*

Dearest Monsieur,

this is preliminary, in part because i have this inclination that i ought be writing about Antony in different weather. this morning was snow upon snow, such that erranding felt like alpine skiing. and now it’s glaringly bright, which feels at least as i type somehow at odds with thinking about a voice that is brightwithout glare. the color of last night’s prestorm sky was a closer bright. a mauve that seemed to have its own various textures, as it was hatched by streetlight and flurry. am i being too selfaware in this? maybe. lots may be excised tho mostly am trying to write something adequate to my thinking, which is far from lucid, per se, after

aforesaid errands. antony’s voice for one makes me think of walter benjamin. his voice as the lovechild of trauerspiel and aesthetic aura. the glimmer and heat-sylph that might form as a building is collapsing and/or becoming something else, a voice that is turret and rootcellar all at once. hence verticality, not just down one’s spine, but architecturally flickering, or up and down a lightning rod. a voice that is both the lightning and the rod. spare the rod/spoil the child. antony’s voice as both the rod and the child and the spoils. somehow spare and sparing spare. all of which needs context. i will find in benjamin what i’m thinking of anon. antony exceeding herm-aesthetic as offering the voice of child and mother at once. child and mother keening together as occupying either side of grief, and grief, like a dickinson poem. grief not inseparable from desire (of the child, for a desire already that exceeds that of the mother–spoiled child indeed), but affectly meticulous. how to be a ruin (trauerspiel) and meticulousness, at once. as tho his voice’s quiver is both proof and effect of this capacity for simultaneity. proof, effect, and cost.

again, preliminary. but a beginning. i have Kiss My Name stuck in my head. his exhortations are haunting. in part because the glass of his eyes seems even in that meticulousness nondefinitive. are those tears, is that wind, are those former of joy or something else. the lightning rod, the quavering sizzle of meticulously becoming something else so very quickly and also oppositely so luxuriously. one axis across another. nonperpendicular. maybe like last night’s mauve sky? the mauve as reliant on the flurry, the streetlight, as vice versa. we’ll see where this goes. much care, regardless of where goes, i’m grateful for you for this occasion to at least attempt to think about why i’m so infatuated with antony’s voice.

xoxoxo m

*

Dear Michael,

The issue I guess I want to explore with Antony today is the unpower of Antony–the word that Derrida uses when he’s talking about Artaud. In Artaud’s case (about whom I’m still writing at present, and so I have a lot to say about him), the sexual images are almost always intersexed (“I take you into me,” he says in his early love < letters, and then later it’s all eunuchs (“But what a beautiful image is a eunuch”) and uteruses–he likes the graphicity).

I would suggest that perhaps a similar dynamic is in play in Antony’s presentation. He is woman and he is man and he stands for transgender songwriting, by virtue of his thematic choices. For example, I Am a Bird Now had Candy Darling on the cover, and the album includes “My Lady Story,” and “For Today I Am a Boy,” both of which are, uh, very direct on the subject. But then Antony really is a boy (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he’s a man, even though “For Today I Am A Boy” defers any certainty), even as he is singing counter-tenor (mother and child, as you say), and singing about wanting to be a woman. Still, I experienced this less as a will-to-sexual-reassignment-surgery than I experience it as a will-to-unpower, a critique of a certain kind of, for lack of a better term, rock music. With I Am a Bird Now, that was all apparent in the wistful arrangements and in the bracing explicitness of the lyrics. A-will-to-unpower, marginalia, self-empowerment. But then the arrangements were really rock and roll arrangements. As on my favorite song on the album, “Fistful of Love.” Which really has Lou Reed’s Transformer as its pretext. Or maybe Ziggy Stardust. Because it is delicate, pianistic, but with a genuine rhythm section (and thus it breaks down rock and roll, empties it off its phallicity, at the same time as it participates in this history), but also because it seemed to be about masochism and getting fisted. “I feel your fist, and I know it’s out of love.” And so on. The Hidden Cameras did this a lot on their first album too, but in Antony’s case, when it’s mixed with the incredible vulnerability of the voice, it’s a totally different thing. It’s not funny. He’s almost daring you to say it’s funny.

I do think this is like Artaud, in some ways. Artaud was straight, but he was clearly unsexed in the theater of his work, unmanned, and experienced himself that way. He seemed, on the one hand, only to exist as this neutered body, and, at the same time, to aspire to being a body without organs (in the famous Deleuzian formulation borrowed from Artaud himself). This transit into body-less-ness is a tremendous and, well, transgressive journey, and in a contemporary musician, it is dramatic (well, Antony got his start in theater, right? he probably knows his Artaud). This presentation of self as a kind of martyrdom. But then the other thing to remember to say is that I Am a Bird Now is undeniably moving. It moved me a great deal. It’s an abdication of power in a musical setting, at the same time as it’s really powerful, moving, and, well, sexy.

My question is, though, is the new album, The Crying Light, simply too good to do the same thing effectively? If it just sounds exactly like a Nina Simone album, is it not mannerism? I’m asking this, having not had enough time yet to talk about specific lyrics, so I’m just responding to the sheen, the veneer.

Love, r.

*

i’m interested in “for lack of a better term.” in part because the latter formulation reminds me again of Antony’s tremolo, as though the absoluteness of his voice were always at odds with itself or with what it sings. in terms of oddness, oddness of what one sings i think about Stephanie Blythe’s rapturous performance as Orfeo, a role meant for a countertenor, in the hands of a mezzo who on stage, in mizrahi’s costume, looks a bit like Tony Soprano. what does it mean to look like a counter-tenor, or not look like a counter-tenor, as a version of your wondering about sexual reassignment.

