Exactly a year ago my discussion with a comrade about music-compelled-by-struggle led to my first original post here, Attica: Coming Together. Last Friday, talking with this same friend caused me to create a list of musics that employ the spoken word—faith-based speech specifically. After jotting down a few titles I came across an extensive list posted for Easter 2013 by one Mr. Fab, a Los Angeles-based deejay and musician. He helpfully includes the name of each orator, which indicates the popularity of two in particular, R. W. Schambach and Gene Scott. My list nearly ended with Praga Khan’s setting of the former in 1991, but Fab provides twenty more years of titles.
My Friday conversation involved Brian Eno and David Byrne’s album My Life In the Bush of Ghosts for which they used the voice of Kathryn “I Believe In Miracles” Kuhlman. While her estate wouldn’t approve licensing, a 1980 UK bootleg of the intended track and others circulated apparently before the official album was released in early 1981.1Bush of Ghosts was completed in October of 1980 and Eno and Byrne must have scrambled to replace Kuhlman’s vocal: the substitute was an “unidentified exorcist” recorded the previous month in New York. Both these speakers are acts in their own right, with the exorcist commanding (below), healer Kuhlman exploring (at least initially).
On the bootleg (at 2:32) Kuhlman seems to introduce a guest, perhaps on her television show? Her phrasal pauses are electronically elongated in contrast to the musical pulses, turning prose into something this side of poetry.2
Sit down by my side. Tell me all about that wonderful experience when you were the possessorof that wonderful gift whereby you were enabled to see into the spirit world. This is what he saw…
This is what who saw? Inexplicably (the track does hiccough as if it’d been trimmed)—and murkily in the mix—Kuhlman turns to scripture: the story of Lot, King James Version (itself a poetical prose).
19 And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground; 2 And he said, Behold now, my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant’s house, and tarry all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all night. 3 And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him, and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and they did eat.
At which point, of course the men of Sodom demand that the angels be flushed out, “that we might know them.”3 To which Lot generously offers his “two daughters which have not known man.” The tale goes even further downhill from there, but Kuhlman—via the X-acto blade of Eno and Byrne?—omits all of this, returning cheerfully to:
But he’d been given that wonderful gift, which enabled him to see into the spirit world. These were angels, angels with Lot, and angels are just as real in your life and just as real in my life as they were in the life of Lot. Only he was given a gift whereby he could see into the spirit world and he saw them.
Surely the men of Sodom also were given the gift, else how would they have known there were new men to be known?
And so Eno and Byrne, having been forced to excise Kuhlman, swapped in an exorcist with a demonic laugh, who declares that his exorcisee’s “husband is the head of her house.” Thus the track moved from house to house, from the spirit world to “The Jezebel Spirit,” its title on the album.4
Anthems and Albums
It’s been noted that Eno and Byrne’s vocals appropriations had an antecedent at least ten years earlier with composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen (Anthems, 1966–1967), which sourced national anthem recordings from several countries around the world. And in 1969 Holgar Czukay (German co-founder of Can) with Rolf Dammers created Canaxis 5 by taking a choral a cappella track from a Folkways album, Music of Viet Nam, and giving it a lush setting.5 On Bush of Ghosts Eno and Byrne would do the same with three tracks from the album Music in the World of Islam (a six-LP box set that I let slip through my fingers when I moved back to Colorado). In 1987 Czukay employed the (mostly sung) vocals of Pope John Paul II, below. “We were blessed by the appearance of His Holyness Popestar Wojtyla and His Swinging Nuns during the Easter ceremonies,” Czukay writes in the credits to the Virgin album Rome Remains Rome.
Touching, Funny, and Disturbing
As can be heard, Eno and Byrne’s careful craft is in contrast with Czukay’s nonchalance. The latter approach also is taken by John Adams in a 1973 composition, a recording of which was released by Eno on his Obscure label. Christian Zeal and Activity is the middle movement of Adams’s triptych American Standard. The ensemble performs a deconstructed “Onward Christian Soldiers” but without benefit of bar lines—and with or without a baton. (Eno would use a similar technique for his Three Variations on the Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel.6) Adams’s ensemble is accompanied by the “extra material” of a radio talk show recording, which the composer called “touching,” “funny,” and “disturbing.”7This description actually could apply to all of the repurposed preachings in Mr. Jay’s list.
