BA DA BING

This is an article reprinted from Badaboom Gramaphone #4 by Ben Goldberg.

None will argue the vast influence of music writer Greil Marcus, as it can be seen by the many who have picked up on his particular style. His supreme ability to wrench and rip the historic, and histrionic, implications out of somebody screaming about wanting a good fuck are unsurpassed in out lifetime. What better a way to justify the hours you spent in your teens listening to the Sex Pistols than to see that you weren’t only participating in a cultural rite of youthful angst and rebellion, but you were actually contributing to an epochal process wherein our very intellectual hegemony is being questioned by laws far older than it and riddled for its pompous overconfidence?!? Well, it’s true, and what matters to you matters, in the grand you-are-the-center-of-everything sense of the word. Remember that senior hippie down the hall who always smoked up in his room, smelled like cheese, and blasted warped cassettes of Dead bootlegs and The Basement Tapes? It turns out he’s a damn prime participant in life as well, witnessing echoes of our ancestral voices as they resonate through our seemingly mundane activities! Marcus’ schtick is showing all of us that music holds a near central part in all concepts of humanity. It’s what gives us our purpose, and it’s from which our actions emanate. Music predicts our future and forces us to recognize the past. It’s not what the astronaut sees at the end of 2001 that stays with us – it’s what we heard while experiencing it with him. Life is short, music is eternal – hear hear!

But, wait, that’s not entirely it. You cant always decipher what important. That’s why we have critics, and hence why people in our culture celebrate Bruce Nauman and David Foster Wallace. Greil, in his infinite kindness, has done the hard part for you! Yes! You don’t need to search through millions of hours of recorded sounds to find the ones which spark with sublimity. Just pick up one of his books – you’ll find all the answers you need right there. Marvel at his regular Salon and Interview columns. One may be curious as to how our musical heritage comes to an apex within the span of two decades – the sixties and seventies – and begin to question why music had reached its most important point exactly during our Teacher’s formative years. Don’t be foolish! This isn’t science! This is truth! If it weren’t for the great writings of Greil Marcus, many youngsters (me included) would never have realized that The Situationists were proto-punks, or that folk rock died when Dylan plugged in electric at that festival. He provided the fodder for hundreds of writers to follow, like a germ of self-perpetuating brilliance coming to fruition in the wake of pages of copy to write and nothing to say.

Yet, something smells rotten in Berkeley, and the naked guy graduated years ago. Greil has gone off the figurative deep end and found it to be a narrowing spiral. What first was an admittedly innovative way to broadcast insight and pomposity has proven to be debilitating, for our hero has fallen to formulaic puffery. While books like Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces have extremely well-written historical passages and, nay say, even a few moments of musical clarity, compare them with anything he’s written in the past ten years. Pick up a copy of Interview, read his essay this month. Anybody who can explain to me exactly what the fuck he’s driving at wins a ten minute cocktail conversation with R’n’R Dean Robert Christgau (Terms: he will only talk to you about why the Backstreet Boys are actually awesome, thereby countering the coffee counter counterculture (!), and you aren’t allowed to mention any groups that have yet to appear on either MTV or in the Pazz & Jop Poll, because they aren’t yet relevant and not yet deserving of a 50 word “shotgun” review on his part and the pointless assigning of a grade.)

Marcus relies on his research, which involves picking out a history book, then reading the morning paper, and thereby comes off as resonant. To his credit, he has continued to champion underappreciated groups. Otherwise, his writing is largely empty. For the first time, you are going to be shown the secret recipe of how to write like Greil Marcus. It may seem daunting at first, but please remember, you are not going to be asked to wear a leather jacket, believe your own hype, nor pontificate more than necessary on The Mekons. Here are the ingredients:

A) Extremely well-respected musician/group (bonus points choice is from ‘60s or ‘70s, but a band that sounds like it could have been from then is okay as well – double your score if it’s Dylan)
B) Highly overlooked musician/group (should be at least twenty years separated from musician/group indicated above)
C) Recent news story/cultural reference
D) Historical event/cultural reference
E) One specific instant in extremely well-respected musician/group’s career which sums everything up (bonus point if non-musical)
F) One specific instant in highly overlooked musician/group’s career which sums everything up (same bonus).
G) Tautological fallacy (i.e. claiming how the ends result from the means because the means create the ends)
H) Don’t forget to use those italics and caps lock! Word processors have them for a reason!

That’s it! All that’s needed is combining these elements with new subjects and you’ve got a career! Hell, you’ve even got a list of bestselling books where the very extremely well-respected musicians you pucker up to like a Georgia O’Keefe flower to praise your work on your own book jacket! As if anybody even needed such justification!

Shall we play a game?

