fuck you, here’s a rainbow and other essays about music CContentsontents 3 Sade Is Punk as Fuck 6 Got No shame, Got No Pride 12 kippers for breakfast 16 true sailing is dead 20 we were promised hot tubs 23 fuck you, here’s a rainbow 27 consultancy rock 31 a beige suffocation 35 no man righteous 40 future’s coming much too slow 43 sweet and innocent Sade Is Punk as Fuck

If punk necessarily denotes the identity which is not one, than Sade is its ablest exponent

Sade Adu, circa 1984

It’s no secret that pop punk’s mainstream branded as a disposition, an iconoclastic attitude success in the 1990s necessitated a retroactive that manifests itself as a rejection of contem­ redefinition of what could be considered “real” porary terms of success and embraces a radical punk. By its nostalgic defenders, it was no longer posture of refusal, sometimes in the guise of an to be understood in terms of any formal musi­ intentionally abrasive avant-gardist innovation. cal hallmarks -- relentless tempos, simplified song Punk wasn’t merely a genre of music; that is, like structures, amateurish guitar thrashing, atonal all genres it aspired to become a totalizing life­ barking rather than singing. Instead punk was re­ style, though its adherents would hardly use that

3 sade is punk as fuck

term. They preferred to discuss it in such terms $7.99 plus tax for a copy of Diamond Life by as “respecting the scene,” disavowing the various Sade. (Pronounced Shar-day. It said so right on brand logos under which they disciplined one the wrapper.) another’s behavior. By arguing for the punkness of Sade, I don’t But this idealization of punk was not con­ mean only to make a claim that she was punk ceived with the first cresting wave of Dookie. in relation to the cultural consumption choices Even in the 1980s, as the dead end of hard­ available to the average white suburban teenage core’s louder, faster nihilism became increasing­ boy in America in the mid-1980s, though that was ly apparent, it was clear to many that punk must almost indisputably the case—Sade was as punk be embraced not as a doctrinaire adherence in this sense as were Duran Duran, Spandau Bal­ to rules but as a contrarian attitude that could let, Level 42, and Swing Out Sister, all of which manifest itself only in unexpected ways, for a were music-listening alternatives considered far community unified only by its appreciation of beyond the pale (pun intended) for the males in difference for its own sake, as sheer possibility, high schools like my own. as a utopian expression of perfect tolerance for And I don’t intend to argue merely that as an the collective commitment to shambolic forms African-born soul musician, Sade qualifies as an of individualism. Punk required not obedi­ ethnically Other punk inspiration or foil, like the ence but imaginative disobedience, but not to ska and reggae acts that were appropriated by punk any given sets of laws per se, but to the Law as bands like the Clash. I want to insist that Sade’s such, to the illusion of self-identity. The point music itself, and not merely her relative position on was to shatter the coherence of the symbolic, a matrix of anticipated tastes plotted according to render illegible the class habitus, must be codes of cultural understood as punk. capital and distinc­ Sade’s poised, tion. That’s why the cosmopolitan jet- most punk-as-fuck setter image may thing I did as a teen­ seem less readily as­ ager wasn’t going to similable to the anti- any hardcore show hierarchical ethos of at City Gardens or punk, but she must performing any act be interpreted as a of juvenile destruc­ figure of the out­ tion to my hair. It sider, condemned to was when I caught a a existential home­ ride to the mall with lessness, embodying my mom, went to the rootless affect of the Listening Booth, the drifter with no and plunked down anchor in the existing

4 sade is punk as fuck

order. The first words she speaks on her debut sible juncture at which resistance becomes sur­ album, in her evocative, accented English, after render without ceasing to be either. The best all, are “laughing with another girl and playing expression of this is perhaps in the aspirational with another heart.” Ostensibly about the male anthem “When Am I Going to Make a Living,” playboy denoted by the pronoun he in subsequent in which Sade gives voice to the generation that is lines, these words also apply to Sade herself. They “hungry for a life we can’t afford.” She alternates introduce ludic alterity as not only a tactic indica­ between giving advice to this generation (“They’ll tive of the lover’s presumably egregious callous­ waste your body and soul if you allow them to”) ness but also as a tactic of the singer, a “smooth and claiming membership (“We’re hungry but we operator” pedaling deceptively smooth music won’t give in”), indicative of the inherently shift­ as complacent background noise, thereby im­ ing subject position Sade attempts to give form mediately transforming it into a stealthy abrasive. to. Identity is chief among the “many lies no one Unlike such clumsy and obvious attempts at punk is achieving.” At the same time Sade tells us not such as this effort by the Exploited, Sade gets on to blame anyone else for our lack of place in the the skin and rubs it raw. social order, she also notes the “sharks wheeling Reviewers and critics generally read Diamond and dealing” and her own exhaustion at “scratch­ Life as a straight take on sequencer-assisted cock­ ing a living.” The result is a prismatic take on tail jazz, dismissively overlooking the rich, cor­ precarity, the quintessential affect of punk subjec­ rosive ironies layered into virtually every track. tivity: “no future.” Consider “Hang On to Your Love,” a seething But the song’s key line is “There is no end piece of lounge funk that takes as its subject the to what you can do,” an obvious double-entendre biopolitical constrictions of enforced monogamy, pregnant with implicit meaning. The subjects by which one must cling to suffocating relation­ Sade addresses exist as sheer potential, posited as ships “if you want your love to grow.” The con­ limitless because untapped and directed toward tradictions of this position climax in the couplet no productive “end.” They exist in a perfect state “Hang on tight, don’t fight,” a semi-ironic paean of “whatever being,” to use Agamben’s term, or to passivity, both a betrayal of the generative “punk,” to use the term I am limning in this es­ potential of love as well as protection against that say. Yet these subjects, as Sade interpolates them, energy being expropriated. Power is exercised by experience their unresolved identity as hunger, as “hanging on,” avoiding overt conflict; productiv­ lack, as the threat of endless exploitation that will ity is expressed as stasis, an apt figure for suc­ waste their body and soul in abstract labor. We cumbing to the emerging Deleuzian society of must remain hungry without giving in, we must control, in which “everywhere surfing has already embrace desire without it bringing us to assume replaced the older sports,” while seeming to resist identity. If we are unable to exist within the insta­ its flows. (Surfing, of course, is a sport in which bilities of punk identity as Sade traces it, we risk participants “Hang ten.”) succumbing to the serial production of the self as I would like to assert that punk, particularly a form of capitalist labor. “No end” is, paradoxi­ as Sade practices it, names precisely that impos­ cally, “no future.” ¥

5 Got No Shame, Got No Pride

Rainbow’s Down to Earth as queer theoretical intervention

The cover of Rainbow’s Down to Earth, 1979

The rainbow as a symbol of gay pride dates Coverdale and Glenn Hughes had brought to his to 1978, when a flag made by Gilbert Baker band Deep Purple—lumbering hard rock-funk was flown at a march in San Francisco and was fusion; cliched, cocaine-fueled macho postur­ widely adopted as a symbol of solidarity after ing—and broke away to form a new group with the assassination of Harvey Milk later that year. vocalist Ronnie James Dio. The band Rainbow dates to 1975, when guitarist One might have expected Blackmore to be Ritchie Blackmore became fed up with the im­ chagrined when “rainbow” began to be associated age and musical direction new members David with a different sort of audience than what is usu­

6 got no shame, got no pride

Left: Ronnie James Dio and Richie Blackmore, circa 1976; above: Graham Bonnet with a dog, circa 1977; below, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, in leather

ally thought of for his music. But let’s not forget that Deep Purple’s crowning achievement was an album called Machine Head. Rather than shy away from the rising connotations of the rainbow as a marker of gay culture and affiliation, Blackmore responded in 1979 by releasing Down to Earth, one of the gayest albums in the hard rock canon, ri­ valing even Judas Priest’s Hell Bent for Leather in its with gay textuality that it might profitably be con­ willingness to explore homosexual desire within sidered a work of queer theory in its own right. the deeply homosocial context of metal music. For Down to Earth, Blackmore decided to A tour de force of innuendo, coded lan­ replace Dio with Graham Bonnet, who was guage, frustrated desire, and orgasmic musical something of a departure from the swords-and- release, Down to Earth is not merely promiscu­ sorcery, rock-and-roll-wizard image Dio had cul­ ously available to the ministrations and interpreta­ tivated. Bonnet, an R&B singer who had achieved tions of queer theoretical analysis; it is so dense limited success covering songs written by the

7 got no shame, got no pride

Far left: Graham Bonnet; left: Faith-era George Michael

Bee Gees, had a look that was a cross between alternative forms of desire, whether they are a Halfordesque leather boy with a penchant for same-sex or outside the couple form. The lyr­ aviator sunglassesand a softer, feminized male ics make plain their intentional queerness: “I’ve model out of International Male. Faith-era George learned to live with a cloud above my head,” the Michael seems to owe a bit of a debt to Bonnet. singer declares, and then evokes two key con­ The startling conceptual departure that cepts in the enunication of gay struggle: “Got Bonnet marked merely through his physical no shame, got no pride.” The pain of exclusion appearance should have been sufficient to alert presents gay subjectivity with a paradox: being Rainbow fans to a shift in the band’s intellec­ cast to the margins allows one to act without tual concerns—there would be no songs about shame, though without cultural recognition or tarot cards or warlocks here—but if that wasn’t validation. The tension between these two poles enough, a song like “Love’s No Friend” left no suspend the gay subject in a detrimental equilibri­ room for doubt. um. “Got no feelings left inside,” Bonnet moans, As the song’s title suggests, “Love’s No with a passion that obviously belies the meaning Friend” is an interrogation of heteronormative of the words. The song preaches defiance— narratives in the culture and the pervasive dam­ “Ain’t gonna fall for no line,” the singer cries— age they inflict by forbidding the expression of but Blackmore’s melancholy, minor-key soloing