(Regarding the image used for the following stream of a 1973 performance…8)
At the time of Adams’s success with his opera Nixon In China (1987), but before that work’s release on record in 1988, Nonesuch issued an Adams sampler, demonstrating that the composer already had a portfolio. For that album, in November of ’86 Edo de Waart conducted (or did he?) members of the San Francisco Symphony in the stand-alone Christian Zeal and Activity, this time with the “extra material” of an uncredited 1976 text-sound piece, Sermon.9
Brother Walter Reigns
Perhaps the most famous stand-alone text-sound creation in history is Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, featuring the voice of “a young black Pentecostal preacher who called himself Brother Walter.” He was recorded in San Francisco’s Union Square; the piece was “composed” there in January of 1965.10
It’s Gonna Rain was incorporated along with other Reich works (including Come Out, which I discuss in my post from a year ago) into Megamix, released by Nonesuch in 1999.
Megamix was crafted by Michael Kandel, aka Tranquility Bass, whose early collaborations under that moniker with Tom Chasteen employ found vocals, such as the Apollo 11 line in 1991’s “They Came In Peace” (a later “Sea of Tranquility” mix echoes Reich), and the South Asian/Latin stylings of ’93’s “Cantamilla.” As far as proselytizing goes, a relatively soft sell is contained within the duo’s 1993 “Mya Yadana (Kin Kin)” (named after the restaurant the two frequented in Bagan, Burma in 1988 and their server Kin Kin).
Power and Poison
Less restrained are the appeals of R. W. Schambach on the first of John Oswald’s famous mashups, “Power” (1975), which aligns the preacher’s calls with Led Zeppelin’s power chords.11
In the 47-page booklet that accompanies Oswald’s Plunderphonics compilation (pictured above), the artist explains:
This is a track which i made while i was working on the « burrows »
—both he and John Adams were taken by the cut-up method (and results) of William S. Burroughs12—
and at the time i somewhat astigmatically decided that the repeating sample idea was not a direction i wanted to go in, and i put it in the closet. Five or six years later i heard that Bush of Ghosts record, which featured electroquoted preachers over rhythm tracks, and the thought crossed my competitive mind that i had already done this, better.
But Oswald explains further:
The basic premise of « power » was a long-standing one for me which dated back at least to my first hearing of Brother J. C. Crawford’s exhortations on the MC5’s Kick out the Jams. Before i knew much about Jerry Lee Lewis’ background, this seemed like the devil’s music. Rock, was eminently suited to be juxtaposed with ranting evangelistic rhetoric, and its brethren in the political arena, exemplified by guys like Adolf Hitler.
J. C. Crawford‘s resemblance to the latter-day Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping notwithstanding—
—Oswald denies these juxtapositions are ironic.
Rock fans were uncomfortable listening to talk about god and jesus. God and jesus fans were known to be uncomfortable about rock. So, even early on i was striving for my music to be unpopular.13
As I noted up top, preacher R. W. Schambach was a popular subject of electroquotation, to use Oswald’s term. In 1985 the British group :zoviet*france: included its song “Ram” from ’84 on a multi-artist audiocassette compilation, Ritual: Land’s End, issued by Touch. The track actually overlaps the preceding track, “Greater Faith Cathedral broadcast, rec by S/Z,” which is an otherwise unaccompanied exposé by Schambach of the truth behind the 1978 Jonestown Massacre. “Ram” appeared also in 1985 on the group’s own audiocassette album, Popular Soviet Songs and Youth Music, issued by Singing Ringing/Red Rhino, but it omits Schambach’s speech. A 1992 re-release of “Ram” on the group’s own compilation-from-compilations, Collusion (The Grey Area of Mute Records), resurrects the Schambach, perhaps because of the line that had been made famous the year before by Praga Khan.14 But before we get to those tracks, listen to the beginning of “Norsch Baelmaen,” recorded in 1982 and released in 1983 on the Red Rhino EP Norsch, which features another preacher.