Directions: Below are a series of quotes. Some are actual lines from Greil Marcus essays. Others are made-up, utilizing the very simple method above (the numbers of the employed techniques, as listed above, are placed in parenthesis). Do you want to be respected by pop culture academics the world over who wish for godsakes that their students would at least once read the assigned Mark Crispin Miller reading and not go off on tangents as to the significance of the recent state of teen flicks? Do you crave a regular paycheck from a national publication for essays where a point is not the point? Read on with the following examples. Then, try some yourself. Answer are at the bottom of page 6.

See you in Spin!

1) “Nobody has any respect,” Dylan (A) shuddered in the midst of “Balled of a Thin Man” in Birmingham, the word shredding, as if it contained all the evil in the world and could not hold it, the crowd now flinching in its turn at what its rancor, what its hatred, what its bigotry had revealed. (E)

2) With the Ohio River cresting as I write, (C) it’s impossible to hear Palace’s ‘Ohio River Boat Song’ (B) without thinking of towns swept away, of death, loss, terror, and judgment; but in truth the music contains all that. The song knew about the flood in advance. (G) It had taken it fully into account. The singer is not surprised, but ready. As a set of words, the song is merely a lover’s lament, crude and implacable. The music grows louder and stronger, the flat tone of Oldham’s voice never varying, the melody never developing. But a body takes shape in the voice and in the melody, an enormous presence, either that of a demon or a god. Soon enough – too soon – the music, without quickening its pace, seems strong enough to bring the flood about, if that’s what it takes to wash away the singer’s pain or memory. (G)

3) The sense of age in the performance is displacing. It’s not as if the event is being recalled by an ancient witness; it is as if the event, as it happened, has made the witness old. (G) The actions described are all will, the performance is all fate, and the rest of “Ballads” follows its path.

4) Then, suddenly, Dylan (A) cocks his head left, pauses, waiting to deliver that last line, (E) and all the anticipation which led to the Watts Riots (C) stands immobilized by this moment. The crowd is silent, waiting for their salvation, knowing this is their recourse, holding out when it’s just too impossible to hold anymore. It’s as if they know what’s going to happen five days hence, and they are looking towards their prophet to tell them what will happen. (C) Dylan, having just pinpointed when America turned wrong, (E) looks out on his audience as if he were Roosevelt about to present the New Deal. (D) He shoots a gaze left, then delivers the line: “I aiiin’t goin’ to work on Maaaagie’s Farm no mooooooore!”

5) “New Wave” was a code word not for punk without shock, but for punk without meaning. Punk was not a musical genre; it was a moment in time that took shape as a language anticipating its own destruction, and thus sometimes seeking it, seeking the statement of what could be said with neither words nor chords. (E) It was not history. It was a chance to create ephemeral events that would serve as judgments on whatever came next, events that would judge all that followed wanting that too, was the meaning of no-future.

6) There was a change coming. It could be seen in Warren Beatty’s freezing body at the end of McCabe And Mrs. Miller, Warren Beatty’s McCabe sitting upright and attentive, like he’s trying to show up the chilling cold around him. (C) Change came in the form of Johnny Rotten. (A) “I’m not an animal!” he screams in “Bodies,” and it’s as if he’s shedding the very skin of his membership in the human race, disgusted with where it has been, where it is headed. (E) With Roe v Wade only a scant few years old in America, the fever was just getting warmed up towards what would be the defining political topic of the eighties. (C) Johnny Rotten forecasted this battle. You can hear it in his voice as he spits out that last word – “ANIMAL!!!” (H) He sees the ensuing battle and it turns viscous inside of him, filling his in-the-red rage to deeper levels. Rotten isn’t singing about the wire hangar as abortion device – he is the hangar, and he’s ready to scrape out the world’s guts. (G)

7) The emotion in the song is so deep, its reach so long, that it can remind you that a certain form of that republic was present almost from the beginning of the Old World experiment in what became the U.S.A. (D) In 1630, on board the Arbella, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, John Winthrop, already elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, addressed his fellow Puritans on what awaited them in the New World. “A Model of Christian Charity,” he called his brief lay sermon, along with Martin Luther King’s address to the March on Washington (C) the only American political speech that can be compared to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. (D) Like those that would follow, Winthrop’s talk was a prophecy of natural salvation and a warning of national damnation, though it was not a nation the Puritans thought they had left England to found, but a town.

