 illustration by A.J. Garces |
music is where our paradoxes exist with the least self-consciousness. Here,
then, is a short, arbitrary list of our most basic energies, our best and worst
secrets.
Carl Sandburg Sings Folk Songs. The old poet was a homey singer and strummer,
and his renditions of 19th-century songs like “Turkey in the Straw,” “Red River
Valley,” and “I Ride an Old Paint,” are sung as they were meant to be. I prefer
Sandburg’s versions because he was born in 1878, when these songs were current;
he took the mood of that era with him into our century.
These songs of the South and West show a longing, a humor, and a tenderness
that utterly contradict the Indian-killing, land-grabbing, Jim-Crow viciousness
practiced and/or tolerated by most who sang them. They sang what they could not
be, and left their songs to evoke a gentler life than they’d lived. But (as
Norman Mailer said) it is our actions and not our sentiments that create
history. So it’s a little maddening and very instructive if, when you read of
the genocide of the Indians and the raw greed of Western town-building, you
play in the background this gentle, funny, wistful music — a little maddening
because you have to face how the most disturbing history can be created by
people with great tenderness of heart. (I know of no balm for that
contradiction.)
Robert Johnson’s Blues. Again, just a man and a guitar, but another whole
history is here — another future, too. Recorded in the mid 1930s, you hear the
murders of rap, the psychedelics of Hendrix, and an impassioned dark vision
that makes Mick Jagger and Jim Morrison seem like kids throwing tantrums. You
hear lynching, humiliation, rage; yearning, redemption, mad joy. Johnson would
have known many who had been born slaves, and you hear the cry of their
experience and the pride and arrogance of those who survived in spite of
history — and to spite it. Lock yourself up in a room with this music for
hours, and you’ll know that until this voice is satisfied there’ll be no calm
in America.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s “Tiger Rag”. In 1917 these white-boy
copycats from New Orleans were the first to record jazz. They were thieves and
liars, claiming to invent a music they’d grown up listening to blacks play;
they were also inheritors (albeit uninvited). They weren’t very good but they
were very, very frantic. Look no further for the roots of punk. Mad, fast,
hard, one-two rhythms propelling screeching instruments in a mood that pretends
cheer but is plainly hysterical — the first flat-out abandoned hysteria in
Western music. Their recordings were an enormous sensation, selling as much as
a million in a far less populated America. While the First World War was
massacring thousands daily in Europe, Americans were giving vent to a cheer
that had all the accoutrements of rage. Take a few deep breaths, set aside your
preconceptions, and then just listen, listen to the level of insanity here —
and then put on the Sex Pistols, for further study.
Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” and “Tight Like This”. There’s no space to
describe the genius of Armstrong, our indispensable musician, inventor not of
jazz but of its extended improvised solo, pioneer of jazz instrumentation,
master of the trumpet, inventor of jazz- and scat-singing, melodist of
unequaled perfection. “You can’t play anything on a horn that Louis hasn’t
played,” Miles Davis said. These 1928 recordings are Armstrong at his pinnacle.
In his tone, his phrasing, and in something untouchable in his timing, there is
Robert Johnson’s unfathomable pain transmuted into an equally unfathomable joy
— both qualities together, in the same note, at the same time, with the same
force. There is nothing else like it in anybody’s music. I call it the sound of
a possible Heaven — a state of the heart, absolutely down to earth, where
nothing is excluded, but all of life is transmuted. It cracks the mirror inside
in which you can only see yourself. That a 20th-century American artist
achieved this (and, moreover, an oppressed man in an oppressive time) means
that we do not have to be trapped.
Billie Holiday. For Holiday to be grasped, she must be listened to across the
length of her life, from the girlish voice of the early records to the voice of
the witch-crone about to die of old age before her 45th birthday. At every
stage she sang of love as though her life were at stake. It was as though she
said, “These silly lyrics are serious business — I’m going to turn these songs
inside out ’til you admit how lonely you are.” Making Shakespearean soliloquies
from trite rhymes, she taught that, with passion and desperate integrity, we
could make this banal American pop environment as profound as we needed it to
be. It wasn’t designed to express anything real, but we could force it to.
