13 April 2011
A much-simplified arrangement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Piano Sonata No. 15, first movement (op. 28).
8 December 2010
I was a guest on the latest podcast by Smashing Pumpkins fan site Hipsters United. Click on one of the visual aids to hear my analysis of Billy Corgan’s 44-song opus-in-progress Teargarden by Kaliedyscope:
Update (12/10):
Corgan likes the colorwheel.
“Just Glitters Like a Morgue”
Or, “Forever, forever, ever, forever, ever?”
Will someone please explain to me this sickly word – “forever?” The concept baffles me. It suggests not a commitment to growth, which naturally implies death, but an embalmed paralysis before the specter of death, which naturally implies the end of growth. It seems to be invoked by those who fear themselves to have peaked, who want to cash out and preserve their winnings.
When Radiohead started ending their concerts with the scrolling visual “Forever….Forever….Forever….Forever….” I knew we no longer shared a sense of life. They were using a moment to assert permanence – an act of futility (though perhaps a fitting one, as futility has become a central theme of their work). They seemed ready to square a frame over their legacy and hang it on the wall. I suspect that fans of the Wu-Tang Clan and the Spice Girls have had similar sad moments. Time is a musician’s canvas; he must maintain a sense of flux. Could you hold an A#7 indefinitely without ruining the musicality of a song? Could a culture revere you forever without ruining itself?
Radiohead is a worthy band, but even their timeless classics would be lucky to survive for 200 years, let alone for all time. For perspective, note that Beethoven’s work has lasted about 250 years so far; J.S. Bach’s, about 300. The life’s work of Henri Ditilleux, Hans Rott, Gilbert Vinter, and countless other composers has been widely forgotten. The temporally cognizant musician at some point asks himself: “Given that my work will be forgotten someday, how long do I really hope for it to last?“ Is there a difference between a reputation that lasts fifteen minutes and one that lasts 150 years, if the end result is still anonymous oblivion? I don’t know the answer. If my songs sound alive, it must be because they’re forgettable… mortal.
By almost every metric – literacy, fertility, per capita income, et cetera - the United States is in decline. Behold! Just as the average citizen can begin to visualize the end of the republic, an insecure government reassures him with this, the Forever stamp:
Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln’s “forever” sentiment from the Gettysburg Address is still considered transcendent, wise, and humanitarian. But what does the phrase quoted above really mean? It would forever condemn mankind to the yoke of an institution called “government.” Abraham Lincoln could not conceive of a peaceful and robust anarchic society, but today, thanks in part to communication technologies that would have utterly shocked him, that may be possible. And who knows what lies beyond anarchy? How will our species organize itself after another 10,000 years of civilized life? I don’t know, but I know it can be better, freer, and cheaper than an endless armed bureaucracy. The question is less, “Will the United States end?” and more, “How will the United States end?” Lincoln could not let it end. Even Millennials only expect 1,000 years of their golden age.
Nothing can or should last forever. The dinosaurs lasted unimaginably long by human standards: they lived about 16,000 times longer than civilized humanity has thus far, and then they disappeared. Thank you, dinosaurs, for dying. We’ve done more with this planet than your walnut minds could have dreamt.
When we say that our peak experience should last “forever,” we are building a ceiling on the future. Even the purest form of social organization that Abraham Lincoln could imagine – a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” – was still a government, with all of the clumsy and repressive traits that implies today. Humanity may yet outgrow the state altogether. And should the species continue to listen to Radiohead, one of the most popular bands on the planet, indefinitely? Not if something better comes along. I would love for even Beethoven to be rendered unlistenably inane by 250 more years of musical evolution. Nothing deserves to last forever. No one can make that claim on the world, even if he repeats those three syllables – “forever” – like a spell, for the rest of his years.
A Conversation with Bill Kim
Bill Kim: In school we study science, biology, all that stuff, right? If you look at it altogether and look at it generally, there’s a common pattern. For example: the universe… the galaxy… planets… stars… human beings… plants… animals… all that. They all have something in common: they have a cycle. The basic cycle would be: live and die. For example: galaxies. What are the odds of having a galaxy where you could find a planet like Earth?
Grant Valdes: I don’t know.
Bk: As far as we know, according to the scientists, we haven’t seen any similar…
Gv: I think it’s entirely possible that we are alone in the universe.
Bk: Alone in the universe. That’s like a Lotto ticket, right? If we think of it as all numbers… I’ll give you an example. Galaxies break up and make their own little stars. They reproduce. When they’re born, and they have their chemical reactions, they form interesting stars and all that. Within the galaxy, there’s a star. Even the stars, in their life cycle, always release some part of their elements. As a result, they create a planet. Just like a Lotto ticket, they created planet Earth. Another result… another offspring.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to say is: throughout all these different cycles, there seems to be at least one that’s perfect. The winning Lotto ticket. Right now, we see that Lotto ticket as planet Earth, because this is the only planet that can create life and sustain it. My theory is, right now, that the ultimate animal would be the human being.
