Ta(l)king Stock

Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Such an incredibly weird and unexpected album, full of silences and pauses, explosions and estranged river winter sounds. Listening to it is an experience alienated from "culture" -- it doesn't relate in any fashion to the time and place around it; it follows no cultural signs, it represents nothing of "pop" music or culture. I don't know if I know anything as far from pop that seems to still be linked to the notion of its existence. If Laughing Stock evokes, say, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew -- the first "fusion" album (not true yet who cares, it is still a recording that evokes a watershed moment, partly because, looking back at Bitches Brew, it doesn't sound anything like what you might expect something that is a landmark recording in a particular genre) -- it does so in a way that we, as listeners, hardly ever really consider, which is the tone of the record. It sounds like it is made -- and that listening to it, we are there while they are making it -- along the edge of a swiftly flowing and soft grey river, and the sky above us is filled with soft grey clouds, the sun sleeping beneath (or behind?) this lush blanket. But the sun is there, since its absence is an absence that evokes a whispered presence, a hushed, yet heightened present. This swift river pours into the center of the music, flooding it with a liquidity that pushes the distance between each instrument yet blurs the boundaries between them, too, so that you don't really know what you are hearing, or what it is you are hearing, or who is is that you are hearing be what it is they are being. It's a uniquely disoriented experience, and you adjust yourself to it. Perhaps you think they made a mistake, that the instruments spilling into each other, bleeding sound into other sound, shouldn't be like this but they let it somehow slip past. But that slipping, too, is part of this waterlogged world, a world that is waking up under the sea, a world that looks up from the bottom of the ocean through a cracked rain spattered windshield at the empty green grey valley.

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It was 20 years ago that I found this silence, actually stumbling upon it accidentally as a birthday present for my (then (first!)) girlfriend, my (now (long ago (ex-)))wife -- I knew she liked music I didn't know and didn't think I'd ever come to know or ever come to like (both of which ended up as being weirdly true, perhaps prophetic, perhaps predictive, perhaps predicated on my willingness to keep things between us boundaried, perhaps caused by my unwillingness to move towards things around me that were not what I knew), but I thought, since it was her birthday, and she was my first real girlfriend, and there were used record shops everywhere around me (this was Boston, 1991, too many shops to count, but just enough shops to frequent daily), that I could give things a chance, since I wasn't yet anywhere far along enough to give up on anything, yet.

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She'd showed me The Color of Spring, Talk Talk's 3rd record, a mixture of 80's synth pop and brooding emotional season tones -- a record clearly produced in a studio, with layered sounds of various instruments placed in mid to late 80's context, but with a larger sense of sound itself, guitars sounding like guitar, piano like pianos, choruses of voices choruses of voices shouting out and making contact with the heavens. I liked it, and I was surprised to like it, since 80's pop wasn't what I liked then, and the fact that I liked it and was surprised to like it made me want to engage that surprise even further when I bought my girlfriend something for her birthday. In the record store, I came across the image of Laughing Stock's cover, and thought it might be nice to buy her this, something I thought she'd like, something that reflected our commingling tastes. She smiled widely when she unwrapped it, she seemed delicately touched that I had reached out to her taste rather than simply reflecting my own, which, at the time, was quite dominant, a voice too loud in a public space to acknowledge the space as public. A few days later, however, when I came over to her place and saw the CD case sitting next to the CD player (but something else was in the player, not this), I asked her what she thought. "That's the worst thing I've ever heard," she said, turning towards the wall. "I hate it."

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Later that night, while she was sleeping, I quietly glided out of the bed and slid along the wall to the CD player resting on the dresser. I extracted Laughing Stock from its cover and silently slipped the disc into the player and pushed my thumb down on the play button. I held my breath. What could she have hated so much? What could Talk Talk have done on Laughing Stock that could turn such an ardent fan so definitively against them? Surely aesthetics are forgivable throughout history, and this forgiveness is what we, as consumers of creative product, are what we use to make up for the distance between what those who produce give us to experience and what we actually think of these art objects, right?

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I could quote lyrics as a way to explain the profundity of the sentiments, the deep humanist philosophy that Laughing Stock proposes. But the lyrics are intended to be unheard -- the words that Mark Hollis sings seem only to be sounds that allow his voice to move between one moment and one other. I almost wonder if the lyrics are actually written down in retrospect, as potential visions of what these sounds could signify in a world in which signification means more than empty thought. If you get the CD (or cassette, possibly, or more possibly) the lyrics are handwritten on the inside in a script that is nearly illegible, neatly and essentially organized, as are the actual words sung. I've often wondered if lyrics exist in order that we have the option to no longer listen to the sounds of the music we are hearing, that if all lyrics were actually sung in a language foreign to us, or if they were sung in order to obscure the words we are hearing and not clarify them, we might actually have the opportunity to hear the human voice in its true place amongst the distant lands of the instruments that always approximate it. We might actually hear the person shining through the rain spattered windows to the outside world, which crowds in from all around us, which is always speaking to us of our difference to it, its indifference to us. The world floods into us, and we withstand it by speaking back to it in the voices that dazzle it with ineffable alienation.

