends, it’s good to let it end.
I had a moment, in some cases, a long moment, with those albums, and those moments don’t matter any less just because they’re over. This is something to which I am slowly reconciling myself, that something can happen for the time being, and that being in time may be enough, may have to be enough.
I don’t know whether this particular musical moment is over—that’s the purpose of this listen-through, to find out—but if I’m no longer moved, there’s no point in pretending otherwise.
But I’d like it not to be. I’d like still to be moved.
~~~
Listened to thus far:
*Joe Acker, The Times and Places of Love
Afro Celt Sound System, Volume 2: Release
Air, Moon Safari
Air, 10,000 Hz Legend
Akufen, My Way
Luther Allison, Blue Streak
Altan, The Blue Idol
Tori Amos, Under the Pink
Tori Amos, Strange Little Girls
*Joe was one of the aforementioned downstairs neighbors who decided to shed the jewel cases. He and his wife Tara were great neighbors, early on kindly letting me use their shower when mine went on the fritz. We got to know one another hanging out in the yard with their amazing dog Gracie, and then hanging out in their apartment. They gave me a key to their place so I could take Gracie out during the day or let her out at night if they were getting home late. We lost track of one another some time after they moved out—last I heard, Tara was pregnant with their first kid—but they remain one of my few good memories of Somerville.
And yes, the cd is nice, too. Joe and Tara (who was learning mandolin) were deeply interested in Americana music, and invited me to listen in when they invited friends-with-strings over to play old-timey tunes, but the cd hews closer to the singer/songwriter folk/rock style, which well-display Joe’s meticulous guitar skills and honey-warm voice.
Eight hundred? Nine hundred? Somewhere thereabouts. Not as many as true obsessive, but, y’know, plenty.
I almost never listen to them.
Oh, I used to, oh yeah, all the time. In grad school I had a cheapo mini-system on to which I could load 7 cds and let ‘er ride. Music accompanied my descent into and out of depression (multiple times), and one of my preps for dissertation-writing was picking out the cds which would take me from, say, 8pm-2am.
I was never much for 45s, but when I hit junior high I started hitting Helen Gallagher’s (the requisite black-light/poster/music shop which dotted small-town malls way back when) for albums. I asked for Foreigner for Christmas and my best friend J. and I listened to her brother’s REO Speedwagon live album (DOOT doot doodlo-doot) over and over again. D. and I would sit in her brother’s bedroom and listen to Pink Floyd and AC/DC (Bon Scott era), and in a junior high art class I carved a KISS sculpture out of a bar of soap.
It was pretty much hard and classic rock all through high school (93 QXM? QFM? out of Milwaukee)—a lot Who, AC/DC (Brian Johnson, this time), Led Zep, Yes,Rush,Loverboy—as well as my aforementioned beloved Supertramp, and then, when MTV hit, what was then called alternative music (mainly British post-punk bands).
I bought albums at Helen Gallagher, I bought albums up and down State Street in Madison. I bought albums at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis. And then when I decided to run away from grad school, I decided to sell all of my albums.
I bought cds instead.
I had just a few (20? 30?) when I hied on out to Albuquerque, maybe double or triple that when I slunk back to Minneapolis, where I was a regular at the Electric Fetus as well as a few other dusty shops in the Whittier neighborhood. I bought punk and post-punk and new wave and jazz and soundtracks and classical and electronica, then expanded into funky new-wave Nordic music and dub and neo-soul and soul and 1960s-era American and European singers and a few blues cds. I hauled boxes and boxes and boxes with me to Montreal, then set out to buy even more.
I ended up buying hundreds and hundreds of cds in the shops along Mont Royal and St Denis and Peel—but this was due in no small part to my apartment having been burglarized my first Thanksgiving in the city. Hundreds of those cds were replacements, but hundreds more were music which was recommended to me by music clerks and friends and stuff I’d heard on the McGill and U of Montreal radio stations and read about in the alt weeklies. I picked up Daniel Boulanger and Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sam Roberts and Athena knows how many chill cds.
I listened to it all.
My cd-buying fell off when I moved to Somerville, in part due to my reduced financial circumstances, but I still hit up shops in Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston, adding both replacement and new stuff. I had so damned many cds that they overflowed my (generous) storage; I followed my downstairs-neighbors’ lead and took them all out of their jewel cases and just kept them in their sleeves in boxes.