when i last was with antony, several years ago, he looked a bit like early-70s Liz Taylor. he had the hairdo of a disheveled Butterfield 8. and was gorgeous, in the way an empire is gorgeous before its depletion, and at the same time to go back to my earlier benjaminian analogue an empire that seemed less vulnerable on account of its already having courted and weathered all it had courted. what if lot’s wife hadn’t turned to salt. what if lot’s wife had become a brilliant spanner in rock music. or something. obviously in my own ambivalent relation to embodiment (chronic pain, eating disorder–), i’m drawn to what in antony seems both somatic and beyond the somatic. his voice as both syncopation and synchronization with his body, as such. i’m conscious of how often i’m invoking some notion of simultaneity, which i don’t think necessarily is a tropaic tic. i think the weird confluence of conjunction and disjunction speaks in a lot of ways to the auditory, but also speaks to some extent to what in Antony seems most sexy– that he somehow is orfeo and euridice all at once. not to get into reader relations, &c. but this maybe is a sort of UNPOWER. euridice being powerless. and orfeo being powerless. and the only ligature (for orfeo, monteverdi, gluck) being song.

i do think that Antony is daring us to adjudicate funniness. is soliciting valuation. and this also is severely vulnerable a position, he’s the bullied child and the redemption of a bullied child, all that the bullied child fears in himself and what might offer consolation. my attachment, in a different fashion, to Katrina and the Waves, before i realized that Walking on Sunshine was in fact an incredibly vertiginous and nonconsoling proposition. whether The Crying Light is “too good.” i think its being “TOO” is what matters most to me. it’s not simply fantastic, and not simply disorienting. lord knows i dont want to slip into the unheimlich, and thank heavens for a sense of gratuitousness in the album’s greatness. a gratuity already announced in its repetition of tracks. sounding like nina simone is one thing. and i did in fact, falling asleep last night, thinking of your email, have Nina in my head– my baby just cares for me. what’s ruthless about antony, sometimes, is that he’s a voice for caring, overcaring, without, necessarily, designatable object for/of caring. which is different, for instance, from the utopic of Whitman. Antony seems both to be troubadour par excellence (and in the disembodiment that IS often the experience of listening to him, versus SEEING him– he’s also inhabiting the wings of Cyrano, his own voice and the voice of someone else– a mezzo singing as counter-tenor) and to ironize the passions of the troubadour. hence the abstraction of I’m going to miss the birds, i’m going to miss the trees. what if, to go back to theatrics, Antony was not only aware of the 4th wall, but was the fourth wall, what if the fourth wall could sing, what if the fourth wall were a very large man who looked like liz taylor who made one fall in love with love songs that were radically evacuated of particularity, maybe or maybe not replaced with/ displaced by some other non-diegetic form of particularity? how like a black hole does Antony’s own particularity absorb other forms of itself, its pathos? what is the experience (acoustically, erotically) of feeling so particularly absorbed? because if one speaks of mannerism, one thinks also of the livid colors of mannerist ascension. at least i do. pontormo. there’s more to say, tho perhaps this is good for today’s missive. by the way, candy darling was born within a year or two (depending on whom one asks) of my folks, and grew up in the same town (massapequa). what if what if if only if my mom had known a pre-candy candy. which might be poetic justic for her son’s being his own sort of candy. darling.

love. m

*

Michael,

This morning I have the two most recent Antony albums on, and I’m allowing iTunes to veer haphazardly between the two, and I’m starting to hear more nuances in this new Antony, and also I’m finding that some of my first impressions of The Crying Light persist. But I don’t want to talk about that yet, or about “Another World,” which you allude to specifically, and on which I have entirely reversed myself (I disliked the vagueness of the lyrics at first, but then I came to find them luminous and inviting). What I want to talk about was how I was at this dinner with a couple of very agreeable and sort of brilliant guys (and one woman! Also brilliant! But who elected to remain silent during this portion of the conversation!) who are reasonably well-known indie rock types, and much of the dinner turned on the disappointment of the Rolling Stones, and so on. But then because I was thinking about Antony, I decide to ask these guys (and one woman!) what they thought of Antony, because I thought I would get an interesting reaction. And I did. These guys just lit into Antony. One of them was really mad about Antony singing “Candy Says” with Lou Reed in the Berlin movie. Now I happened to see the Berlin recreation live, the theatrical performance thereof, and I found Antony one of the most transporting moments in what was a fascinatingly post-modern event (recreating the album exactly as was, complete with choir and string section), and I didn’t find his “Candy Says” anything but a great relief after the pitchless Dietrich croak of Lou. My friend indicated that there were many great rock counter-tenors (I adduced Robert Plant, kinda joking), but he somehow found it irritating, or so it seemd to me, that a countertenor had to be gay, or, perhaps androgynous in his presentation, in order to serve this roll. Then the other friend weighed in, with a bit of an assault on Antony’s vibrato. Admittedly, he was very hesitant to talk this way, and felt like he was being politically incorrect by doing so. But in the end I think his reservation was simply aesthetic. He would say, I think, that Antony has been lured into a certain way of conducting his evolution by the forces of the music business, viz., the exotic qualities of this vibrato are really new, so please do this over and over and over, this really NEW VIBRATO! It did cross my mind, however, that these two guys, these guy guys, found something powerful to resist in Antony. And of course I worry as a person with a rather complicated libido, that there are parts of my self that I am disliking by disliking some of The Crying Light.

But here’s the thing. Part of me hates art, just really reviles art (and this reminds me of Artaud on literature: “All writing is garbage–people who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs”), and everything that is associated with high art. Stylish people, well-dressed at art openings, and, yes, opera. Part of me just reviles opera. You know this about me. And I recognize that this is just biting the hand that feeds, but there it is. And it’s for this reason that I often really distrust and hate whatever music is, at the moment, being wrapped in the mantle of art. For example, I violently disliked that Joanna Newsom album entitled Ys. To me that is one fussy, uptight, excessively mannered (Pontormo!) album. It just reeks of pretense and a sophomoric need to do something to the tenth power when nine of these exponential increases are entirely unecessary. Another good example would be, e.g., Matthew Barney. I just think Matthew Barney flattens, with his cremaster, everything he touches. He squeezes all the spontaneity out, until life is, in Matthew Barney’s world, predictable and unpleasant and smells like a teenage boy’s sweaty wrestling gear.