And the backwards version…
“Ram” is the first track on Collusion by :zoviet*france:…
…from which Praga Khan borrows key bits, making his own message, calling for an abandonment of the old modus.
And since we’re on the subject: “Jim Jones” by the L.A. band Party Boys, from the 1984 LP No Aggro issued on Independent Records. No electroquotation here but rather the band’s recitation of Jones’s words.
A somewhat sour note to leave you on, but in Part 2 I look at Ralph Swickard’s Sermons of Saint Francis, Pierre Henry’s take on John the Evangelist, Cabaret Voltaire on Gene Scott, and more.
As I noted in my last post, I can’t ignore Morrissey’s recent displays of support of the relatively new political party For Britain. What follows is my personal approach to the ongoing controversy—mainly looking for clues in Morrissey’s own words via his 2013 memoir, Autobiography (London: Penguin Classics). But I begin by listening to his new album.
Given my commentary regarding Morrissey in my posts here I can’t ignore his support for what’s described as the “far-right political party” For Britain. I haven’t delved into this but am reminded of how filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom Morrissey collaborated,15 sounded the alarum of Britain’s demise. And there’s other stuff. Again, I won’t ignore this.
Listening to songs by The Royal Family and the Poor while writing my last post, I found myself comparing them with those of Scott Stapleton, who has created and contributed to music in various guises: solo, Virgin Forest, Phosphorescent, New Duo.
Phosphorescent Forest
I first became enamored of Stapleton when viewing the chipped silver laquer of his nails as he played pedal steel on Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” at Glastonbury in 2014. It’s just about all we see of him apart from a denim shirt and ’stache. His picking is tasteful and ensemble (yes that’s an adjective) and contrasts with his keyboard work the year before on Phosphorescent’s “The Quotidian Beasts” at the SXSW music festival. There, he is flamboyant in a red T on the keys, practically conjuring the song’s lyrics as they are sung by Matthew Houck (aka Phosphorescent), with flourishes from his hands and arms.
Last week, when I was uninspired whilst reviewing my running list of blog topics, YouTube operated as a sort of Oblique Strategies, the deck of cards initially developed by musician Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt independently in the late 1960s and early ’70s. (Eno included four of Schmidt’s prints in his 1977 album Before and After Science.) The cards’ suggestions and comments can act as disinterested—oblique—prods for artists when they encounter roadblocks during the creative process. And so YouTube essentially did the same for me, but not obliquely—rather, evidently, based on my past searches and pointing-and-clicking. “Recommended for you” last week was an obscure track from The Zulu Compilation (1984), an album I happen to have in my collection. Zulu Records was formed by Jayne Casey and Ambrose Reynolds (both of whom also worked in the band Pink Industry, which issued lovely minimalist and melancholic music in the ’80s). The compilation is perhaps most collectible for its inclusion of a pre-Trevor Horn version of “Love Has Got a Gun” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
I hadn’t listened to that compilation LP in years and had completely forgotten the track YouTube selected for me: “The Kremlin in Flame [sic]” by S.T.F.O.T.P.A. It sounds like something from the 1976 Art & Language-Red Crayola collaboration, Corrected Slogans (discussed in my post I Found That Essence Rare). After some searching I found the identity of the track’s creators in a 2010 interview by Arthur McDonald of The Royal Family and the Poor fame. Except that I’d never heard of the band. Or, rather, when coming across their LPs, two of which were issued by Factory Records, I’d passed them by.
Seeing the nave and altar of Notre-Dame de Paris after its recent fire, and thinking of it open to the elements, I had an eery sense of, well, déjà vu. I had been there, literally, with my family on a 2002 trip to France in celebration of my parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. But I had been in that ruin, virtually and earlier, twice more.
