Monday, January 21, 2008

"cry for tommorow, cry for today/cry for the lives that we've frittered away"
David Stubbs recently did a heroic job with the sleeve notes for the re-issue of Pere Ubu’s four Fontana years’ albums, The Tenement Year, Cloudland, Worlds in Collision and Story Of My Life, albums that are largely regarded as being the point where Ubu, having drifted into terminal avant-garage inaccessibility with the Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man suddenly tried to have an unseemly stab at the pop mainstream. Buy the Modern Dance and Dub Housing, the early, angularly experimental stuff, rock-concrete carved into odd new modernist geometries, pre-post-punk masterpieces of urban alienation and industrial decay. Maybe have a go at the next few if you’re smitten. Forget the next twenty year’s worth.

Naturally, I beg to differ. Actually I came to Ubu late and via Thomas’ side project, the superb David Thomas and Two Pale Boys and the somewhat expanded Pale Orchestra, who substantially re-worked much of the mid-period Ubu. For me the Modern Dance and Dub Housing are slightly pointless preludes to Thomas and co getting to grips with the central myths of American art, refashioning it, attempting to distil its central tropes, trying to figure out what it all means instead of simply attempting to obliquely sidestep the issue, and in doing so tracing a distinctly American modernist tradition. There was a horribly smug riposte to Springsteen circa Born in the USA called “Cars and Girls” (by Prefab Sprout, whose first album was called Steve McQueen and had them posing on a motorbike!) whose chorus ran something like “some things hurt more, much more than cars and girls” but in these albums cars and girls are precisely what matter, and the ways in which they hurt are uniquely American. The Sproutist attempt to have your cake and eat it (among other examples) can’t help but leave me thinking that there’s a horrible condescension on the part of “smart” Europeans for the mythic substratum of American life, a certain knee jerk anti-Americanism that holds the indigenous blue-collar culture in contempt and believes it needs to be corrected by our authentic European culture, and which is really just a defence against both the potency and the universality of certain American archetypes.

I intend to have a go at expanding this further with a considered blather on the four records but first I have to figure out a rather complicated idea on the notion of tradition which may well take me The Rest Of My Life and so I will leave it for the minute with a link to this. A very good thing in my book as among other delights it gives us a two hour set from my prime Ubu circa 91, a fine companion piece to the wonderful Apocalypse Now.
Can my money just go directly to Keith Moline?

9 comments:

Dominic said...

I could have sworn that was a picture of John Martyn at the head of this post. Who might very well have sung the lines "Cry for tomorrow, cry for today..."

Anonymous said...

Nah it's David Thomas... in a pretty similar state to Martyn though (hasn't JM had a leg off....)I have an important question for you Dominic, which is.. where do you stand on the whole new-rockist "Lyrics are not literature" thing.. as.. well... i stand a rather long way away from it...

Dominic said...

One of the reviews of Defective Epitaph had a nice line about how you could string the titles of Xasthur songs together to make a fairly absorbing prose-poetry...

Much of the writing I like best (sci-fi in particular) isn't generally considered "literature", so in that sense I couldn't give a flying one; if the idea is that lyrics in general aren't worth paying close attention to, then that's a bit of an obscurantist, know-nothing stance to be taking. Even crap lyrics are part of the song. Sometimes they're tossed off as a bit of an afterthought (vide Spiral Jacobs, passim), but even then they can be quite revealing, as automatic writing often is.

A lot of music-making, especially in pop/rock/metal, is intuitively driven; it's people who aren't trained musicologists or whatever just mucking about with whatever musical language comes to hand and experimenting in search of things that sound good. You always risk sounding a bit ridiculous if you start saying "obviously Malefic put that diminished chord there because he wanted to play on the mediaeval concept of the tritone as 'the devil's interval'"; and that goes for lyrics too. But it is nevertheless broadly significant that metal as a genre makes such extensive use of tritone intervals, just as it's broadly significant that a lot of death metal and grindcore lyrics use tropes borrowed from extreme body horror. These things are worth paying attention to and theorizing about, because they're among the structural conditions of all that intuitive mucking around; and because sometimes an individual group or musician plays off against that background in a significantly novel way. Why on earth would anybody not want to know about that, or think about it?

Anonymous said...

aha! But... i often like stuff primarily because of the lyrics. they basicaly compensate for turgid music for me if they're any good and i'm very fond of analysing and getting involved with people like Richard Thompson's large output in a pretty general lit-crit way...i mean, what's your take on the literate singer sowngwriter thing Dominic...who do you respect as lyricists...?

Dominic said...

Richard Thompson, for sure. Mark Eitzel, truly great. Stephen Immerwahr of Codeine ("Dream in black and white, / model cities shooting up in the air"). Thalia Zedek. John Martyn, on occasion. Mark Kozelek can get a bit sixth-form-poetry, but has a few lines to die for - "Glass on the pavement under my shoe, / without you, what does my life amount to?". Miserable bastards the lot of them, needless to say...

Dominic said...

This will either make you go "meh" or cast an unshakeable grey pall over the rest of your life:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NFQ4nuUuwNo&feature=related

Dominic said...

Eitzel doing "Another Morning With Kathleen":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruhWmvLoR0I

Anonymous said...

Thalia Zadek! aha! yes i'm a bit of a fan myself from live skull right through Come to her solo stuff... few people can't sing quite so well..i'm off to check out those links....

Dominic said...

No-one does infinite dyke sadness like Thalia.