Frank Sinatra’s Torch Songs. Up-tempo Sinatra is show-offy and brilliant, the
epitome of panache. Torch-song Sinatra is spooky, a territory where gender
disappears into a fog. He always said that Billie Holiday was his prime
influence, but he never said that his macho pose was how he got away with being
a man who sang more from the feminine side of his nature than any man before or
since. Again: Take a few deep breaths, let go of the image he painstakingly
projected, and listen to the torch songs, especially from the 1950s. A man is
singing, but not with the male part of himself. You are listening to a
heterosexual with a woman’s voice in (just barely, at times) a man’s timbre.
You are listening, not to a female sensibility, but to the tortured female side
of one man’s sensibility. You’re in a gender labyrinth of the psyche — so, of
course, the sound is terribly lonely. Then go right out and look into the eyes
of the men you pass on the street — you’ll hear Sinatra’s voice. He was
telling our secrets. And as he often said about singing, “I go wherever it is I
go, I can’t help it.” A macho guy who’s into surrender? That’s why so many
women found him so sexy. He is our contradiction, making a career of
simultaneously flaunting and subverting the American image of manhood.
Hank Williams. Williams knew he was trapped and sang from within the trap, and
his dignity was that because of what he knew he sang stripped of pride. His was
the voice of an animal, a coyote howling, caught and trying to gnaw off its own
leg to escape the steel claws. Love trapped him. Whiteness trapped him. Poverty
trapped him. Southern bullshit trapped him. The loneliness of macho, poor white
trash, unable to communicate through anything but clich�s and a howl,
trapped him. A trapped creature and a freight train whistle alternated in his
voice, the most naked expression we have of the white South.
Aretha Franklin. Is there another voice in American song (beside Armstrong’s)
that is so un-trapped? Joyful defiance. Defiance without bitterness. Defiance
as an act of necessity and self-respect. This is the Declaration of
Independence as pure sound. This is Martin Luther King’s ethic without the
sometimes sappy rhetoric. This is freedom. “I guess I travel to a lot of places
when I sing.” Freedom as concentrated energy, not freedom as dissipated
longing. Holiday had to turn everything inside out and then drag it around.
Franklin either buries it in the earth or lifts it to the sky. There aren’t
many sounds of triumph in our music. This is triumph at no one else’s expense.
This is what that sounds like, and to find it in a culture based on theft —
and to hear it from one of the stolen ones — is to witness a miracle of
regeneration, and to sense great possibilities.
Bob Dylan. To paraphrase Joyce, the American dream is a nightmare from which
we have not awoken. Perhaps we cannot. Perhaps that is its nature. In a voice
half banshee and half wraith, Bob Dylan made songs of that dream, and of yet a
deeper kind of dreaming, the phantasmagoria of pictures and surreal events that
all of us encounter in sleep. Some people walk in their sleep; it’s as though
Dylan sings in his sleep. Nobody in his songs is quite human, everyone is
touched with ghostliness, a Halloween/Day of the Dead music in which the mask
takes on more life than the face beneath it. When nothing is left of America as
we know it, if Dylan’s music survives they will hear fragments of our films,
pages of our Bibles, whispers in our bedrooms, explosions of our wars, animals
trapped and freed, and the tenderness of our oldest songs burned with the first
and bitterest voice of punk. Everything in America is in his songs, but in
fragments, as though he’s picking through ruins. But there is a also a strange
energy, as though the ruins have a life of their own and could become whole
again. He once said, “All I’m trying to tell you is that anything is possible.”
Which is what America was supposed to be about in the first place.
Thelonious Monk’s Piano Solos. Somehow he made the instrument sound as though
it were made of stone — a stone on which a pterodactyl had once perched. Such
odd sounds. With unpredictable rhythms. And sudden expectant silences rise
between his notes, so that sometimes you remember the pauses more than the
melody. It’s a music that unobtrusively walks through walls. Think of it as a
funeral march for all our dead ideas. Monk’s music is of an American character,
an American possibility, still unformed. It says, “There is more here, right
where you are, than you can guess at.”
This article appears in December 6 • 1996 and December 6 • 1996 (Cover).