Which is how I transported them to New York. I bought a few cds here, but the urge to survey the scene fell off and never returned: my desire for music had always been abstain-or-binge, but for the past few years I simply haven’t been interested.
It’s not even that cd shops are scarce: there are still plenty o’ joints in the East and West Villages where I could score tunes if I wanted, and, of course, I could always download stuff. Nor is it that I hate all new music: I think Lady Gaga has fine set of pipes and I’m charmed by Adele and and Janelle Monae is somethin’ else and I’ll hear bits on WNYC or in stores and think Oh, that’s nice.
But the urgency, the need, to own music is gone. I don’t even bother buying music by acts I already know I like—Emmylou and Beth Orton and GY!BE—much less feel that I have to make any effort to find something new.
C. has said that there really is nothing new out there, and I think she may have a point. Some of the newer stuff I like sounds a lot like the music I listened to in the 1980s, so why not just listen to the old stuff? The one genre in which I have bought stuff is classical and (a very few cds of) opera, and that because it is all new to me.
It’s not bad that my enthusiasm has waned—more money for books!—but it is a loss. I loved music, loved listening to it and thinking about it and searching it out and sharing it and dancing to it and everything everything everything. I’ve lost something I loved.
So, I have a plan. I’m going to listen to every cd I own, in (rough genre-and-alphabetical) order, to re-acquaint myself with the sounds that once so moved me.
I’m not trying to recapture my youth (hah!) or somehow go back in time, but given how much this all once mattered, it’s worth it to see if I can recover or rediscover what was once there.
If not, if it’s gone, then I’ll let it go, I’ll let it all go.
But I don’t think it’s gone. I think I just need to crouch down and put my face close and gently blow those fading chords back to life.
President Obama’s campaign playlist is out; it is, unsurprisingly, unexciting.
I’ve already made known that were I ever to run for office, my campaign theme would be “Life During Wartime”—This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco/This ain’t no fooling around—which may go a long way toward explaining why I will never be elected to anything.
More fun than coming up with campaign song-lists, however, is considering anti-campaign songs: all those tunes which would doom any possibility of election.
Some suggestions:
Radiohead, “Creep”
Beck, “Loser”
Beth Orton, “Devil Is My Angel”
REM, “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”
Talking Heads, “Road to Nowhere”
Talking Heads, “Psycho Killer”
Be Good Tanyas (Townes Van Zandt): “Waiting Around to Die”
Mission of Burma, “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver”
Velvet Underground, “Heroin”
Bjork, “Army of Me”
Birthday Party, “Release the Bats”
Any song by Serge Gainsbourg
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry” (Terrifying. . .)
Smiths, “Unhappy Birthday”
Wilco, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”
Butthole Surfers, “Pepper”
Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”
Bob Marley, “I Shot the Sheriff”
Thee Headcoatees, “Don’t Want to Hold Your Hand”
Bruce Cockburn, “If I Had A Rocket Launcher”
Loretta Lynn, “The Pill” (Sigh. . . )
B-52’s, “Dance This Mess Around”
B-52’s, “Hot Pants Explosion” (Just because)
Dead Kennedys, “Let’s Lynch the Landlord”
Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn”
Rolling Stones, “Shattered”
Semisonic, “Closing Time”
X, “See How We Are”
X, “Hungry Wolf”
XTC, “Dear God”
Sam Roberts, “Where Have All the Good People Gone”
Christine Fellows, “Roadkill”
Violent Femmes, “Kiss Off”
This could go on and on—feel free to drop your own suggestions.
Anyway, it would be awesome if someone were willing to use any of these songs—now that person would be someone I’d want to have a beer with.
Yeah, I was thinkin’ that I had the song title wrong on the last post. Knew it was a Sam Roberts gig, but couldn’t quite get the right name (and was too lazy to get up and check my cds).
As I was falling asleep last night, the right name came to me.
Roberts is a Montrealer, and I first encountered him, duh, when I lived in Montreal. Saw one of his shows at a bar just east of downtown. Very energetic, very smoky.
This is one of my favorite song of his:
This is the other one:
(And check out his official YouTube site; for some reason, I couldn’t post his vids—where you can really see his sense of humor—from there.)