8 9 Movie posters for Cruising (1980) and Making Love (1982)

undercuts it, suggesting it is at best a partial solu­ The chorus then ambiguously asserts that “love tion. One cannot reject heteronormativity at the don’t go begging in the danger zone.” The idea level of the individual; its hegemony deforms the here is that “love” in the sense of sexual activ­ subject beyond the reach of the conscious will. ity can easily be found in the cruising “danger To correct the deformity would require a change zones” of the pre-HIV 1970s, but at the same in the entire drift of society. time it would be a mistake to name it “love”—love The other tracks on Down to Earth take up doesn’t go there, and its ideologized comforts various facets of that challenge, exploding the won’t be found. You will not find a self-stabilizing tropes and anxieties of straight masculinity and relation; instead it is a place where normative positing challenging alternatives to it, as in “Dan­ gender relations and the straitjacket of sexual ori­ ger Zone.” Again, the lyrical intent of this tough entation evaporate (your own eyes become “no­ cruising anthem is not exactly obscure: body’s”), and you will learn that, as the song states, “faking has no return.” Here, then, we are deep in Love don’t make it on those pin- the “danger zone” of jouissance, as Leo Bersani striped nights When you’re looking through would later describe in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” someone’s disguise You can’t make it alone, so you Male homosexuality advertises the risk of gotta make a move the sexual itself as the risk of self- dismissal, But you’re looking at nobody’s eyes of losing sight of the self, and in so doing

9 got no shame, got no pride

it proposes and dangerously represents referent or the privileged example of sexual jouissance as a mode of ascesis. culture.” It is a gender-inflected expression of what Bersani calls “sex as self-hyperbole,” a So the danger zone—really a sexual coun­ self-aggrandizement to stave off the way desire terpublic, in Michael Warner’s sense—is danger­ threatens to shatter identity. ous only to the extent one is attached to the self If “All Night Long” is about the trap of as such and that which anchors it in patriarchal masculine phallocentrism, the album’s hit, “Since society, the gendered power relations that hinge You Been Gone,” is about homosexual panic, on viewing passivity and penetration as sexualized about a fear of, and desire for, the closet. Its violence. The danger zone is as dangerous to so­ bridge addresses the closet directly (“These four cial control as it is supposed to be to self-control. walls are closing in, look at the fix you’ve put me The other tracks on Down to Earth are not as in”), which clues listeners in to how “you” stands overt in their queer themes, but they are unmis­ for both his gay desire, alienated as a invading takable once one begins to listen for them. The entity, and for debilitating protection the closet album’s opening song, “All Night Long” at first affords. Without its protection, the singer admits blush seems full of standard numbskull cock- he has “been out of my head, can’t take it.” But rock bluster. But it turns out that this exaggerated there is no alternative; desire has already fractured parody of straight desire is displaced aggression, his pretense to hetero identity: “I get the same a response to how that desire always threatens old dreams same time every night, fall to the to dissolve into a puddle of anxiety. The singer ground and I wake up.” The dream of becoming keeps insisting, “I want to love you all night a “bottom” hinted at in “falling to the ground” long!” but the very insistence of the demand is not something the singer can elude. “You cast transforms it into a plea: Give me the sexual a spell, so break it,” he implores, looking for a capacity to go all night long, let me escape the tra­ release, but there is no escape. jectory of straight male desire and its deadening refractory periods, let me become like a “girl who So in the night I stand beneath the can keep her head, all night long.” backstreet light Such capacity is theoretically available with I read the words that you sent to me I can take the afternoon, a willingness to be penetrated, but as Bersani The nighttime comes around too soon notes, “To be penetrated is to abdicate power.” Thus that furtive desire to become feminized, When night comes, disruptive desire reasserts itself with an insatiable capacity for pleasure, must and language is useless for dismantling it. Incapable be buried under derogatory sexist comments: of coming out, yet incapable of not acting on this “I don’t know about your mind but you look all desire, caught between homo/hetero, the singer is right”; “Your mouth is open but I don’t wanna driven beyond epistemology (his conflicted desires hear you say good night.” This sexism is the render him “out of my head”) and representation. price for maintaining the heterosexual couple, as But the album’s centerpiece is “Makin’ Love,” Warner and Berlant put it in “Sex in Public,”the which not coincidentally would become the name

10 got no shame, got no pride

Joe Lynn Turner in the video for Rainbow’s “Street of Dreams” of a groundbreaking American film about a mar­ sacrifice,” to borrow Bersani’s phrase. “When ried man having a homosexual affair. The song’s I look into your magic eyes, the mirror of my lyrics tie together the disparate theoretical ideas of love,” he sings, openly acknowledging mimetic the album in one tightly wrought chorus. desire rendered sexual, and the urge to shatter that mirror in an act that’s equally transgressive How can I deny my heart and unnervingly familiar. When my love is blind Down to Earth I got no choice Though was among the band’s I’ve gone too far higher-charting records, overt queer theorizing at I lose my mind this level of sophistication was somewhat over When we’re makin’ love the Rainbow. Bonnet would leave the band after this album, to be replaced by Joe Lynn Turner, an Here, the singer admits to a “blind” passion anodyne Lou Gramm clone, as Blackmore would beyond sociocultural categories that carries try to steer his band toward conventional MOR him “too far,” past the will to normativity. This success. Instead of continuing to chart the course desire, he confesses, will cause him to lose his of radical intervention in the name of queer mind, forgo subjectivity and admit the “internal­ culture building, gay fans of the band were aban­ ized phallic male as an infinitely loved object of doned, left to walk the Street of Dreams. ¥

11 kippers for breakfast

How Supertramp and Baudrillard reached the same conclusion about the American land of plenty

Supertramp, Breakfast in America (1979)

Could we have kippers for breakfast, else in America eat kippers for breakfast. I’m not mummy dear, mummy dear? They got to have ’em in Texas, entirely sure what a kipper is. ’cause everyone’s a millionaire Yet because I was at a vulnerable and im­ —Supertramp, “Breakfast in America” pressionable age in 1979 when the English group Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” dominated I haven’t spent much time in Texas, but FM radio, part of my mind has always clung to I’m pretty sure that everyone there is not a mil­ the idea that in Texas, there are millionaires eating lionaire. I never saw anyone in Texas or anywhere kippers for breakfast. The very fact that I had

12 kippers for breakfast

no idea what that meant was having anything anyone else exactly what made it alluring, could imagine wanting. aspirational. I wasn’t sure if The point of being an I would like to have kippers American, as it is refracted for breakfast myself (I could back to Americans, is that you be finicky), but I definitely live in the most thoroughly wanted to be the sort of per­ stocked marketplace in the son who knew why that was world, an efficient engine for desirable. I wanted people to realizing desires, imagina­ think I was eating them. tion, experiences as products In my youthful naiveté, I available to anyone who saw secret and powerful knowledge in a line that chooses to afford them. As Baudrillard contem­ was meant to convey Supertramp songwriter Rog­ plates the desert—perhaps a desert not unlike the er Hodgson’s own naiveté about America when rugged high plains of vast, sparse West Texas—­ he was young. Eating kippers for breakfast was Baudrillard comments that it is “a miracle of something that happened in England, not Amer­ obscenity that is genuinely American: a miracle ica. Hodgson was trying to evoke what it was like of total availability.” In “Breakfast in America,” to try to imagine the unimaginable — what life Hodgson captures this same fantasy about Ameri­ was like where I already lived. I was already living can plenitude in the song’s opening verse: the unimaginable. Or perhaps it’s better to adopt the terminology of another naivé interpreter of Take a look at my girlfriend, she’s the only one I got America, Jean Baudrillard, and say I was already Not much of a girlfriend, deeply immersed in the hyperreal, in “simulations never seem to get a lot of simulations” that were “more real than real.” Take a jumbo across the water, There are no “real” kippers to have for breakfast, like to see America. See the girls in California yet “kippers for breakfast” as an concrete idea, I’m hoping it’s going to come true as something to sing and wonder about, is end­ but there’s not a lot I can do lessly reproducible and served for me at least as a constitutive fantasy. In America, there is an overflow of eagerly Baudrillard writes in America (1986): “There available California gurls and an apparent prom­ is a sort of miracle in the insipidity of artificial ise of sexual abundance for every dismal, passive paradises, so long as they achieve the greatness man bogged down in monogamy, even though of an entire (un)culture.” Kippers for breakfast there is “not a lot” he can do about it. The is that sort of miracle. An entirely implausible singer’s dream of America seems to be that he fantasy that is nonetheless perfectly characteristic. will deplane from the jumbo and the women will In America we want what we want when we want throw themselves at him. That is what it means to it, even if “we” never would consider eating a him to “see America”: consequence- and effort- kipper. As Americans, we still expect to be seen as free libidinous indulgence. He will become a

13 kippers for breakfast

­perfect consumer who “gets a lot,” who derives with its post-World War II climb toward global pure pleasure from sheer quantity of generic of­ hegemony, as the Cold War exporter of freedom ferings, uncompromised by any specific appeals in the form of consumer choice and glamorized to him as a particular subject, as such hailings commodities—its movie stars and its blue jeans, would also bring specific responsibilities. And in inspiring the “children of Marx and Coca Cola.” America, who wants that? But as the U.S. was beginning to send its Mc­ In other words, the fantasy of touring Donaldized way of life around the world with the America, of conquering America, of becoming rise of economic globalization, life within America American, is a fantasy of losing oneself and being was becoming ever more vertiginous, as American perfected in the hopeful consumerist melting pot culture was situated at the vanishing point reflect­ as an exquisitely receptive pleasure sensor. Baudril­ ed in two mirrors pointed at each other. Growing lard writes, “The only question in this journey is: up as an American meant trying to master that in­ how far can we go in the extermination of mean­ finite regress, to take cultural hegemony in stride ing, how far can we go in the non-referential desert even as it spawned ambiguous forms of resis­ form without cracking up and, of course, still keep tance in the zeitgeist, like Supertramp’s homage. alive the esoteric charm of disappearance?” In part, it meant discovering one’s own privilege This fantasy stems not only from America’s in the distorting, mocking, and envying repre­ colonial history as a catch-all for Europe’s dis­ sentations of it in entertainment products from sidents, heretics, and hustlers. It has more to do abroad—products that Americans feel unabash­

