The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  —Rolling Stone, 2005

  People Who Died

  The summer of 1980 I was sixteen and unpersuasively cool. I listened to the Ramones, and clung to a thin claim of “having been there”—meaning CBGB, which let you in without an ID. But I meant to be a writer, and had begun favoring Talking Heads and Elvis Costello, music which buffered emotionality in layers of cleverness and metaphor, in postures of alienation. I spent a lot of afternoons at my desk, writing stuff that wasn’t any good. One such day that summer the DJ on WNEW came on and announced a new single, a debut—“by a New York poet turned rock ’n’ roller” was the way the he set it up. While the DJ rambled I had time to sneer in advance—this would probably be some flowery singer-songwriter, at best about as tough as Billy Joel. Then the DJ dropped the needle on “People Who Died” by Jim Carroll, which, by the end of one snarling, anguished chorus, had wrecked the walls of my pretensions. The song was a ticking bomb of rage at loss—“they were all my friends, and they died!” Carroll moans, as astonished that he’s found a voice to report it as he is at the gruesome fact of death itself. Though I’d have to learn the lesson a thousand times again, Carroll’s channeled beatnik vulnerability, shrouded in a punk rage which was still, that summer, an undeniable thing, was the first rebuke to my foolish hope that being a “writer” or an “artist” could mean skirting my emotions. No, it would always mean ramming straight into them—Carroll had put me on notice.

  The DJ let it finish, then played it immediately again: He, and I, were that impressed. I still am. Nothing else of Carroll’s has had that impact on me, but it hardly matters, because “People Who Died” is breaking me open still, and there’s only room for so many songs like that in your life, even if Carroll had somehow managed a career that kept that song’s impossible promise. Punk—or pop, or life—isn’t always about keeping the promises you make, but daring to make them in the first place. Despite knowing what’s at stake. Maybe even making them because you know what’s at stake. That’s what “People Who Died” knew that I didn’t, that summer afternoon, and why it broke my heart twice quickly in succession, before I’d completely understood it could be broken—and why the song goes on breaking it now that I’ve learned.

  —GQ, 2002

  Only now do I realize this piece was an unconscious memorial to a book Paul Williams described to me several times before suffering the brain injury (falling from a bicycle) that meant he’d never write it. Paul’s unwritten book, his masterpiece, was called The Beauty of the Singer.

  The Fly in the Ointment

  There’s something about a voice that’s personal, not unlike the particular odor or shape of a given human body. After all, that’s pretty much what voice is: Summoned through belly, hammered into form by the throat, given propulsion by bellows of lungs, teased into final form by tongue and lips, a vocal is a kind of audible kiss, a blurted confession, a soul-burp you really can’t keep from issuing as you make your way through the material world. How helplessly candid! How appalling! And because expressivity is the only standard, the low-chops approach forged by touchstone figures like Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison and Jonathan Richman helps define rock-and-roll singing, which is both egalitarian (“Anyone can do this!”) and Dionysian (“But only if you’re crazy with passion!”) in its premises. Nor are genius-technical-liabilities solely a male province—I’m looking at you, Patti Smith, Chan Marshall, Tina Turner.

  But, contrary to anything you’ve heard, the ability to actually carry a tune is in no regard a disability in becoming a rock-and-roll singer, only a mild disadvantage. As proponents of Aretha Franklin, Van Morrison, Jeff Buckley, and P. J. Harvey will attest, virtuosity can be gotten around. Meanwhile, nothing in the vocal limitations of a Lou Reed guarantees a “Pale Blue Eyes” result every time out, any more than singing as half terrible as Tom Waits guarantees a “Downtown Train.” This sad truth several million forgettable spoken-whined-mumbled-intoned “indie-style” vocals (a few committed by Lou Reed himself) make incontestable.

  Now, putting my own cards on the table: For me Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, just to mention two, are superb singers by any measure I could ever care about—expressivity, surprise, soul, grain, interpretive wit, angle of vision. Those two folks, a handful of others: Their soul-burps are, for me, the soul-burps of the Gods. The beauty of the singer’s voice touches us in a place that’s as personal as the place from which that voice has issued. If one of the weird things about singers is the ecstasy of surrender they inspire—that “Madness of Crowds” associated with voices like Elvis, Om Kalsoum, Teddy Pendergrass, etc., but is also present in intimate situations, as when a listener first communes with Jeff Buckley’s “Lilac Wine” or Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” alone on headphones in the dark—another weird thing is the debunking response a singer can arouse once we’ve recovered our senses. It’s as if they’ve fooled us into loving them, diddled our hardwiring, located a vulnerability we thought we’d long ago armored over. Falling in love with a singer is like being a teenager every time it happens.