8)In the song, the lust driving gory imagery takes seconds to get where David Cronenberg (C) couldn’t take Crash in more than an hour and a half; the constant high chant of “Oh-ah-ah-oh-oh” takes the place of a chorus, as if the Shangri-Las (A) have just shown up for the performance – or anyway the “long lost member of the Shangri-Las” who appears in Steve Erickson’s new novel The Sea Came In At Midnight, “expelled from the group before their first hit record for the one night she went down on an entire college fraternity.” (C) On The Avengers Died For Your Sins, (B) a 1978 performance of “Car Crash” sounds like Bill Pullman’s face looks as it breaks up in the last shots of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (C) – except that, there, saxophonist Fred Madison’s life is ending, and the people making “Car Crash,” you can feel certain, are just starting. (F)

9) Corin Tucker screams “I’M YOUR LITTLE, I’M YOUR LITTLE, I’M YOUR LITTLE GIRL/DON’T YOU WANT ME.” (B, F, H) An entire generation of women scream along with her, embittered by having to read Lolita in school from the Humbert Humbert’s perspective, (F) disgusted by Amy Fischer being seen as temptress, (C) reviling Clarence Thomas and the subsequent character assassination of Anita Hill. (C) Tucker was born into a world that scares her, and, like an inversion of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, (C) she’s striking back a thousand fold.

10) If Buñuel had damned those who found his movie beautiful or poetic when it was fundamentally a call to murder, much of the twentieth-century has taken up with attempt to prove that the beautiful, the poetic, and the call to murder are all of a piece (D) – and in the last seconds of “Holidays in the Sun,” Johnny Rotten (A) seemed to understand this. His incessant shout of “I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS BIT AT ALL!” (H) as the song headed to a close may have been his way of saying so, of saying that he didn’t want to understand it: (E) his way of saying that when he looked into the void of the century, he found the void looking back. (G)

11) When Fishtail Morton (B) was younger, before he ever met Harry Smith or played guitar, he knew the prejudice. The prejudice followed him everywhere, and when the white boys in town almost killed him by keeping his head submerged in his father’s rain-filled trough, he stared its ugliness in the face like never before. But he would do it again. “Lord, They Know Not” (E) never made it on the Folk Anthology, and yet it’s far scarier than any David Fincher film (C) could ever pretend. Fishtail sings the song, but, more essentially, the song sings him. (H)

12) That’s what happens when you start to play with covers. Every song becomes an opportunity to join the Grand Continuum of Rock ‘n’ Roll History, to indulge in its deepest satisfactions, and to trash it – “No, it’s not true,’ says a voice from the stage, “we’re not doing any fucking Wallflowers songs tonight” (F) – while offering it to your heart. (H)

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Viper Press Presents Blue Fire Hereafter (c/o Jon Resh, PO Box 3394, Chicago, IL 60690-3394; jonresh@yahoo.com) Jon Resh’s work with this magazine carries remarkable similarities to the ideas behind Badaboom, but he comes at it from a completely different direction. It’s 160 pages, perfect-bound, and hosts a variety of article topics. However, Resh having a knack for design, has beautifully laid out this first issue, keeping in mind the need to keep everything readable. In fact, this can be used as a prime example of adventurous design that doesn’t interfere with actually reading the text. Articles include: a stunning piece on a social worker’s experience in the Chicago projects, the history of the laser, an interview with the organist of Cubs games, and scattered prose. What is admirable about the magazine – besides the amazing move to reject all forms of advertising – is how it is classy and well made while simultaneously keeping the solipsistic attitude of being a zine. It’s $6, and manages to come with a CD as well.

Joel R.L. Phelps Blackbird (Pacifico, 1916 Pike Place, #12370, Seattle. WA 98101) One way to measure how long you’ve been involved in underground music is to count the number of labels on which you remember the artist releasing albums. Let’s try Joel Phelps: Temporary Freedom, C/Z, El Recordo, Matador (albeit, as a rerelease of Silkworm’s Libertine), and now his third full-length for Pacifico. In the time since Phelps broke from Silkworm, he has continued along a similar tangent, writing intricately beautiful downer songs. On Blackbird, though, Phelps actually rocks, and it’s perfectly timed – however I love his sparse, skeletal sound, another album of utter agony might have been overkill. When he turns it up, he does so in a Silkworm manner, meaning the song structure is both complex and immediate. With Phelps rocking like this, it’s all the more compelling when the slow songs come, “Unless You’re Tired Of Living,” a slow tempo weeper reaches intensity by the addition of woodwinds. Phelps’ voice remains frail and leading throughout, quivering and sanguine, hitting the high notes with utter perfection. Performing in the Downer Trio, Phelps has realized his musical goals in a similar manner as his three former band mates do, but has taken the music in his own secluded direction. Never has he seemed as confident to be on his own as he does on Blackbird.

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Answers: (1) is from Invisible Republic p 38, (2) is from an Addicted To Noise essay, (3) is from Invisible Republic p 105, (5) is from Lipstick Traces p 82, (7) is from Invisible Republic p 207, (8) is from Speak, Summer ’99, (10) is from Lipstick Traces p 17, (12) is from Interview Jan ’99, (4), (6), (9), and (11) are made up.