The Crying Light has that unfortunate reputation, already, of aspiring to the condition of art. And maybe this is the interpreters who are doing this. But it doesn’t help, for me, that it has Nico Muhly doing some of the arranging, because he is, after all, the It Boy of high classical art at the moment. And some of the songs on The Crying Light, for me, do have arrangements of startling elevation. “Daylight and the Sun,” e.g. And “Aeon,” the beginning has HARP! Before it gives way to what is essentially my favorite bit of the album, the bluesy double-tracked electric guitar, and the moment when Antony falls down into his chest voice, and does some genuine erotic longing. Nico Muhly is the tuxedo-wearing aspect of the album. But I like the rock moments, the glam moments, the sexy moments, when Antony is nothing more than a soul singer, and a particularly visceral kind of soul singer. (I felt this way when I saw him in Berlin, that his strange neurologically challenging singing style resembles that ticcing behavior that used to animate Joe Cocker in the late sixties.) But I am also these days very transfixed by Otis Redding, and I spend a lot of time thinking about Otis Redding, and there are resonances, conjunctions here too. Antony, in the moment of longing, gets hold of a phrase, and he completely wrings every bit of passion from it. Daylight! Daylight! Daylight! Exactly the way Otis Redding does it. Another example, of course, is the cool vibrato of Bryan Ferry. In fact, initially, when everyone was saying Nina Simone, I was thinking about the Bryan Ferry of the middle period of Roxy Music. Stranded, let’s say, when Ferry was still playing his piano. Anyway, the point here is that on the one hand, I hear all the transgender thematic material in this singer, but I also here a lot of resonances with the great masculine soul tradition too. And frankly I am more rapt when he is using the instrument to be brave about exactly who and what he loves, as on the song that you led me to, “Cripple and the Starfish,” from his first album, which is just an entirely different thing.

Am I suggesting that the explicitness of the lyrics are where the risk is just because I’m not the one who has to write about? Because I have liberty of not being, as you say, the bullied kid growing up and making good? Am I wrong to want him to risk the way he used to risk, because I am not a gay artist who has to live in the capitalist world experiencing what it is like to be a “niche artist,” when all the straight guys (or the straight women, in the case of the music world) get to go out there and make records or write books that are about straight life, which, apparently “everyone” wants to know about? Is it easy for me to say all this? When you say “radically evacuated of particularity,” it’s perhaps this that you are saying, and it’s much more the case on The Crying Light than it is on I Am a Bird Now, or on the first album. It’s an issue that Stephin Merritt, to use another gay artist at hand, has faced (and he’s something of a friend of mine, so I think I can talk about it without feeling like I’m introducing a gay artist haphazardly, or in order to ghetto-ize Antony). And he has dealt with this situation by multiplying and complicating the surface of all those love songs: girls singing about girls, men singing about men, gay men singing love songs to women, gay women singing to men, and so on. Here the concentration on identification in the love song is interrupted, or made secondary—to the sheer showoffy brilliance of the songwriting and the melody. Antony is going at it another way, this time, he’s emptying the song of its love song particularities, although the complexes of gender and desire lurk beneath, on, e.g., “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground.”

The loss of particularity may be why there is so much death and afterlife in Antony. I mean, there’s a lot of masochism, too, but masochism can be very uplifting, and enthusiastic, and, well, lively. But Antony is full of eschatological longing, and you hear it here, to my way of thinking, especially, on “Another World” and “Dust and Water,” and also on the cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” which clearly influences “Another World.” This listener does perform the listener’s dance of identification here, too, thinking that he is the bullied kid, the dissheveled Liz Taylor boy who turns out to be kind of a genius, but who just can’t live with it. I want him to feel better, want to, as listener, rescue him somehow, and I want the music to occasion the release, which it doesn’t really do.

Meanwhile, I’m also thinking of Sontag’s “Notes on Camp.” I guess this is the only way I can rationalize the album’s big glam moments, like “One dove, to bring my some peace! In starlight you came to bring mercy!” That it is campy, and he is daring us to think that it’s a little campy, and he’s saying that all music is campy, and that when he really lays on the vibrato thick, it’s always on these campiest moments, and as Sontag says camp is really a protective gesture, a meta-narrative over what is “organic” in culture, and a way of processing it that says, it’s different for me. I feel like I’m responding to the album a little bit like a straight guy (though not resisting it like my straight friends from dinner the other night), in that I want a deeply felt first-person narrative. I suppose I want a first-person narrative of the horrors and delights of gay life. And that is not what we have here.

That’s where I am with it today. I am really liking “Another World” now, though, and “Aeon” too.

Love, r.

*

Wow, there’s a lot to say, as ever. I was grading papers on Septimius and thought Fuck it I WANT TO WRITE TO RICK. I’m not even sure as i type what i want to say, which is to say, in honor of our shared frustration with CREMASTER, this is Non-Premeditated. contra Antony, of course who premeditates. who performs meditation as though it were spontaneous when of course there’s always some component in music that is not extemporaneous. difference btwn a Barthesian punctum and the photo itself, etc. There is, of course, a lot in Antony’s corpus (as it were) that intransigently is indebted to and extending what for lack of better words we might (pedantically?) call a Masculine Soul Tradition. there’s also something of the gregorian, something of the baroque, and lord knows there’s always something gay in any baroque instantiation of masculinity. as tho “my lady’s story” hearkened to a moment when one spoke of lords and ladies, transplanted to working class England.

