Fashion designers frequently work in cycles. Trends come, go and return in our lifetimes, different on the surface perhaps, but less so once we scratch it a little. People can hold that human history too repeats itself, unless we learn from it. Sometimes when I stop to look back at my own life, it seems that I'm slowly climbing a mountain by a long path going around it, almost returning every now and then to a similar vantage point.
The new place, though, is rather higher than before, so that it's almost like being in the same one again, but each round of the cycle path brings a broader view of the landscape around me and of the way I've taken. I can see again where it forks and when I made decisive choices in relation to other people and their own journeys through time...
Thus this is bound to be, by far, one of the most extensive chapters in the logbook about the still mysterious Lilith and her musicians! There is a big vision here so if you're in the mood for a tea-break, I do hope you enjoy the view.
Simply feeling my age ... and maybe yours too
I can scarcely just call such an entry a column, when I've set out to take a very long view indeed. I plan to turn the clock back a whole century and talk about tone poems and folk notions, sweet dreams and tough realities. I'm making a bid to capture something of the essential spirit of our own times: the Zeitgeist, some would say, of these early years of a new century of life and of music. To do this, it's a good idea to seek out some firm roots, for we live in pretty tough times, when I find that musicians who reach right into the hearts of folk are rising remarkably well to the challenge.
What follows is a tale deep enough probably to keep most of you going until my next music week in a month's time! But it remains the exception to the rule, even now that the Log is a book unfolding before your very eyes. I've had many years to reflect on the contents of this particular chapter, in which I'd like to break new ground the way I apparently did seven months ago in my first essay tackling the twin languages of music and sexuality...
While it's an astonishing site in my blogroll for its range and depth of cultural studies, a vast enterprise undertaken by Piero Scaruffi and his usually anonymous acolytes is as human and fallible as any such encyclopaedic venture:
"The debut album, 'Installation Sonore' (V2, 1999), reprising the single ['Le Mobilier' or 'The Furniture'], toys with hard-rock, blues ('I Love Ma Guitare') and funk ('Sublimior') in a witty and captivating manner.
'Music Kills Me' (V2, 2002) is a vastly inferior affair. 'Schizophonic' (V2, 2005) is an ambitious concept album with Freudian overtones, but the music is still the same silly dance-pop."
But this is the silliest I've seen of one of vain attempts to approach the pair I introduced last night; a brief look at the Rinôçérôse project in an ever-growing History of Rock.
So what's really going on?
What's now in style for teenagers like my own, who is 17 next week, often strikes me as a contemporary return to trends I've known before in slightly different guises. The same frequently holds true for music. Beyond the sounds, where the parallels aren't always obvious because of the technological changes that give contemporary musicians new kinds of "instruments" including an array of electronic means of making music, what goes on is something more profound.
Rinôçérôse isn't just the girl and the guy of the publicity picture shown here and also in part (i) of this column. The group's members have been dubbed a "band", a "project" by Scaruffi and co., and on the most interesting French sites I've browsed, Rinôçérôse is called a "collective".
Jean-Philippe Freu and 'Patou' Carrie, at its heart, defy bids to label their music, but they too are fascinated by cyclical things. With 'Schizophonia' (my default Amazon France choice of "product link" concerns a reissue due out next June 17), let's leave out the Freud who cropped up recently for personal reasons, since as a musical reference, the couple openly express what people my age can easily guess, an admiring tribute to one of my all-time favourite "concept albums".
When 'Quadrophenia erupted in 1973, Pete Townshend and the other members of The Who released a lasting slice-of-life achievement about a deeply fractured society. That "rock opera" -- one term people had for it -- is still selling well, I'm told, and has today regained a very strong social relevance. Freu and Carrie weren't around as I was 33 years ago, but they sense that pertinence to the age.
Recalling rock as a real rebellion
I well remember a night Townshend was interviewed on television at an unusually prime viewing time for the 1970s. My mother sounded a little surprised, "Goodness, he does seem to be an intelligent young man!" That wasn't just her being my mum either, when other adults were astonished the likes of Pete Townshend showed signs of articulate thought! It's worth a reminder to younger readers that nowadays most of you can and do listen pretty much to what you like when you want, often by private means like your .mp3 players. However, for lots of us only three decades ago, many kinds of music right in the mainstream of a vast worldwide "industry" today were considered by our elders as an appalling racket produced by dangerous young people who were a "bad influence" on us. Rock, taken for the sort of revolt it often embodied, aroused wrath and was often held to be disruptive and divisive both in families and in hidebound society at large.
Yet in 2006, though my own half-century saw radio and television monopolies, rigorous constraints and censorship overturned in European nations -- such as France in the early 1980s and Britain at around the same time -- far less has really changed than many might initially imagine. The likes of The Who and those who have learned from them are no longer late night broadcasting or promoted from "pirate ships" like Radio Caroline (an interesting history lesson), but musicians and other artists have started to show a deep interest in the fairly recent past because of the turmoil and hardships of our own times.
Some are looking much further back in what they do, turning some very down-to-earth concepts that mean a lot to all of us into modern tone poems.