A still from Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin (1966)

14 kippers for breakfast

Supertramp in the 1970s edly entitled to appropriate. And in part it meant clinical, intellectual, cynical.” This is the corol­ coming to terms with building an identity in line lary of America as the land of libidinal plenitude: with America’s apparent competitive advantage, America as land of hyperrational calculation and which is in making seductive images and then alienated consciousness. Kippers for breakfast quickly rendering them obsolete. turn out to be a very different sort of pleasure So Americans learn to know themselves in than the jouissance of being at one with the relation to ephemeral signifiers that tenuously birds who are watching you and singing to you, have value attached to them, that can come and the pleasure of being assured of your belonging go like Supertramp did over the course of the within the natural world. Banished to the desert summer of 1979. As the chorus of “The Logi­ of the hyperreal, one must banquet on ultimately cal Song,” the other massive hit from Breakfast empty signifiers, strategizing all the while how to in America, put it, “I know it sounds absurd, but consume more of them before it becomes mean­ please tell me who I am.” ingless in the eyes of others to do so. On its face, “The Logical Song” is a pretty I have lived in that desert, with its many mi­ straightforward song about the disillusionment rages, and I’ve become too disoriented to find my of coming adulthood, as one is forced to accept way out of it. I still want kippers for breakfast, the reality principle and the “logic” of society’s and if I didn’t, I’d want something else impos­ repressions and compromises. Wrenched from sible to nourish me. I don’t think the birds were the childhood idyll in which “all the birds in the ever watching me, and if they were, I would have trees, they’d be singing so happily, joyfully, play­ thought they were just jealous. I had the new Su­ fully, watching me,” the singer is instead thrust pertramp album on 8-track, and what the hell did into “a world where I could be so dependable, they have? ¥

15 True sailing Is dead

On “Horse Latitudes” Jim Morrison dared to walk the plank between ambition and pretentiousness

Jim Morrison performs on the Smothers Bros. Comedy Hour in 1968

What’s the difference between artistic they are ashamed at having been so transfigured. ambition and pure pretentiousness? When one lis­ Once they break on through to adulthood, they tens to the Doors, this question can never be far find themselves embarrassed to realize how little from one’s mind. Yes, the group often does blow substance there is to the Doors’ parables of open the namesake doors of perception in many transgression. The garage-goth organ and the a young child’s fragile eggshell mind, but these sinewy guitar figures remain alluring, perhaps, but same minds also tend to reach a point at which the overriding silliness of Jim Morrison’s postur­

16 true sailing is dead

ing, his portentous, overenunciated delivery and Dean seems to miss the peculiar appeal that his his egregious lyrical overreach, becomes impos­ decidedly unsexy music has for adolescents. Con­ sible to ignore and all too easy to ridicule. spicuously lacking in subtlety and seductiveness, But it’s also hard not to feel somewhat sorry Doors albums have more in common with those for him. Undermined in his quest to be taken of female-repellent wizard-rock bands like Uriah seriously in part by the occasionally solid pop Heep and King Crimson than with anything instincts of his band and most of all by his own you’d put on for a make-out session. They revel leonine looks, Morrison sought various ways in inscrutability, haunted-house creepiness, jarring to sabotage his success, from dropping surreal juxtapositions, and aimless, self-indulgent instru­ poetic fragments into otherwise innocuous songs mental passages. Their love songs, of which there to getting fat and growing a are surprisingly few, are generally beard (an approach Joaquin anodyne and unconvincing, Phoenix would later emulate when not arrestingly blunt in his own quixotic quest for (“Touch Me,” “Hello, I Love credibility) to exposing him­ You”). In short, outside of self while inebriated during a their singles, the Doors often performance in Florida. Lost thrived on being awkward and in his Roman wilderness of petulantly unapproachable, pain, he would eventually die just like many self-conscious of a drug overdose in a Paris teenage boys. bathtub in 1971, at age 27. My own Doors phase Ten years later, adding insult began one Christmas when to injury, Rolling Stone would I was in elementary school, help spearhead Morrison’s after my brother got the elevation to the youth-culture double-8-track set of Weird pantheon by putting him on its Scenes Inside the Gold Mine, an cover with the tag line: “He’s hot, he’s sexy and early-1970s deep-cuts-and-oddities package that he’s dead.” seemed designed to cash in on the emerging idea The associated story, by Rosemary Breslin, that Morrison was a symbolist-inspired visionary depicted Morrison as an empty icon of teen re­ rather than a drug-abusing alcoholic poetaster. bellion for his new generation of fans: “To these Whereas the band’s other greatest-hits compila­ kids, Morrison’s mystique is simply that whatever tions naturally focused on their accessible materi­ he did, it was something they’ve been told is al, this collection featured the Doors’ more outré wrong. And for that they love him.” Breslin’s the­ efforts, including “The End,” an ominous and sis, that Morrison was the latest iteration of the meandering tour of the unconscious climaxing in eroticized bad boy for mass consumption, seems Oedipal bathos; “The Wasp (Texas Radio and the plausible enough when you look at photographs, Big Beat),” an incoherent, semi-spoken-word ex­ but recasting the self-styled Lizard King as James cursion into the Virginia swamps and the land of

17 true sailing is dead

the Pharaohs (“Out here we is stoned, immacu­ moaning wind and various nautical sound effects, late”); and “Shaman’s Blues,” which has an unset­ we hear this: tling coda during which Morrison spouts sinister When the still sea conspires an armor lines like “The only solution, isn’t it amazing?” And her sullen and aborted These songs were unlike anything I’d heard, Currents breed tiny monsters, except for the Beatles’ White Album—which True sailing is dead. was fitting, since that record evoked a person­ Awkward instant And the firstanimal is jettisoned. age I came to have a hard time keeping separate Legs furiously pumping, from Morrison in my mind: Charles Manson. I Their stiff green gallop had already discovered Helter Skelter on the fam­ And heads bob up. Poise ily bookshelf, so when Morrison enthused about Delicate how “blood stains the roofs and the palm trees Pause of Venice” in “Peace Frog,” or declared that “all Consent the children are insane” in “The End,” it wasn’t In mute nostril agony Carefully refined hard for me to imagine him leading a band of And sealed over. drugged-out disciples on a killing spree to set off the apocalypse. Though it has some crabbed, superficially inter­ I certainly wasn’t drawn to Morrison be­ esting diction, “Horse Latitudes” doesn’t stand cause he seemed a cool rebel; if anything, he up all that well to repeated listening. It starts seemed remote and terrifying, someone likely to to sound less unsettling and more ham-fisted. shout “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs” as he climbed But Morrison was clearly proud of the effort, through the window to murder me. That No One choosing it over his other undecodable poems Here Gets Out Alive, the hagiographic Morrison (eventually anthologized as The Lords and the New biography by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Suger­ Creatures) and persuading his bandmates to put man, put forth the proposition that the Lizard it on the Strange Days album. The band may have King faked his own death and was out there still, believed, along with the label execs at Elektra, haunting the forests of azure as Mr. Mojo Risin, that literary esoterica was an important part of only fueled my fears further. their brand. But by far the weirdest scene of all on those But I wonder if Morrison’s fondness for it 8-tracks, the thing that frightened me the most, stemmed from his identification with the sacri­ was “Horse Latitudes,” in which Morrison re­ ficed animals, the expendable ballast. I’m not sure cites—in stilted, stentorian tones without nuance what “mute nostril agony” is supposed to mean, that gradually ascend to incongruously belliger­ but it seems like a concise description of Mor­ ent yelling of Rollins-level intensity—a poem he rison himself, who would be doomed to a fate of claimed to have written as a child. lashing out against the airhead image the media According to Hopkins and Sugerman, was conspiring into an armor for him. His career young Jim was inspired by a suggestive cover he would prove little more than a series of “awkward saw in a bookstore. Over a spooky backdrop of instants,” whether they were musical moments,

18 true sailing is dead

Morrison with the Doors on Danish television in 1968

pharmaceutical misadventures, or sullen and to misfits and outcasts who don’t want a sex aborted confrontations with live audiences and symbol to emulate but someone who epitomizes the police. (I’ll refrain from speculating on what the Pyrrhic victory of the will. Like other writers sort of “furious pumping” went on.) that appeal mainly to adolescents — Ayn Rand, Morrison seems to have sincerely wanted J.D. Salinger, Edgar Allen Poe, J.R.R. Tolkien — to launch his drunken boat like a latter-day Rim­ Morrison caters to a specific sort of precocious­ baud, but he failed to register the superficial Ro­ ness, encouraging certain baroque ideas about the manticism in the cultural zeitgeist couldn’t really superfluity of adulthood and tapping into alterity support such a self-image. The Whiskey-a-Go-Go despite his conventional path to fame. And in was not fin-de-siècle Paris; the Smothers Brothers actual adulthood, you can return to the Doors for Comedy Hour (on which the Doors performed a nostalgic idyll about what you once thought the “Touch Me”) was not Le Mercure de France. As future should hold in store — moonlight drives much as he may have wanted to will himself into to the end of the night, supersaturated posturban becoming a poet from another age, nobody can decadence, cars “stuffed with eyes” in “fantastic make the era amenable by fiat. So he became a L.A.,” daring escapes to some soft asylum. But un­ sad anachronism. fortunately, “Horse Latitudes” always lies in wait to But this is also why Morrison can still speak remind us which dreams we must jettison first. ¥

19 we were promised hot tubs

Bob Welch and the glories of the lost ideal of 1970s adulthood

Bob Welch, French Kiss (1977)