working class is something to think about as much as sexual orientations and disorientations. not that i know anything, biographically speaking, about such things, re: Antony. but he’s a hybrid in a hybrid genre, contra, for instance, Rufus Wainwright, whose pedigree, whose version of gay confessional indulgence way more often than not drives me crazy. not in good ways. He seems likes Roderick Usher with blueballs and a lilt. if one wants horrors and delights of a gay life, there’s always Rufus. with a bright pink bow. Rufus seems gayer than Antony, and Antony seems queerer. which i guess is a truncated way of saying Antony strikes me as more interesting, more salubriously troubling. the generic quality of his lyrics reminds me of FLOW CHART or Stein– the fantasy of Everybody’s Autobiography. turning the confessional on its head. or maybe turning it upside down, butt up. particularity, or at least the staging of particularity, seems to occur in Antony, as we’ve already intimated, less on the level of lyric than register of voice. if your indie-rock guys over dinner articulated, in the end, a kind of resentment with what in Antony seems disingenuous, then one might well say that the Disingenuous is Antony’s subject AND his context. disingenuity isn’t queer or non-queer and wouldnt necessarily accrue particulars (of a life, of a song) until after the fact. i’m transfixed by the hydraulic in a lot of Antony’s songs, that saturation and vocal extravagance are in service of an apposite emptying. and vice versa. which goes back to your thoughts on Sontag. to say camp is a protective gesture might too quickly foreclose the extent to which camp also potentially is the performance of a protective gesture. lord knows in a sort of queer pantheon (not beginning but settling, eg, in Patty Duke’s Valley of the Dolls), the rise to fame [sic] is itself a volatile topos. and Antony, like Iphigenia, seems to offer himself for the sacrifice, not unaware of the theatrics involved, in part because not entirely credulous that the sacrifice is real. which is different from believing or not believing that the sacrifice will have consequence: it will. which makes Antony a version of both Iphigenia and Euripides’s absented proxy-Helen. there’s something beyond queer masochism in Antony’s starfish song– it’s not just that the voice, the person can endure aggression, require aggression, court aggression, but in a terribly realist (i do think it’s a form of realism) gesture, similar to Emerson (cf EXPERIENCE) grieving his inability to grieve, that he is in fact inexorable. his body (the voice, the performed body in limbo, the performed body as elephant in the room, great, preposterous inertia attempting conversion or alchemy through the disembodying effects of a voice) remains.

i think one of the things i like about Antony’s flavor of camp is that it’s so imbricated with its own melancholic self-realization. to which gay boys listening to Antony certainly don’t have exclusive claim. lord knows when i listen to antony he seems less like a refraction of what i might sing, but the very sort of thing (Freud’s Ding, the Freudian “It”) i wouldn’t sing.

it’s sloppy to suggest that Antony operates as a sort of unconscious, and as i move into psychoanalysis, i recall i still owe you thoughts on Lacans little “a.” i wonder how the little “a” relates to the BIG “A” that is Antony. he’s not just the capricious and harrowing upsurge of the real into the symbolic (an overly succinct account of the Lacanian objet), he is a proof of the symbolic’s spoiling unto itself, as tho spoilage leads to spoilage. his voice is one of spoiledness. in terms of over-ripeness. and it’s both THIS IS WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME and THIS IS WHO I AM, What I’ve Become. a damaged fruit. i wonder what your dinner companions would think of that taxonomy. i’ll send this off now, in the spirit of unpremeditation. i love that it seems you and i have hit a chord of spontaneity and sincerity. i’m excited that i no longer AT ALL know where this conversation will go. but we’ve travelled this ground before (cf Septimius, pacing back and forth across a burial plot, until the path is worn) and we’re all the same getting somewhere new (cf Septimius, but with a happier ending?). Antony seems to ask that we take him seriously, nonseriously. and that we take him nonseriously, seriously. this is a predicament. and not necessarily a queer one. tho of course the imperializing impulses of queer theory would want to say THIS IS QUEER. anything could be. what’s the difference between making a confession (your desire for “a deeply felt first-person”) and making a confession with a gun to one’s head? the holder of the gun could be the subject of an other email. ok, forgive quickness of this communique, i hope it contributes to what i most love, that we’re producing our velocity within correspondence.

much love, m

*

Dear Michael,

A couple of days have passed, days in which I’ve tried to let all of this settle. I guess part of my regret is that my end of the conversation has been somewhat insistent on thinking of Antony H. as a gay artist, reading the songs, which on the new record are without a clear libidinous direction, back against the biography. It doesn’t seem adequate to what we have on The Crying Light, and I think you are right to propose the counterexample of with Rufus Wainwright (erstwhile Antony collaborator), who wants the performance of gayness always out there on the surface. And, as my friend Wesley says, when an artist covers an entire album of another artist, then you know where their tastes lie. Rufus covered Judy Garland. That’s the performance of a protective gesture wrapped in the performance of a stereotype wrapped in a performance of virtuosity for its own sake. Instead, from Antony we get this kind of thing, “I was born to adore you, as a baby in the blind/I was born to represent you,/ to carry your head into the sun,/ to carry your face into the back of the sun/Crying Light, crying light, crying light.” I think “I was born to represent you” is an arresting thing to say in a song, in a strange, evasive, grammatically dicey song that seems half written in child language, and half in with the knowing gaze of someone long schooled in the heartbreak of the heart. And maybe the light in the song is the bright light of attention, which has to be rather overpowering, now that he has been profiled in the New York Times Magazine, and been on FRESSSSSSSSSHHHHHH AAAAAAAIIIIIIRRRRR, and just about everywhere else. Won big prizes. How to deal with the attention? And is that what he’s saying when he says he needs another world (“This one’s nearly gone”), the world that permits the unpower of Antony Hegarty, the pre-fame Antony. (In this formulation a good analogy for The Crying Light is In Utero by Nirvana.)

If there are songs that I still don’t care for somehow, on The Crying Light, like “Kiss My Name,” there are also any number of them that I find stunning now. And what I like best about the arrangements are the strange moments, like the cello and the clarinet that drone in tandem at the beginning of “Another World,” or the ominous continuo underneath “Dust and Water.” Things that are textural, and which allow the otherworldly qualities of Antony to seem more otherworldly. Moreover, every time I think I have had enough of “Epilepsy Is Dancing,” with its campy lines like “I cry glitter is love,” the song sneaks backward into the ending, “Cut me in quadrants/Leave me in the corner/Oh now it’s passing/Oh now I’m dancing,” and the strings begin to swell, along with the woodwinds, and all the cuteness of the first part of the song is erased in the Eucharistic juggernaut of its conclusion. And such a thematic does seem to me to be about how to deal with the total immersion of publicity. I guess, in the end, I still want sadness in songs, and sadness accomplishes something for me, and I am willing, on occasion, to attempt to bend the artist to my will, regardless of where he is—and as you point out yourself Antony is some kind of transcendental signifier, an artist who can be read in almost any way, and that is especially true on The Crying Light, where the lyrics give us very little that is definitive, which leads us back, again and again, to the vibrato, the counter-tenor, to the dialectic of spontaneity versus the composed or premeditated. The sad song is purgative, is Platonic, but Antony, if offering some kind of meta-narrative, refuses the purgation sometimes, but just bends the sorrow and the mystery back around on the purgation: “Inside/Myself/The secret grows/My own/Shelter . . .”

