“Shame” (Rollins Band)

The self is a vertigo-inducing creation, inducing shame by instituting regimes of decency. This is “obscene,” even though this is a trax dedicated to finding and communicating the self. The initial problem of interpretation here is how to make sense of a confession that one embodies obscenity. The narrativization of such depravity activates the corruption with each and every telling. Not much help. But listen to the instruments, the other items of divination. At various moments, they are marginalized (panned right and left), only to be put in solitary confinement in the center. Or, as with the sustained guitar bends in the solo, they rely on the listener to make the connection between the partitions. (Don’t miss the dizziness as well, especially in the wobbly, chorus- and reverb-laden guitar figured in the verses.) The “beast . . . inside” doesn’t need to listen to this nonsense, but sociability demands un-beastly behavior. Backtrack and follow the bass: relentlessly descending, divorced from this self-introspection. We’re already low, setting the groove; no need to aspire to (the heavenly) heights.

“Walk on the Wild Side” (Lou Reed)

In memory of Lou Reed, written on 27 October 2013

The eulogies are pouring in today, and everyone is name checking Metal Machine Music (1975) and the Metallica collaboration, Lulu (2011), as evidence of Lou Reed’s enduringly perverse and antagonistic relationship with his audience. But it’s important to remember Take No Prisoners (1978), too, where his hostility is forcefully redirected at his own work, and, in particular, at his most beloved trax, “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972). Its very success is the target here, and no fan’s nostalgia will escape this act of self-trashing. The problem with the original trax is obvious. Noirish, smoky, and luded out, its call to the other is romantic and touristic through and through, as Reed strolls past the Factory’s collection of transvestites, straight and gay hustlers, drug fiends, and Norman Mailer’s “White Negroes.” (It’s a kind of companion to “Perfect Day”: let’s take an evening constitution where we will “feed animals in the zoo, and then later a movie, too.”) So, on this night at the Bottom Line in New York, Reed tells us that Nelson Algren’s original novel, Walk on the Wild Side (1956), is about a bunch of ludicrous “cripples” in the “ghetto” and written by a know-nothing Chicagoan. He claims the song was written at the prodding of some awful, off-Broadway theater producers, who later dumped him in order to produce Mahogany. “Better to be a garage mechanic,” he says, than write tripe for the Man. As for the famed quartet of wild side denizens, Reed claims he didn’t know Candy Darling very well, but she was nevertheless a dumbfuck because she got “leukemia from a silicone tit”: “And I’m supposed to feel sorry? I don’t have enough heart for 14,000 assholes.” Joe Dallesandro, another loser, has “an IQ of twelve”: “he can barely tie his shoelaces and dress.” And the less said about Joe Campbell’s pathetic love life the better. In the end, according to Reed, Andy Warhol withdrew from the Factory scene because of all these jerks and lowlifes. Who needs all this fake radicalism and posturing, this cheap imitation of the “wild”? But beyond all of this, remember: all coked up or not, “I am not trustworthy.” I am composed of “several selves,” and “Lou No. 1” is just getting around to meeting “Lou No. 5.” One Lou writes the song the whole world sings, and another smashes its pretensions. If there’s a takeaway from this scattered, broken, jumpy, and even peppy take on the song, it comes from the nihilistic Lou No. 5: “Nothing is in style, man. Haven’t you gotten into nothing yet?”

“Nomads” (The High Llamas)

Superstar satire, with character comparing his life to the nomadic wanderers of old. Tribal identity secures internalized, romantic-anthropological slumming that occludes political economy, actual stateless persons, and the whole bother of encounter. Brass band and banjo pump up the (oxy)moronic, T.J. Jackson Lears factor: elite antimodernist jetsetting.

“Dreams” (The Allman Brothers Band)

Could The Allman Brothers Band be the harbingers of the fertile ground that postmodernism gives to anti-utopian thinking (Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky 140)? Keep in mind that one year after “Dreams” (1969), they release “Revival” (a track now performed in churches, it seems). Unlike the latter’s politically debilitating profession of collective love and its uses, the trax in question finds us at the precipice of social collapse. Dystopias, according to Jameson, require a character/subject, and singer’s “blues” (which he “had to wake up with”) are founded on the “dreams I’ll never see” (The Seeds of Time 56). But unlike an anti-utopia’s attempt to proclaim imperfection in the name of greater (achievable) perfection, the singer can only turn to the lover who will witness the singer’s “end of me.” Dystopian praxis: the sharing of a plural “hunger”/impulse and an “us” out of join(t).