I guess I am old enough now for my music- Fleetwood Mac guitarist Bob Welch after I heard writing “career” to have entered officially into the about his death, maybe something about the ne­ obituary rather than the discovery phase. It’s just glected Mac albums that feature him prominently, more likely at this point that a musician I already Bare Trees or especially Mystery to Me, or maybe love will die than it is that I will find new musi­ something about his special flair for vaguely cosmic, cians to get that attached to. meandering midtempo love songs like “Emerald Anyway, I wanted to write something about Eyes” and the epic “Future Games.” But then I

20 we were promised hot tubs

remembered I had written an appreciation of sorts woman wearing a red dress or maybe some sort a few years ago of his first solo album, French Kiss of terry bathrobe that exposes her leg up to the (1977), the apex of his success. It seemed as good a top of her thigh, where her bronze tan begins to time as any to opportunistically rework that. fade. Her spindly fingers, with their long, blood- At the Princeton Record Exchange, there red nails, are stretched across Welch’s chest. (Both are probably enough copies of French Kiss in the she and Welch wear rings on their ring finger, but dollar bins to wallpaper an entire apartment. It’s you don’t get the impression they are married to a testimony to how popular the album became each other.) Most strikingly, she is tonguing his when the single “Sentimental Lady,” a re-record­ face, or perhaps his earlobe—confusing, because ing of a Bare Trees song, went to the top of the isn’t french kiss when you put your tongue in charts. Any reasonable person would identify that someone’s mouth? song as Welch’s chief legacy, but whenever I think This cover tells you everything you need of him, I think of this album cover and what it to know about the ’70s ideal of languid self-­ did to me as a child. Somehow I got it into my indulgence: It gloriously conjures up cocaine head that this is what adulthood would look like. spoons and key parties, empty promises made in When I saw this cover in a Listening Booth hot tubs, interchangeable and indifferent bodies as a kid, I concluded that this was the essence letting it all hang out in discos, sex in sports cars of adult entertainment. Clearly it was meant for and hotel rooms while the 8-track of something people who weren’t embarrassed or reluctant to like this album repeats and repeats. have left youth behind. As you can see above, the The rock milieu today seems suffused with left half of the album cover seems to have set nostalgia about the time when the genre’s aging itself on fire in an effort to cleanse itself of the audience was teenagers. It implies that those were seedy filthiness of what’s happening on the right. inevitably the best years of our lives and that Welch, balding but with the long scraggly wisps of being grown up is one compromise, one sellout, the middle-aged man who hasn’t given up, wears one dreary responsibility after another. In fact, it’s pleated white pants and what looks to be a misbe­ hard to think of anything in contemporary cul­ gotten cross between a track suit and a rugby shirt, ture that celebrates adulthood today as a distinct, opened to expose his sparsely haired chest. He appealing stage of life with its own special allure. seems barely able to stand as he tries to … what But French Kiss’s cover embodies the idea that exactly? At first it appears he’s trying to ignite adulthood can be one endless party too, a bet­ some unidentified smokeable object (cigar? roach ter one, since everyone has more money, better clip? gnarly half-smoked butt from the ashtray?) drugs, and fewer inhibitions. but on closer inspection he might just be trying This mood is epitomized by “Sentimental to throw a lit match into his mouth. He has on Lady,” which opens the album and encapsulates oversize, burgundy-tinted sunglasses that almost the era’s zeitgeist. Lindsey Buckingham produced but not quite conceal heavy-lidded, utterly wasted this remake after replacing Welch in Fleetwood eyes, which stare out vacantly at the camera. Mac and gave him the biggest hit of his career. If Draped on him is a tall, heavily made-up you want to get a sense of Buckingham’s genius,

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it’s worth comparing the deluxe ver­ front of their faces. There is also sion with the not-bad original. He a guy who appears to be on a date revamps Welch’s serviceable album wearing a Shriners hat. cut into something indelible. From “Hot Love, Cold World,” the shimmering arpeggios that open the album’s third single, is less the track to the pillowy backing memorable—a stab at funk with vocals from Christine McVie to the some incongruous soloing more spare guitar solo over the bridge suited to Welch’s subsequent work to the elegant, contrapuntal lay­ with his ill-fated progressive-metal ers of sound during the fade out, band, Paris. The rest of the album Lindsey Buckingham “Sentimental Lady” is as perfect a is rounded out with material that specimen of the California soft- sounds like the Elton John of those rock sound as ever blessed FM radio, and it surely years (“Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart”, bicentenni­ must have mellowed many a midlife crisis. Welch al anthem “Philadelphia Freedom”)—peppy and is no one’s idea of a strong singer; he had a wispy synthetic, replete with choppy bursts of strings voice that was equal parts Neil Young and Glenn and overexuberant backing vocals, often from Frey. But “Sentimental Lady” makes his weakness Welch himself, multi-tracked unmercifully. This a strength, as the indifference built in to his laconic was the AOR-certified hitmaking formula of the intonations takes the cloying edge off the lyrics day, and Welch adheres to it dutifully, abscond­ ing on the spacey contempletiveness of his Mac You are here and warm songs to engage in some slick pandering. But I could look away and you’d be gone That’s why I’ve traveled far The cynical expediency with which Welch Because I feel so together where you are dispatches tracks on French Kiss seems like a taunt, as if he’s daring you to call him on merely go­ and generates a bracing undercurrent of tension: ing through the motions. But his barely disguised He seems both deeply in love and deeply bored. jadedness is part of what makes the album such The rest of French Kiss doesn’t live up to a piquant 1970s memento now: This suits the “Sentimental Lady.” Welch had a second hit with way we’ve been trained to remember the ’70s, “Ebony Eyes,” which has a “Begin the Begin”– as a time of soulless selfishness and narcissism, like opening guitar hook and a chorus punctuated of baby-boomer egomania gone amuck. Welch with a string arrangement typical of the many at­ makes selling out—agreeing to the compromises tempts to assimilate disco to soft rock. The video of adult life—seem like a grand fuck-you gesture has some of the same sleezy vibe as the album whose material rewards always garner you the last cover, though: Welch wanders around what is laugh on the earnest. For this reason, French Kiss is supposed to be a high-class supper club, wearing still grimly compelling, like that one last line when a beret and holding both a mike and a cigar while it’s already five in the morning and you’re way an interracial couple dances some warped version past strung out. You can’t even feel anymore, but of a tango. Several of the clientele hold masks in that’s no reason to stop. ¥

22 Fuck You, Here’s A Rainbow

The heroic tedium and anti-nostalgia of Van Morrison’s 1980s

Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision (1980)

Warped nostalgia can take you to critics think the record is mediocre; the incredibly weird places. Recently, I suddenly started listen­ lame album cover may have something to do with ing to this Van Morrison album Beautiful Vision, that. It might be the worst cover ever for a musi­ which I’ve owned for more than 20 years and cian who has impeccably bad taste in cover art. never particularly liked before. Now I can’t stop It’s like he is daring his audience to listen to listening to it. it. The message seems to be: “See how indifferent Part of this is egotistical contrarianism. Most I am to the surface things of this world? I put out

23 fuck you, here’s a rainbow

my music with this on the cover. That’s how far I have moved beyond petty commercial posturing. Fuck you, here’s a rainbow.” But probably the design was a calculated attempt to move into the burgeoning New Age niche of the time, especially given that space- music synth player Mark Isham was among the musicians on it. The cover has the Windham Hill hallmark fonts and design motifs, which are applied almost parodically. Whose hand is that supposed to be popping out of that crescent, emerging from the otherwise depthless space? What’s with the smeary blotches? It looks like Van Morrison, Inarticulate Speech someone spilled something on the negative and of the Heart(1980) didn’t bother to wipe it up. I am drawn by this design that seems to melancholy of my lost youth. Unlike Morrison, make no place for me, that makes no concessions I don’t want to go back. He can go back for me. to anything a person like me would find appeal­ I’m moving forward. Or maybe I’m mytholo­ ing. I am also drawn by the thought of listening gizing my present moment for myself through to a revered musician’s rejected work. It gives me sheer repetition. intimations of immortality—I’ve got so much I like that Beautiful Vision sounds nothing like time left that I can burn some of it listening to any music I have ever liked before. The younger Beautiful Vision instead of Astral Weeks. I’m not me heard this record and thought, What a bunch worried about time. I’ve beaten the hype cycle. of bullshit. The whole album is drenched in a Listening to “bad” albums also indulges that diffusive, trebly sheen, like it is trying to twinkle. arrogant side of fandom that leads me to believe Though it concludes with a bombastic instru­ that I can hear the greatness in records lesser fans mental that rains chords on listeners’ heads like so are beguiled by. I am the only one who appreci­ many velvet hammer blows, it steadfastly refuses ates their merit; I alone understand where Mor­ to rock. It proceeds with a kind of sublime indif­ rison in his genius was coming from. I too am an ference to its audience. No hooks, no attempts artist, an artist of listening. to engage listeners directly—instead he captures But mainly what keeps me playing the a complete self-absorption, totally lost in his album is anti-nostalgia. Beautiful Vision, though own music and esoteric preoccupations. He’s not clearly an indulgent nostalgia exercise for Morri­ afraid to throw out a song title like “Aryan Mist,” son (“Down the mystic avenue I walk again” and which is one of the album’s many references to so on), inspires in me no memories of the good occult spiritualist and apparent racist Alice Bailey. old days when I used to listen to it, it invokes no He can’t be bothered to explain that the “Vanlose glory from my past, borrows nothing from the Stairway” is a real place in Copenhagen where

24 fuck you, here’s a rainbow

The San Mateo–Hayward Bridge

his girlfriend lived and not some made-up mysti­ 1980s and ’90s albums that he says “carry their cal abstraction, though he sings about it like it’s titles like warning labels.” The warning is that the Veedon Fleece or his own personal stairway the spiritual process generates generic artistic to heaven. Then he takes the opposite tack with by-products. The titles are indicators that the “Across the Bridge Where Angels Dwell”—­ aesthetic substance has been extracted and con­ allegedly a reference to an actual bridge in San sumed in the search for private spiritual meaning, Mateo that led to a house where his ex-wife and and what’s left is a holy relic from a religion you daughter lived. Morrison chooses to present this can’t belong to. private iconography in the blandest, most generic Marcus claims these albums have “no ten­ spiritual terms, as if to protect it from our phony sion,” whose “tedium” is “almost heroic.” At bandwagoning. this point in his career, Marcus argues, Morrison But that’s a big part of why I like it all of a had embraced the placidly indifferent side of his sudden. I take the album as a soothing investiga­ musical persona: “He wants peace of mind and tion into how to turn precious memories into ordered satisfaction most of all, and sings as if “precious memories” or a “beautiful vision.” he already has them.” Marcus thinks that is a bad That is what Greil Marcus is getting at in When thing, but it’s actually kind of awesome. Beautiful That Rough God Goes Riding when he lumps Beauti- Vision promises spirituality as a process of ab­ ful Vision in with a bunch of other of Morrison’s straction and nostalgia as process of exclusion.