I’m forgetting which song contains the “eyes open/shut your eyes” refrain, but I keep thinking that this refrain kind of tells you what you need to know about listening here. But I was also thinking of something Foucault says of madness in Madness and Civilization, that madness is reason dazzled: “Dazzled reason opens its eyes upon the sun and sees nothing, that is does not see; in dazzlement, the recession of objects toward the depths of night has as an immediate correlative the suppression of vision itself; at the moment when it sees objects disappear into the secret night of light, sight sees itself in the moment of its disappearance.” This could easily be, with just a little syllabic finesse, a lyric on The Crying Light, which doesn’t mean that Antony’s album represents madness (because as Foucault says at the end of the book “madness is the absence of work”), but that Antony transforms his material somehow, gets beyond love song cognition, into the mythic and (I have to say it) the operatic, and we are transformed by it, and I for one, do not always want to do this work (I experience this same resistance sometimes with John Jacob Niles, whose countertenor is a lot like Antony’s) with listening. Sometimes I just want the record on in the background to decorate my time. But in Antony’s case the more attention you give, the more your participate in invitation to participate in the radically evacuated and self-protective journey, the better he gets.

Love, Rick.

***

Read more of Rick Moody’s Swinging Modern Sounds

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Also: I was going to say that my late sister turned me onto Springsteen, ahead of the curve, giving me The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle some months before that other record came out and made him a household type of name. And maybe because my sister is no longer living, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle is one of those albums (along with Zuma, by Neil Young, and Collaboration, by Shawn Phillips) that will always seem like an unsurpassed masterpiece, even as it seems, for me, wreathed in death. Maybe what’s great about music is what we use it for, and not its innate qualities. (I can remember driving to the beach in Rhode Island, in 1983, listening to “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, and for me that’s what that song will always summon.) Maybe music, even more than literature, is owned by the listener. Every artist, when contemplating quitting the day job, when contemplating a profession in music, should remember that the casual listener is no auteur theorist. They give a shit mainly about what’s playing on the radio on the way to the beach.

Meanwhile: I’m trying to write an essay about Antonin Artaud right now and in this capacity I was reading Jacques Derrida’s essay about Artaud’s drawings, where I came across the following lines, concerning Artaud’s total inability to render in “professional” way: “The awkwardness . . . comes from another source and is submitted to. Artaud means to reappropriate this hand and this body against what he calls ‘the drawing principle,’ that is, against the strict organization of that kind of know-how which regulates itself by foreign forces and compromises with them.” What a strange, beautiful thought! That awkwardness (inability, refusal to improve) is to militate against an academy of compromises! This is, for me, exactly what “unprofessional” music does. Having said this, I should say that I do understand that when Bob Dylan commenced to imitate the singing style of the late Woody Guthrie he was, in truth, making just this sort of compromise. And thus I know that Dylan, the trickster, is just as guilty of professionalism as, e.g., Whitesnake. And I further know that all the indie rock kids with their constructed inability and their Will Oldham-style imperfect intonation, can be just as calculating.

Still, it’s with the guilessness of the truly unprofessional musician, the crudity of means, the foregrounded impulsiveness of the unprofessional musician, that you occasionally get a glimpse of what music really is, and what human psychology really feels like. The unprofessional musician really cares about what she does, because she only does it when she cares about it. The professional musician has a mortgage, a contract, kids, a model girlfriend, managers, and hangers-on, and he can’t stop playing even if he wants to. He will flog the horse until the horse collapses between his legs.

I bring all of this up as regards a songwriter I really like. A somewhat “unprofessional” type. Timothy Bracy, you’ll probably remember, was in a band called the Mendoza Line (named for the lowest acceptable batting average for a professional baseball player), who broke up in 2007 after making nine or ten albums over a ten-year period. The band, after some years of shifting constituencies, eventually hardened into a lineup that featured Bracy and his wife Shannon MacArdle as singers and songwriters—backed up by some really good players streamlining the vision. In this way, they made three very fine albums, culminating in 2007′s “farewell” package, 30-Year Low. This is one of my favorite albums of recent years. It’s really, really great, and not enough people heard it. 30-Year Low is mainly a country and folk-rock inflected affair, with a little Velvet Underground around the edges, likewise a little post-punk (especially on Shannon’s songs). But the whole never feels like one of those genre exercises. Because, most importantly, these are songs with words, songs that glory in words, and which, in their rush of images, shy away from nothing, from no confession, from no unsavory incident: “I’ve seen the whole three-act play, I’ve seen the poster and trailer,/and I never thought I have to pay so much attention to one girl just to nail her.”

Why was this the last album, you ask? Well, apparently paradise wasn’t so paradisal. Maybe it was never paradise at all, because the songs seemed sad as hell even before Tim and Shannon’s marriage fell apart. But by the time of 30-Year Low the principals could, if the songs are any indication, barely tolerate each other. The songs, whether autobiographical or not, are full of savage accusations (“She follows all your work/she’s got a fucking kitty on her shirt”), and there is the implication that many drinks were apparently drunk, and there was bad behavior on the tours (they even have a song called “Mistakes Were Made”), episodes of middle-of-the-night histrionics, and then the marriage was over, and what was left behind was one of the very finest documents in song about love and the lack thereof ever. Right up there with Blood On the Tracks and Rumours.

After that? Shannon made a solo album and seemed, well, extremely adept at getting in the last word, while Bracy sort of kept to himself, except for a few solo shows (he also holds down the keyboard spot in the band called Bird of Youth, which mainly features the preternaturally talented Beth Wawerna). But in retrospect, upon reflection, it seems it was Bracy who was the real writer in The Mendoza Line, not McArdle. Bracy’s voice, which is to Bob Dylan’s voice as John Prine’s voice is to George Jones’s voice, is a brokedown and sodden thing, perfect for giving up entirely. His voice sounds like surrender was written on his birth certificate. His voice sounds like it never met a melody that couldn’t be improved on by mumbling and deciding not to bother. But the words, the words (“Baby, don’t you think you’re being a little too drastic/there are things in this world you can’t buy with plastic;/you blew threw your cash like a Klondike miner/you made me feel the lash of the intelligent designer”), the words are so frigging great that you don’t care about his voice (you come to love it, in fact) likewise his by-the-book rhythm guitar playing (ditto). He writes like almost no songwriter of his generation, with an absolute vision of and a total commitment to the ugly truth, even if the truth emphatically does not flatter him in this his third decade (“Trading’s mixed, the dollar’s weak, productivity has reached its peak, now you’re lying in the basement contemplating a 30-year low”).