Many of today's trend-setters like Rinôçérôse, though keen to be innovative, tell the music press how they feel they have lessons to learn from those The Who called 'My Generation'. But the less apparent cycles in fashion, our lives and and society often crop up once musicians, social historians and scholars start talking about "a return to roots". This entry and its partner partly concern issues that have really gone unchanged in a little more than a century!
When folk wake up to 'folk music' again
For 20 years, musicians and their followers have been renewing Afro-American ties in a way I've already written up, seeking out the origins of the Blues. This was a wise thing to do, since we have lots of new media for it and to have delayed such a retrospective renewal would also have seen almost all of the real "greats" of the 20th century to their graves, with very few left to tell their own stories.
 Miles Davis is now making a comeback in France, where the likes of Jazz Magazine (Fr) started a special series this month before everybody who remembers him well is dead. More generally, there's been a similar Johnny Cash (home) phenomenon including and partly because of a new movie.
Country and folk music have never been stronger on the shelves of the well-furnished newsagent's shop I frequent. Now it's Bob Marley's turn for a generous reggae recap in print and on CD, but there's no web link to that 10 euros' worth of double album. There's a good reason for so much nostalgia, beyond media trends and what's regarded as either newly worthwhile in the old or downright dull in the mainstream of novelty.
A lot of young people I talk with have regained an interest in the issues a broad range of "folk" musicians have always dealt in and are now seeking out this stuff or making new contributions of their own, alongside what's superficially trendy. Such music today helps feed the kind of social and personal hunger that was also manifest in the first decade of the last century, but then it was mainly the province of artists with foresight and of their well-heeled public, rather than the "provincial" people city slickers looked down on and who still formed the majority of the population living on the land.
Along with the slow process of industrialisation, France became one of those countries with a lively press, both home-grown and -- for those of us living in big cities -- on the import shelves. This is more than ever true of the music magazines, where newsagents Béatrice and François tease me about knowing their monthly stock better than they do! For years, I've dropped in at least once a week to check out that part of the shop and nobody minds my browsing on the premises if I keep them informed.
In less than one year, the mainstream music media have changed hardly at all, but alongside the regular fare at least half a dozen folk and country reviews have appeared on those several shelves to jostle for survival. With Francis, the previous owner, I used to play a game regarding lots of new magazines before he sold up to Béatrice and François and I swiftly befriended them. First issues of magazines on every imaginable subject appear all the time. One of the funniest in a sick way was a monthly guide to how to divorce! So we devised a betting system as to how long each title would last before forever vanishing into the shredders.
If Francis won, I burned him copies of CDs and other "prizes" and when he lost, what he gave me was just as illegal before the law started changing here. But he shared with me a very long view of the social trends our game echoed, and he did well to chastise me when I became too distraught about some horror story in Africa or other immediate aspect of the political, economic and social phenomena I cover in my paid job as news editor.
"Distance, Nick!" he would warn me from behind a counter where he could learn about everything under the sun when he wasn't raving about soccer or teasing women customers. "Calm down, that's just the way the world is. You have to learn to detach yourself if you want to keep your head."
How music reminds us what matters most
Looking back a century, you'll soon see how most music the French call savante or "knowledgeable" -- as against folk traditions, popular song and the music-hall and "saucy stuff" of the day -- was exclusively reserved for the rich urban-dwellers and critics who kept up with what was happening on the expensive "classical" concert scene. Let's not exaggerate and relegate everything else to a proud self-proclaimed "peasantry" and to unschooled townsfolk who formed the bulk of the new labour force -- but music was cut across huge social divides.
This is how the leisured classes usually liked it anyway, but they had already been given a few surprises and were in for more from the very musicians whose work they could afford to pay to hear and express views on before the recording industry developed; then that first gave us the heavy 78 rpm platters I remember still being common in my childhood and then on to stereo, singles, a hugely cut-throat competitive approach to the "charts", and today, new "codecs" for scaling down the size of the sound files that make peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing the bugbear and bane of too many in the business.
It's taken only a very few years of returning to my own roots in writing about music to understand that while nowadays it is much of the "industry" that wants to stop the sharing, leading to massive pressure on governments like France's to retain a "protectionist" outlook, most musicians have a message that is far more generous. Barely a woman on this log lacks a site of her own, characterised by attitudes much more forward-looking than the record labels that "play monopoly". Many musicians eventually set up their own or form co-operative ventures to challenge "market values."
Anybody creative almost invariably wants to be heard. They do what they do for others and most of those who are more than a manufactured flash in the industry's frying pan, which is constantly on the heat, have begun trying to market themselves. In what they do, whether it's really "folk music" or fits under some other tag, singing "silly love songs" may still be a staple since we're all overwhelmingly interested in sex and affairs of the heart, but today there's also a popular, "folk insurrection" afoot -- exactly as there was in classical music about 100 years ago.
In those days, many a musician with an ear tuned in to the times was composing something other than symphonies and concertos, or chamber music. The insurgency that best caught the mood of the moment, reflecting shared values, took the shape of tone poems in classical music. Some of those caused quite a stir. For those who don't know, I'll talk about how tone poems work and are a great way to deliver messages shortly.