In December while trying to verify the colloquialism in The Smiths’ song title “Reel Around the Fountain”16 I noticed that the band’s singer Morrissey had employed a now-abandoned slang in his solo single “Piccadilly Palare,” sung in the character of a former street hustler. It was the lead track on his album Bona Drag, but I hadn’t really collected Morrissey records and skipped that one because it was a compendium of singles. I had, however, collected much Smiths, but I was confused by the band’s many, many compilations and 12-inch vinyl product. In fact “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” from the final album, can be seen as a commentary on this excess, as it laments a pop star’s exploitation in death but also questions the star’s complicity in life.
Satiate the need slip them into different sleeves! Buy both, and be deceived
This second installment of movement musings begins (or rather ends…) below with a variation of a video sampling technique that I covered in “Knee, Sugar” of the last section of Everybody Dance Now 1 (Knee, Sugar, Hammer, Shame). I also look at what was suggested by “Shame”: what might be seen as anti-dance, or what I call adansual.
I first became acquainted with the Australian band Bumblebeez 81 via their suggestive “Pony Ride” from 2002. Five years later they released “Dr. Love,” the promo for which involves a parody of a dance music video that could have been shot on a smoggy day along the Los Angeles River. All the performers sport Sharpie-ed chest adornments: pushbuttons and keyboards, chains, phones and headphones, a bandolier, a mink stole, an LP, even sham shoes. Rapper Christopher Colonna is bedecked in markered bling, and his sister Queen ViLa, dons an eyepatch through which she easily sees. The promo’s coda reprises the song’s sonics with pushbuttons pushed and keyboards keyed, essentially A/V sampling.
An instance of years-ago seeming yester-day. My recently departed comrade, Lowell May, in a fortunate instance of synchronicity, on September 12, 2011 forwarded a snippet of Karl Marx just two months after musician Brian Eno had issued his collaboration with poet Rick Holland, Drums Between the Bells (and six days before Occupy Wall Street). What Lowell sent was a blog post of the same date by one N Pepperell, lecturer at an unnamed university in Melbourne, who felt the quotation from Marx “is on point for the sorts of reading strategies I apply to his style in Capital.” The language of this relatively obscure open letter, published twenty-four years before Capital, when Marx was 23, abstractly mirrors that of Holland’s words atop Eno’s soundtrack.
Reading Jim Dooley’s invaluable Red Set: A History of Gang of Four17 last year I was fascinated with how some of the philosophical underpinnings of the band’s songs mirrored what I’ve been dealing with in writing materials with comrades in a labor group. What follows is not a review of Dooley’s book, but rather a commentary on the mirrored passages and also, to a much lesser degree, remarks on my exposure to theoretical thought through pop music (of all things). This post is based on the notes I took at my first (and only) full reading, and is not a comprehensive look at Gang of Four reasoning.
Art & Language
The future Gang of Four’s Jon King and Andy Gill both met Terry Atkinson while studying art at Leeds University in the mid 1970s. Atkinson, an instructor, had been a cofounder of Art & Language, an association of artists that molded conceptual art into concretized ideas. But that collective also had a cachet for fans of popular music. Just as avant-garage rockers Pere Ubu would collaborate with Red Crayola in 1979,18 the latter’s Mayo Thompson already had worked with Art & Language on the LP Corrected Slogans (1976).19
So Atkinson had a built-in interest amongst students of art and music, like King and Gill and future Mekons Jon Langford and Mark White. Dooley quotes Atkinson from the beginning of a 1990 essay that appears to be so in line with Gang of Four’s song “Why Theory?” (1981) that it could raise a chicken-or-egg question if we weren’t aware of the interaction between the instructed and their instructor. Atkinson, followed by Gang of Four:
No matter how much theory is disguised or repressed, there is no practice without theory. The theory that practice has nothing to do with theory is a theory, a disingenuous and naïve one, but none the less a theory.20
Each day seems like a natural fact And/But what we think Changes how we act
The operative word is “seems.”
Dooley follows this up with a discussion of Jon King’s interest in the original Situationists and their culture jamming, which is fairly obvious, but of course integral to the GO4 story.
Seventy pages later Dooley discusses how, if action can’t be divorced from thought, institutions can’t be separated from their history. In other words, there is nothing necessarily “natural” in the order of things. On this point Dooley cites a text that King provided, by Georg Lukács.21 (I include here a preceding line because of its correspondence with Atkinson, above.)