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Of course, my girlfriend was right, as any pure Talk Talk fan had to have been in 1991, 5 years after The Colour of Spring (although, to be fair to both history as well as their audience, Talk Talk did release Spirit of Eden in 1988, which clearly opened the path through a misty musical forest, on the other side of which is Laughing Stock, along the banks of the sopping river; this essay COULD be about the radical step Spirit of Eden was from The Colour of Spring if the goal was to talk about the relationship between an artist and their audience, but that's another topic for someone with a larger sociological mind than I. And, for the record, this essay is not about the value of Spirit of Eden as opposed to Laughing Stock -- it is simply about the total oddity of Laughing Stock as an object of art, and I refuse, for the moment, the applicably progressing context of Talk Talk themselves.) She was right because this record was totally unintelligible, muffled, mumbling, hesitant, definite, cloudy, obscured, fogged, elongated, diffused. It was everything you don't want to hear in pop music. It was all the content that pop music has nothing to say about, all the waste pop music discards, all the words pop music never uses. My girlfriend hated it because she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be "Talk Talk"; but, more than that, she couldn't recognize anything in it that was what she knew to be what music was supposed to be or had been.

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It was dark and quiet in my girlfriend's studio apartment, with the parking lot streetlights peering in through the half-closed blinds. It was as if they were seeking me out; as if they, too, wanted to know what I would hear, as if they wanted me to tell them what I heard and explain to them what my girlfriend heard that freaked her out so badly, what jarred her and upset even the simple order of a man in a dark room listening to recorded music on headphones in the middle of the night with the light of the street illuminating the corners of the walls. And then, in the distance, at the edges of the headphones, a sharp pulsing like a tape machine, interrupted by a deep, clean, trembling guitar chord, soon echoed by wind instruments and the whimper of a snare drum being righted and set in place. The chord rumbled a second time, and the elongated notes of the woodwinds lighted up the night air beneath this liquid thunder. Everything was of a depth, submerged in something full, something invisible, something to be seen later. "Place my chair at the backroom door" sang Mark Hollis, the words less sung than chanted, less chanted than lamented, less lamented than flung to the floor with the energy of a man tired of everything, especially that which he has to say, especially that which he says and which no one hears. My eyes were open. My heart was quick, then quicker. I understood immediately what my girlfriend did about this music, but from the perspective of someone with no expectations, with nothing of the future, with nothing but the moment in which everything is being heard and will continue on in its hearing. I understood that what I heard at that moment was something that had never been in any moment I knew; I understood that I knew less about what I was hearing than about what listening was to mean for me later, after I knew what I was hearing. 

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If whoever you are that is out there could meet me, I'd choose a coffee shop where the coffee is fresh, dark, and strong; where there are not too many laptops to clutter up the silence; where at least a few conversations are punctuated by passion, gesticulating hands, perhaps even gazes towards the sky evoking the real world of the false god; where the windows are filled with either sun or rain and the chalkboard menus reflect the nature of the day outside. If we were to meet, I would say more about Laughing Stock and how it still, to this day, if I am able to listen to it, makes me rethink what I think about things in general, and things in specific -- about what I say and what I see, about what I hear and what I know. It makes me reconsider what luck is and who has it; what fortune is and where it goes. Who men and women are and how they interact. But none of this seems relevant to the actual content of the recording, which is the content of something other than what you may or may not be willing to know. And willingness, we know, is where aesthetics imprint themselves on the name of the world. Willingness is how we know what we may love, and why we can decide to hate something dear. I'd tell you about that girlfriend I once had, who then became my wife and then became my ex-wife, and how her hating this record impacted my experience of music more than almost anything, and that the rabbit hole of exploration down which it led me does not yet end, even when I remember her being gone, long ago, in the future that is ours to dream in time, the rain softly beating back the soft waves of the grey river.

Utopia: Pop Topic of Pure Unimportance

What to make of Todd Rundgren's Utopia? Certainly not a whole blogspot, but perhaps a stop on the blog, a blinded blip spot upon the screen saver of popped-out sounds....