However, before launching in that far, I want to tell you how I hear a similar trend emerging in a renewed interest in "concept albums" in much of today's "popular music".
The charts don't often reflect this when the industry is so obsessed with singles and with sales values measured in gold and platinum. Yet numerous musicians are putting tunes and songs together to make albums with strong social messages. The concept album has crept back into fashion.
The words "country" and "folk" take on more meaning as soon as you listen less to the industry promoters than a lot of musicians themselves describing what they're doing and why. Reading such interviews frequently, I'm swiftly taken back to my youth when people saw music as an invaluable means of changing the world.
I've often spoken of music as "soul-food" of a kind needed by almost anyone with a good pair of ears, but it can be much more than a mirror to our hearts and a means of opening doors in our minds.
Melody as a means for reshaping society
I've considered it axiomatic ever since the 1970s that no music can be divorced from broader social trends, within the concert hall or outside it, but when the scholar Christopher Small I've written about before first said this clearly in his pathfinder's book on 'Music, Society, Education, he caused a lot of trouble. So did I, at the BBC, when in 1977 I interviewed the man who deliberately exaggerated his case by suggesting: "Isn't it time we simply threw the classics away and began listening to what's happening around us instead?"
Small hated elitist thinking and so did I, in a rebellious reaction to being indoctrinated by bad teachers who alleged that some kinds of music were "better" and more worth my while than others. At the polar extremes, "pop music" was necessarily a passing phenomenon of little value, while the "classical" kind was serious and needed a high-minded and learned approach.
Christopher loathed hearing the orchestral concert hall treated as the inner sanctum of a sort of snobs' temple, where people with fat wallets and contempt for all the noise of the plebs could dress up of an evening. Then they could wall themselves for a few hours in an "island of culture" off the street, listening mainly to symphonic bands resurrecting the work of the long dead.
Personally, I've nothing against the long dead!
When I visited France on a school exchange years before meeting Small, the lad who did the return trip was a snotty-nosed, highly "cultured" idiot, but I got on famously with his older brother, whose situation was far worse than mine. He almost had to hide Pink Floyd albums because his parents thought them dangerous for his mental health. Pink Floyd and their kind meant hard drugs! Their long "tone poems" were heard as being as messy as long hair, most unlike The Beatles in their early days, who knew all about "nice tunes" and melody.
Later I learned that this was the France of the day where that elder brother was a very bad boy. And now the English band Bloc Party, as we'll find out soon, express fascination at what happened when the inevitable social explosion came in May 1968, led by students battling riot police and with trade unions doing their customary thing to leap on a very lively bandwagon, just as they did again this year (I put the story of that national ritual in the Orchard).
Urban, uprooted and increasingly uneasy
Yet by 1968, inside the concert halls, wealthy "patrons of the arts" had for decades often found tone poems on the menu. They still do, perhaps without stopping to think where that once new musical form -- which was in its heyday with other similar compositions a century ago and more -- came from. It's well worth finding out.
For decades now, there's never been a lack of "country music", notably in the southern United States, but that term taken literally, like "folk music" everywhere, has a very broad reach though many of its most famous practitioners are town people. Memphis is scarcely a cowboy city!
Today's young musicians are also mostly urban people like the rest of us, in a world where much of the countryside -- certainly in France -- has been abandoned in my lifetime by those whose ancestors lived and made popular music down the centuries. Much of the youthful generation has left family land where mechanised agriculture now predominates, with force-fed crops. Much farming is ultimately in the hands of multinational companies who tell governments what to do. The same is even truer in the poorer nations, where music and working the land have often gone hand in hand, notably in Africa.
People hate being uprooted, however, and being forced to fit their destinies into the whims of often invisible rulers. This dislike and a strong sense of a need for roots became evident in the work of classical composers when my daughter's great grandparents and their own parents were alive and young. The same thing is happening now but what has most changed for the likes of Rinôçérose is the means to the end.
Tone poems as a popular tool and technique
In the late 19th century, a central European piano virtuoso turned -- relatively -- austere and black-clad priest in his old age, Franz Liszt, was among many who began writing tone poems. These at the time were orchestral pieces, usually not very long, that told stories and intentionally painted big pictures, a kind of "crossover" in the arts. Another central European, Bedrich Smetana, composed 'Mà Vlast', or 'My Country' a cycle of six such pieces rarely performed as a whole today. They should be since the lesser known ones are every bit as good as the two from which we could well hear "bleeding chunks" in TV commercials. Smetana didn't merely depict the river Moldau (Vltava) in his music and write stuff for a symphony orchestra to sound off about life 'From Bohemia's Woods and Fields'.
 The man set about producing a stirring and moving history lesson for compatriots less than happy at being part of somebody else's empire -- the Austrian one. Smetana was stubborn and pretty brave because he did this when he was deaf and the poor fellow had tinnitus as well -- that nasty sickness when people hear a permanent ringing or whistling in their ears.
