Daring

The word “pathology” always makes me think of dark wood-paneled rooms filled with bookshelves and things floating in formaldehyde.  They lurk creepily at the edge of your vision, but when you whip your head around to check they snap back to innocence.  One of these days, damnit.

So naturally when I saw the book curiosity got the better of me.  It’s called Dark Mirror: The pathology of the Singer-Songwriter by Donald Brackett.  It’s about the universal quality of music, specifically the way some artists can write things that describe so perfectly what the rest of the world is feeling that it’s almost uncanny.  And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Brackett’s book tries to explain both how artists manage it and what it means for us, the listeners.  He starts with Bob Dylan’s observation that making records is like working in a coal mine.  He says artists do work in a coal mine, one built of  “their own personalities and identities, real or imagined, into which they must first descend to scrape away at the dim walls of their own emotional mine shafts” (xiii).  What they come up with is a coal “blacker than belief,” dragged up into the daylight under the pressure of intense concentration, until the product we see is stunning by comparison (xiii).  Doing all this for the sake of an audience is a bit like being the canary in regular mining.  The ultimate adventurer and the ultimate sacrifice.

From this perspective it’s a wonder anybody would be willing to try, but try they do.  Maybe it’s because they know we’re all rooting for them out here at the top, hair blown by the dusty heat.  It doesn’t seem enough to pay them back for the perils of that journey.  Then again, maybe it is.  Maybe they go down there because they need to.  They don’t know what they’re going to find.  They’re just driven by some inexplicable impulse to look right over there, and also around this corner.  Somewhere in these hills is a river of gold.

When they find that elusive scrap of truth, then comes the really good part.  They can hold it up above their heads and march for miles, showing everybody in the little prospecting town what treasure there is to be had.  Brackett says, “So when we gaze into the dark mirror that each artist holds aloft, we are at first puzzled, since we can clearly see that the substance itself is mere carbon…but at the same time, we are astonished by the sudden brilliance [of it]” (xiii-xiv).  We marvel at how familiar it is when all along we never saw it coming.  That’s the beauty of it.  The moment when the artist and the listener realize that they weren’t the only one.  Someone else was there, thinking the same thing, and now someone has been brave enough to say it.  It’s one more piece we can add to the vastly complicated puzzle.  One more thing not to worry about because it has finally been pinned down.  That kind of certainty would get even me into a mine shaft, and I hate things that go crunch in the dark.

Brackett, Donald.  Dark Mirror: the Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter.  Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008.

All Wound Up

I’m not unconvinced I was born in the wrong generation.  I saw Pirate Radio (released in the UK and Europe as The Boat that Rocked) a few weeks ago and ate up the soundtrack.  There were no squeaky voiced women going on about sunshine and phone calls, or equally squeaky emo bands trying to sound earnest without popping their tight pants.  It was the Kinks and the Who, the Beach Boys and Dusty Springfield.  Lots of pop music from back when there was such a thing as good pop music.  My generation has Britney Spears.  Let’s back away slowly.

Hang on minute, though.  Just now I was reading an interview with Joe Strummer that somebody submitted to Fark.  In it he says that he forces himself to listen to the radio as a masochistic kind of inspiration.  “Every time Bob Geldof comes out with that emotionless eunuch’s voice, it boosts me ten miles in the soul, just for the irritation.”  Eventually it nags at you so badly you just have to go write an antidote.  It’s a tricky theory to prove, but I think the Clash’s musical output speaks for itself.

People always say that raw talent is fine.  It’s artists who build on their talent and really work at it who produce the best stuff.   Maybe that creative instinct could use some goading now and then.  Like a sibling on a long car ride, but useful.  Poke, poke, poke until he gets all wound up and writes “Lost in the Supermarket”.  It’s such a perfect description of life as a perpetual bystander.  I especially love the bit that goes, “I’ve heard the people who live on the ceiling/ they scream and fight/ they’re scared of me/ hearing that noise was my first ever feeling/ that’s how it’s been/ all around me”.  It’s sad to know how he feels and yet the music is so good that for a moment you really don’t care.  At one point in the interview Joe says, “to me, music is a feeling, the best that there is.”  I couldn’t agree more.

Brainwaves

So true (from xkcd.com)

• Pandora has been playing the most embarrassing ads lately.  Today it played one for something I wouldn’t buy unless I had to, and then I certainly wouldn’t be telling people all about it.  But there was my computer, happily spouting away about how wonderful the product was.  You know, Pandora, dorm walls are thin.  Keep your yappy little mouth shut.

• The other night I watched part of Paul McCartney’s new concert dvd Good Evening New York City.  Since it was filmed at Shea Stadium, they interspersed it with clips of all the Beatles playing there in 1965.  Once or twice they flipped so fast it made my head spin.  Most of the time, though, they focused on Paul alone.  It was amazing.  He puts on a better show at 64 than most people do at 24.  Part of it is his talent, which has always been incredible.  Part of it is that he really cares.  He runs around the stage switching from bass to piano to bass stopping only to “hear the people sing” here and there.  Even then he sang back “you know you sound good now” without breaking the melody.  He brought Billy Joel out to thank him for the opportunity to give the last concert at Shea.  Billy barked along with the next song and all I could think was, what are you doing on Paul McCartney’s stage?  You can’t compare “Maybe I’m Amazed” with “Uptown Girl”.  Sometimes I am a giant musical snob, I know.

• “Charlie Birger Time” by the Copyrights is very awesome.  Have a listen.

That’s what has been rattling around my brain lately.  Happy small hours of Tuesday, everyone.