(For specific context you can read about Utopia on Wikipedia, and the information is in good enough order for me to leave most embellishments aside for now. Yet, can't resist this, a quick synopsis:

"Todd Rundgren and Utopia -- 70's - 80's. Assignment: describe "who" "they" were. Rundgren was/is a unique producer, singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, front man, composer, bandleader, and all other kinds of things. He made a great living producing records for rock bands -- Meat Loaf, XTC, The New York Dolls -- and making solo records of all musical sorts on the side. And on the side of THAT (like an extra order of bacon (or something)) he had a band called Utopia, which included a bunch of no-names (to the general public -- Moogy Klingman, anyone?) -- these guys were respected professionals in the biz, but this wasn't a supergroup. They originally started as a snazzed up progressive-rock-art band (3 keyboardists on their first record!) with ineffable ideas/technique, without the internal/external seriousness of Important Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. As time went on (and it did go on!), Utopia became a very minor and curious pop band, really not like anything else, but also sounding like a perfect pop band, but also not like anything else, while also sounding conspicuously like everything else, such that no one could notice them unless they intended to notice them, meaning that they would have had to have known to notice them..."

I'll start near, but not completely, at the beginning, with this: a live performance of "Sunburst Finish", from the 1977 RA album.

Sunburst Finish, live, is kinda goofy -- the dress and hair and audience, the drab colors and ragged costumes, as if this is a performance of abstract musical theater, the context of which is forbidden to all of us looking historically at the screen. But the performance is incredibly agile, ambi- and multi- dextrous. A melody is sung over a too-many-notes-in-one-space, laughably relaxed and complex riff, the singing shared equally by three men whose voices, while of not the same caliber or quality, can each easily carry the melody safely across shifting rhythmic sands. While a few pop bands have had multiple singers -- the Eagles, Kiss, The Beatles, CSNY, Fleetwood Mac all come lovingly to mind  -- usually songs are "owned" by a singer or a voice, and that "ownership" creates the "meaning" and "message" of the song -- i.e, a "Paul Stanley song", or a "John Lennon song". But in this Utopia track, all three singers are the messengers. Later, they harmonize over what sounds like a ship sliding into the edge of the sea with an orange sun leading them onward, towards deeper waters of wizardry. Todd Rundgren has the "best" voice, so he takes the lead at the end before a disseminating a knuckle-clutch-the-highest-note guitar solo into the heart of a screaming orange jubilee sun....

But back to the singing over the initial riff -- it's the gaudiness of the act, combined with the hum-drum-iness of its execution, that gets me. Keep in mind that the "heyday" of musical prowess in rock and roll was really the 70's. I don't mean that "bands were better musicians then" (What a preposterous thing to even think to think. Who's going to publish the double-blind studies on that?), but more that this was a time when Rock music was claiming a musical legitimacy and complexity as a "part" of its identity and self definition. (Even the Ultimate American himself, "Uncle Ted" Nugent, had songs in odd time signatures as a sign of pure capitalist, sold-out-arena solidarity...) And part of this ultimate effort towards legitimacy was to flaunt, to brag, to expose, to shout one's prowess into the name of the heavens as a way of claiming one was there, that one had come, seen, laid waste to, politicized...

With that as contextual backdrop, relisten and relook at the riff and the singing in this clip: it's quite concentrated, yet totally casual, and nearly haphazard, in its delivery. And that's what Utopia brought to this 70's bombast, even a smile when Rundgren takes a high note and sleepily mangles it like Peter Brady. This is high art rock on the silliness of Spinal Tap stonehenge stages, made more normal by the homemade custom of cloth-cut, space-ape-aged costumes.

Utopia are totally unimportant. As they intend to be. Which makes the ease with which the difficulty of the musical task is accomplished as imperfectly astonishing as it ought to be for us outsiders.

(As a quick aside, RA's entire second side is a monstrous piece of Art Rock Storytelling entitled "Singring and the Glass Guitar." (Was it once intended to be "Sigmund and the Glass Cigar"?) In it, each member has their "own song" where they each solo (guitar, keyboards, bass, drums) and end each of their solos with a thematic section that they then all overlap in the song's epic denoument. Art Rock Fairy-Story Arche-Type in deed.)

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Somehow, it's 1984. We ended all up in here, synthesized and drum-machinated on our way to an empty heaven, where pleasure could only be the perfect automaticized autonomy -- and so does Utopia with their Oblivion album, where "Crybaby" (audio) meets "Crybaby" (video). (Nice irony, asymmetrical serendipity -- the video on YouTube has no audio, and the audio no video, so you've gotta double-window it to experience it in sequence -- chalk it up to the unimportance of a band no one even knew to know was there). This track's a sublimated sliver of 80's art-pop synthesis; a proto 2001 Space Odyssey with primitive future man as the monkey, and the video screen revealing his loss of total meaning, of a universe emptied of everything but pouting models with "hearts of leather and steel / who take self defense and turn it into art..." Everyone ends up crying, because isn't that what rock music is for? Crying voices, crying models, crying drums, screaming/crying guitar -- which is what this song fades with, just as 1977 faded from its art, so does 1984 fade with its identical art....

It is as if from the start, by being the side project of a musician whose solo career itself was a side project to the act of producing other artists, this replicating of reality, which is the replication of one style by another, shows the true dis-empowerment of meaning everything. Of the meaning that means unimportance.