'Mà Vlast' is an excellent example of a return to roots because it drew on music everyone knew, had lots of memorable tunes that people liked regardless of whether they considered themselves "educated", and Smetana subversively slipped an unmistakeably patriotic and nationalist message into the cycle. It aroused his audiences and didn't cause undue pain to those who might have lost sleep and cracked down as political censors, because they enjoyed the pictures he painted. Smetana did another thing too: he put folk legends ordinary people knew about in the mix as well. Maybe that's why the cycle got staggeringly moving performances under the baton of fellow Czechs like Karel Ancerl in what's now a "gold edition" as a marketing ploy, since the people in the pit then, the Czech Philharmonic, could use it to say what they thought of being a part of the Soviet empire.
In the opera house, meanwhile, the likes of Verdi and Wagner used overtures to stage legends, love and historical stories and even Shakespearean drama both to set the scene and to give a kind of plot summary in sound. They occasionally made the music itself a part of the tale. A lot of people don't like Wagner, but I'm no secret admirer of a flawed genius whose vast works sometimes include what are really tone poems.
He was always an extremist, that's for sure, but the Siegfried Idyll (Glenn Gould's transcription for piano is the work of another late genius) did three things. It's one of many pieces that show Wagner doesn't always make a huge din, it told part of the fabulous mix of myth and music in his enormous 'Ring' saga that speaks to the deepest in anyone who can bear it, and as a "tone poem" by a happy dad it was quite a birthday present for his son, who then had to endure being named after Siegfried.
Sadly, 'Apocalypse Now' has also done its thing and for some people Wagner's ride of the Nordic battle demi-goddesses, the Valkyries, is all about helicopters, crazed Americans and Vietnam. And that's Wagner, just bombastic "bleeding chunks", for such people...
Still, his kind of return to roots in legend and the ways of nature -- which Wagner was singularly good at turning into music for unprejudiced ears -- gathered pace as part of the "crossover" trend of the times. In France, Claude Debussy painted 'La Mer' like an Impressionist might on a real canvas and Maurice Ravel wrote the ballet 'Daphnis et Chloë'. Debussy and the Austrian Arnold Schönberg both made very penetrating musical stabs at a different love story, the one of Pelleas and Melisande.
Jean Sibelius, a Finn born in 1865, did several tone poems as well as music later used to try to sell cigars and the like. He too covered a wide emotional range, from nationalism and historical heroism to real, recognisable country music in the pastoral sense. A last famous one to round off the several points here was Igor Stravinsky, the Russian who upset a lot of people in 1913 -- and to my astonishment still does among closed minds -- with 'The Rite of Spring', which gets a whole Wikipedia page to itself. It remains music of elemental power and drive.
The great chord and how people cut it
Bringing matters more up to our own day, I'll leave the history and patriotic heroics in tone poems and ballets to make further mention of what Schönberg actually did in his surprise ending to the monumental and epic 'Gurrelieder' I wrote a bit about a while back. As I said then, this work for soloists, a whopping great orchestra and chorus is a mind-blowing love story.
It's about a royal affair of the heart cut short by the early death of the woman and what happened afterwards.
Though I've yet to listen to it again, memory rarely fails me with music, especially when it wallops you so hard. Schönberg knew that Wagner had already composed his opera on Tristan and Isolde's great love tragedy. In so doing, the high romantic used a striking expedient, mainly known only to awed scholars, that turned musical composition since J.S. Bach, who came a long time before, upside-down.
 Many academics just call what Wagner used the "Tristan chord", an unsettled sound that thrusts and twists and cries out for a climax that never comes. But what this means to the non-scholarly ear is all about sex! You get an opera that goes on for hours with huge near climaxes in it, very much like hot stuff between the sheets if you want to play "Let's postpone the pleasure". There's no real sexual release like a fantastic series of orgasms until the very end of the whole thing, by which time one of the lovers is dead and all his girlfriend wants to do is to join him.
So poor Isolde enjoys a private ecstasy as do any listeners -- albeit only in their minds -- who can make the same countless parallels between sexual activity and music as me and many musicians do, though for the latter I've learned this is mostly instinctive and intuitive. It's a moot point whether Isolde and Tristan manage to get their act together, either in the hay or on silken sheets, before there's an fatal mistake about the colour of a signal sail on a ship. You see, though they must do because otherwise their passionate wild fling wouldn't cause quite as much mischief in hearts around them, a shared orgasm isn't in the musical score. Savant people refer to Isolde's demise as a Liebestod, which is the last word in all our little love deaths of sexual intercourse.
Wow! It was so heavenly you could have died? Isolde did...
So where does Schönberg pick up on this? I've avoided most of his literary writings since he got very dry and for a while, after his music went "atonal" -- which he felt was all he could do if he wanted to drag the concert hall audience right into the 20th century -- he wrote pieces I sometimes find all brains and no heart, unlike his own disciple Alban Berg, who remembered tonality mattered. I can guess, and some scholar will tell me, that when he did the 'Gurrelieder' (Song of Gurre) as a romantic young man with a huge shadow hanging over him, Schönberg wanted to beat Wagner at his own game in style, scale and orchestration.
He succeeded and that's where the post-death part of the tale gets quite hair-raising -- but also it might have ended there. Schönberg could have left his King Waldemar forever seeking out Tove, his heart's desire, in the domain of the dead with a skeletal army at his heels. However, Schönberg went further to a different ending and it takes the breath away!