25 fuck you, here’s a rainbow

No one else needs to understand your memories for them to transport you, and you don’t have to torment yourself with how ineffable your nos­ talgia is. If you get preoccupied with your own mythology, you flatten out your personal history, which is better remembered spontaneously and not in deliberate and protracted trips through your inner sanctum. In fact, your memories mean nothing to any­ one else unless you are willing to make them into broad metaphors. The song “Cleaning Windows,” where Morrison connects his youth of listening When Morrison was making Beautiful Vision, to soul records and washing windows with his and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, and Poetic view of his current self as a yeoman musician, Champions Compose, etc., he seems to have been expresses this tension: “cleaning windows” wants working against this deliberately. He doesn’t want to be a metaphor for his bringing some spiri­ to commoditize his struggle; he wants to bask in tual clarity to the audience through his devoted, its private resolution. The lyrics are still all about unassuming devotion to his humble craft, but in spiritual quests and finding transcendence, but practice Morrison doesn’t care how dirty your poetic pain no longer is the route. window is, and the last thing he seems to want Morrison was apparently determined (if is for you to be peering through his. Clean your you believe this Wikipedia page) to reject the own damn window; I’m getting paid to do this. heritage of American blues and soul music that Marcus would seemingly prefer that Mor­ he had relied on for so long in favor of some­ rison always sing as though he’s desperately thing more authentically Celtic. Blues and soul seeking transcendence, not comfortably assured music operates by and large within that idea that of it. He wants Morrison’s music to validate an suffering is the only communicable form of endless struggle, a life that promises only fleet­ artistic commitment, the blues the only gateway ing rewards in ecstatic instants to the aestheti­ to ­transcendence—only pain is real. Instead, he cally attentive, moments in which music and art extracts a different message from the dubious unexpectedly transport you after you’ve paid your and somewhat inhospitable theosophical mate­ dues in patient attention. Morrison is supposed to rial he was working with—that the poetic and the be the rootless poet—“nothing but a stranger in powerful are impersonal, and art that can move this world”—who makes us appreciate the valiant you draws its energy not from some wellspring of struggle of art vicariously while we get to take personal suffering that permits an individual to comfort in our commonplace lives. You don’t express spirituality authoritatively but from na­ want to have to live Van Morrison’s creative tor­ ture at its most ordinary. Stop fawning over your ment, especially when you can simply consume memories by combing them for anguish. Your the experience. pain’s got nothing on a rainbow. ¥

26 consultancy rock

The solace of sociological distance in the music of Rush

Rush, Signals (1982)

Certain rock groups persist as their bands (Phish, Dave Matthews Band, etc.), Rush own subgenre. The venerable Canadian band fans seem to believe that ostentatious musician­ Rush is one of them, maintaining a legion of ship excuses indistinguishable songs—that tracks loyalists willing to stick with them as they release from, say, Rush’s 1993 grunge disc Counterparts album after blandly titled album—Power Windows, are somehow over the heads of ordinary music Presto, Test for Echo—that defiantly sell in the mil­ fans rather than simply being inaccessibly boring. lions despite little mainstream notice or media But maybe the Rush cult is right. Though excitement. Like the devotees of other cult the band’s music often belatedly reflects rock

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Originally the group was a A tour shirt from Rush’s Grace Under Led Zeppelin imitator—with a vo­ Pressure tour, 1984 calist far shriller than Robert Plant in Geddy Lee—that seemed happy to turn out functional songs like “Working Man” and “Best I Can,” exploring the evergreen prolekult themes of hard work, horniness, boozing, and bro-ing down. But then Rush rejected their manifest destiny of becoming a barnstorm­ ing heartland rock act à la REO Speedwagon, Head East, or Kan­ sas (or fellow Canadian anthem- mongers Triumph and April Wine) and made the genuinely brave choice to dorkify their music, serv­ ing up increasingly intricate sci-fi trends, Rush seems to deliberately exist outside fantasy opuses like “The Fountain the hype cycle and the desperation it fosters in lis­ of Lamneth” and “Cygnus X-1,” and supplying teners who try to keep up with it or, worse, direct socially awkward boys with that perfect fusion it. Bands and songs can easily become phonemes of King Crimson, banshee wailing, and Piers in a musical-taste language meant to express Anthony novels that they never even thought to cultural capital. Unreflexive musicconsumers—if ­ hope for. such people can even exist in a Spotify universe— The decisive move for the group, however, may not be invested in the status games that often came after it achieved its greatest fame, with the enshroud pop music, but their listening habits 1980 album Moving Pictures. Having built a hard­ are still shaped by the zeitgeist, which constrains core prog following and cemented their virtuoso what is possible and what gets circulated. The bona fides with a series of hyperambitious con­ appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan cept albums (1976’s 2112 featured a sidelong seems to exempt one from such constraints and epic about an oppressive race of techno-priests anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes who obliterate rock and roll), Rush smoothed the by advertising them. No matter how counter­ edges just enough to make their sound accessible intuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a to the unwashed rock masses, crossing over into Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to massive AOR success with “Tom Sawyer” and “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone. “Limelight.” But rather than consolidate their How did Rush get there, beyond irony, be­ popularity by reprising Moving Pictures, the band yond cool and uncool? members suddenly became enamored of moody,

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Left: Rush, from the 2112 album, 1976. Above: Rush in the 1980s.

atmospheric new wave. They jettisoned the Such ideas had an obvious appeal for those roman-numeraled, Ayn Rand-inspired suites they who would become the stereotypical Rush fans: were known for, cut their hair short, swapped the lonely gifted kids who found respite from their Chinatown junk-store kimonos and hooded relentless social anxiety in the belief that their robes for New Romantic–style suits, and began irrepressible superiority was what made others using more synthesizers and sequencers than reject them. Initially, Rush didn’t pander to this Tubeway Army. On their next album, with the audience so much as epitomize it: asexual nerds, aptly sterile title of Signals, Rush offered fussy, always obsessively diligent about their work and hermetic soundscapes that seemed inspired by ostentatious with their learning, always seeming to bands like the Police and the Fixx. try too hard, and always with a tendency to invent As dramatic as the change in musical direc­ grandiose escapist fantasies. The band embar­ tion was, the change in Rush’s lyrics was more rassed rock critics because the pretentious juve­ significant. Previously, the lyrics, written by nilia its records were saturated with was precisely drummer Neil Peart, were maladroit and generally the sort of thing the critics were struggling to inscrutable, and when they were comprehensible, distance themselves from. they tended to offer the sort of libertarian life les­ With Signals, though, Rush seemed finally to sons you might get from an accomplished mem­ be attempting a similar move, putting away child­ ber of a high school debate team: “I will choose ish things and embracing a measured lyrical ma­ free will”; “Live for yourself, there is no one else turity. Hence “Subdivisions,” the album’s opening more worth living for”; “The men who hold high track, assumes a distant, Olympian tone toward places must be the ones who start to mold a new the suburban milieu it describes, patronizing the reality, closer to the heart.” teenagers suffering within it:

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Growing up it all seems so one-sided, Opinions all provided, The future predecided, Detached and subdivided In the mass production zone.

Whereas Rush once brought solace to the outcast “dreamers” and “misfits so alone” that “Subdivisions” mentions by being manifestly one of them—looking gangly and hopelessly unfashionable, quoting J.R.R. Tolk­ ien and perpetually practicing their A still from the “Subdivisions” video ­instruments—the band now suddenly came across like well-intentioned modern order’s either/or, summed up in the song guidance counselors surveying their core fan base as this: “Be cool or be cast out.” from a sociological distance. The video adopts this Though it seemed that Rush were aban­ perspective as well: cutting clips of the band’s pas­ doning the misfits it once celebrated, the band sionless performance with some establishing aerial was actually offering a new mode of escape, a shots of freeways and tract housing and grim better solution for the brainy teen’s alienation, scenes from a teenage Rush fan’s miserable life. something that, more than role-playing games or The song’s chorus begins with a voice inton­ math metal, could prove legitimate in the eyes of ing “Subdivisions,” a word so uneuphonious that outsiders. The detached, transcendent point of they didn’t bother to rhyme it or set it to melody. view of “Subdivisions” points toward a techno­ The word just hangs there: a clunky abstraction cratic future for those analytically minded teens, that establishes the analyst’s viewpoint and the toward a successful place in the universe of homology between suburban development and research consultancies and policymaking think high-school hierarchies. It’s followed by an inven­ tanks. They need not become bogged down in tory of the sites where conformity is constructed: high-school popularity traumas as long as they high-school halls, shopping malls. Then the cho­ can take the long view, can see them clearly from rus concludes with a dismal diagnosis: the outside, and can assume the ability to com­ ment on them neutrally, as if they didn’t affect Any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth, them personally at all. But the suburbs have no charms to soothe This subtle refinement catered to the nerdy the restless dreams of youth. teens’ sense of innate superiority in a new—and arguably dangerous—way. With “Subdivisions,” The implication was clear. Rush had escaped Rush taught the embryonic meritocrats among its this grim fate and now looked on with realist de­ fan base that power, coldly and clinically deployed, tachment at those teens who were doomed to the is the best way to redeem awkwardness. ¥