Marx opposes to [his predecessors] a critical philosophy, a theory of theory and a consciousness of consciousness. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every respect including historical decline.22
(Racist police as progeny of slave hunters comes to mind.23) To perceive any institution, law, idea as natural—the flipside being unnatural (as in acts)—simply perverts and subverts human agency. For worse or better, these are our constructs. Natural is not in it, as Gang of Four exclaim in their iconic song from the first album.
The same song poses:
The problem of leisure What to do for pleasure
Dooley cites a Situationist International line: “The emptiness of leisure stems from the emptiness of life in present-day society, and it cannot be filled within the framework of leisure.”24
As Dooley notes, this implies that leisure “is somehow exterior to our everyday working lives, and larger society […].”25
It’s a sharper critique than British band Multivizion would present in their 1981 single “Work to Live, Don’t Live to Work,” which actually leads off with the line, “There’s dignity in labour” before complaining of a demanding boss who wants “blood for money,” and which encourages resistance against the status quo without questioning it altogether. The lyric does, however, declare, “Well, money comes in handy/ But I don’t need it that badly.”26
The (In)Dignity of Labour: Too Dear a Price
I’m compelled to digress here and comment on Multivizion’s critique by way of what I read decades ago in Bartolomé Bennassar’s The Spanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century, first published in 1975.27 In a chapter titled Power, Work, and Wealth, the author begins by mentioning the need for immigrant labor in the households of the wealthy during the first two centuries of his study, quoting Jorge Nadal, who wrote a few years earlier that “Spain, especially its Catalan and Valencian regions, was invaded by a multitude of immigrants from the other side of the Pyrenees.”28 Bennassar then explains that such a dearth of labor was in part solved by slavery.29
In a subsection titled Attitudes Toward Work, Bennassar writes, “Very early it seems, foreign travelers and attentive Spaniards noted this people’s lack of interest in manual labor and, more generally, their poor opinion of labor.” Felipe II’s 1561 study of his realm showed that prominent cities like Valladolid and Burgos had only 40 and 48 percent of family-heads declaring an occupation, respectively; Segovia only 70 percent.30
Bennassar quotes Henry Swinburne, who visited Spain in 1775 and 1776:
The poor Spaniard does not work, unless urged by irresistable want, because he perceives no advantage accrues from activity. As his food and raiment are purchased at a small expense, he spends no more time in labour than is absolutely necessary.”31
Bennassar also provides several examples of Spanish industriousness. Labor that long was considered “honorable” includes work on the land as well as public service—“the royal service, the study of letters, and the sea (the road of conquest and large-scale commerce).” Looked down upon were “mechanical professions” (use of hands) and “dealings in money.”32
Then Bennassar discusses what caught my eye nearly thirty years ago. I’ve never liked to work for a wage myself, and I guess this resonated at least on the level of “work to live.”
For Spaniards of the Old Regime, labor, even if remunerative, was not an end in itself. Labor might be the necessary condition for a decent life, but excess in work should be avoided.33
And then:
We must dismiss the legend of interminable days of labor, of years made up of identical days, all devoted to labor. A large block of time was always reserved for diversion.
Bennassar goes on to explain that even after the archbishop of Toledo had reduced the number of dioscesan holidays, per a papal recommendation at the end of the eighteenth century, feast days plus Sundays totaled 94 a year—ten days shy of our own 104 weekend days—
[…] to which must be added the parish feasts, the occasional corridas, the Mondays off demanded by artisans, apprentices, and day laborers as free time. This comes to 170 idle days in the year.34
We can roughly contrast this with our (U.S.) 104 weekend days, six relatively firm national holidays, and ten days of vacation: 120 total (if we’re lucky). To which, Bennassar adds that the workday itself was “rarely longer than six hours,” citing Joseph Townsend from 1731.35
Bennassar makes a near-summation in this subsection by quoting another foreigner, Théophile Gautier, a hundred years later:
Pleasures like ours, gained by dint of pain, fatigue, tension of spirit and application, they think are bought at too dear a price.”36
Leisure is loss
Nearly forty pages later in my reading of Red Set Dooley points to another Gang of Four song, “A Hole in the Wallet” from the second album, which deals with the commodification of “all aspects of contemporary life.”37 The song concerns women, however, whose “business” is to have been educated in order to recognize their equal status, but also: to be seen and not heard, to mask their “nature” with makeup, and to “stay in bed or in the kitchen.” Love, too, is a dead end:
Why work for love if it shows no profit You’ll only earn emotional losses Wasting time is a hole in the wallet
Dooley writes that the song “seems to ask whether we can possibly succeed if we don’t exclusively dedicate ourselves to our work. In a way, leisure is loss.”38 In work as in love.