Natural cycles come into the picture
He gently brought in nature and its cycles.
Schöngberg introduced a strange kind of folk music with a novel technique called Sprechgesang (Wikipedia), the German for "speech song". Just how he did this isn't a story I wish to tell when I like to avoid "spoilers". But it was in 1911, part of an exuberant time of musical activity everywhere on the eve of a terrible World War I.
Some today say more people then should have seen such a conflict coming. Europe was locked into a system of alliances so that once an archduke got shot in Sarajevo, a fearful killer machine went into motion. Meanwhile, the "subconscious mind" had been "invented", so to speak, which just means a few bright people began writing down how we tick in a more scientific way than what was already going on in the arts, with all their Jekylls and Hydes, portraits of Dorian Gray ... and the composers, busy delving and finding what they wanted in nature, myths and magical legends.
"The world turns on its dark side", one of the late English composers I most respect and admire, Sir Michael Tippett, was to write three decades later in an oratorio during the war with the Nazis. And now when a new century has begun, powerful political leaders tell us we're fighting a new war: they assure us terrorism is the enemy today.
So the cycles of history go on, endlessly on, and you and me are supposed to be scared of a new enemy without, as well as of all the perceived darkness inside us. It's not the most cheerful prospect, there are grave new shadows we're told to fear. In music, "atonality" in itself nearly proved to be a dead end. Nobody much liked that either.
What atonality means, roughly, is to imagine that the black and white notes on your ordinary piano keyboard are all given equal musical value in relation to each other. You could think "wonderful"; that may mean long-suffering kids just don't have to practice their scales any more!
However, while the musical "scales" of other cultures may still sound as odd to our ears as our own octaves might to a Mediaeval peasant, such "modes" everywhere in the world use harmonics that strike people as "right" when notes are naturally linked and one thing leads to another. Thus when atonal music removes these relations, it may be a diverting exercise, but we'll say, "This sounds wrong!"
Mechanical music and the steam engine
Atonal music depends on artificial cycles. A few composers did things I happen to enjoy with my heart and sound fine to my ears because they were smart and opened the doors that make this a worthwhile digression, but for the most part and for many people, the "classical" noises that resulted grated throughout a century. The point is that they nevertheless led to new forms of making music with the help of fortune or chance, like using the 'I Ching', and of calculating machines and computers. Today we have electronica and techno and all kinds of good stuff brushed that way.
So I discussed atonality in passing because without it, we'd probably not have Rinôçérôse to enjoy, with many other things I love listening to and putting on the Log, and hope you enjoy learning about when I put on my scholarly hat as well. But it's nearly time to talk about the steam locomotive! There are few noisy inventions that have seized the imaginations of modern classical and popular musicians alike as the railway engine.
Before getting to the locomotive's importance for women and men who make and listen to music, however, I want to despatch atonality by saying too many people who could really hear better hold that it "killed good music by taking away the tunes". They matter to me like the sad ones who think of music like a rail track or several such lines with junctions and different gauges in various parts of the world, and then say, "For me, these are the buffers. My kind of music stops here, thank you, because after so-and-so I don't like it or it all raced on downhill."
Induced ignorance calls for 'crossover' colours
I feel genuinely sorry for such people and had to listen to one yet again this week, going on about how he was an "uneducated house painter" but still had "some culture". The trouble was there were a heck of a lot of buffers in his culture as well as a very deep prejudice against me!
My mistake, he felt, was to have been born in Britain, and there remain many people who give me hell for that error of birth, though I've lived in France for more than half my life. I've long given up worrying about it, I just think they need to open their minds a bit more. This site, in its way, is partly about getting wise to prejudice and where it comes from so we know how to be done with it.
Now travelling truly helps open the mind.
Steam trains, which I'm just old enough to remember as nothing special when I was a kid, were a start in taking folk like Debussy and me -- and I hope you -- right out of the cities. For Debussy to "paint" 'La Mer' so beautifully in music and for Ravel -- who was a countryman himself a lot of the time -- things like trips to the seaside became much easier, less bumpy, cheaper and faster.
The blue-collar workers of our newly industrialised societies could start demanding regular holidays and they did. French society remains interesting in the way that happened. Most of the country still takes its summer vacation during the sole month of August, when my therapist this week warned me, "I'll be away."
"Poor you!" I said. "Paris is great in August, I love it when half the city clears off and leaves the town for the rest of us. Musically it goes rather dead, but my goodness, the women still around then make up for it!"
"But too many of them are my patients," he sighed. "So I've got no choice."
What really happened about a century ago -- when composers did the same as Impressionist painters who went west of Paris, often by train down the Seine, to seek a new way of capturing nature and get back to their roots out of the urban environment, then put what they found in to their art -- is happening today more than ever.
Yes, there is a insurrection afoot among musicians and while I've had several weeks to recover my health, this has often struck me in my reading about what they say of their activities. A fair number, like Alison Goldfrapp at home with her man, absolutely need to get away from it all -- the artificial and urban environment -- to work in peace. Those two live in the country and have a home studio.
