From humble origins in Idaho, the little band that could makes good in the world, through sheer power of earnest pleading to radio stations to “play our record.” Homespun, twangy. Then Dick Clark arrives. And: “Come to think of it, our business manager’s our biggest fan.” Charting the fall into the market. But, following Shershow, a false nostalgia for popular culture’s “original” outside position disenables meaningful politics. Legerdemain.
Setting up the ten pins of the “unseen,” “concrete,” and “individual” against those earthly powers perpetuating the “divinity” of the group. If the future is, as vocalist claims, wholly about exploration, then getting into “Judas”/traitorism is the first commitment. Caveat: aim high and punch upward.
Metal has birthed so many beasts. Hundreds of metal trax invoke the “Beast,” and each one, consciously or not, finds its roots in the Great Beast, the Victorian mage Aleister Crowley (rhymes with holy). Crowley’s mother, Emily, called him “Beast,” and set him on a path to magickally overcome the Christian era and its morality and enter a new aeon in which “every man and every woman is a star” (Liber AL). In the wake of Crowley, this “beast” was hybridized with paganism, nihilism, anti-modernism, and therapeutic individualism and bestowed onto metal as a fundamental legacy. In metal’s looking-backwards eutopianism, one affirms the “beast” set free from the church and the state (any remainder tacitly becomes prey). In this way, metal attempts to recover an original beast, self-named, rather than ascripted by steeple and rotunda. Beasts without sovereignty. And yet, and yet. . . . Twisted Sister’s claim regarding the “nature of the beast” remains tethered to clerical inventors (to understand the beast, we must “listen to the [Judas?] priest”) and the sovereign’s original ban (against “this Cain”). And sovereignty, as Derrida suggests in The Beast and the Sovereign, has always already shown its beastly side, whether one reads Hobbes or Rousseau. In all this beast talk, one searches for something more, or something less, than a mirror for magistrates.
Here, it’s preferable to speak of a “new world coming on” rather than a “new world in the morning,” and the difference seems to stop just short of an ideological edict. After all, it seems to be lexical and not conceptual. Things, as they do, get thorny. The narrator’s arrogance—why even sing a song about something so self-evident?—seconded by the testimony of an old man with a decades-old dream: we will banish the diurnal in the name of the cataclysmic. The latter “comes,” and you can sense it. Shed your dreams of change within your serial existence and enter the realm of “thought,” which is divorced from the quotidian and assumes immanence. A possible response could begin with a worry: if yesterday and tomorrow are banished, how could one be mindful of (and ethical toward) difference?
This English ballad, uncollected in the Child Ballads, presents a startlingly human picture of the youthful Jesus. He likes playing ball, he resents his mother’s punishments, and he’s quick to anger. He also drowns three rich boys who insult his lowly status, and he does it by conjuring a Moses-lite miracle: a sun bridge is projected across a body of water, and it collapses as soon as the rich boys try to cross over. So Jesus is both absolutely human, and he’s also ready to revolt: proto-politically, he aggressively takes the side of the poor. But he’s also absolutely terrifying, a possible bad seed, and definitely someone you don’t want to cross. As his final act here, while Mary is whacking him with a switch from a withy tree, he curses the tree (the whole species!) and makes it suffer a rotting death from the inside, from the “heart.” Some might call it overkill, but perhaps that’s human, too. A bit of a celebration, then, of a pleb who won’t take shit from no one and nothing.
Probably most famous for being third in line (but the most successful) to record “Love of the Common People,” Thomas shifts from smarmy community-building to an immigrant’s plaint here. It’s a move from a coercive optimism for the poor to an embodiment of living death in which those of means “don’t care if I freeze to death and die.” The “promised land” is a set of shifting goalposts, each subsequent one narrowing the chances of survival. Salvation, too, is a false panacea, with your preacher soliciting money to go to the “holy land.” We’re implored to “give no money to that lying, cheating man.” But this shouldn’t be mistaken for either a sunny worry about equality (i.e. “we all go or no one does”) or a desire for deeds that match the (national) creeds. “Saturday night” proves formative for the trax’s critical dystopia; parties that are “outside” enjoy the practice of aggressive, excessive exchange. Come Sunday, we institute an economic austerity from the bottom up.
What did Braxton learn from Cage? Little, perhaps, but that’s not a problem. Cage’s legacy primarily is one of compositional indeterminacy (short-circuiting the composer, but not the composition), whereas Braxton seems interested instead in refiguring Cage as an improvisor’s avatar. That is: Braxton creates oblique scores, like Cardew’s Treatise (in this score, the letter “G.,” a line, a crossing, a shaded block, a dotted barrier, and the notation, “4%”), which thrive on deciding, each time, that which is in principle uninterpretable according to a verifiable rule. One way, then, to hear the myriad skronks, foghorn soundings, runs, and even screams into the alto: the unescapable decision, always with reference to an ultimate undecidability.
Sanger’s got nothing on this. Sandwiched between the releases of “Uptown” and “He’s a Rebel“— the transition from lionizing the common, alienated working stiff to affirming the sensitive rebel—Spector’s most unsuccessful single takes dead aim at the foundational violence of the betrothal’s gift: the landed man. Spiraling strings, especially at the song’s center, explain this problematic logic by centering on the “care” which induces the “glad” somnambulance of the “tender” self.
Without this song—the one often sung by South African White friends as an un-national anthem during apartheid—without this song, no ancient cults of Sixto Rodriguez. It’s his one underground hit record (though never a single), and it is a tower of weird. Opening peregrinating bassline says we’re on the streets, checking out the entrance to her apartment while vaguely musing about soldiers, class, and race. If the revolution is a kind of romantic love (Warren Beatty’s Reds, for example), then its first wonderments are like a bad breakup’s hangover: obsessing over her sleeping habits, running through her list of awful friends. In relation to the State of Apartheid, were even its children of privilege like spurned lovers?
One would probably want to worry about the numbering and disregard the LSD theories about the song for the moment. What makes #23 special? Nothing in particular, it seems. Letters are co-authored (anticipating another), and their meaning(s) resonate in unintended ways. All of this makes imagination (the sense of traveling toward an other) both impelling and dispersed. But: this experience comes from #22. So, #23, like the repeated descending arpeggio (with initial pull-off), is a missive about trax as ground(s) for flight. Only “sit[ting] in[side]” for a few moments, at ease: freedom as disposition (and to be spent).