And so we come to the bulletin: in this unprofessional present, this disagreeable now, Bracy is attempting to get a new band off the ground. Fitfully, with mixed emotions. Is it taking so long because he associates the whole band thing with unadulterated pain? Is there any point, when your ex-wife has become so efficient at the deployment of her side of the story (taking a page from the Mia Farrow and Claire Bloom finishing schools), to making another album? Why bother? Still, against all the prevailing wisdom, Bracy intends a new band. The band, so far, is called the Collection Agency (a growth business with which Bracy has apparently had acquaintance in the time since his divorce settlement). And Bracy has a running sequence for his album, and a number of really good demos, many of them leaning on the 12-bar blues more than on recent Mendoza albums, and all of them appropriately skeletal, even naked.

Of the songs I’ve heard the best is one called “Doug Yule.” Doug Yule, it will be recalled, was the guy who joined the Velvet Underground after John Cale was dispatched, and who, with reliable if barely inspired work ethic, played Lou’s foil on Loaded. After even Reed had left the band, Yule insisted on making a last Velvets album by himself. This album is effaced from nearly all accounts of the Velvets. Doug Yule, the very height, therefore, of professionalism! Let me quote: “Nico said ‘I cannot make love to Jews anymore’/That’s what she said when she broke it off with Lou./And a man can work, but can he pay his dues anymore?/Like the Velvets in the time before Doug Yule./Doug Yule, Doug Yule/Life just can’t be this cruel/Why can’t I feel the vestige of new beginnings?/Doug Yule, Doug Yule/Spare me one more year through/I swear I have another album in me.”

It’s a duet, on this demo, between Tim and Beth Wawerna, she singing the part that Shannon might once have sung with warbly southern dipthongs. You can feel Bracy’s grief, here, his good humor (despite everything), his foreboding, and his absolute love of music history, which undergirds everything he does. But you can also feel, in these demos, Bracy refusing to do something, refusing to finish, committing to some of what neglect offers, which is exile and cunning and pathos, committing to awkwardness, in the face of excess professionalism, in a song about excess professionalism. Which is to say, for good or ill, that Bracy is another gifted songwriter, a sublime songwriter, laboring mostly outside of the music business, making songs for his MySpace page, biding his time. And as a result, in “Doug Yule” he has quite a bit more to say than you’ll find, e.g., in that new single, the one with the preposterous whistling on the bridge, from the famous New Jersey bar band.

**

See Also: Rick Moody’s Music Blog Swinging Modern Sounds

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Somehow I’d missed the Straw era of the Golden Palominos. I had their first album, a much artier affair featuring Arto Lindsay, Bill Laswell, and John Zorn, et al. And I’d heard some of VISIONS OF EXCESS on the radio station, including “Omaha,” the song on which Michael Stipe sang. But it wasn’t until I heard the KCRW show that I understood what incredible singer Syd Straw was. I admired Holsapple already (and I ran into him on a plane once, when he was touring with Hootie and the Blowfish–and let me tell you there’s something strange about running into the heroes of your young adulthood when they are playing in Hootie and the Blowfish), and he shines on the bootleg, too, but Syd’s voice, which is part faux-country, part Broadway, and a fair amount Vaudeville, really struck something in me. Especially on songs like “Diamond,” Holsapple’s song from BLAST OF SILENCE, and “Listening to Elvis,” a Straw song from a Hoboken sampler called LUXURY CONDOS COMING TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD, Syd had some bittersweet (emphasis on bitter) and tragicomic (emphasis on tragic) quality that could not help but move even the casual listener. I wore out that cassette.

Then what happened? She released a solo album about the same time, and based on the popularity of the Golden Palominos, she got a major label deal. The first album has a lot of great New York players on it, Marc Ribot, most of the dB’s, most of the Paliminos, including the elusive Peter Blegvad, and so on. Still, that album didn’t haunt me the way the radio show had haunted me, and I kept it around for a while before selling in some purge of insufficiently-listened-to items. After which, ten years passed. That’s how it goes in stories like this, stories about time and the effects of time: ten years pass. A lot happened in those ten years, but of import for the story is the fact that my music biz friend sent me a promotional copy of Syd’s first album in ten years, War and Peace. By then Syd was living with the guy who managed Wilco, and was recording with this pretty amazing bar band called the Skeletons–in a stripped down format, doing nothing at all as slickly or as homogenously as on her first album. There was a desperation to the record, as though Syd couldn’t bother to take the time any longer to polish up the dark parts of her autobiographical impulse with love song varnish. And nowhere was this more evident than on its hit, a song about the New York that she knew when she first moved there to perform (as, among other things, a backing vocalist for Pat Benetar), “CBGB’s.” A song about a real bartender at that late lamented club, and his band The Nylons, and the moment of chemistry between the real Syd and the real bartender (“I was married for a while/It ended in tragedy/Oh well, enough about me”), and the fact that nothing much ever came of it. ”CBGB’s” ends with a reiterated and entirely painful inquiry by the narrator, “Remember me? Hey, remember me?” But it’s not just the particular bartender that Straw is trying to recover, it’s the time, the ambition, the promise of youth, the belief in music, in the so-called redemptive power of rock and roll, not to mention the belief in love. As on the rest of album, which seems composed of one grim breakup after another, it’s the trying not to give up that commands our attention.