Situationist Guy Debord, not cited at this point by Dooley, discusses the work-leisure dialectic, writing that leisure, i.e.,
inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated[,] just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.39
Another song on that second album (Solid Gold)—the aforementioned “Why Theory?”—also had its genesis in a feminist critique, although one might be hard-pressed to detect it. Dooley quotes Andy Gill as saying the song’s title and possibly some of its lyrics were “sampled” from a “thick pamphlet” of feminist thought. The song expressed Gill’s dearly held idea “that all of this is man-made, it’s all idealogy—it’s created and it’s used to shape the world we live in.”40
Trying to tell you a dream
My notetaking skipped sixty more pages to mark an interconnection between Joseph Conrad, Karl Marx, Margaret Thatcher, and Guy Debord. The song is “We Live As We Dream, Alone” from the third album Songs of the Free. Dooley writes that the song “is linked to Gill and King’s shared enthusiasm for […] Heart of Darkness,” with Gill observing that the book “is as much about London as it is Africa,” i.e., colonization begins at home.
The title comes from a line in Conrad’s novella, exclaimed after its narrator explains that he’d lost his ability to view Kurtz rationally:
“He was just a word for me. […] It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no realation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essense of dreams…” […]
“…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essesnce. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone…”41
Defining ourselves
As Dooley writes regarding this same song, “Interconnected are the Marxist ideas of reification and alienated labour,”42 covered thusly in the lyrics:
Man and woman need to work It helps us define ourselves We were not born in isolation But sometimes it seems that way
The space between our work and its product Some fall into fatalism As if it started out this way
In conversation, I find the perfectly “natural” question, “So what do you do?” to be pretty personal, just this side of asking someone about their sexual orientation. We hardly are defined by what we “do” any more than by what we do (or don’t) in bed (or whereever). And so that “space” (GO4’s term) of some workers’ estrangement from the product of their labor grows, just as it does for some young people these days vis-à-vis their gender and their sexual preference(s). Last summer Harvard’s Gay & Lesbian Review reported that, according to a British poll, “only 46 percent of eighteen- to 24-year-olds identified as ‘exclusively heterosexual’—0 on the Kinsey scale.” Another 35 percent fell in the categories of Kinsey’s 1 (predominantly hetero, only incidentally homo) and 2 (predominently hetero, but more than incidentally homo). So nearly one out of 5 fell into the area of bisexual-to-exclusively-gay.
A 2017 poll stateside already had expanded that sample to ages 18–34, and the results matched: 20 percent IDing as LGBTQ.43
The G&LR then reported last fall that stats from a survey of Yale’s first-year class—admittedly a tiny sample—essentially were the same, even if the categories weren’t Kinsey’s. “Straight” came in at 76 percent, while “Asexual/Ace” polled at three, “Questioning” at six, “Bi/Pansexual” at nine, and “Gay/Lesbian” at five percent.44
Just as there are people who accept a sexual status quo on its face, yet move beyond its bounds—say, anyone in that 2 slot on the Kinsey scale—, there are workers who do the same. Even those who adhere to “be thankful you have a job,” as if all value came from Capital—“as if it started out this way” (GO4)—, manage to finagle the system by myriad methods, from lifting paperclips to calling in sick, at the very least.
Society’s Bunk!
They’re invincible, didn’t exist!