Gv: I agree.
Bk: They could pretty much kill every species if they wanted to.
Gv: We’re so far beyond the other animals that we really can’t relate to them anymore.
Bk: So if we are the ultimate cycle, what is our purpose?
Gv: I think what you’re getting at is the immense feeling of responsibility that comes with being human – a free human. There are humans on this planet who are enslaved by various things. But if you are a human with choice, and you realize that we are the ultimate species, on the ultimate planet, that we are not just the single group of observers in the universe, but we are the sole actors in the universe… it’s a lot of responsibility, I agree. It’s a crushing responsibility for a lot of people. (more…)
Bach/Siloti/Ruich
In 1722, Johann Sebastian Bach released The Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of keyboard preludes and fugues in each of the twenty-four keys. Here harpsichordist Glen Wilson performs Bach’s prelude and fugue in E minor (BWV 855):
Here Martin Stadtfeld performs Alexander Siloti’s piano transcription of Bach’s prelude in E minor, now transposed to the key of B minor:
Here Ante Ruich performs his new transcription of Siloti’s transcription of Bach’s prelude, for two acoustic guitars:
Here Ante Ruich performs his new electric guitar transcription of Siloti’s transcription of Bach’s prelude:
Ante Ruich is a guitarist and songwriter living in Seattle. He performs at Seattle’s Rendezvous/Jewelbox Theater on June 24th. The event is also the CD release show for At Peace At Last, the new album from ShoestringCentury.com editor Grant Valdes.
The Life’s Work of Elliott Smith
About a year ago, I started writing a manuscript called The Life’s Work of Elliott Smith. If finished, the book will include one essay for each of the man’s songs. Here is some of what’s been done. Well-regarded as it already is, I think Smith’s work deserves the attention.
St. Ides Heaven
Smith uses the blank, white moon as his Rorschach test – it can be a menacing “sickle cell” in one piece and a pitiable “burned-out world” in another. In “St. Ides Heaven,” the drunk and speed-addled narrator projects the obvious onto the satellite: it is high. The phrasing is ambiguous: is the speaker or the moon itself “high on amphetamines”? The closing couplet, “It won’t come down for anyone / no, I won’t come down for anyone,” tells us that, by the end, there’s no use in distinguishing the two.
Songs set at night are expected to be tranquil, but here restlessness prevails. This choice shows Smith’s ability as a psychologist: What kind of person is really awake and having a songworthy experience at the dead hour when only 7-11′s are open (let alone “every night”)? Someone full of energy. The hallucinatory image of the moon as a “light bulb breaking” suggests a mind overflowing, blowing out with inspiration. This moon/mind, looking down on the people and their parking lot world, has, in its own crazed way, transcended issues of what one “should and shouldn’t do;” of being good or “no good.” It is a consciousness “smiling” without reference to “a frown.” It fears it must come down with the morning, but it will not do so for or in sight of anyone else. The narrator wishes to stay not just high like the song’s moon, but also remote and in heaven.
Smith has challenged himself to musically portray a state of mind that is colored by (1) malt liquor drunkenness, (2) an amphetamine high, and (3) sleep deprivation. Whether these influences ever literally acted on the composer while he walked around a 7-11 parking lot is unimportant; “St. Ides Heaven” is accessible because we have all at some moment felt that peculiar combination of wooziness, edginess, and grandiosity. Smith brews these elements together with a chemist’s sense of proportion. The verses’ angular, syncopated dyads convey agitation but remain ghostly by their absence of a clear root note. When the key and rhythm lock into place for the chorus, the effect is not a release of tension, but the start of the next build-up, as four chords ascend endlessly beneath a straining falsetto and above the quickening pulse of faint drums. The coda neither collapses downward nor resolves triumphantly; it softly fades out in mid-passage, as the sun bleaches out our moon, which will doubtless return to its high at next nightfall.
Good to Go
As feared by the narrator of “St. Ides Heaven,” what gets high must come down. That song, the ninth on Smith’s eponymous release, ended with a stubborn declaration: “I won’t come down for anyone.” Might one of the people that narrator ignored be the “low riding junkie girl” referenced in the first line of the album’s next piece, “Good to Go”? While this lyric puts her front and center, the song proves to not be about the girl at all; it is about her absence. Other figures in the song “trace her footsteps in reverse” and see “things of hers… lying around,” but they are in fact “waiting for something that’s not coming.”
