"Horseradish Road" is an unsettling song. The album version1 is all subdued acoustic guitar and cold, pizzicato violin. Even Darnielle's vocals sound detached and a little distant - a far cry from the snarling, swooning, effervescent narrator-character who, in all his incarnations, dominates just about every Mountain Goats record. The only clue to the fragility of his composure is the way his voice cracks and quavers, just once, a minute and seven seconds in.
But there must be more to it than that. The Mountain Goats catalogue does have its emotionally distant (or distanced) narrators, with their songs of "I" and sometimes "you" but never any trace of a "we". These songs are invariably discomfiting, but their stories usually give the listener something on which to hang the uneasiness.
At just under two and a half minutes in length, "Horseradish Road" is an impressive convergence of recurring Mountain Goats themes: a couple held together by nothing any outsider will be able to fathom;2 a long drive from one unspecified destination to another;3 tiny concrete details married to broad presentiments of doom; diegetic music; tacit invitations to the listener to seek out oblique meanings and connections;4 terrible crimes, both legal and interpersonal, and the resultant guilt (or lack thereof).
And yet the song is not really about any of those things - except, perhaps, the very last.
The concept of karma gets bandied about by all sorts of people, to all sorts of ends. Popular usage in mainstream Western culture seems to suggest that it is a magical force that swoops about the place rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked. A crudely-fashioned god for the modern atheist, perhaps, to relieve the pressure of personal responsibility.5 The raw material for said god is a variation on the idea of cause and effect that, depending on who you ask, applies to intentional actions or all actions or everything up to and including thoughtcrime.
The narrator of "Horseradish Road" doesn't care what it means. He has probably never even considered the word. All he has is his fatalism and a paralysing fear of his own just deserts. Not for him self-deceiving promises to reform; not for him hopes of salvation. He knows the score. The score is: I am a bad person, and you are a bad person too, and boy are there ever going to be consequences.
From The Coroner's Gambit, which was finally revealed to me in all its glory as I struggled to write about this song. [↩]
Not the fabled Alpha Couple, though, this time. We have not yet met the Alpha Couple in this series, but you can be certain that we will. [↩]
This might be metaphorical rather than literal in "Horseradish Road", but then again it might not. [↩]
The song mentions Elgar's Enigma Variations and Maria Callas; the musical project Enigma released a song called "Callas Went Away" featuring vocal samples from her. I don't for a moment suspect that this has anything to do with anything. [↩]
Whoops, let's not start me harping on that tune. [↩]
There is no way I am going to keep up with myself if I try to write a separate post about each book I read, so here are the books I have read since last time I wrote about books:
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Michael Azerrad
Rating:
An interesting overview of some interesting stuff that happened while I was much too young to notice. I've never gotten into hardcore or punk music in any meaningful way, but the anecdotes and (disarmingly frank) first-person accounts of various local scenes in the 1980s made for great reading. It also turned me onto some music I'd never been motivated to check out before, Mission of Burma's Vs. being a particular highlight.1
The writing was not outstanding, often destabilised by Azzerad's habit of inserting fannish blurbs into his historical overviews. In a way it added to the book's charm, I suppose, in that the stories of a bunch of DIY-loving amateurs who wrote fanzines and started their own record labels is related in the style of an over-excited but knowledgeable fan. Sometimes he wanders well away from his stated topic - for instance, each chapter is titled for the band it focuses on, but the Mudhoney chapter is really about Sub Pop, Mudhoney being a conveniently-placed band from which to hang the story.
Overall, not a great book, but a good enough book about great things, and that is often sufficient for non-fiction.
Black Coffee Blues, Henry Rollins
Rating:
Henry Rollins' writing has something in common with Chuck Palahniuk's. There is an immature or at least arrested quality to it, with cynicism and aggression being celebrated and, in Rollins' case, clung to. Rollins seems to insinuate that anyone smart, anyone who really thinks, would be as alienated and angry as he is; I think that is a cop-out.2 Instead of aiming for an improved future, he turns pain into his identity and proceeds to defend it at all costs. The monotonous cocktail of violence, anger and fear that propels Black Coffee Blues almost completely drowns out Rollins' moments of insight and humanity.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
Rating:
This book is amazing. Anybody who says otherwise is crazy or lying.