A couple of years later, I was teaching at Bennington College when Loudon Wainwright III showed up to perform. The guy who ran the writing program at Bennington had very good taste in songwriters, and so he invited up Loudon for a show, and Loudon in turn brought along this friend of his to sing on a couple of songs. Syd Straw. I had never seen Syd in person, had never seen her do what she does, and because it was Loudon’s gig, she didn’t steal that dimly lit limelight. But afterward everybody went back to the faculty “dorm” and sat around singing songs. I tried to persuade to sing “CBGB’s” and finally she complied, though she complained a little bit. It was already snowing outside, and while we sat in there, the snow piled up. It was incredible to hear Syd sing her lament for a totally, irreversibly, irrevocably lost youth with just a few people sitting around, a couple of really great novelists, a poet or two, Lucy Grealy, Loudon Wainwright, and so on.

We became pretty good friends after that. Syd and I did. Or, to put another way: ten more years passed. Because that’s how it goes in these kinds of stories. What did Syd do in her next ten year layoff? She played a few shows, especially on Valentine’s Day, got in various kinds of arguments with whoever was booking the show, she found fault with the musicians that were backing her (and usually I attributed this to a) the fact that the players were, in fact, not good enough, and b) that Syd was and is so talented that she just wanted people to play with the kind of grace that she brought to her efforts), and then there were always unsettling stories, gigs where she got arrested for quarreling with the police before the show, horror stories about romance and about her family, her parents, both of whom died after War and Peace, siblings who were either into some dark stuff, or who would scarcely lift a finger to help, and so on. Always the hard way, as Syd always put it, and it sure was the hard way.

Then some years back Syd started talking about making another record. How was she going to do this, exactly, since she’d been dropped by the thieves at Capricorn Records, and she was chronically “financially embarrassed,” as my grandfather used to put it? And she was kind of stuck in central Vermont, forever trying to avoid the punishing winters and their attendant heating bills, and there weren’t any of her awesome musical confreres there, the guys who might be willing to sit in on a few sessions out of love for this difficult, brilliant singer. Over the years, all the labels rejected the album, some motherfucker stole the master tapes, and Syd was, as far as I could tell, five guitar solos from being done. This went on and on, and I for one, because I believe that time is the avenger, that time lays waste to everyone, to every bit of talent that has he hubris to appear in the world, never believed that Syd’s album would be finished. Not because I didn’t believe in Syd, but because I don’t believe in time.

And then without any fanfare, it was done! Pink Velour, it’s called, and most of it orbits around the title song, about Syd’s mom, who not long ago passed away. That’s a beautiful song, but the one I want to talk a little about is last song, “Actress,” which manifestly deals with Syd’s avocational, or occasionally vocational interest in the thespian pursuits, but which is more concerned with the travails of Hollywood failure (“Then I failed my screen test/Fucked up my audition/I’m an actress/In a town that’s full of them/Act as if you care”), as a way of talking about everything that Syd Straw once believed in, as a singer and songwriter (“I’m having that kind of career,/I’m having a kind of career/I came here to become a star, but this is my life so far”). As with a lot of Syd Straw songs, since Syd’s guitar playing is in the beautifully rudimentary category, the song comes to rest on a one-four chord progression, and settles in there for about four and a half minutes, as Syd’s new band (a heterodox group of very talented jazz and rock veterans called Plankton who have the wherewithal to go wherever they are sent by the chanteuse) brings all the dynamics to the part where she mumbles a few more devastating self-lacerations and accusations, during the long slow fade: “Always rely on the kindness of strangers,” and “Who am I anyway, when I’m not acting?,” and “Why don’t you come over and see me sometime?” And so on: trying not to give up.

If this song doesn’t make you cry, you aren’t listening carefully. But what does it tell us about where music is now, because that’s the reason to write about it (besides, that is, writing about it to bring your attention to it). Most popular songs, with their puppy-love advice-column nonsense, tell me nothing about how life is actually lived, and as such, they are incapable of moving me. Doesn’t matter how good the performances are. Probably part of the reason for this is that the record companies, who are not immune to demographic calculations, are chasing the disposable incomes of the young, and so they hew to songwriting that addresses young people. But what about adults? Who the hell, then, is making records for adults? There are a few obvious examples, the baby boomer icons (long past their best work), but otherwise the vast majority of popular music is made not to stand the test of time, but to be wiped away by time. The collateral damage is just about every songwriter of a certain age, every songwriter who tries capture in the amber the heartache of middle age, and the giving out of the ambitions that sustained her when she was young. There’s no mercy in it, there’s no mercy in the world, there’s no mercy in time, unless there’s the occasional glimpse of the fact that we are not, in this suffering, alone.

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by Rick Moody

Arthur Danto, the Columbia University philosophy professor and frequent writer on contemporary art, has often referred to this “historical present” as a time after the history of art. What he seems to mean about this, I think, is that once Warhol made the Brillo box pieces, art had come to the end of a certain historical imperative. Anything after that time was at liberty to be whatever it felt like being, there was no urgency to be one thing or another. Pop, abstraction, narrative painting, landscapes, they all could coexist in the strange marketplace of the present. It’s worth asking what Danto would say about jazz. Jazz, in the main, seems to have two iterations these days. One is the Wynton Marsalis notion, the conservatory movement in jazz. Marsalis basically hews to the conviction that jazz stops sometime in the sixties before electric instruments. This is not a bad idea about jazz, in some ways, in that it is reverent and aesthetically coherent. It doesn’t, however, take into account that last 45 years of music history.

The other idea of jazz is the jazz that I will refer to henceforth as “smoove.” Smoove jazz is very popular in a demographic that includes elevators, hotel lobbies, and car service. What it has to do with an improvised art form that began in New Orleans brothels is clear: they both often feature saxophones. I think it’s possible that some smoove jazz occasionally has improvised solos, but mainly it’s through composed.