  Singers are tricksters. Sometimes we’ll wonder if they’re more like movie actors than musicians per se—we’ll decide that the “real” R.E.M. is embodied by Buck, Berry, and Mills, not that kooky front man Stipe, or the “real” Rolling Stones is Richards-Wood-Watts-Wyman, rather than that irritating capitalist Jagger. But beware—go down this route and soon you’ll find yourself wondering how the Doors sound sans “Mr. Mojo Risin’,” or imagining someone can better put across Dylan’s gnarly syllables than Dylan himself. Firm evidence is on the table against both those lines of inquiry. In truth, so often what makes a band like the Stones or R.E.M. (or the band Dylan transformed from the Hawks into the Band) so truly unique and powerful is in how the instrumentalists rise to the challenge of creating a home for the vocalists’ less-than-purely-musical approach to a song: the braggadocio or mumbling, the spoken asides or too many syllables crowded into a line that destroys traditional rhythm or measure, those movie-star flourishes that compel us to adore and resent the singer at once.

  The funny thing about this imposter-anxiety is that it infects singers themselves, to the extent that certain well-known vocalists have been known to decorate themselves onstage with a carefully unplugged guitar (I know of a couple). And it certainly explains the “rockist” bias in favor of singers who are also the writers of the songs they sing. If a vocal performance that tenderizes our hearts is a high-wire walk, an act breathtaking and preposterous at once, we can reassure ourselves that Neil Young or Gillian Welch or Joe Strummer have at least dug the foundations for the poles and strung the wire themselves. Singers reliant on existing or made-to-fit material like Janis Joplin, Rod Stewart, Whitney Houston—or, for that matter, a band’s pure vocal instrument, like Roger Daltrey—might just be birds alighting on someone else’s wire. Listening to singers who are like magnificent animals wandering through a karaoke machine, we may derive a certain thrill from wondering if they find the same meaning in the lyrics they’re putting across that the lyrics’ writer intended, or any meaning at all—as opposed to dwelling in a realm of pure sound-as-emotion.

  This points to what defines great singing in the rock and soul era: that some underlying tension exists in the space between singer and song. A bridge is being built across a void, and it’s a bridge we’re never sure the singer’s going to manage to cross. The gulf may reside between vocal texture and the actual meaning of the words, or between the singer and band, musical genre, style of production, or the audience’s expectations. In any case there’s something beautifully uncomfortable at the root of the vocal style that defines the pop era. The simplest example comes at the moment of the style’s inception, i.e., Elvis Presley: First listeners thought that the white guy was a black guy. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that when Ed Sullivan’s television show tossed this disjunction into everyone’s living rooms, American culture was thrilled by it, but also a little deranged, in ways we haven’t gotten over yet. If few vocal styles
since have had the same revolutionary potential, it wasn’t for want of trying. When the Doors experimented with how rock ’n’ roll sounded fronted by sulky bombast, or the Ramones or Modern Lovers offered the sound of infantile twitching, a listener’s first response may be to regard their approaches as a joke. Yet that joke is the sound of something changing in the way a song can make us feel. In the café where I write this, Morrissey just came over the speakers, and it’s unmistakable that he came through the Doors Jim Morrison opened. Janis Joplin’s voice howled in the wilderness for decades before Lucinda Williams came along to claim its tattered and glorious implications. In doing so, she deepened them.

  The nature of the vocals in post-Elvis, post–Sam Cooke, post–Ray Charles popular music is the same as the role of the instrumental soloist in jazz. That’s to say, if it isn’t pushing against the boundaries of its form, at least slightly, it isn’t doing anything at all. Whether putting across lines that happen to be written by the singer, or were concocted in a Brill Building or Motown-type laboratory, or covering a song pulled in from another genre, from the blues, or bluegrass, or a show tune, the singer in rock, soul, and pop has to be doing something ineffable that cuts against its given context. Etta James, Ray Davies, Mama Cass, Mark Kozelek, Levi Stubbs Jr.: These singers might not all seem like protest singers, but they are always singing “against” something—whether in themselves, in the band that’s backing them, in the world they’ve been given to live in or the material they’ve been given to sing, or all at once. We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is served. That’s the standard Frank Sinatra exemplifies. We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer unearths that the song itself never quite could. It explains why voices such as Joan Baez or Emmylou Harris or Billy Joel never really seem to be singing in the contemporary idiom, no matter how much they roughen up their material or accompaniment, and why Elvis—or Dylan—is always rock, even singing “Blue Moon.” It also explains precisely why such virtuosic pipes as Aretha Franklin’s or Karen Carpenter’s function in the new tradition. No lyric written by themselves or anyone else could ever express what their voices needed to, and they weren’t going to wait for the instrumental solo, or for the flourish of strings, to put it across for them. They got it into their voices, and their voices got it out into the air, and from there it passed into our bodies. How can we possibly thank them enough?