And yet I didn't give it five stars! There are only two reasons for this: I found the ending slightly unsatisfying (possibly because I had been bracing myself for something quite different since approximately page three), and dialogue of any length, while rare, was difficult to follow (probably because both of the main characters were "he" and there were no quotation marks).
Everything else about this book is amazing. It is bleak and realistic like nothing I have ever read before, and so unobtrusively written that it's possible to completely forget that one is reading at all. I read it on the train and before work and in my lunch break, and despite the piecemeal consumption and the public, emotionally-neutral locations I found myself wanting to cry, or crawl under something and hide away for hours, or both. It hits hard.
I am extremely skeptical about the upcoming film adaptation. I seriously doubt that any filmmaker could capture McCarthy's world on film, especially with a live-action adaptation. At the same time, though, I am a bit excited about it. Maybe it, too, will be amazing.
On Writing, Stephen King.
Rating:
I had been resisting On Writing for a long time. Anything recommended so highly by people I admired and people whose tastes I often shared couldn't possibly be any good, right?
Right?
In the end it was a mixed bag. I liked the personal-memoir "CV" section, found the "Toolbox" section interesting despite King's avowed love of Strunk & White3, and could take or leave much of the "On Writing" section. Interestingly, that was the part that King mentioned struggling with in the last section, "On Living", which was by far my favourite.
I think my problem with much of the writing advice was that I had already either received it second-hand from King's many acolytes, or figured it out for myself. That is hardly an objective basis for criticism of the book, but I have never pretended that my opinions about these things are anything but subjective.
Against the Stream, Noah Levine.
Rating:
The subtitle of this book is "A Buddhist manual for spiritual revolutionaries", which really makes me cringe, but I read the thing anyway. The subtitle is a good indication of why I dislike the book as a whole. Levine spends a lot more time playing up to his his militaristic theme than he spends on actual ideas, which makes me think I am just not his target audience. He is also glibly literal about reincarnation and prone to using a lot of buzzwords, but he does have some interesting things to say about celibacy and equanimity (the latter being something I struggle with, and the main reason I picked up Against the Stream to begin with).
I still don't like Henry Rollins or Black Flag, though, so there. [↩]
In fact, any variation on "Happy people are either unintelligent or in denial" gets my goat. [↩]
I am going to have to read The Elements of Style so that I can make such dismissive remarks legitimately. Damn it. [↩]
conrad_zaar over at Livejournal gave me five things to write about, as mandated by one of the few blog-memes I always enjoy both reading and writing. I am posting each Thing separately, because I am being baroque and wordy and a single post would be far too unwieldy.
(Anyone who wants to join in the fun can post a comment. I'll give you five words/phrases to write about.)
I have written plenty of poems, but never poetry. Something makes me shy away from using the word to refer to anything that I have made myself. While I think poetry can be found in more places than poems, I will restrict myself to the obvious for this post. Goodness knows it takes me long enough to write these things without trying to make them comprehensive.
I tend to treat poetry more like music than literature. What I want from it is a sense of truth, or resonance; I want to read poetry that taps into my subconscious and expresses things that I have never quite succeeded in expressing myself, or creates a pattern of sound in my mind as surely as the latest catchy pop song to embed itself there.1 An analytical, critical approach to poetry never suited me.
As a result, poetry that I love tends to come from the 20th century and be fairly informal in tone. Allen Ginsberg reliably captures my imagination (and Howl never fails to take my breath away), Kerouac and Bukowski have their moments, and one of the most recent poems to touch me was Robert Bruce's poem about writers. (I have, however, also loved Eliot and Yeats, and I am sure there are vast unexplored fields of poetry where I would fall again and again, if I only ventured there.)
The poet I love the most is e.e. cummings.2 I was first caught by anyone lived in a pretty how town in high school with its seemingly-nonsensical content and delicious word choices. From there I followed him through sonnets and typographical experiments, despair and joy, love and play, and found little to dislike and much to love. A folder of 4KB text files of cummings' poems has followed me from computer to computer over the last ten years. I think it would be fair to say that he is my John Darnielle of poetry. I wish I knew where my book of his poems had gone.