30 A beige suffocation

The impeccable despair of the Carpenters

Carpenters (1971)

Somewhere beyond angst, beyond polyester wardrobe, are enough to project the in­ hopelessness and utter desolation, lies the Car­ effable sadness of pretending to casualness when penters. Even if Karen Carpenter’s anorec­ you are in fact suffocating. And of course the tic decline hadn’t been mythologized in song pair’s music is merciless in the way it pummels (Sonic Youth’s “Tunic”) and film (Todd Haynes’s you with Sunday afternoon ennui and dentist- ­Superstar), the creepy sexless photographs of the office despair. Nothing else in the history of brother-sister duo, with their strained toothpaste- pop music sounds quite like their otherworldly white smiles and their lacquered bangs and their blend of sunny harmonies and glimpses into the

31 a beige suffocation

The original cover of the Carpenters first album, Offering

Carpenters, their third album, was released in 1971, with a nov­ elty faux-envelope that concealed the mawkish photograph of the duo sitting together in a meadow. This was the first record to feature their distinctive logo, lettered in the customary brown and featur­ ing the sort of typography that you see in Christian bookstores. It evokes a hymnal, with Richard and Karen as the priest and priestess of some strange neutered religion. Just as this record comes sealed in its dainty flesh-colored envelope, the Carpenters themselves are hermeti­ cally sealed off from the world we know, inhabiting instead a muffled abyss; in retrospect it seems amazing that they inner sanctum where every dream ever could have been on the charts anywhere on inexorably goes awry and there is every oppor­ planet Earth, let alone field a half dozen or so tunity to lament and ruminate over what you are Top 10 hits. powerless to affect. Listening to this record is like Initially marketed as flower children slow-motion drowning in a bathtub full of tears. (have a look at the original cover of their first Side one opens with a musical suicide album,Offering, above), the Carpenters began their note called “Rainy Days and Mondays,” on career covering Buffalo Springfield and hippie an­ which Karen sings cheerless lines like “Walk­ thems like “Get Together”. But they didn’t catch ing around, some kind of lonely clown” and on commercially until they released their version “talking to myself and feeling old” with a re­ of Burt Bacharach’s “Close to You,” which takes morseless, pitch-perfect clarity, accompanied the somewhat corny song’s implicit wistfulness by mournful notes on the harmonica and a and makes it a steamroller of melancholy. Paced lachrymose string arrangement calibrated for like a death march and embalmed with a fas­ maximum pathos. The lyrics gesture toward a tidious, airless arrangement, it’s like the musical supposed consolation in love and friendship, equivalent of the most luxurious casket in the fu­ but the overwhelming feeling evoked is that neral director’s showroom: One could lay oneself depression is impossible to eradicate and there to rest forever in its easeful, languid groove. is indeed “nothing to do but frown.”

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Karen and Richard Carpenter

After the brief one-minute interlude of “Sat­ through the mist of the wine”—and dwell on the urday,” a bouncy music-hall tune sung by Richard usual themes of sorrow and self-recrimination. that is pickled in nostalgia, a show tune lurched Richard’s arrangement, framing Karen’s unearthly out of context that may have been intended to voice with tasteful woodwinds and swelling introduce levity but instead demonstrates how far strings, is as soft and gentle as always, a downy, away such lightheartedness can seem, how much fluffy pillow slipped comfortably over your face. effort it can require, how false and accelerated it The side closes with readymade wedding can feel, it’s a relief to return to lugubrious des­ song “For All We Know,” an apparent attempt to peration on “Let Me Be the One,” an economical repeat the duo’s earlier success with “We’ve Only song with a verse that lasts only one line before Just Begun.” Ostensibly a joyful song celebrating it hits the pleading chorus. The bridge, which has the possibilities of love’s growing, it neverthe­ four lines, seems to last a relative eternity. This less conjures a stubborn moroseness; it seems subtle reversal of what you’d expect from the to mock the very thing it tries to describe. Again verse-chorus structure keeps listeners off balance the music is warm and coddling, but it nurtures for the entire duration, mirroring the uncertainty unsettling contradictions. When Karen sings that that the lyric evokes and conveying an ultimate the couple remain “Strangers in many ways” and sense that the singer is not going to “be the one to fatalistically concludes that “love may grow for all turn to” for the “silent understanding” she prom­ we know,” the outcome of the relationship seems ises, that nothing but anxiety lay on that path. “(A very much in doubt. This is what the Carpen­ Place to) Hide Away” returns us fully to the dark­ ters excel at: creating exactly this kind of self- ness. The lyrics verge on psychedelic—“Bright consuming artifact, producing songs that efface colored pinwheels go round in my head / I run themselves as they play, leaving a chilly feeling of

33 a beige suffocation

pristine emptiness where you’d expect the heart­ duce us. They can seem to have been designed to warming treacle to be. specifically illuminate our lives, but ultimately they The first side forms a perfect suite of pur­ have nothing to reveal; at some point we discover gatorial misery, capturing the way depression can that everything we thought we saw in them came pass itself off as a grim kind of perfection. Hope from inside us and that they have duped us into shimmers only to evaporate before our eyes. But engaging merely in an ersatz emotional dialogue that all pales in comparison to the album’s cen­ with ourselves. The pathetic groupie in the lyrics terpiece, “Superstar.” On the surface the song is is just us, scoring our deepest feelings to songs a maudlin account of a groupie hopelessly in love that were written only to distract us. “Loneliness with a musician—the man with the “sad guitar”— is such a sad affair,” indeed, and our only recourse who’s used her; but in the Carpenters’ hands the is to lose ourselves again in another song. scenario takes on almost existential significance. It’s the most devastating portrait of futility What’s being described through the song’s unbear­ on an album replete with them, and its effort­ ably dramatic mise en scene is the way that pop less effectiveness, its irresistible pathos, lures us culture in general invariably lets us down and the in to listen to it again and again, condemning us irremediable despair that’s bred into us when we further each time to the peculiar hell it so adroit­ are taught to respond so thoroughly to the dispos­ ly describes. It makes misery indistinguishable able chintz that’s sold to us for entertainment. from bliss. Carpenters leave us with confirmation Despite being made for the masses, pop of just how good it can feel when our culture songs can seem to speak to us personally and se­ betrays us. ¥

34 No man Righteous

The pseudo-conservatism of Bob Dylan’s born-again period

Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming (1979)

Troubled by the sectarian, paranoid place album that inaugurated Bob Dylan’s notoriously America has become—and probably always baffling born-again-Christian phase, Slow Train has been—I occasionally yearn for a moment Coming, which offers as complete a picture of of negative capability that would allow me to the mind of a newly minted reactionary as one understand where birthers, Tea Partyers, evan­ could hope for. gelical Christians, and all those who smell apoca­ Slow Train Coming is a gospel album, but it lypse in every current event could possibly be isn’t the sort of gospel album that consists mainly coming from. At such times I take solace in the of praising the Lord and giving thanks for find­

35 no man righteous

ing Jesus. Instead, it draws inspiration from the political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.” promise of God’s wrath rather than his mercy, With that in mind, consider this verse from showcasing scornful, brimstone-tinged songs the song “Slow Train”: about the folly of our sinful times and the threat of impending damnation. When it was released, All that foreign oil controlling American soil, in 1979, unrest in the Middle East dominated the Look around you, it’s just bound to make news, an ongoing energy crisis threatened the you embarrassed. “American way of life,” and a recent nuclear ac­ Sheiks walkin’ around like kings, cident had prompted fears of invisible radioactive Wearing fancy jewels and nose rings, Deciding America’s future from clouds rendering vast suburban swathes uninhab­ ­Amsterdam and to Paris. itable. The economy was dogged by stagflation, and unemployment had remained stubbornly high Or a verse from “When You Gonna Wake for years. In other words, it was an anxious time Up,” a song which plays like Jonathan Edwards’s quite similar to our own, in which a disgruntled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” crossed middle class was able to see itself as persecuted with a Rush Limbaugh radio-show transcript: and scorned, and more than just the usual sus­ pects on the political fringes seemed to feel the Adulterers in churches and pornography world had gone irretrievably wrong. in the schools, You got gangsters in power and Into such times Dylan issued an album that lawbreakers making rules. presented itself explicitly as a conversion story, When you gonna wake up and only the conversion was twofold. Slow Train Com- strengthen the things that remain? ing unambiguously conflates Dylan’s conversion to fundamentalist Christianity with a conversion Both of these passages convey the hall­ to a histrionic form of right-wing thinking that marks of the pseudoconservative’s paranoid style, Theodor Adorno branded “pseudoconserva­ which, as Hofstadter pointed out, could be dif­ tism.” Historian Richard Hofstadter, who ad­ ficult to distinguish from religious millenarianism. opted and popularized the term, characterizes it For the pseudoconservative, “time is forever just in “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt—1954” as running out … The apocalypticism of the para­ a “profound if largely unconscious hatred of our noid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pes­ society and its ways.” The pseudoconservative, simism, but usually stops short of it.” Hofstadter Hofstadter notes, “believes himself to be living in continues, “Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion a world where he is spied upon, plotted against, and militancy, and strike at susceptibility to similar betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin.” themes in Christianity.” That is, they play to the In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” religious sensibility, draw strength from it, fusing Hofstadter argues that for such people, “history spiritual and secular goals with the binding agent is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of rage. of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to Slow Train Coming captures that process be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of in action: how newfound piety can spill into