An average songwriter would seek to convey how fascinating this girl is – her cobweb smile, her autumn eyes, etc., etc. If Smith had spent the verses of “Good to Go” doing so, the piece would have been reduced to a standard love ballad. However, all we as listeners really need to know is that this person is a “junkie girl.” The junkie is Smith’s archetype of the fallen individual, one controlled by his or her weaknesses. Individuals representing short-sightedness, self-centeredness, and moral blindness are consistently labeled “kid,” “child,” or “girl,” in this case. “You can do it if you want to,” says the pre-chorus. What is “it”? The previous line provides enough of a hint: “Rode down South to your little world like a dream.” “It” is indulgence in the false hope - the “dream” – represented by the junkie girl.
Smith is ever the moralizing writer. His narrators can’t observe something out of place in their environment without reflecting upon the moral influence of that object – whether it is corrupting, liberating, mendacious, or a revelation. What keeps Smith from hectoring is his clear-eyed willingness to cast himself as the example of moral failure (via his narrators). Hence we have the sinister musical edge to the line “You can do it if you want to / be like me,” whose last three notes are an off-putting half-step beneath the section’s previous low. A Bb3 slumps to an A3; Smith’s narrator is revealed as fallen.
Satellite
A delicate nocturne that suggests how Smith’s writing might have developed had he been born into the late Romantic era. A sliver of words accompanies stately guitar sweeps… and a narrator walks alone beneath the moon, Earth’s satellite, following some dramatic confrontation with a lover (“people you [the moon] watched collide”). The moon is his confidant. It’s an archetypal image of the poet – one more likely to be found in Blake than in the work of Smith’s contemporaries.
Because this image is too simple for Smith, he twists it at the end, now identifying with the moon, not as a beacon of light, but as only a composer born after the Apollo landings could see it: a vacant “burned out world… staying up all night.”
Single File
It is a testament to Smith’s powers of observation that his listeners continue to debate whether he ever stood in this particular single file line to buy drugs, or whether he was viewing it from the outside. The answer to the question doesn’t much matter – Smith is not in confessional mode here; he is addressing something larger.
The single-file line, ubiquitous in our culture, is used as a metaphor for the dehumanizing effects of hard drug addiction. Hard drug addiction itself is used as a metaphor for moral weakness. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a totalitarian government was always prepared to gas a roomfull of citizens with the pleasure drug soma. In “Single File,” however, “idiot kid[s]” have created a self-immolating social network of drug use all by themselves. No totalitarian government is required – only a need to fit in. (“Trying hard to become whatever they are;” “Help yourself to this bitter pill / or somebody else will”). It’s arguable that Smith is portraying the song’s street corner as being even further degraded than a Huxleyan dystopia. The narrator’s disgust with the moral cowardice of this “stupid shit” is his reason for not intervening to improve the situation. This is the music’s logic for never detouring or reaching a satisfying climax (Smith repeats the phrase “single file” with some urgency at the end, but no synthesis or breakthrough is achieved): the narrator has chosen to let the grimness proceed.
“In a Jacknifed Juggernaut”
I once encountered a homeless man sitting outside of a Barnes & Noble, whose sign announced that he could
Answer any question for 10 cents
Needless to say, this intrigued me. I gave him ten cents and asked him:
Where do songs come from?
Without so much as clearing his throat, he proceeded with a fluent five-minute soliloquy on the origin and the nature of music. This man was inspired. He seemed to draw only from first-hand impressions; he had no system to defend. That may be why his words have stuck with me more than most academics’ and critics’. Amongst other things, the homeless man told me:
If you want to get at the true nature of a song, listen to as many different performances of it as you can.
In that spirit, I illegally offer you these performances of a beloved Thom Yorke composition.
“Airbag”
Radiohead [1997]
The Vitamin String Quartet [2001]
Christopher O’Riley [2003]
RJD2 [2006]
Easy Star All Stars [2006]
Grant Valdes [2010]
What do you hear? Wherein beats the heart of the song?
“I’m Superbrain… That’s How They Made Me”
For many readers, Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” is about just that – a high fever and the delirious, bedridden thoughts of the poet suffering through it. Mary Lynn Broe, like many critics, seems content to dryly observe that in the poem, “increasingly violent images drawn from personal, classical, cultural, even environmental realms mingle.” As to what these images are collectively supposed to mean, Broe merely notes that they “link the confusion attending a high fever to adultery.” I contend that the sexual themes of “Fever 103°” are much more central than that critique suggests, and that the piece in fact narrates a women (Plath), bedridden and ill, masturbating to orgasm. Without acknowledging this scandalous element of the poem, I don’t believe that a reader can fully appreciate what is being said overall, which is a much richer lament and celebration of sexuality than one would find in a poem about simple adultery. (more…)
“Consider Now the Charms That You Hold”
This piece, “The Smashing Pumpkins: The Last Great Romantics?”, was originally published 23 February 2008 at the old Shoestring Century. Since then, Mr. Corgan has given plenty of insight into how he sees his world, via the fine Everything From Here to There. I have altered the original text to replace disingenuous uses of the term “The Smashing Pumpkins” with the more accurate “Billy Corgan.”