What can I say: scruffy stoner Canadian boys with a sense of humor do it for me.
I am not now nor have I ever been a politician, but yes, I do have a song I’d use—I’d ask permission first—to accompany me on my Quixotic tilt at the windmills:
Really, is there a more perfect song for running for office?
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.
We want bread and roses, too!
Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
Okay, so that last slogan may not have been associated with radical or revolutionary politics, but it should have. And while Free your mind and your ass will follow! could be read as a somber observation of the necessity of intellectual development in one’s liberation, set it to a beat with a thumpin’ bass and you get the right spirit.
Anyway, this is prompted by a New Yorker blog post by Sasha Frere-Jones on music and culture critic Ellen Willis. I’d heard of her—read encomiums to her upon her death—but hadn’t been much moved to read more about or by her.
I should read more of her.
Frere-Jones offers this excerpt of some emails by Willis’s friend Karen Durbin:
Ellen was that wondrous creature, an intellectual who deeply valued sensuality, which is why she wrote with such insight about rock and roll but also with such love. She respected the sensual; in a fundamentally puritanical culture, she honored it. She saw how it could be a path to transcendence and liberation, especially for women, who, when we came out into the world in the early to midsixties, were relentlessly sexualized and just as relentlessly shamed. Rock and roll broke that chain: it was the place where we could be sexual and ecstatic about it. Our lives were saved by that fine, fine music, and that’s a fact. [emph. added]
I’ve been lamenting the left’s failures to offer any alternatives to our current deracinated culture—capitalism is flattening us into consumptive nothingness—without doing much beyond, well, lamenting.
But here’s a clue for us: remember the pleasure of liberation, remember that pleasure can itself liberate.
Here’s Richard Goldstein on Willis (also quoted by Frere-Jones):
Ellen was, more than anything, a liberationist. She taught me that gay liberation was an “epiphenomenon” of feminism, and that’s something I still believe. Finally, she believed that for any leftist agenda to succeed it has to be based on pleasure, on realizing desire. This is a lesson the left has largely forgotten; indeed, the right has appropriated it, though they use social sadism the way we used orgiastic ecstasy. Ellen would surely agree that we won’t see a revival of revolutionary sentiment until we learn to make it fun. In that respect, Ellen, Emma Goldman, and Abbie Hoffman are part of a lost tradition—radicals of desire. [emph. added]
I’m much better and winnowing down than opening up, much better with distance and critique and despair blah blah, and, for the most part, I’m okay with the distance and the critique and the despair and the blah blah.
But it’s not enough, not for me personally and certainly not for any truly radical politics. If we are to have a human politics, then we have to begin with us, as humans—in our mess and despair and failures and blah blah and in our pleasure and amusement and joy and ecstasy.
Okay, so I”m a little uncomfortable with the ecstasy, but I can certainly get behind humor and dancing and ever more laughter. And while I’m also uncomfortable with my own desires, I have to admit that I have not been improved by my suppression of them.
So let’s bring it back, the mess and the desire and everything else—not as a problem, but as a given.
That stutter of chords, fanning out across the guitar strings, repeated, then a side-step into another flutter of chords. And now, that high reed of a voice. . . no.
A cover.
Strangely, I was disappointed. I didn’t particularly want to hear the song, but if Planet Fitness radio is going to play it, then play the real goddamned thing.
Faux Supertramp is unacceptable.
Not that I can listen to the real Supertramp, but at least with Roger and the boys, I know what I’m getting.
(I have no idea about the images, but this is the only actual Supertramp version I could find in my, uh, 3 minutes of searching YouTube.)
I sometimes listen to vids after I post them—I watched the Lena Horne interview a couple of times—but I won’t listen to this.
Takes me back. . . to where I don’t particularly care to go.
My older sister brought home Even in the Quietest Moments some time before I was in junior high, and by eighth grade I almost certainly listened to that album more than she did. ‘Give a Little Bit’ opened up side 1, and side 2 ended with the long mashup that is ‘Fool’s Overture’.