Getting out of things to get centred among them
In France, musicians with the money or inclination for such breaks often tell journalists they feel the same way, and now I can, I'm seized by a similar desire to strike a necessary balance between the push and shove of a city life and the pull of a harmonious natural environment, the way it's expressed by people who make music in many countries and talk about this to the magazines I devour.
Those boys in Bloc Party, having raised their 'Silent Alarm' and even remixed it, say they may be in London, but they will record their next album in a relaxed setting in Ireland. In one recent interview in 'Les Inrocks', they talk of being into David Bowie, Roxy Music ... and heaps of classical music.
"We're not going to compose a classical music album, but we are inspired by the atmosphere you can find in them," singer Kele Okereke explained. And that's when he said they are into France's Mai 68 "revolution" as he put what the French still just call "the events":
"I've read a lot on the subject. I wanted also to talk about the way English society is more and more conservative, particularly since the London bomb attacks."
My own less conservative friends are deep into classical music and country ways while I lived in a suburban village near Paris myself for a few years while married. The Kid and her mum are still close to the fields and forests. My friend Ellie is in her Burgundy countryside for a while, now she's had a baby, and the first French girl with whom I fell in love, Ghyslaine, proved when we picked up our old friendship to have become a permanent urban "defector".
Once I've regained my full health again, I plan to get out of town myself when I can. For several years it got quite difficult, but always to hang around in Paris is bad, though I love my district. It would be wrong to remain a constant city dweller now I've had the time to reflect on my instincts and intuition, without saying much here until today, about what I feel to be the real spirit of the times.
We may be living at the start of a new millennium and there's no real reason I can see to be afraid of a terrible terrorist threat or anything like the kind of conflagration that scarred Europe and other parts of the world a century ago and then again in World War II. The Log is no place any more, either, for my own politics in detail, but I don't doubt for a moment that we live on a planet where humanity is still very much at war with itself, in a whole number of highly dangerous ways.
We need to look and listen beyond ourselves for solutions and musicians are, as often, leading the way.
An anti-material meltdown to harmonious values
The French economy is in dire straits -- even I know that much -- and the African conflicts I shall soon be again covering every day in my paid job are more than ever mainly battles to be in control of scarce and diminishing resources. Anybody with a head knows how the poor are getting poorer and most of the rich simply don't give a damn much of the time if they feel their own interests are safe. In Paris, as in many other big towns, the number of street beggars and homeless people has rocketed in just one decade. Any real thought about ecological values in today's world can be scary.
Most people know well enough that science simply lacks a lot of the answers. Off the top of my head, I could list several dozen of the women musicians my site is mainly here to serve, whose songs today take up the real issues in a realistic way and prefer to seek their own answers in non-materialistic and spiritual values I would readily qualify as natural and right ones.
My outlook has become more pessimistic than it was, since there is so much egoism and greed in the human heart, but I'm not as bleak as I might be. While I no longer plan to do more than I can or end a movie I half-completed about what I once called the "Quiet Revolution", I still feel it's there and have time for intelligent New Age thinkers. The insurgency is all around us and deep inside quite a number of people who have shed materialist ideals and values. We very simply believe in sharing stuff and each being a small part of networks of people who do still think a wee bit differently. I can't leave off writing about my own experience of recent weeks and years without being open about my strengthened faith in the Big L.
The real spirit in the Zeitgeist
A deeply personal thing it may be, but without delving into it or seeking an explanation where there isn't one outside my soul, love has been too strongly channelled through me and towards me in the acts of others, for me to go on kidding myself it isn't a powerful force in its own right.
The Big L is there, outside me. I don't want to give it any other name, but I find it in sex and in music and I hear it every day in what I'll go on describing as the "music" of people. Without it, there can be no hope, and André Malraux was right -- the 21st century has to be spiritual or we won't be around to enjoy it.
Other people who say they feel the same way are normally turning again, like our ancestors did in the arts of a century ago, back to nature. Moreover, it would be foolish to ignore the many ways in which our ability to understand more about nature than in 1906 and also to share cross-cultural insight into ourselves has grown along with our capacity for destruction.
For me, this helps explain why the shelves at the newsagents' stores are as full now of country and folk music as the concert halls were back in the heyday of tone poems. A lot of people with whom I discuss the times agree they are extremely hard, but when we pool resources in a newly networked world we can help each other more as well.
While means of making and sharing music have changed a very great deal, for example, underlying trends are the same and many of the barriers to shared "songs of experience" have vanished. I don't wish to slap unnecessary labels on any shelves, apart from saying, "Well yes, it's all popular and I've got a web site aimed at making it a little more so!"
Musicians who know about sharing
So who does that give us musically to start polishing off the most wide-ranging piece I've yet written in this Book of Lilith? I'm inclined -- for now -- to speak of those obviously into sharing and joint ventures, though I know hundreds of the soloists at issue here are also wonderful givers.
I still know little about Lilith, but rather more about Rinôçérôse and others who function in "collectives".
What's brand-new to me in the French band this month has already been classified by Amazon and others under "electro techno", but not on this log, when a first hearing got me reflecting so much on tone poems in the first place, since those are what some of the Rinôçérôse music is.