— “History’s Bunk!”
The third connection to “We Live As We Dream, Alone” is noted by Dooley’s citing45 of Garry Mulholland,46
who draws a parallel between the song’s sense of estrangement and Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip in an interview five years later, that people
are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.47
Months later she issued it as a statement, itself of interest given what we’ve discussed above:
All too often the ills of this country are passed off as those of society. Similarly, when action is required, society is called upon to act. But society as such does not exist except as a concept. Society is made up of people.48
Dooley then quotes49 from Situationist Guy Debord, the final interconnection:
What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.50
A way out of this dead end is presented by Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in Uniform,” from the same album. As Dooley writes, “Soldiering is not only a way to make a living in difficult economic times”—“Handouts, they got me down” from the lyrics—“it is also an occupation that offers some sort of structure to a chaotic life.”51 “I had to regain my self-respect,” the song’s narrator sings. “To have ambition was my ambition.” The whole song is a justification for joining, a justification that would change days after the song’s album Songs of the Free was released in March 1982: the Falklands War began April 2.52 Debord: “The spectacle reunites the separate….”
Ideology
My next two notes, scribbled between a couple dozen pages, concerned how Gang of Four viewed their engagement with the message in their music. Dooley cites53 a New Musical Express profile of the band by Charles Shaar Murray in which Andy Gill makes a distinction between GO4 and other bands championing a cause. Gill could have named a number of musicians, but chose Paul Weller, who “seems to be interested in areas of social welfare, but we’re not in the same category at all. A display of conscience is not the same bag as discussing ideology.”54 The difference is between a soul being simply sympathetic and being critical of the order that’s responsible for engendering that sympathy (via the order’s action, or inaction).
Gill had received questions from women friends regarding the song “Woman Town,” which was inspired by Fellini’s City of Women, in which Marcello Mastroianni’s character finds himself in a city with no men—especially a scene in which he “walks down a hallway that seems to consist of countless images, and audio fragments, of women from the doctor’s past,” as Dooley writes. It’s a sexist portrayal in the film, Gill tells Dooley, and is sexist in the song. So Gill’s friends’ queries re the song become problematic, since the song is a commentary on sexism using the sexist as mouthpiece. Such an approach, Gill says, “should be about truth and not trying to present some kind of politically-correct balanced view of the world. Because if that is the case, then what you are presenting is not truth but ideology.”55
Leonard Cohen’s third album displays his stubbled mug and a poem on the verso that begins, “They locked up a man/ Who wanted to rule the world.” To my knowledge that poem, like “Woman Town,” is not autobiographical. And Andy Gill is not Joni Mitchell, who remarks in the current issue of MOJO, “My work is personal, too vulnerable,” in reference to her paintings and the ignorance with which they’re met. “That’s why I quit making records.” But this quintessential confessional-singer-songwriter cuts to the quick regarding the underlying star-making machinery. Upon hearing that A&R types “are no longer looking for talent, they just want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate,” she thought: “That’s interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist—not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision.”56
Of course, Mitchell could be relegated to the same bag as Weller, but her comment remains a critique of capitalism. (For a thoughtful critique of ideology, not out of line with what Dooley presents, see a concise introduction by Chad Kautzer, who first introduced it to me.57)
Pastel Palette, Hard Harmonics
People hated Gang of Four’s album Hard, the band’s fourth, on which “Woman Town” appears, and there’s a lot to dislike, beginning with the cover: pastel palette, a group shot (a first, suggested by their manager, according to Dooley58), the geometric doodles on the verso that were a lot more Malcom Garrett (Assorted iMaGes) than GO4, although the matte finish is a nice touch.