I loved it, beginning to end, unreservedly and unashamedly. When Breakfast in America and the double-live Paris came out I scooped those up, then went back and sussed out Crisis? What Crisis?, Crime of the Century, Indelibly Stamped, and their eponymous debut. (The latter two didn’t get much time on my turntable, and Stamped, which featured a naked woman’s tattooed torso embarrassed my teenaged self.) I stayed with them through Famous Last Words—Roger Hodgson’s last gig with the band, but didn’t let up until I was in college, and knew that Brother Where You Bound was the last Supertramp album I would ever buy.
Six years of intense devotion; it wasn’t a bad run.
I almost certainly still listened to them in college, but I don’t really remember that. And when I sold or gave away my albums prior to my 1993 desert sojourn, I knew that I would never own Supertramp in cd form.
I’m no longer embarrassed by women’s breasts (which, given my ownership of a pair, is probably a good thing), and even all these years later, when I don’t want to listen to one Supertramp song and two is out of the question, I can’t quite be embarrassed by my former ardor, either.
I was just about to write something snarky about the band, but, honestly, I can’t. You can, if you like—there is much eye-rolling to be done when it comes to Supertramp—but given how much I loved them, how they carried me out of my childhood and angsted right along with me in my teenaged years, it seems like bad faith for me to slag on them now.
I don’t love them now, but I did, once, and even if—or, perhaps, because—I no longer love any band (or any thing) the way I loved Supertramp, it seems a kind of betrayal both to my young self and to that love to repudiate them.
They weren’t the only band I listened to, of course, and when MTV hit SmallTown in the early 80s, a whole genre of music which the album-oriented rock of the Milwaukee stations never played suddenly chipped its way into my consciousness: the Police, the B-52’s (back when they still had the apostrophe), the Eurythmics, the Call, the Fall, the Clash, the Jam and on and on. I didn’t like them all, but to have the world open beyond Kansas or Boston—well, MTV in the early days performed a public service to us SmallTown kids who didn’t live close enough to catch the college radio stations.
By the summer after my sophomore year I was slam-dancing to the Violent Femmes at the Peaches stage at Summerfest, and when the LP played their 3 song ‘alternative’ rotation of the B-52’s (Rock Lobster), the Femmes (Gone Daddy Gone) and Surf Punks (Shark Attack), I was out whipping my skinny little body around that almost-empty dance floor.
A slightly-older co-worker at the local health club introduced me to Pat Metheny, and my theatre buddies to Manhattan Transfer, Frank Sinatra, and anything else that wasn’t, well, album-oriented rock played out of the Milwaukee stations.
So while I took Supertramp with me to college, I was already heading away from the songs which cocooned me and toward those that smacked me in the face, upside the head, and out into the headwinds.
I haven’t missed them in the fifteen or twenty years since I stopped listening, and I don’t think I ever will.
But they were a part of me, and they’re at the heart of one of the best things anyone has ever done for me:
Supertramp’s final tour with Roger Hodgson stopped at Alpine Valley, a mass-seating concert venue somewhere west of Milwaukee. I couldn’t afford one of the few hundred reserved spots, but I damned sure made sure that we got as close in as general seating allowed.
(General seating: the stage at Alpine Valley was situated near the bottom of a hill; the reserved seats were covered, and rising behind them, a vast slope of green. You’d get to Alpine Valley early in the day, set out your blanket and cooler in line if wanted to be first-ish in, or just in the gravel parking lot if you wanted to, I don’t know, hang out near your car. At some point they’d announce they would shortly open the gates, at which point you grabbed your shit and scrambled up into the crowd—which would, inevitably, start mooing—and pressed and pressed until they opened the spigot and you popped through the turnstiles and ran as fast as you dared down the hill to claim a spot.)
We did pretty good getting far down the hill at the Supertramp show, but as I was as short then as I am now, when the crowd stood up for the first song, I couldn’t see a damned thing.
That’s when the best-thing happened: JK, who didn’t come with us and wasn’t a part of my regular crowd, came over to me. Get on my shoulders, she said.
What?
I know you love Supertramp. Get on my shoulders.
JK was not a big girl, but she was strong, and she hoisted me up and bounced with me through that whole opening song.
What a magnificent thing to offer someone who’s not, really, even your friend.
I don’t remember what the opener was, and I haven’t seen JK since high school graduation, but as long as I can remember her I will.
So, you see, to turn my back on Supertramp is to turn my back on that passion and is to turn my back on this great, good deed that JK did for me.
AbsurdBeats 