You Know, You Know

A common practice I've engaged in over long years of music buying is the selling back of used albums -- this practice has outlasted even the change in media (note, you can't sell back mp3s or anything downloaded, really, for that matter. Let's take a moment of mourned silence; even though selling something back to the store nets you nearly zero profit, the feeling that something that is no longer worth owning to you is worth something to the store that can then recycle it to a new and anonymous fan, someone awaiting the sounds of their lives -- this recapitulation of the same into what is always eternally different (it is always new to someone else, even if it is dried up of all tantalizing possibility for me, it is a shining honeyed grapefruit ripe on the possibility tree for the figure behind me) is the magic economy of the real.) from records to 8-tracks to cassette to cds. The best thing about cds is the fact that they "last forever" (as if we needed them to!), but they are now, outside of well kept record albums (like well-kept baseball cards), the only thing you can really "sell".

Selling Back is essential in BUNCHES. I mean, you could sell one or two cds, but the fact is, you generally get no more than $3 in store credit or $2 in cash for them. In the world I'm operating within, cash is meaningless except for what you need to bring in if you don't get enough store credit to exchange for what you want. In other words, we're looking at the $3 store credit, which is basically a future option on the record store's current or future inventory. The whole exercise is a total gamble, but a gamble for the rush of the gamble that leads to the rush of the victory over winning. This rush only has a success rate that starts at $50 -- because, at even the cheapest used record/cd shop, to get anything cool that is more than just one cool thing, you need about $50. Meaning, you have to sell back at least 15 cds. And if what you have to sell, for example, are 80's metal cds, or orginal issue Blue Note Jazz cds -- all of which they sell to you for no more that $5 -- you will need at least 50 cds. So, you really have to be willing to be arrogant with yourself, you have to strip everything you have away to the essentials, which you can never do, which you must do if you want to bury your doldrums at the center of your troubled, discarded mind.

The Sellback is basically how you overcome depression. You know, life gets boring sometimes. You look at your music collection, and everything is grey sand, dark dirt, decades of indecency, decades of over-dependency. You're like the philosopher who realizes he's never read a novel; the high fashion shopper who is surprised by her ignorance of much needed flip-flops; the gourmet chef who has lost his taste for the simplicity of peanut butter. You lie there, with the articles of faith strewn about the world, and at the center of your bible is a black and white image of the devil yawning. Yup, there is no question about this, my son; your lifeblood is ebbing into the ether of the past.

So, you get yourself up (the Republicans were right; bootstraps do mean something; you grab them and lift them and you fall flat on your back, and you realize the pain in your backside is, well, you), and you limp on over to the tape case, or the record cube, or the cd rack, or the hall closet, or whatever. And you start picking your way though the graves of what you were once so promiscuous to freely love, now hell bent anything that you HATE. Now, this gets really interesting, because the impetus for doing this has little to do with your feeling about the recordings; what it has to do with is the feeling you MIGHT HAVE once you get rid of these recordings and replace them with something else that you "feel better" about. Notice that I'm not talking about what you "like". As soon as you own a recording, you are beyond the point of "taste"; you are now at the point of determining where, relative to your aesthetic sense, what you now own is placed, what world it lives within, and what space within the sum total of that world that it, curiously, owns. You may own the recording, but it knows more about you than you do about yourself.

When you comb through your collection and let yourself hate what you've become, you are reinventing yourself from the past to dwell in an ambiguous future. (Perhaps what will happen, when it is time for you, is nothing, and your depression may have been the true state of things.) But you don't know what this ambiguity is -- that's what ambiguity is, of course -- and this unknown is what you convert into a hope that you then use to stare into the heart of your error'd ways (all the music you own that you hate, that you should have once known to never own), rip out that very heart and stuff it into a bag, and then race out the door while it still beats, determined to make it to the record store before all that past blood spills out and dries up and leaves you with no possibility of a future life.

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Once the cd or record buyer flips carelessly and tired-eyed through the pile of your losses (the causes of which are even greater losses than the objects themselves) -- the only sound being the click of opening and closing the cd case, with a 5 second pause between the click open and the click shut to turn the disc upside down and stare at its imperfections -- your own living heart rumbles in your chest, your breath quickens while they calculate the value of what you have found meaningless and write it down with furrowed brow on a post it. They don't do this without first creating separate piles of value, things worth almost nothing, more than nothing, possibly something -- these piles are, for you, the visible result of everything you have discarded coming to bear on the moment. These piles are what you begin to doubt about yourself, your loves, your life, your pleasures. Yet, when the post-it reveals a sloppily "$90" on it, who "you" are is suddenly cast in the light of the wistful summer sun: you can now go play and make a bunch of new mistakes you never made before and become that "you" that the memory of the sun promises you.