I am not a subscriber to the school of thought that says song lyrics can be poems. Poetry, maybe, but only in that broader sense which I am determined not to address in this post. Matt Berninger of The National summed up my feelings on treating song lyrics as poems beautifully in a Daytrotter interview a couple of years ago, saying they would be "like a dress without the girl".3
While I was travelling in Sweden I bought a copy of Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled. Mr Fry and I have very different tastes in poetry, as it turns out, but his focus on forms and his sternness about sitting down and working on something were very useful to me. I write poems very rarely, partly because I only ever do it to capture a moment or a feeling that I have been unable to express in any other way; the exercises in The Ode Less Travelled took me well out of my comfort zone and encouraged me to appreciate poetry for a wider range of reasons.
That being said, the essence of my relationship with poetry has remained the same. I am fascinated by the challenge a sestina represents, for instance, and suitably impressed by those who have completed one, but no amount of respect for craftsmanship can replace the giddiness of falling in love with a poem.
To be fair, this also applies to other forms of art, including literature in general; poetry simply resists my attempts to approach it from other angles as well. [↩]
The capitalisation of his name is a matter of debate, but I like it this way. [↩]
I prefer to phrase it as "the dress without the girl", myself, but what do I know about poetry? [↩]
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
The upcoming Mountain Goats album has ruffled a few feathers. There are die-hard fans out there who cannot possibly enjoy a Mountain Goats album in which all the songs are named after Bible verses. Perhaps these people have not been paying attention, because John Darnielle has been releasing songs named after Bible verses for a long time. The connection between title and lyrics is rarely overt, instead providing an extra layer of meaning for those open to a little bit of contemplation.
I am a complete sucker for layers of encoded meaning. Back when I posted on Livejournal all the time I delighted in referring to one thing in my post title, another in my "current music" field, and squeezing in allusions and double meanings wherever they would fit. It was irrelevant that nobody was likely to decode it all, or even notice my efforts. If I even suspect that someone else is doing the same thing, it fills me with glee.
Leaving the title aside for a moment, "I Corinthians 13: 8-10" is a relative rarity in the Mountain Goats catalogue: a song of love and hope, pure and simple. There is no relationship here that contains the seeds of its own destruction; for once the threat comes from the outside world (specifically, Nazi soldiers and the start of WWII). The jaunty, stop-start guitar and simple melody disguise the terrifying situation the lovers are in, but at the same time remind us that they are in love, and that is enough.
The song is not called "I Corinthians 13: 8". "Love never fails" could be an acceptable reading of the song, but it is not enough for Darnielle. Perhaps this kind of optimistic idealism is only tenable at its most extreme. Everything you think you care about - freedom, for instance, or comfort, or not getting shot by Nazis - will cease to matter, he suggests, because everything you think you know is a pale shadow of the truth. Maybe the Bible verse is "about" God, and the Mountain Goats song is "about" romantic love, but they agree that all of our mundane nonsense pales into insignificance beside perfection.
Not only that, but they are both adamant that perfection exists.
In a meme that has been going around, the one where you answer a bunch of questions with song titles from a single band, one of the prompts is "You and your best friends are ...". I answered "I Corinthians 13: 8-10". I will leave the interpretation to the reader.
The last day of the Woodford Folk Festival was the first day of 2009. I woke up and didn't know what to do with myself.
I ended up at the last session of FYI with Martin Pearson, which also featured Sandy McCutcheon, Kristine Olsen, Liz someoneorother1 and Alastair Hulett. Before the talking started I got chatting to the people sitting either side of me; bizarrely, this was the first such occurrence all week. Perhaps I was setting the scene for a more sociable and outgoing year. We talked about playing music and made small talk and it was not even unpleasant.
