Were-Waitsing: Gothic Elements in the Musical Imagery of Tom Waits
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MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature Were-Waitsing: Gothic Elements in the Musical Imagery of Tom Waits Master’s Thesis Brno 2019 Supervisor: Author: Mgr. Pavla Buchtová Bc. Jakub Jiaxis Svoboda Abstract This thesis focuses on the musical imagery in the songs of American singer- songwriter Tom Waits, with special attention paid to Gothic elements in Waits’ music, as well as in his on and off-stage presence. As Waits himself eludes critical efforts to be labelled – his art and music is described in an array of genres as wide as blues, jazz, vaudeville, industrial and experimental – this thesis undertakes to present him as a Gothic artist, a view which has so far been academically neglected. The thesis analyses two key notions of the gothic genre, as portrayed and manifested by the artist, primarily the wound-healing duality and the notion of shape-shifting as a form of code-switching between personas and genres, thus showing that for Waits the Gothic is a medium through which he can confront the intact American discourse with the disfigured, peripheral socio-cultural domains. Key words Tom Waits, American Gothic, Southern Gothic, wound, healing, shape-shifting, liminality 2 Anotace Diplomová práce se zaměřuje na obraznost v tvorbě amerického písničkáře Toma Waitse, se zvláštním ohledem na gotické motivy ve Waitsově hudbě, stejně jako na umělcovu sebeprezentaci na pódiu a mimo něj. Waits samotný uniká snahám o škatulkování – jeho tvorba spadá často do širokého spektra žánrů jako je blues, jazz, vaudeville, industrialní či experimentální hudba – tato práce jej však představuje jako gotického umělce, tedy z pohledu který byl v rámci akademického diskurzu opomíjen. Práce analyzuje dva klíčové momenty gotického žánru, tak jak je ve svém díle Waits manifestuje, a to dualitu rána-hojení a motiv měňavce, jako formu code-switchingu mezi personami a žánry. Ukazuje se, že pro Waitse je gotický žánr médiem skrze které může konfrontovat intaktní americký diskurz s deformovanými, periferními socio-kulturními sférami. Klíčová slova Tom Waits, americká gotika, jižanská gotika, rána, hojení, měňavec, liminalita 3 Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my own, that I worked on it independently and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography. Prohlášení Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou diplomovou práci vypracoval samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů. In Brno on 26 March 2019 ………………………………………… Bc. Jakub Jiaxis Svoboda 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the supervisor of my diploma thesis, Mgr. Pavla Buchtová, for embarking with me on this uncanny journey, as well as for the time she devoted to discussing the focus of the thesis and the invaluable feedback she provided to my writing. I would also like to thank my wife Jana and our little Jasmínka for making any of this possible. 5 Contents 1 What The Hell Is He Building In There?...................................................................7 2 The Gothic – An Overview........................................................................................11 2.1 Haunting.............................................................................................................12 2.2 The Obscure.......................................................................................................15 2.3 America – Dark And Grotesque........................................................................22 3 Shapeshifting............................................................................................................25 3.1 Persona And Persono.........................................................................................26 3.2 Spin Me A Yarn..................................................................................................31 4 A Wound That Will Never Heal...............................................................................40 4.1 Invitation To The Blues......................................................................................41 4.2 Trombones And Bones......................................................................................50 4.3 War Machines....................................................................................................58 5 Conclusion.................................................................................................................71 Bibliography................................................................................................................76 6 1 What The Hell Is He Building In There? Before Tom Waits was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2001, Neil Young in his induction speech introduced Waits as “undescribable”, labelling him in an array of professions as broad as “performer, singer, actor, magician, spirit guide, changeling”. Young reminisced that he had seen Waits standing in a bunch of dust, and he thought that he saw sparkly things coming off him, and, having looked at him while he was singing, he said to himself “Is my vision going? I’m seeing three, maybe four people up there now. And they all seem to be waiting for the other one to finish so that they can come in.” This seems to be a very apt description of the man whom Young claimed to be impossible to fathom. It is this very undescribability, this lack of a heterogeneous focus which makes the art of the American singer-songwriter Tom Waits complicated to grasp academically. Although there have been attempts to cover the artist’s life and work, namely in three biographies – the first to be published being The Many Lives of Tom Waits by Patrick Humphries (1989), followed by Wild Years – The Music and Myth of Tom Waits by Jay S. Jacobs (2000) and Hoskyns’ unauthorised attempt at a comprehensive biography titled Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (2009). The range of full-fledged academic texts is limited to a handful of articles from academic journals, primarily dealing with the musical aspect of Waits' lengthy career, most of which are cited in this thesis. In the anglophone academic context, two more book-length studies on Waits have been written – one being Tchir’s Master’s Thesis focusing on Rain Dogs titled Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs: Influences and Musical Genre (2013) and Corine Kessel’s Master’s Thesis bearing the title Human Oddities, Raid Dogs, and Other Wanderers: Character and Narrative in 7 the Music of Tom Waits (2000), which was subsequently published as a book titled The Words and Music of Tom Waits (2009). Tchir’s thesis, although it predominantly deals with a single album, views Waits' work as “a musical pastiche par excellence, drawing from multiple disparate sources and freely integrating them into his oeuvre” (78), which seems to be a fitting description of what the author of the present thesis labels as shapeshifting tendencies. In the 2009 book re-vamping of her thesis Kessel, on the other hand, analyses a body of Waits' lyrics ranging from Waits' debut album, Closing Time (1973) to the three-disc song collection, Orphans (2006), stating, in a somehow exaggerated manner, that through his career, Waits “guides the listener through the underbelly of society, through the deepest despair of the human condition, through the crazed nightmares and psychotic episodes of his delusional characters” (129). As regards academic context of English studies in the Czech Republic, inquiries into the Waits matter are limited to merely a single bachelor thesis written by Filip Drlík titled Tom Waits: A Songwriter on the Edge, which predominantly deals with the question of authenticity in Waits' art, albeit in a slightly informal fashion which would benefit from a clearer scholarly focus. Firstly, the present thesis does not aim to present a comprehensive account of Waits' artistic endeavours, nor does it wish to limit itself to a single theme which would be analysed in a selected body of lyrics. It shall rather strive to grasp the works, and marginally also the life, of an artist whom Young so aptly described as a changeling, a kind of doppelgänger, a sort of vampiric character who in his art presents the Other face of America, the Uncanny as defined by Freud, the abject as proposed by Kristeva, from a Gothic perspective. What is meant by Gothic in relation to Waits is the fact that both textually and musically he tends to present notions which are eccentric, peripheral, as opposed to those which might be best 8 labelled mainstream, or central. Secondly, the term “Gothic” is not only viewed as a discrete literary genre, or the ensuing body of texts which contain motifs and topoi which would generally be labelled as such, including graveyards, were-beasts, Thornfield-like mansions, supernatural forces and the omnipresent feeling of fear and claustrophobia, but rather as a kind of lens through which an author views the surrounding social reality and the individuals occupying it. This perception of the Gothic, i.e. that which lies on the periphery, or in spatio-temporally liminal realms, is further described in the second chapter of this thesis, which serves as a groundwork for the analysis of Waits' works. The term “liminal” is described by anthropologist Victor Turner in 1990 as “fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities”.