I'd been happily unaware of any iPod commercial that uses their 'Cubicle' for a soundtrack, but there must be no escape from music as marketing this month! However, for personal reasons several tracks on this fine album, with titles like that and 'Bitch', 'Music Kills Me', 'Dead Flowers' and 'Metal Mental Dub' should have told me what the Rinôçérôse home site makes clear about the dynamic duo at the core of a musical collective: Patou Carrie and Jean-Philippe Freu are a couple of psychologists for their day jobs. I've seen a lot of those folks lately...
These two come from sunny Montpellier in southern France and travel a lot. The couple, with other members of the collective or their guests, sing -- if they sing anything -- in English and they describe themselves as "electronic in spirit and rock at heart", but there's rather more to their big storms and serene hours.
On reading what the Windish Agency says of the 'Schizophonic' album, the critical thumbs down quoted at the top of this long essay surprises me a little less. There's plenty of news about the band, with divided personalities and deep-buried obsessions, in the same psychological vein, all over the Net. But I'm here for the music, even if some:
"can easily imagine Rinôçérôse, the infernal duo in their white coats, listening to their patients attentively, allowing them to admit to their deviances, and hidden vices...
[so that] the illuminated professor and the sexy doctor imagined and produced music with new sound, drawing content from the new rock resurgence as well as in electro anthems, allowing for funky escapades, and going from organic and wild travels to savage seventies baggy rock."
I fiddled a bit with that music agency's translation into mediocre English, but what "baggy rock" is beats me! I'd guess the reviewer from the huge Scaruffi site took very pretentious prose like that too seriously.
I hope Rinôçérôse avoid being too serious themselves about also being very funky, hot on some jazz inspiration and most rewarding in their inventiveness. They claim the biggest ranges of "influences" I've yet seen on a myspace music page!
I like their music when it's sometimes as "spaced-out" as suits me when inclined that way myself: when I'm in need of emotional toning-up poems for meditation and to keep my bearings regarding the Dreamtime -- as I'll go on calling my sense of what lies outside time but is good for our souls.
The iTunes music store is a good way to make a first acquaintance and to get the new album with some bonus tracks, so I made it one of my picks of the month on a hunch, hearing enough to know I'll be listening again when my interest in cyclical matters comes to the fore.
 On recycling of "folk music" into something new and very much of our time, I'm also getting back into the likes of Lincolnshire lass Beth Orton, who is true to some very fine form and full of her new 'Comfort of Strangers'. I note Beth's "official site" is the first I've seen to be up with the times enough to have .mu for its tag. I didn't know this was allowed yet, but would like one myself the day I shift this virtual book on to a server of my own.
'Comfort of Strangers' merits visiting as both a deeply personal experience for Beth and we who listen in, while being a joint venture particularly with a true guitar virtuoso from America, Jim O'Rourke, who produced it in New York for release earlier this year.
My iPod and hi-fi have meantime been attuned to yet another such enterprise, 'Ballad of the Broken Seas' by the Scottish Isobel Campbell, singer of Belle and Sebastian fame, and gravelly voiced American Mark Lanegan. This is another of the first great albums of 2006 that returns to roots in old folk pastures in an enthralling, bewitching fashion.
 This 'Ballad', which is a whole series of them -- a kind of concept album again -- will doubtless establish itself as a sometimes melancholy masterpiece, bringing two very different people together in such a way that what you are hearing is traditional folk singing while again being truly innovative. It was on my listening list for ages, as an album of sharing.
The sophisticated city chick in Isobel Campbell explains on her site how she enjoyed doing this as an "entertaining" way of revisiting a famous relationship between Jane Birkin, who might also be here for recent collaborative adventures, and France's late chain-smoking and hard-drinking "grunge" poet, Serge Gainsbourg. But Isobel turned the bond round and herself wrote most of the lyrics, which make for plenty more than mere duets with the life-worn Lanegan.
Listening in can often be like overhearing a conversation, not only in the words, but between different musical styles. It's a deep dialogue very much of these times when people who feel uprooted ache to get back to nature and try to do so with wisdom.
How we all love a good story!
What Lanegan often does in those ballads is close to Schönberg's Sprechgesang; being neither quite song nor speech, but something else, something different. The 'Ballad of the Broken Seas', taken as a story-telling concept again, just grabs you by the balls so to speak, even for women!
I'm tempted to write, on the strength of these albums and plenty more untold recent listening, that what's also happening in music of our age is a kind of "crossover" in what the Amazon sites call "contemporary adult" listening. However, I think it premature to develop this too far.
My ear's simply to the ground and the springs in it, rather than any musical variant of those rail lines that made such a difference 100 years ago to how much musicians could do in extending their range.
It's evident many people must feel a crying need for stories again, rather like we do as small children, and a host of musicians have begun responding today to that very deep desire, imaginatively and by creatively using modern myths and old legends, to draw on what's more permanent in us all than our immediate lives and loves.
Much of what I've heard, one way or another, since being unable to go to the concerts themselves but still arising from this year's French 'Lilith Fair'-type festival, is a return to roots in both musical traditions and people, but in a dual-faced Janus way.