FYI itself was quietly entertaining, a good way to ease into the morning. It was more enjoyable than the resurrected version of Good News Week that has been on television in recent years, but much less awesome than the Good News Weeks of old.2 I particularly enjoyed the suggestion that someone should run "rationality awareness workshops" at the next Woodford, a welcome indication that I was not alone in feeling somewhat beseiged by woo at the festival. There were also bizarre underwear stories, and Alastair Hulett had a Scottish accent.
Then I went to see Rosie Burgess, and was immediately kicking myself for not going to every single one of her performances at the festival.
Completely unaffected, down-to-Earth, Australian modern-folk-ish music from an entirely adorable group. The violinist didn't seem terribly comfortable on stage, but a lack of showmanship did nothing to disguise the fact that she rocked.3 The drummer was all sunshine and snare, and Rosie was the charming hinge it all swung on.4 I think my eyes may actually have turned into tiny hearts when she played a harmonica solo. I was very sad to miss her recent show in Melbourne.
It turns out I posted the wrong photos of The Ellis Collective in my previous post, so I have none left to use now. Never mind, it would probably just provoke unjustified comments about beards.5 I had the odd feeling that I had heard their music before, not just the day before but going back long enough for me to have favourite songs and a general sense of familiarity. I would like to hear a lot more of The Ellis Collective. I love the well-ordered, uncluttered, subtly complex results of having so many musicians on stage without them getting in each other's way. They weren't even subject to the festival-long curse of terrible sound mixing at the Grande stage.
I just had a look at the Ellis Collective's Facebook page, and noted that they have added "Tasteful Bogan" to "Bloke Folk" in their list of descriptive phrases, and also that they have an album due out late this year.
The Wells struck me as a country-rock'n'roll-type band in the vein of The Wallflowers (at least, The Wallflowers when I was paying attention to them in the mid-nineties). Their performance didn't really click for me, although that may have been because everyone in the band was Too Hot and complaining quite vocally about wanting to get off the stage. Another blow was struck for the Skeptics of Woodford when a band member cried out "Is there a doctor in the audience? I need a real doctor!"
I laughed. Not all that many other people did.
Later in the day Dougie MacLean did the shortest soundcheck I have ever seen. He walked on, made a little bit of noise, asked for less guitar and vocals in his foldback, then walked off again. Like The Wells he was suffering in the heat, although he just made a brief reference to drowning in his own sweat and then got on with it. I think I will probably continue to have a weakness for Scottish folk music until I die. It's in my blood, or something.
In the absence of anything else to do (the program becoming increasingly gappy as everyone went home) I went on the Mystery Bus one more time. The band of the moment turned out to be The Wells, who were much more to my taste in an acoustic (and less overheated) setting. A song called "Got Love" was particularly nice.6
Between the Mystery Bus and my last scheduled performance-to-watch of the festival, I had the misfortune of sitting on a hill near something called Belswagger Morris. All my notebook had to say on the subject was:
Augh!
PIECES OF FLAIR
Were I given to such things in non-keyboard-mediated contexts it would have said D: as well. The morris dancers seemed to be entirely in earnest and their recorder was not in tune. I am all for people doing things they enjoy but being in the vicinity of such people doing this particular thing is not something that I enjoy.
Alastair Hulett and David Rovics brought up the rear as a kind of filthy-commie double header. By far the most overtly political music I had heard at the festival, which was not unwelcome. Some of Hulett's material felt a little dated and studded with empty rhetoric, and Rovics sounded a bit too much like Weird Al for me to concentrate properly; on the other hand, Hulett's amiable Scottishness and a song about Mrs someone's Army won me over, as did Rovics' moment of channelling John Darnielle and song about pirates. Also, they came from two of my favourite places in the world: Hulett from Glasgow and Rovics from Portland, Oregon.
And that was the Woodford Folk Festival. Unfortunately I was completely burned out on new music for six months afterwards, but it was packed with interesting discoveries and opportunities to take pictures of bands without getting in people's way and being obnoxious.7 A week away from reality and full of music is not to be sneezed at.
A double bass player whom I had seen in several bands over the course of the festival. No idea what her name was and too lazy to Google her. [↩]
I compare it to Good News Week simply because it had people talking about things and being funny, not because there was any actual link. [↩]
