Rock S(l)obster

I'm dedicating this to honesty. The kind that is the truth of a song. Because songs are true. The truth of a song is its truth. Because you can trust it to tell you the truth of spirit, of life, of the clarity that is thinking your way through life, of joining with the words in song that would be your words to sing if you had your own song to sing. The truth of a song is the trust you place in it to present the truth in all its simplicity. Songs may exist solely to be placed in the mouths of listeners and displace their minds with the sentiments of the singing sung; songs may exist to erase the minds of listeners and replace their mouths with the sentience of the sung sentence.

 

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I never really wanted anyone to sing anything for me, or to sing anything that I would have wanted to sing, or even sing anything I would have wanted to have be sung. All of that always seemed to me to be pointless, really, because if they were singing it, and I wasn't, that seemed to be the end of everything, and the beginning of the future that is me and not you and you and not me. Perhaps this silenced crash of point and pointless was the ultimate meaning, though, where what we end off with is a beautiful moment where meaning, suspended in the animation of one lullabying another in the lie of the next moment, becomes what one is and is to become.

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What do we mean when we say that a piece of music or song is "devastating"? On first thought, it would seem we are referring to the emotional effect this piece has upon us, that its content or the presentation of its content reduces us internally to some doubled over position of pain, of pure suffering. Interesting, though, that in this equation, we are not calling ourselves, by default, masochists for suffering as a result of connecting with this music; rather, we are saying that we are powerless to react in any other way to this piece, that the emotional pain it brings out in us (as opposed to causes us) is the means through which we are devastated. What about us is "stated" in this devastation? What pain is already stationed within us such that it can be devolved through (a) sound(s)?

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I'm also aware, rereading the paragraph above the above paragraph, how arrogant this all sounds, that I would refuse any words in any voice that touched me or that I could relate to. And it is totally untrue. I wanted to be Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley and sing with their confidence and righteousness. I wanted to be Paul McCartney and John Lennon and know that everyone around me was touched by the canopy of my gigantic heart. I wanted my heart to expand with the words that the voice that wasn't mine had given me, I wanted to be inflated with a meaning that lay beyond me.

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I notice how much easier it is to write around music than about it, to write near it than through it.

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Monster Magnet's Powertrip is a cross between what my buddy Josh calls "Scuzzball Rock" and what is often known as "Cock Rock". The former means that beer has been poured over everything and mildewed its way into the seat cushions and speakers out of which the rock sizzles; the former means that the singer has poured beer down the front of his pants and dares you to enter the front door where the (c)rock sizzles. In either case, there is a slob at the door, a lobster on the floor, and everything is too loud for anything but psychedelic thinking. For the record, I have always liked Powertrip, although I don't care about it, or the rockslob aesthetic, or anything with relation to beer or pants or doors or sizzling. Within the "slob" is the "sob" who weeps for humanity, whose songs are the songs of the end of times that are the end of men.

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Powertrip is embedded with a dark reality that seems to invoke the darkness that rock-dick-death-excess won't ever have reckoned with. This dark reality is that there is a truth to evil, and its truth is that evil is what becomes what you are when you are willing to court it and let it live inside you. Heavy, isn't it? There are 2 poles of this reality. The first begins with the last song on side 1 (this record, even though released in the pure CD era, is here as proof that albums created the narrative space for recorded music to wax/wane/ascend/descend, and each side of the record perfectly ends in a clouded doom), "Baby Götterdämmerung". (First, listen, but don't just listen. Play the track and read below while it is playing. It's ok if the words of the song get mixed up with the words on the screen; this mix up is part of the listening that should be in the head that this song will blow up.)

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I don't care about lyrics. I've said that in a previous post, and I will repeat it every time I talk about "songs". They don't matter only because you need to "know" them, and "knowing" them is not the same as "hearing" them, which may mean never "understanding" them. I'm going to "never understand" them in order to hear what they are -- a voice singing inside the music to convey the music as much as anything else within the music conveys them.

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"Baby Götterdämmerung" is a pulse, the sound of a guitar plus-ing and minus-ing in a total repetition of one clean, whitewashed chord that disappears between each beat. There's a perfect way this is being created from the perspective of making sausages, but from the perspective of listening, it sounds like each second is divided in half, and that the second half of the second is the half where the power plug has been pulled from the floor. There's a voice that comes in over this pulse as the verse, this plus, and it is a deep, convicted voice, disturbed enough to never exceed or embellish the bi-phrasal melody. The song being sung seems to be a song of death -- and when the chorus comes, and the music's urgency ascends, and the voice gains in gain and turns ever more urgent -- the death is sung with the first refrain -- "I looked in the mirror / and somebody blew up".  The "and somebody blew up" repeats to end each chorused phrase, a repetition of the recurring annihilation that is the death that is this song. While I have repeatedly ignored the meaning of the lyrics to this song, I can't my turn my mind off to the point of completely whiting out the semiotics of memory -- the song is about forgetting, about the limits of remembering, about the demand to destroy the contents of your mind chambers in order to free space for additional content. The song is about "picking which (brain) plugs to pull" and pulling them, which is why each moment of noise is followed by, or preceded by, absolute silence. The absolute silence that is the silence of each and every death of each and every thought.