“Working on a Building” (Cowboy Junkies)

Permanent housing. Gospel traditional reworked through Xanax-like vocals and behind the beat accompaniment. Singer plays with possible performances (as a drunkard and liar) and then denies she’s a singer; if she were, though, she’d sing and work on the building for “my Lord. “Religious subjectivities, surely, are always structured by denials, but also by somnambulant identity politics: the bondsman forced to produce/build self without own signature.

“dt 3.1415926535897952384” (Pimmon)

Computer macro introduces the electronic into the analog. Pi, to be representable, must always be rounded (off); same goes for “music” in general: sound always bound by technology’s inevitable failures in producing verisimilitude. Clicks become the ends of the diameter—touching the skipping, incomplete arcs of ringing noise at the supposed circle’s edge; identity, always incomplete, can only hope to touch its own laborious borders. The digital is pitiless, but it’s still a system.

“Good Guys & Bad Guys” (Camper Van Beethoven)

Slacker cosmopolitanism that places false contingency at the core of identity production: “[I]f you didn’t live here in America/You’d probably live somewhere else.” Kick back, “be yourself,” and sing (y)our song—since you’re living under Old Glory. But “folks like you and me” don’t seem to make any decisions whatsoever. Professionals do, be they licit or illicit. Countries do, too, but they’re entirely repressive. Even Randolph Bourne believed in the potential of positive law (dual citizenship and migration without restrictions)—despite the WASPy chauvinism. Life as a case of premature withdrawal.

“Behemoth” (Tad)

As with any bloodsport, ideas concerning representation and authenticity are both solidified and dislodged. Tad’s ascendance came with the attendant Sub Pop marketing, firming up the label’s reputation while playing up an image of the band, as Kim Thayil contends, that deviates too far from their “smart[ness].” This radio-unfriendly trax insists, however, on the “strange new sound” that emerges from such forms of violence. Rather than “stay[ing] to hear” what’s been produced for “no reason,” those subject to the “behemoth” of institutionalized sound—or the vice-like “leather straps” cinching the cranium—will ideally live to see it “fall down.” This isn’t an undressing and it’s certainly not a recovery narrative. Occasional fuzz bass, solid-state distortion, and tightly controlled distortion erupt from within. Anticipating the birth of grunge, we witness its birth and evisceration. The necessary joy of quixotic, preemptive sonic battles.

“War” (Henry Cow)

War is a product of the “partial mind,” clouded by “dark obscurity.” One could read this Hegel’s way, since he argues that the State “is most supremely its own” (has a truly self-sufficient and complete identity) only at the moment of War. But instead of critiquing identity, which cannot be closed without adopting a warlike posture toward the other, the Cow’s disciplinary Marxism maliciously heckles all patriotic persons as dumb lemmings (“people get what they deserve”) who should have been able to make themselves whole without all the drum beating, trumpet playing, and gore. A project both impossible and endlessly, potentially murderous; or, ranting become its own object.

“Stone Crazy” (Buddy Guy)

Presently positioned as the object of Jimi Hendrix’s affection, it’s also become common knowledge that Leonard Chess initially constrained Guy to sideman status and fairly tame guitar tones. But the beginnings of Guy’s (amplified) overdrive can be heard here in 1962. Restrained initially, the lines/runs slowly become more direct and shrill; in the solos, the distortion emanates from the note’s floor/base and occupies the majority of registers. The narrator’s main complaint: he’s betrayed by a lover who thinks his “little heart is made of iron.” Even his daughter knows this isn’t true, so it’s willful abuse. But this leads to a complaint about labor and location: slinging guitar in the North isn’t compatible with the clothes he’s accustomed to wearing. So, he’s going “back down South.” (But that’s not gonna happen; he’s just started ripping the top off of blues amplification, and the song goes on to be released in different forms on almost 50 different albums/compilations.) Devastated, overwhelmed, and speaking from a contractual/obligatory positioning, seeking an appropriate climate is a luxury. After the plaint: a throbbing, throttling identity whose work—levied at the point of a finger—begins.