  —Rolling Stone, 2008

  Dancing About Architecture

  or

  Fifth Beatles

  When I dance these days I don’t bend so much at the knees as I used to. My knee bends are more Kabuki indications, representational rather than presentational, like Lou Reed’s vocal range, like Muhammad Ali teasing a video crew with boasts of flurries of punches so fast you couldn’t see them, even as he posed with his upraised fists completely still. My dancing, these days, enciphers in shorthand the drops and knee bends of my twenties, even as it is likely circumscribed by my excess of drops and knee bends in my twenties—these were moves that, once I’d learned them, I drove, so to speak, into the ground, and my knees reminisce of old dance floors in clubs in Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco when I climb too many stairs, a sad involuntary pun on dancing about architecture.

  Other ghosts rustle in my dancing these days, kinetic memory-routines, muscle-quotes of punk-rock-ironized glam kicks, Elvis Costello intentional-awkward heel-scoots and skids, a kind of sideways bunny hop and mechanical stop and restart that I appropriated from my friend Sari, and which always reminds me of the B-52’s and a certain beer-swollen wooden-plank dormitory living-room floor in Vermont. From that same scene my dancing self still periodically retrieves a mimicry of the solitary, ecstatic dancing of a young poet named Reggie, who’d cascade his body side to side to the Psychedelic Furs and Donna Summer, propelled by his hurling arms, as if caught up on the shuttle of a gigantic loom—for a while I could only want to dance exactly like Reggie, and the phantom still gains possession of me from time to time.

  When I got to college I was already a dancer. In my freshman year of high school I seized that role for myself, first, and definitively, at a Manhattan loft party full of hip adults to which my father had brought me and my new girlfriend, my first girlfriend—and when the dance floor filled, not to be outdone by my father’s friends, I began impulsively and spastically showing off in the midst of the dancers, finding my own ready dance-appropriating instinct available when I needed it to even begin. An image is still fresh in my mind of the shaved-bald black man in a dashiki whose technique I glommed, or tried to—he bent at the waist, snapped his fingers, and shook his bright dome as if in a self-amused trance. His obliviousness to our regard was what I wanted for myself, was what I wished to hijack on behalf of my own craven pursuit of regard. I began immediately shaking my head, not yet capable of observing the finer details, how that dancer’s headshaking must surely have been driven by less ostentatious but completely authoritative movements through his feet and hips, zones I’d yet to learn to activate. Yet my ears were open, I wasn’t deaf to the music, I know I experienced the bodily rapture-in-sound where all real dancing begins. Alas, I was trying to lead my dance with my head, as if trying to play a song’s bass line on a pair of cymbals or a triangle. Somehow I made this my trademark, no one intervened to advise me otherwise, and so I built my dancing body from the headshake downward, like a Cheshire cat begun at the grin. At grown-up parties in Brooklyn hippie communes I gradually worked it out on this basis, to the sound track of The Harder They Come and to the Rolling Stones and to Marvin Gaye and to the first Devo record which I smuggled in and was allowed to play sometimes, earning in the process a nickname from my father’s best friend, Roy: He called me the Headman.

  As the Headman I became the mascot dancer of a band in my high school, three brothers and a bass player named Blake Sloane, a blue-eyed soul group who called themselves Miller, Miller, Miller and Sloane. Their “hit” song, “Funky Family,” a Jackson Five–ish single, was the song to the tune of which the Headman laboriously discovered his body: I danced to it at high-school parties and alone in my room, wearing out several copies of the Miller brothers’ parent-financed 45. I was or wanted to be Miller, Miller, Miller and Sloane’s Fifth Beatle, the evidence of their groove, and so at our high school’s auditorium but also at an opening slot at CBGB I danced in some area closer to the band than the rest of the audience of my schoolmates (who were as much their whole audience at CBGB as they were in our high-school auditorium), my vicariousness charted in real space. But I never pretended I was in the band—Miller, Miller, