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Thursday, February 13, 2003 |
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I don't quite understand the process that leads me wander over to my CD collection, and unfailingly pull out the right work at the right time. I suppose I have some sort of mental library of the things in my collection, and subconsciouly align that with my current mood. Anyway, I grabbed Public Image Ltd's Metal Box on the way to work this morning, and have been listening to it all day. With the first deep-dub bass note and guitar scrape of "Careering," I was overcome with a horrible, suffocating sense of dread and terror - all the emotions I have wilfully sublimated, each and every time I've read the newspaper, or turned on the television lately. Although it felt bad, it came as a bit of a relief to finally just go there, you know? Its not as though these feelings are in any way irrational, given the current state of things. I've never paid much attention to PiL's lyrics - Johnny Rotten's tormented, keening vocal technique is quite expressive enough for me. But, I did look up the words to "Careering" today, and those words, coupled with the atmosphere of near-overwhelming horror the music conveys, almost eerily capture our current situation: A face is raining I recently read an interview in The Wire with Keith Levene, PiL's guitarist. He observed that, although Johnny Rotten has been accused of portraying an almost completely cynical and amoral world in his lyrics, Rotten was in fact possessed of some capacity that allowed him to sense evil at a near-palpable level, and was extraordinarily tormented by this. This really resonated with me - as an adolescent, I was terrified by the Sex Pistols. But later, after I grew up a little, I was able to see them quite clearly for what they actually were - frail, undernourished, frightened, and angry boys. In The Filth and The Fury, the excellent documentary detailing the social and cultural conditions which gave rise to the Sex Pistols, its very easy to observe the now-adult members of the band turning away from this very quality of vulnerability. This sort of negative critical response to serious artistic work about bad or dark things seems only to pop up around marginalized forms of expression - punk rock, avant-noise, performance art, Surrealism, Dada, The Situationists. I don't know if I've ever read a critique of, say, Francis Bacon or Picasso that took them to task for delineating the horror and abjection of post-war Europe in their work. At this point, I suppose its inevitable that I reference Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. In this book, he plays a quite-brilliant game of connect-the-dots between some of the most significant, yet marginalized, artistic movements of last century (many of which I mentioned above). I read this book, quite by accident, after I'd just finished Stallybrass and White's The Politics and Poetics of Trangression, and was therefore able to see quite clearly the manner in which tangential and despised social movements are co-opted by mainstream society, and become absolutely essential to that society's function. Reading these books in tandem was, in many ways, one of the defining moments of my intellectual development (if something so scattered and happenstance can be referred to as 'development'). It was a real, startling, epiphany-inducing eye-opener, gentle readers, and an experience I'd recommend highly. You'll never look at one single dirty or despised thing the same way again.
5:19:09 PM 
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Last update: 4/12/2004; 3:55:53 PM .