36 no man righteous

Dylan onstage in Toronto during the 1980 Gospel Tour

­nativism and aggrandizing intolerance, glorifying out in the wilderness? / Can I cast it aside, all this blind obedience and demonizing nuance; how a loyalty and this pride?” These lines can almost fear of the end-times quickly becomes indistin­ be understood as a willingness to lay aside fun­ guishable from a yearning for them. That appetite damentalism’s moral certainties and threats for a for destruction animates the entire album, from more tolerant kind of spirituality, but the follow­ the title track, “Slow Train,” on which Dylan ing lines clarify that Dylan in fact means to sug­ sings, “Sometimes I just feel so low-down and gest the opposite. “Will I ever learn that there’ll disgusted,” to its closing track, “When He Re­ be no peace, / that the war won’t cease until He turns,” on which Dylan has deceptively tempered returns?” The problem is precisely that he was the vehemence in his voice. asking such questions; won’t he ever learn that “When He Returns” seems to be self- nothing but the Last Judgment can lay such ques­ questioning, expressing the sort of searching tions to rest, and that human inquiry along those sentiments his left-leaning listeners appreciated lines is essentially useless? him for: “How long can I listen to the lies of By assuming the attitude of a zealot prejudice? / How long can I stay drunk on fear and claiming liberation from prejudice, self-­

37 no man righteous

righteousness, and undue fearfulness, Dylan the religious right but harder when it spews from efficiently delineates the moves typical of and a onetime countercultural icon whose words have integral to pseudoconservative thinking. First, long been cherished and carefully parsed for their the responsibility for war and other evils is dis­ transcendent truths about freedom and social placed onto God. Second, intolerance is actually justice. Yet on Slow Train Coming, song after song an expression of humility in the face of what depicts the experience of suddenly realizing that the Lord demands, and it is the equivocators and the secular, liberal perspective is hopelessly naive negotiators who are too full of pride, too com­ and if not altogether decadent, utterly unaware fortable in outmoded loyalties. Lastly, from the of the threat of evil. This is most pointed in radical right’s point of view, it’s not Christians “Precious Angel,” in which he declares that “you who are prejudiced, despite their adamantine either got faith or you got unbelief, and there certainty about the spiritual errors of others, ain’t no neutral ground,” before offering this but secular humanists, who routinely scorn the chilling verse: deeply held and cherished beliefs of the Ameri­ can Christian majority. My so-called friends have fallen under a spell, These lines, from “Precious Angel,” reit­ They look me squarely in the eye and they erate that last point, suggesting that secularists say, “All is well” are tolerant and sympathetic toward all religions Can they imagine the darkness that will except Christianity: “You were telling him about fall from on high When men will beg God to kill them and Buddha, you were telling him about Mohammed they won’t be able to die? in the same breath. / You never mentioned one time the Man who came and died a criminal’s On Slow Train Coming, Dylan paints a picture death.” Here, Dylan concocts the same potent of an America in which every civic action must blend of persecution paranoia and contempt be understood as part of the war against evil, in for cultural relativism that has long served to which neutrality is not an option. You “Gotta fire up the G.O.P’s religious base, presenting the Serve Somebody,” whether “it may be the Devil supposed persecution of evangelicals not as a or it may be the Lord.” Taken as a whole, the logical conclusion but a given certainty, a famil­ album offers a political outlook that resembles iar leap of common sense. Slow Train Coming that of Carl Schmitt. In The Concept of the Politi- doesn’t ask you to agree or disagree; it exists in cal, Schmitt claimed that the inescapable distinc­ some cultural space beyond dialogue. In polar­ tion of “friends” and “enemies” is the essence ized political times, it promises a debate-proof of politics and went on to argue that “all genuine realm of moral certainty where what is beyond political theories presuppose man to be evil.” reason can seem eminently, comfortably, inevita­ Schmitt insisted that “the high points of politics bly reasonable. are simultaneously the moments in which the Understandably, Dylan’s ressentiment enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the confused many listeners. It’s easy to summarily enemy.” Dylan’s determination to delineate the dismiss this kind of rhetoric when it comes from enemy on Slow Train Coming—the various songs

38 no man righteous

yield an exhaustive, Whitmanesque catalog of or just being cool.” Here he touches on the un­ villains—comes to seem like a prerequisite for derlying existential problems that fuel reaction­ his accepting the reality of his conversion. The ary politics, the sense of ontological insecurity omnipotence of the Christian God has created and inner emptiness that derives from a culture for Dylan a peculiar kind of spiritual certainty that sends perennial mixed messages about “do­ that relies on the proliferation of enemies, at ing your own thing” and “being cool.” These once implacable and clueless, to define the deity’s slangy phrases vulgarize the ideal of self-real­ strength. This contradictory pursuit of powerful ization, which consumerism reduces to a series enemies is arguably the quintessence of a reac­ of postures vis-à-vis conformity, but they also tionary, who wants to be righteous more than he capture the way our own identity has come to wants to be right. constitute an inescapable problem for us under The inherent confusion in the pseudo­ capitalism, presenting us with two bad options. conservative position—its unstable blend of Is it worse to try to prove one’s individuality or faith, persecution and antiliberal realpolitik—is neglect it? enough to make one suspect that Dylan was Dylan’s attempts to escape from himself staging some sort of elaborate critique of the and his legend are legion, and it’s easy to see his ideas he professed to espouse. In other words, Born-again conversion as merely another at­ by espousing an absolutist rhetoric that admits tempt to shake off that burden for a rebirth as of no possible nuance in one’s worldview, Dylan a nobody in Christ. But even in this, arguably seems only to enhance the mystery of his “real” among the most forgettable phase of his career, thoughts. Some wrote off Dylan’s turn to fun­ Dylan proved to be a prophet. The rise of social damentalism as willful idiosyncrasy, despite his media means that we all increasingly face Dylan’s carrying on with two more proselytizing, Bible- dilemma, in which our identity loses meaning saturated records, Saved and Shot of Love. In for ourselves as it gains economic value gener­ retrospect it seems even harder to believe he was ally, becoming an asset to be carefully tended and ever entirely in earnest about his conversion. Was invested. Reactionary thinking in its fundamen­ he actually trying to make an oblique and far-­ talist guise promises to halt the vertiginous self- reaching comment on America’s growing intoler­ consciousness that stems from that by letting us ance and frustration with vicissitudes of pluralism think of ourselves not as a personal brand but as and liberal tolerance? Was he documenting how a persecuted soul. It tempts us with an apparent far an artist must now go to convey any sort of liberation from endless self-fashioning, endless conviction, or was he making a mockery of the risk-taking and deliberation over how best to “do very notion of conviction? your own thing” or “be cool.” Instead, we are the There may be an answer in a line from victims of those cool people, who undeservingly “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” that harvest the fruits of this world. As Eric Hoffer seems to jump out and stand apart from Dylan’s noted in The True Believer, “Faith in a holy cause is myriad other complaints on the album: “Don’t to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost know which one is worse, doing your own thing faith in ourselves.” ¥

39 future’s coming much too slow

Post-punk is unthinkable without the trailblazing work of 1976 proto-punk band Boston

The cover of the seminal Boston (1976)

The 1976 album Boston, conceived by reclu­ itself is customarily dated to 1977, a year after sive and uncompromising musical mastermind Boston was released. But from its futuristic, post- Tom Scholz, who wrote nearly all the songs, apocalyptic cover art to its giddy sense of sonic played most of the instruments, and recorded exploration and outré effects to its combative, most of the tracks in the studio he built in his conflicted stance toward the rockist tradition it basement, is perhaps the ultimate post-punk warred with (“You’ve got nothing to lose, just statement. That may strike some readers as a rhythm and blues,” the band declared in their paradoxical claim, given that the birth of punk manifesto “Smokin’”) to its ardent advocacy for

40 future’s coming much too slow

A 1976 photo of the band assembled by Tom Scholz (center, back row) to promote the Boston album

“Peace of Mind” and the clever prog-parodizing of “Foreplay” (intensifying the satire by pairing it with a feigned musical incompe­ tency), it was post-punk that really grasped the angular core of Boston and explored the rich tapestry of possibilities that Scholz wove with­ in the album’s intricate and sump­ tuous textures—the overdriven minimalist noise soloing of “Long the power of pleasure in a turbulent and cynical Time”; the proto-Goth keyboards political era, Scholz’s DIY masterpiece anticipated in “Smokin’ ” the arch, highly stylized yawp of so many of the hallmarks of the postpunk era vocalist Brad Delp; the sardonic appropriations that it must be understood as the linchpin of the of rawk-and-roll cliches; but most of all, the go- entire movement, the album without which bands for-broke willingness to experiment and extend like Killing Joke, Sex Gang Children, Spandau the standard palette of pop. No other band bal­ Ballet, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark anced the sense of the studio itself as instrument would be unthinkable. with the spirit of spontaneity and openness and Of course it would be easy to argue that celebratory joy like Boston did (with the possible Boston created postpunk merely by spawning exception of that other great post-punk progeni­ punk. The tough, confrontational street-rock at­ tor, Steely Dan). titude of the incendiary “Rock and Roll Band” It’s easy to see that the spirit of endless and the thick guitar sound and three-chord anthe­ inventiveness that marks Boston came from an mic song structures favored by Scholz in songs intense sense of isolation. As Scholz noted in like “More Than a Feeling” and “Long Time” are a 2007 interview, he and Delp spent five years all over the so-called seminal 1977 punk records doing “a lot of basement recording,” getting by the Sex Pistols and the Clash. And certainly “absolutely zero recognition locally and complete “Rock and Roll Band” is as scabrous and uproari­ rejection submitting our demos to national record ous a takedown of the generic state of rock in the labels.” Such indifference not only led to Bos­ mid-1970s as anything punk bands would release, ton’s developing a fierce anti-image, a rejection though with an irony that only the later post-punk of the cult of personality that would have echoes acts would prove capable of assimilating. throughout the flowering of post punk. Indeed Though the punk bands would in many Boston is sometimes seen as the first faceless ways co-opt the apparent rejectionist ethos of “corporate” band, presaging the satiric stance of