But the strangest thing that happens with the Sellback is its binary correlate -- the Buyback. You come across a record you once had that you once had determined that you hated and all of a sudden you redetermine, anew, that you might possibly love it (or have loved it and didn't know it at the time, or never gave yourself the chance to love it, or were blind to your love of it, or that you weren't advanced enough to love it, or you were too refined to love it). And so, in the privacy of your own mind, with the true embarrassment that can only be the personalized experience of someone recognizing something in themselves that no one else could ever have the subjective knowledge to reveal, you add the Buyback record into the pile of records that the $90 post-it will cash out for you.

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All of the above is my preamble to a VERY strange record I once tried to love but truly hated -- in my late 20's -- that I sold back -- in my early 30's (as you can see, I endured this conflict for a few years) -- that I recently bought back -- at 40. The record is Keith Jarrett and Jack Dejohnette's Ruta and Daitya, a 1973 post-fusion noodle space spirit empty mind dharma jazz session. Drums, Rhodes, Flutes, Chants, all that cool stuff (or stupid stuff, depending on late 20's, early 30's, 40 mindset). These guys were post Electrice Miles, Post Charles Lloyd at Monterey, and probably ecstatic to go to Oslo, Norway, and make a gorgeous sounding record in a pristine studio with the attentive detail of classical musician sound and a label ready to take jazz to somewhere non-jazz. So, what happens, when I buy back this curiosity? Well, I LOVE it. Egads. Is that me? Is this me? Am I now a you to my me because of what I now know?

Here's the track that does it for me -- You Know, You Know (interestingly, this is the name of my favorite Mahavishnu Orchestra Track, too, also slow and simple and brooding and bursting, just like this, with a sense that the knowledge one knows is the knowledge one ought to have always known). Perhaps this song is the Sellback/Buyback dilemma perfectly named -- you sell back what you know, and you buyback what you have already known. You Know (once you buy/sell), You Know (second you buy again).

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The world is what we know and have always returned to have known, you know? Yes, you do know, if you are me. If you are you, only you know your hates that you may return to love.

Sabotaged by Tomorrow's Dream

It's funny to think of Sabbath now -- not "funny ha-ha", but "funny strange", maybe even "funny wistful", or "funny sad" -- after all that's happened in rock music, heavy music, popular culture and with every parody of what rock music is. It's tough to remember that there was no such thing as "self-consciousness" when rock began as we know it to now be, no empty reflection on the lack of meaning or absurdity of intended meaning, which we now have and by which we will always be plagued. I don't mean an "innocence" here, though  -- there is nothing like that anywhere on this earth, which is unearthed with the sound of what has always lain beneath. Nothing is innocent there, because there is no guilt where no one has ever been.

What earth, anyway? And whose? As "Hole in the Sky" from 1975's Sabotage shrieks, (please) "Take Me to Heaven". Which heaven, nohow? It's the heaven of space, of non-planet Pluto, of a future where there is nothing but the future that promises us the future. Black Sabbath had, since their second record, Paranoid (1970), authored a sound of doom they then enrobed in a bucket of glorified sludge, but, weirdly enough, they held this sound at enough of a distance to give you a space into which you could crawl and hide and safely wait, en-wombed, for the sun to crash into the sea. This sound continued down its dark path through each subsequent record -- the pope-on-a-rope-hopelessness of Master of Reality, the cocained-emotion-freeze of Vol 4, the morning-after-Bloody-'ell-Mary of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath -- until the high voltage hero came across the other side of the world to the depressed pill popper, they commingled translucences, and they effervesced a sacred problem child: the complete annihilation of everything, Sabotage, which seems to believe less in nothing than in what is the "less than nothing". "The food of love became the greed of our time / and now we're living on the profits of crime" - these lines aren't even sung, they are smiled over a riff that evokes the electricity of any abandoned power station on any planet not yet learned of in any science fiction novel. What I always thought, when I dropped the needle down on this track, was that the windows over my stereo would implode in a fit of static recognition, since the song wasn't angry as much as it was scolding, explaining to each earthling, with each rabid and overamplified sound, that the narrator's gaze through the heart of the sunrise, beyond the purity of space, was a wish to start everything over again, was to rebel against everything that had driven us all into depravity. This was heaviness in the name of clearing everything and replacing every piece upon the board, cleansing us all in a mud bath of delectable regret.

Of course, after we have catapulted through the sky to the end of things, and we interlude with fluttering butterflies of acoustic guitar layered across the path of the nevermore, we come upon a universe that we won't ever understand. Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAH naht - Gug-gug-gug gug-gugga-gug NAHT NAH naht-- the riff of "Symptom of the Universe" breaks open the typical Sabbath heavier-than-thou-lead-doom and spills the blood of punks into the black space, punks who have not yet invented themselves, but whose DNA blueprints the end of history so long as we decide to critique it. As a kid, I longed to know how this riff -- simple to the point of blank absurdity, creating the raw deal that one can only have always lived beneath -- could shake the world to bits and leave behind this trail of dust that one could follow beyond the sun and the yoke of its setting. But the song is stranger than the riff, Sabbath was always stranger than doom and more ambiguous than this metal genre they helped to make into a gorgeous dark joke.