Is he really a Romantic? A Romantic might say this: ”I have no problem telling you I am also a world class musician, and one of the best songwriters alive. If I said those things in an interview, I would be mocked, not because those things aren’t true, but because I shouldn’t be the one saying these things.” But one would never, in the same essay, renounce “the illusion of independent thought [that] sustains the momentary peace of believing, ‘Lucky me, I am in control of my world.’” The Romantic, the acme of the Western man, is in control of his world!
In the history books of Western music, Romanticism is regarded as a dead idea, something that went quietly into that atonal night of 20th century. Everything resembling it since seems to be a Postmodern tribute, such as a John Williams film score, or a flat-out misuse of the term, like a “romantic” Coldplay ballad. Yet I would argue that, by some historical anomaly, Romanticism’s ideals live on in the compositions and the career of Billy Corgan, a century after the death of the last great Romantics. Based on the blues, rock has never really been a Romanic form, but Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlain and Co. have managed to transform it into something so grand, expressive and virtuosic that it warrants our consideration of whether or not the band should be thought of as the heirs to the legacy of Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Frederic Chopin.
Let’s look at some of the defining traits of the old Romantics, to see just how well Corgan keeps the flame alive, intentionally or not:
Populism
The Romantic period was the first time that musicians could play directly to the people, traveling Europe and selling reams of sheet music thanks to new technology, instead of writing for the ears of dukes and churches. This certainly calls to mind the mutual indifference between the Smashing Pumpkins and the music press. The band only provided one magazine interview upon the release of Zeitgeist, choosing instead to directly answer fans’ questions through YouTube. Seven years before Radiohead’s much-ballyhooed web release of In Rainbows, the Pumpkins refused to play courtier to Virgin Records, and gave the uncompromising Machina II/Friends and Enemies of Modern Music straight to twenty-five of their biggest fans. In another symbolic act, the band members finished a 1998 performance of “Pug” on Brazil’s Programa Livre by handing their instruments to shivering, star-struck teenagers.
Virtuosity
The Romantics were the first to celebrate the virtuoso onstage, through improvisation and inhumanly complex arrangements. On that note, I’ll never forget the glee on my friend’s face as he proclaimed, in the middle of an extended Corgan 2007 guitar solo, “Man, I would never accept this shit from anyone else!” I agree with him on principle – there’s too much jamming out there. And yet Corgan’s wild improv held thousands of us transfixed. That’s real virtuosity.
Chamberlain’s drumming virtuosity is likewise beyond question. In live performances, he tears into the kit with the same semi-improvisational abandon that Liszt, the first great concert pianist, brought to his instrument. Corgan revealed in a 2007 interview that Chamberlain laid down his take for the searing, nine-minute-and-fifty-three-second “United States” in one go (barring one “small” mistimed hit). The experience of a non-stop, sweaty, three-plus hour Smashing Pumpkins concert is not so different from the recitals in which a frail Chopin collapsed onto his piano keys following one last cascading, fifteen-minute number.
Wild Ambition
This is my term for the Romantic’s desire to master every known form and length of musical piece. This stems from the 18th century’s surging belief in the individual’s abilities – no longer was the composer a humble servant of classical dogmas. In today’s pop climate, Corgan rejects the Postmodern idea that every possible genre has already been done, or the traditionalist’s (i.e. the blues man’s, the punk’s) notion that a band should serve one sound. Corgan has shown a mastery of the whispered and spare (“Black Irish”, “Blank”) as well as the vast and thunderous (“Thru the Eyes of Ruby”, “Behold! The Night Mare”).
And I don’t believe Corgan was ever truly psychedelic, despite the paisley shirts. That’s just what people say nowadays about guitarists who try to wring every possible tone out of their instrument.
Nationalism
With Zeitgeist, flanked by a drowning Lady Liberty and deadened black Stars and Bars, the Smashing Pumpkins embody that last defining element of Romantic music: nationalism. Before you recoil in horror at the idea of a goose-stepping Billy, let me quote Chopin biographer Benita Eisler’s definition that nationalism, for the Romantic, “breathed the poignancy of exile from which a patriot artist… affirmed ties to a violated country.”
Are all of these parallels deliberate? Does Billy Corgan yearn to be seen as a Romantic in an age of Postmodernism? I diagnose here a clear, incurable outsider: Corgan was born around 150 years too late.
Remember these lines from The Gay Science: “When a human being resists his whole age and stops it at the gate to demand an accounting, this must have influence. Whether that is what he desires is immaterial; that he can do it is what matters.” The proven, indestructible greatness of Corgan’s career thus far is antimatter to Generation Y postmodern detachment. This is why Corgan offends. He stands unashamed as a great man, humiliating the lesser — the scenesters.
leave a comment