41 future’s coming much too slow

such acts as PiL and the British Electric Foun­ “­Future’s coming much too slow,” Delp sings, dation. The isolation also was the mother of a setting the tone for the song’s antsy impatience rich and challenging anti-rock species of rock, as and discontentment, all “indecision” and “peo­ neglect warped their nostalgic wonderment into ple living in competition.” Instead of getting something at once wry and plaintive, evocative caught up in ambition that has been conditioned and shimmering but with an undergirding rib cage by institutionalized culture, be it corporate of iron. bureaucracy or record-company conventional­ Consider the band’s breakthrough, both ity or the tired poses of “free expression” and in terms of mainstream popularity and Scholz’s individualism, we should, the song insists in its musical vision quest: “More Than a Feeling.” The urgent break, “Take a look ahead! Take a look lasting influence of its innovative, near oracular ahead!” A more suitable motto for post-punk soft-loud dynamics is uncontestable. The care­ could hardly be declaimed. ful layering of guitar noise, the precise use of The impatience continues into “Long silence within space, and the sonic separation of Time” (reinforced at the level of form by the in­ the instruments into impossible “rooms” con­ terminable “Foreplay,” a pun that works on mul­ structed with reverberation effects all work to cre­ tiple levels). Positively obsessed with the relentless ate a kind of Rubik’s Cube of interlocking sound passing of time, the song declares the singer’s shards that would not be lost on the post-punkers intention to “keep on chasing a dream, though I of the ensuing years. may never find it.” He laments that “you’ll forget The lyrics of “More Than a Feeling” also about me after I’ve been gone,” admitting the speak to the power of stale music (represented by unshakable truth of the cyclical nature of time, radio songs and the lost love “Marianne”) to drive and how the myth of progress, personal or cul­ the dream of something new and better, some­ tural, can devolve into a snake consuming its tail. thing reconfigured to make “my Marianne walk It seems an eerie and prescient warning, given the away.” The sensuousness of music is an incom­ eventual fate of one of the few vocalists to match plete experience, the song insists. What is needed Delp in supple vocal intensity, Joy Division’s Ian is something “more than a feeling,” something Curtis, who tragically took his life on the preci­ cerebral that can defrost a listener when they’re pice of achieving an oppressive level of fame. “tired and thinking cold.” The muscularly intel­ Nonetheless, the song espouses a certainty ligent bands of late 1970s, groups brimming with that what we all want from music, and from life, musical and political ideas, like Mission of Bur­ need not be painfully mysterious and obscure, but ma, Au Pairs, Gang of Four, Bush Tetras, Bow is instead “just outside your front door.” What’s Wow Wow, would all attempt to rise in their own wanted is merely the courage to walk through various ways to the challenge Boston set out. that door, rather than to procrastinate or to try to “More Than a Feeling” shows us that the sneak out the back way. The turbulent history of past can be a seductive trap, a theme developed postpunk would show how deeply that message further on the song that follows it on the al­ was taken to heart by the bands that spawned in bum, the restless, searching “Peace of Mind.” Boston’s wake. ¥

42 sweet and innocent

The more we laugh at the idea of the world remade in the Osmond image, the more its underlying commercial vision comes true

“I could record a Prince song, peo­ ple wouldn’t probably misconstrue what I’m saying as something dirty because it’s Donny Osmond, right? But if Prince recorded it, then it’s dirty. That’s not fair.”

—Donny Osmond, quoted in Barry Scott’s We Had Joy, We Had Fun: The Lost Recording Artists of the ’70s.

As an adult, Donny Osmond clearly regretted his having been used as a squeaky- clean weapon in the war MGM boss and one-time California gubernatorial hopeful Mike Curb waged on popular culture in the early 1970s. Curb, even in his twenties a con­ servative right-wing ideologue, despised the hedonistic individualism that crossed into the mainstream from the ’60s counterculture

43 sweet and innocent

thanks in part to the pop music that celebrated in parts of Africa, the Osmonds’ heavy-metal and advertised such a lifestyle. The Osmonds anthem “Crazy Horses” is not really about the (who were discovered at Disneyland and honed alluring power of heroin but rather the air pollu­ their chops on the Andy Williams Show), perhaps tion emitted by California power plants. MGM’s most successful act during Curb’s tenure That anyone could have thought the Os­ there, represented his ideal cultural product: a monds were cooking up drug hymns suggests vaguely religious, ultra-white group of boys who that perhaps Donny is wrong, and that in fact, were malleable enough to be used to co-opt any their aggressive wholesomeness almost demands other vital form of pop music and neutralize it, that we start looking for double entendres in draining it of any of the progressive possibilities the Osmond oeuvre. It’s not hard to discover a implicit in its popularity. plethora of salacious possibilities: what exactly Thus, when the Jackson 5 suggested Amer­ do they mean when they claim that they’re going ica could accept a black family into its pantheon to give a woman “double lovin’,” claiming that of stars, Curb was ready with the Osmonds, and she’ll “get a double pleasure every time”? What their Jackson 5 rip-off hits “One Bad Apple” and exactly is it that “they” call “puppy love”? And “Yo-Yo,” to offer Americans an opportunity to in the song “Sweet and Innocent,” who in the keep their radios white. When hard rock began to world could be too young for the 12-year-old become a way for teenagers to express rebellion, Donny, who nevertheless spies “a little wiggle in the Osmonds were there with their guitar-heavy her walk” that he “loves”? albums Crazy Horses and The Plan, to remind kids Because the Osmonds took their role as that the establishment was one step ahead of family entertainers so seriously, because they seem them. Whenever a teen idol threatened to in­ so utterly trapped in a Reader’s Digest version of the ject some sexuality into the lives of young fans, American heartland so extravagantly out of touch ­Donny Osmond’s hits were there to make the with both the world in which it was made and the whole notion of love and sex being connected world in which we now hear it, because they are seem ludicrous: A pre-pubescent boy with the entirely without pretensions of their own, they are voice of teenaged girl singing wistful, self-sacrific­ perfectly suited for us to enjoy them as camp. ing love songs addressed to other teenaged girls The packaging of their hit collection is effectively drains all carnality out of the situation. designed with this in mind, emphasizing their For Donny to claim that there was some­ ridiculous uniforms and their congenial lack of thing subversive in their ’70s hits seems rather far- self-awareness, with photos of them performing fetched at first, particularly when the liner notes karate kicks and wearing mock Native American to their hits collection Osmondmania! is at great costumes. The relentless schmaltziness of their pains to reassure us of how concerned they were sound (what another reviewer has called their “va­ with protecting the delicate minds of America’s riety show arrangements”) manages to be wonder­ children, explaining how they edited suggestive fully silly without ever seeming like the band’s fault. lyrics out of their 1974 hit “Love Me for a Rea­ Their obvious desperation to please appears guile­ son,” and reminding us that despite being banned less, completely unsophisticated, hewing to some

44 sweet and innocent

anaesthetic bottom line that rejects all subtlety, now universally accepts that it can maximize the complexity and mystery. Musical lobotomies like profit it extorts from the youth market by selling “Down by the Lazy River” are irresistibly infec­ circumscribed pseudo-rebellion and a castrated tious, still resonating with the same hollow feel- form of übersexuality both hyper-present­ and good vibe that originally made them hits. Overall, completely unattainable. we can enjoy the absurd, surreal fantasy of a world We are in no danger of having our culture where all youth is remade in the image of the Os­ sanitized by the like of the Osmonds. If anything, monds without ever fearing it could come to pass. the Osmonds, with their fluorescent smiles, their Countercultural groups at the time, how­ robotic identicalness, and their complete surren­ ever, must not have felt the luxury of such de­ dering of any will to individual expression, come tachment; judging by the irrational ferocity of across like proselytizing members of some creepy their responses to the Osmonds, they must have cult. Their cheerful cooperation with whatever ex­ felt very threatened indeed—the liner notes of ploitative measure was commercially necessary, be ­Osmondmania reveal that the SLA, the anticapitalist it performing many of their shows on ice skates, radicals who abducted Patty Hearst, announced singing incestuous romantic duets with a sibling, they would “annihilate” the Osmonds if they or wearing outrageous jumpsuits that report­ performed, and that the Hell’s Angels once invad­ edly made Elvis jealous, makes them seem even ed an Osmonds concert in Germany and threw more innocent and harmless now. The marketing “anything they could get their hands on” at the maneuvers that shaped them are so transparent to Osmonds on stage. us that they seem laughable rather than repugnant (Written by Alan, the eldest Osmond broth­ and reprehensible, as they must have seemed to er, the liner notes are, incidentally, fascinating in observers at the time when such tactics earned their peculiar lack of perspective: in explaining the Osmonds mainstream acceptance. how “Osmondmania” was “overwhelming” in Outdated hype sometimes seems like failed “Malaysia, Europe, the Far East and in Norwegian hype, which tempts us to appreciate the Osmonds, countries,” he depicts without regret how their whose marketing strategies now seem so mis­ limo ran over two girls and how their tour bus guided, as a demonstration of how silly and stupid rolled over someone’s legs, and he cites Sgt. Pepper hype really is. But because audiences embraced and Pink Floyd’s The Wall as inspiration for their the Osmonds despite their being overtly synthetic, 1973 concept album about Mormon theology, The their success helped usher in an era of popular Plan, even though The Wall wasn’t released until entertainment where more and more variables are 1979. Alan proudly boasts the Osmonds “were controlled from the top. Audiences made it plain once known as one of the loudest musical acts in that they didn’t care how much pressure was put the business,” as though their sheer volume would on a band to conform. If the record industry was prove to skeptics how with it they were.) afraid that developments in the late ’60s made the The Osmonds didn’t enact a new era of quirks and idiosyncratic concerns of individual morally pure entertainment: The whitewash has artists important to audiences, the success of the proved counterproductive. The record industry Osmonds laid such fears to rest. ¥

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