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Side 2 of Powertrip -- and it is important that this track is the end of the album, as well as the second side -- finishes with the descent of man into a pit of snakes -- a pit of lies, "Your Lies Become You".

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I'm trying to cultivate the art of listening without hearing, hearing without interpreting, interpreting without judging, judging without knowing, knowing without listening....

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I can't think of anything more terrifying than that phrase, "Your Lies Become You". There are other words in the song, all sung with an earnest seriousness, like the moment you look in the face of the devil and realize he's no longer a dream or a wish, that what makes him real is that he is there, before you, and he is going to take you down to the bowels of the earth and have his way with eternity. The music is pristine, the sound production -- the bass, the guitar, the drums, the voice over all of them -- is like a crystal mountain lake whose chill is the chill of your bones and the thing that chills them, too. But your lies do become that "I" that is "you", don't they? What else could they do, being the words you spin, the songs you sing? Where else could you put them but inside you because you hurl them outside you? This is why the song must sound like it does, like a dark country road, like an attic set on fire, like an ancient amulet that shimmers on the mantle, like the fireplace whose embers crackle and set sparks flying in the empty room, sparks which glow and flicker and cease.

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Bob Dylan's "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is a song about a farmer whose farm produces death, whose children starve and cry and scream, who ends it all with seven shotgun blasts. The song devastates, Dylan's voice devastates, Dylan's guitar devastates, too, and everything is reduced to "Seven shots ring out / Like the ocean's pounding roar," even though, later, "there's seven new people born." (Dylan was always too concerned with the words themselves to leave them at the feet of the devil, so he picks them up and scatters them into the heart of the wind.) Nazareth were a Scottish rock "almost" metal band from the 70's (they exist past the 70's, yes, but not in any meaningful way, although meaningful, I know, is as subjective as clouds in your coffee...) Nazareth take "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and they rockslob it and dirgeslow it into the death of time, the death of wind, the death of your bleeding brain.

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The singer seems to be tearing at the words with his teeth and bones and blood, as if each word were the next moment of sanity gone past, and to tear open a vein is to tear open life itself and hope for an additional external moment,. The melody is too high for him, as it should be, since the death of a family on the outside of town, a family outside everything that is society and the world of society that is so close to them, is the death of everything that could be human on earth, which is earth because it is the home of humanity. And this lost humanity is abominable snowman, is ancient banshee wail. There is a guitar or bass or fuzz or force in this song that spreads out across the ground that is the head pounding, drums making roaring tiger headache. I don't know quite how to describe it, it feels like the feeling that happens when, in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", the elevators open and spill a sea of slow motion blood onto the floor. The spreading fuzz sound is a giant bloodstain that sweeps across the swooping plain of the flat earth, it is the end of everything that never ends, but it expands, it explains the meaning of death without ever explaining the meaning of dying. That meaning is outside anything any song could bring us to, but the song could point us towards this wind.

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I'm trying to think without words, to judge without thought...I'm thinking, but I want to let the forewarned arm me for the future, where there are only always songs to avoid and meanings to dodge, and killers to get close enough to that we can look in their eyes and see nothing but frozen fire.

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Perhaps beneath it all, there are songs that are meant to reveal a kind of truth that we can only take in in moments, perhaps there are songs that are hidden at either ends of albums that are the deepest expression of the truth of the singers, of the songs, of the players, of the audience. Perhaps these songs take everything away from the original experience of singing and dancing, perhaps they are there to silence everything but the truth of the moment in which the song exists and you expand to fit into the space around the song, you are there to contain what the song sings and to be changed by the depth of it, to let the devastation reach you and restate you, to feel the deviation between these songs and all the others that surround them. Perhaps the rockslobs are not what they seem, perhaps they are the demons of truth couched in denim and leather and mirrored shades, and perhaps the truth they champion is only as valuable as it is because it is hidden, because what you expect are cars and girls and fights and beer, and what you get, when this has all been razed to the ground, is a skeleton, a body stripped of all flesh, a skull whose emptied eyes are the eyes of time.

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.