What about all the other stuff happening in jazz? All the other evocations of the form? The last 45 years? One thing that happened, and which seems to amount to the Brillo Box in terms of its effect on jazz history, was BITCHES BREW by Miles Davis (and, following it, a slew of really interesting electric albums by Miles, culminating with ON THE CORNER, an album often reviled by jazz writers and players, at least at the time of its release). Electric jazz made a lot of things possible–the Lounge Lizards, Prime Time, James “Blood” Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, Curlew, Soft Machine, and so on. In short, maybe electric jazz is a sort of tower of Babel that sends out the jazz players into the world, improvising in their myriad tongues. However, to much of the musical world much of this music is all but completely lost. Excepting the Knitting Factory, e.g., and Zebulon in Brooklyn, and a few other rarified locales (all of which don’t feel lost to their partisans, of which I consider myself one, but still), contempory improvised music seems mostly under the radar. This is perhaps a very good thing. Because then you have the isolation that makes for a great scene, a scene that does what it does and follows its own historical promptings. I love music like this, music that just doesn’t sound like anything else.

And one such band that has really moved me recently is this band from Seattle, The Tiptons Sax Quartet. Billy Tipton, you’ll recall, was the George Eliot of jazz–although in this case she not only had to take a man’s name, but actually lived as a man in order to make possible her music career. The Tiptons, as you might imagine, therefore, are an all-female sax quarter (with drummer!). They play jazz. I first saw them play in 1991 or so, in Vermont, where I was teaching at Bennington College. What I loved about them then was a stunning cover of “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” by Pere Ubu, wherein Amy Denio, one of the two main composers of the Tiptons, tried to simulate Allen Ravenstine’s synthesizer part on alto. This fleeting (and Bad Plus-esque) inclination toward covers belied the strength of the Tipton original compositions. Now it’s nearly twenty years later, and the uncanny chemistry between Denio and Jessica Lurie, the band’s other lead composer, has only deepened. They range, in terms of interests, across expanses of klezmer, soul, funk, folk, punk rock, and experimental music, and, most compellingly for me, they have also become really amazing singers. On Laws of Motion, their most recent album (available on CD Baby, but you can also hear excerpts on MySpace), there’s a lot of extended vocal technique, some of it in Italian, some of it in Taiwanese. Both Denio and Lurie have great voices, the former somewhat spooky and sad, the latter very Eastern European and sultry, with hints of jazz scatting. But now I’m failing to suggest to beauty of the sax playing here, and if so it’s only because I don’t really have the jazz education to write well on the subject. Let me flail around on the subject briefly! The Tiptons can really shred, in the realm of the sax solo, by which I don’t mean that they can play really fast, though they seem to be able to do that, but that their playing is fierce, implacable, but also wonderfully suggestive, melodic. Apparently, and this is frankly shocking to me, the level of sophistication and musicianship is such as to permit making Laws of Motion in a single day, during the last Tiptons tour. And yet for me, it has the wisdom of twenty years of playing together, the warmth, the chemistry, and the ambition. Maybe that’s exactly what allows you to record a rangey, hilarious, moving, and sublime album of contemporary jazz in a single day. Of course, it bears mentioning that the current lineup, featuring Sue Orfield on tenor, the secret weapon Tina Richerson on baritone, and a great new drummer, Faith Stankevich makes possible what Denio and Lurie require: an ensemble that can turn on a dime, and even put down the horns to sing. They have never sounded better. The Tiptons are self-releasing, I am told, because they want more creative control over the whole field of decision-making with regard to what they do. One result of this, however, is that they should be much better known than they are. So have a listen. And as in my last post I beseech readers to send me their best kept secrets among unsigned, unreleased, and indie bands. I will investigate. I already have chased down a couple of suggestions, in fact, with great enthusiasm.

See Also: Swinging Modern Sounds, A New Blog by Rick Moody

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Everybody knows the book business is in dire straits these days. The news comes in awful fusillades from the daily press. But in part the book business looks so dire right now because it has mainly been indemnified against the kinds of downturns that have afflicted other media in the digital age. Books are not pirated the way movies are, in Asia, and elsewhere, and the digital storage of the book hasn’t taken off the way it has in the music business. In fact, from my vantage point, the music business, the place where I have probably spent the greatest portion of my disposable capital since my teen years, is the canary in the coal mine of twenty-first century culture. It has lost much of its economic dominance in the last decade, and it has lost control of the form that, through a variety of iterations, has been its shining face for forty years: I speak of the album. The album, insofar as it is a thing that people make and buy from large multi-national corporations, is basically dead. This is not news. However, what happens after the death of the album is, at least to me, very, very interesting, and full of lessons for those of us who toil in related areas of endeavor. Here in the “Swinging Modern Sounds” blog, therefore, I intend to try to quantify and examine closely what’s happening in music entirely APART from what mostly interests the business itself. The business is mostly interested in a very deracinated hip hop, and in young men with drums and amplifiers criss-crossing the country in vans singing about lost love, and in teen sensations with drum machines lip-synching at shopping malls, or in flag-waving, jingoist country music with no sense of humor. Since none of that music is of any interest, let’s leave it behind. Elsewhere, at the site of the big negation–the site of the music that has nothing in common with what the suits are desperately hawking–there is a great profusion of styles, idioms, levels of competence, languages, and so on. Almost all of this music is being made by people who really love to play, and who really have something to say. That this music is largely ignored is what makes it interesting, because wherever there’s a negation, there’s an affirmation waiting to happen. I’m proposing, therefore, simply to start listening, to follow the rumors and the links and the MySpace pages to a bunch of musical acts that are all but totally unknown, and to bring news back to you. The methodology is completely democratic and wide open, therefore, and the style is going to be my actual style, which is to say all tangled and slightly incoherent as written at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning (like this post) before I’ve even had a cup of tea. The lessons I’m imagining to find are lessons that are not confined to music making, but ones that might have implications for rear guard industries like book publishing or, at another extreme, radio (where I also occasionally ply my hand). But I’m not going to give away all the lessons this morning. I will say this, though, I have been thinking of Richard Brautigan a lot lately. When I was a teenager, I really loved that novel called The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. In it, you’ll recall, a library stores all the unpublished manuscripts of the world. There’s a great tenderness to the idea of this collection, and it seems to me–now that we all have the capability of making, or publishing (online, e.g.) our own novels, not to mention our own films and our own albums of music–that the library Brautigan imagined is at hand. The only thing the library needs is someone to sift through it periodically. I volunteer. Please send me any tips you might have, about your banjo and theremin orchestra, your album played entirely on rubber band, your twelve-guitar army and so forth. I will listen.

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