In the Orchard, I dubbed February my "Janus month" this year, for so it was, a time for looking outwards and inwards at once, before the "backfired" medication I was taking gave me the accidental overdose of introspection that sent me way round the bend. But here I'm no longer harking back to the illness of which everyone has had enough, but making my way on with the cure (I've been listening to The Cure too: an oldie, 'Disintegration' ... more mood music)!
Keeping our centres of gravity
Getting the balance right between what lies in ourselves and being naturally outgoing in a culture as artificial as most 21st century industrialised and urbanised nations have become is far from easy for any of us. The sharing approach is the only right one, so I have developed a growing regard for what is coming out of the kind of joint ventures I've mentioned and some lively collectives that are far from "hive minds" but managed to become extremely productive.
One loose collective of Canadians who know plenty about this call themselves and a double album also new this year 'Broken Social Scene'. That's a link to the music, which comes in short order too as just one album, but I was greedy and wanted the lot. The members include Feist, a woman who didn't actually write those 'Secret Heart' lines I use under the front-page link to the Orchard. Ron Sexsmith wrote the song, but I love how Feist sings it and have wondered what she's been doing for too long since 'Let It Die'. It's a good job she didn't let everything die, I'd have been mighty cross after an album that fine!
So there's plenty of new territory here, a lot of "work", except that the Canadians of one reconstituted Broken Social Scene prefer to describe what they do as "arts and crafts", which is a good habit once you're sick of mercenary values. All the same, if Bloc Party are really into what happened in Mai 68, they'll be realising that trying to establish more human values than selfish financial ones is a practice fraught with difficulties.
Since the 1970s, what usually went wrong was the inability of people to avoid taking themselves and their old baggage with them. Like Napoleon's armies and everyone else who tried to invade what was had by 1968 become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, many of the idealists who sought to change a very "broken social scene" suffered dire fates once grim winter set in again after that spring.
All kinds of imported political doctrines, including Maoism, didn't work -- they never do in France any more than elsewhere -- and many people who brought a starry-eyed 13-year-old like me to attention while they upset the "grown-ups" with impassioned notions of the brave new order did go on to "sell out".
Numerous are those who forgot their ideals and today have become rich, cosy members of an elite governing a society perhaps more fragmented than ever. Communes fell apart. After all, "free love" was fine and novel enough well into the 1970s, when jealousy and matters like deciding who got to do the hard work and how to bring up the kids arose. And so on...
Still, some really smart people made it. They kept the ideals intact and abide by those to this day. I should know because I'm one of them, if I remember to practice what I preach! Politics -- not just the sexual kind -- will have occasionally to come up again on the Log, in a broad sense, since we live in times when musicians are so weary of the way the world still is that some political issues arise as frequently in song nowadays in the late 60s and 1970s.
The protest song is back in style, that's for sure, and on the whole I'd say that a lot of the young musicians we're going to hear at it have found the right, but again difficult, centre of gravity between ideals and realism.
Tough times test our deepest dreams
My own daughter is a dreamer. More power to her for it! We closely share two streams of ideas she raised herself last weekend in some depth, during talk of her literary and musical tastes and also of her future.
 On being asked by nice neighbours what she hopes to do with her life, Marianne presented quite a "battle-plan" and nobody could blame her, since me and the other people -- who included an astute woman in her nineties -- know just how rough the world can be on today's youngsters.
I reckon some of the "kids", including ones who write to me occasionally and whom I'm honoured to count among readers of this place, have never had it so tough perhaps since the 1930s. My post-war generation and later ones, until fairly recently, had a much easier life than many people the age of Marianne and Isobel Campbell, who is now in her mid-20s.
I shan't overdo the modesty when I had to put a good schooling to hard work, but in those 1970s doors opened to me, as a drop-out so bored by my witless university studies I packed them in for a job, counting on my determination at the expense of paper qualifications. I knew that if what was offered to me was "higher education", there were better and faster ways of getting it. So that's what I did. The Kid has no such choice. Without a degree, she doesn't stand a chance of achieving her goals today like I did.
Marianne's battle-plan is a wise one, combining realism about her own relative good fortune and some hard work ahead to get through those kinds of doors, with a sense of the same search for new roots I've written about in this chapter. And she knows she'll have to look inside herself, her fantasies, her understanding of myths and legends, and the notion she shares with me of what lies beyond, which I call the Dreamtime out of respect for things that aren't primitive in the least, but a start to a worthwhile civilisation.
To close, this month I even bought a solo album by a man, 'Merz', who fits very well into a column about people who got lost for a while and then made a remarkable comeback in the "folk" arena.
Musicians who go both deep into themselves, like everyone here does, and remain outward looking in their art, have no need of labels and tags. Nowadays, anyone is doing all right if they seek what comes naturally in a world that threatens to overwhelm us. When you weigh up the permanence amid the changes, life really is very much the way it all was just a century ago!
_________
Where I found picture credits, they go to:
John William Waterhouse for the painting of Tristan and Isolde;
Micaela Rosatto for Beth Orton;
Eva Vermandel for Isobel Campbell;
while the Smetana painting came from a Czech site where I couldn't see any name.
2:08:44 AM link 
|
|
postbox