The massive cymballic flash on "Symptom of the Universe" -- it's as if the cymbals create a blankened space for the "A" part of the riff, the guitar and bass a raft hurtling down a desolately endangering river, the cymbals the smooth rock canyon walls on either side. But when part "B" of the riff comes, the guitar and bass stop short and the drums are the raft thrown over the rapids, cymbals fading behind the sound of the falling sticks hucked in panic at the drumskins. This being Sabbath, this song has too many parts for a song to have; they shoved too much music into a small space in order to crack the space open, in order to explode space into a blackness for the world to believe in. "Symptom of the Universe" literally explodes after a series of multiply interchanging parts, --verses, choruses, post shard-shooting guitar star solo -- into a universe where the lone planet is future hippie desire -- "O my child of lost creation / come and step inside my dree-eams" -- this is pattered over a slight funk vamp, with a village of acoustic guitars and extreme post-Woodstock noodling across each passing second, which are hurtled into the asteroids of tomorrow's hallucinatory promise.

"Megalomania" closes side 1, and it closes the hole in the sky, it reverses the exploding universe by imploding everything back into the center of your mind. I had to look the word's meaning up when I was a kid, but even reading what it meant didn't change the absolute otherness of the word itself staring into me from the back cover. What does it mean to name a song "Megalomania"? It is a mania of the metaphysical; perhaps the symptom of this mania can only be known through the universe itself....

The song is a dark cauldron of impossible sorcery, something that seems to be from beyond time, but also in the time that is the time inside your head, which is the same hole as the space in the sky. There are swirls of guitars spiraling within synths stacked atop the dream brain that is the one who thinks only of himself in his blindness. Sabbath has always courted madness as a state of mind in their songs, and "Megalomania" is the pinnacle of the madness that plagues the mind that knows nothing of itself, not even its own pain. We get to deal with this for 9:46, and when everything fades, we are still getting to deal with what faded away.

Side 2 entices the most Vegas-ed of us with "The Thrill of it All", a perfect cynical counterpart to "Megalomania', which ends in a cannibalistic carnival of total confusion. "Thrill" begins with forked tongue guitar, soon overridden by the return of the cannibals in droves, 30 guitars and synths and bass and drums and too many people in too few rooms. But when we get to the verse of "Thrill", everything drops out but a greedy rock riff played with democratic vision, even the singing sliding over it all is the riff, too. The thrill is the fact that the self obsessed autocrat is engaged with only this thrill, everything is included inside it, the entire universe compromised by lying still, lying perfectly in the lap of this lie. The narrator is only all lies, the intent of the lying voice is to thrill you with a forked tongue. Lying leads only to tyranny, a tyrant's fantasy of a swirled world of voices, strings, and death.

"Supertzar", whose only words are the play on words of "star/czar", and whose only song is the chorus that accentuates the ascension of each musical mountain, is the result of this tyranny, this mutation of the real into the space that is behind the mountain, that dominates it with its barbaric yawn. The song is "heavy", but what's weird about its "heaviness" is that there is only a lone guitar amongst the multiplicity of strings and chorus, whose mutivalence atop the simple rock accompaniment of bass and drums (these are there but almost unheard) gives the guitar its extra chainsawing cinder block-ed power, as if the guitar is the black figure of the lone rider (as in Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter") and the strings and voices are the sky and sun and the drums and bass are the impotent ground beneath it all. The future, beyond the sun, lies where there is nothing beneath anything, the ground is helpless to crumble, the mind is everything that is every crumb in any world. Insanity, when I walk into a room and everyone stares at the bright new world painted lazily behind my eyes.

"Am I Going Insane" seems to ground us for a moment, the song disguised as a sheen pop surface with entwined guitars in splendiferous harmony. We hear that everything is right, except for the fact that everything feels wrong in this song, the bass awkwardly loud and thundering and stomping like a zombie stalking the moon, the crunchy edges of the guitars peeled back to reveal only a pierced vein of twisted soloing. The singer seems too loud, too large, a baby crushing the zombie stalking the moon, semi-articulate and semi awake. As the song fades, a crazed chorus (the mirror image of the warlord choir in "Supertzar') arises, cackles and frantic howls and intensities of the inner voice gone to the zombie moon. The voice that wins out over all is the voice that screams the loudest -- the screams of a child whose pain will outlast every universe. Sabbath lets that voice extend 11 seconds into the next track, the exploding monolith "The Writ".

Writing about this is tiring, and "The Writ" is the most tiring of the writing. Why? Why write something formal, something to order and organize the world such that the universe itself is no longer only the singular amorphous mass that is the "it" it is? "The Writ" is made up of many shapes, it is also amorphous, and it seems to slip past you before the 8:17 it occupies. The song is like the presence of something that is in a space, that vanishes, that has vanished even while it was there, a law laid down by ghosts of the never to be remembered future.

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Sabotage is that memory of something that never was; it is the reduction of that thing to what can never have been. It's where Black Sabbath was last seen, before we forgot what it meant to see something appear and mean even nothing. It is the meaning of the "less than nothing" that is the universe you will forget right this minute.