Surfaces aside, I can’t get enough of the opening cut, “Is It Love,” owning four vinyl iterations, which I mixed live as a deejay. It’s not the song’s lyrics but rather the sound that grabbed me. Gill and King had planned to work with Nile Rodgers of Chic, being “huge fans.” But when Rodgers’s fee increased following the popularity of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, which he co-produced, GO4’s manager nixed it, according Gill, as recorded by Dooley.59 Still, Hard, which was produced with brothers Ron and Howard Albert, has a disco sheen akin to Chic, a departure from the prior punky-funk. It opens with Brenda White and Chic’s Alfa Anderson’s piercing a cappella “Is it…” falling nearly an octave to a serene “love…,” which seems sampled from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. Andy Gill demonstrates the depth of his artistry by crafting a guitar solo out of his harmonics—unmatched in his oeuvre, to my mind. It comes off as disco, unapologetically. Yet the band members spend a whole chapter apologizing to Dooley for the album.60 My notes urged me to reread the critique of Hard. In the course of doing so I was grateful to Dooley’s citation of two critics who put into words what I was feeling vis-à-vis disco—the music and its temples.
Disco Dialectic
Simon Frith gets into territory too involved to discuss at length, but states, for instance, that on the disco floor “there is no overt competition for partners, no isolation.” In my experience that was an element of the disco dialectic, that one could be surrounded by potential partners while feeling alone.61 And to quote a line of Frith that Dooley does not:
There was an obvious link between the vocal styles of disco and 1930s torch songs: Billie Holiday and Donna Summer alike stylized feelings, distanced pain, opened up the texts of sexuality (and for this reason, disco, despised by punk-rockers on principle, had an immense appeal to the post-punk avant-garde).62
One can list a number of artists in the latter camp: Lizzie Mercier Descloux, James White/Chance, Malcolm McLaren, The Slits (sorta), Robert Fripp, Talking Heads (they’d hedge by calling the sound African rhythms), Scritti Politti. And Gang of Four. (And all white.)
Dooley also cites Richard Dyer, writing in a publication issued by a gay men’s socialist collective: “[Disco’s] eroticism allows us to rediscover our bodies as part of this experience of materialism and the possibility of change.”63 I never danced to “Is It Love,” but Dyer distills the feeling at least some men had on a dance floor in the ’70s and ’80s. After which we might walk outside and be bashed.
My late musical partner John Callahan who, like me was a fan of both punk and disco, would comment that both genres were reactions to rock’s baroque tendency. The rhythm was reinvigorating, whether via punk’s simplicity or disco’s Latin-esque complexity. Dooley himself touches on this:
It could also be argued that embracing disco had overt political overtones. As with [Gang of Four’s] use of a melodica and the employment of dub techniques, the norms of robust, hyper-masculine rock music were thereby contested. A challenge was made to categories within genres and genders. In many ways, an active dancefloor is the very opposite of music being created by a lone genius and enjoyed by solitary home users. Community is realised via participation.64
But, again, at night’s end, we dream alone.
It’s Not Made By Great Men
Dooley covers more ground in 100+ pages before summarizing the Gang of Four legacy in his final chapter, titled Blooming Flowers, which can be read as a stand-alone essay. My last two notes referenced Fredric Jameson (cited throughout the book), Gramsci, and Foucault from the many thinkers in this section. Dooley writes, “The Gang of Four members are not heroic outsiders pointing to societal ills but rather players caught up in those contradictions, ambiguities and compromises. If answers are even possible, they are hard to come by.”65 He then quotes Jameson, who speaks of the Left’s “very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history.” This can be said to a certain extent of the Industrial Workers of the World, with a rich history that can tend to overshadow a radical modus operandi that never ended. Dooley cites the concept of “movement of history” via Gramsci’s “notion of hegemony that most aptly captures where Gang of Four were coming from. For Gramsci the idea was that power was in a constant state of flux—that it was something perpetually negotiated and reconfigured. Power was not solely oppression, or force, from above, but also entailed an element of consent. As there was an element of contestation, there was always a potential for agency.”66 And Dooley cites Foucault who asks “the ultimate question” in a discusison of emancipation: “How can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?”67
As Dooley illustrates over and over again in Red Set, Foucault’s question lurks in the background regarding Gang of Four’s internal dynamic. The members constantly second-guessed their choices while also unnerving their bandmate comrades by their probing. (Read the book…) Again, as Dooley puts it so well, Gang of Four were (are) not heroic outsiders but rather participants—not great men.
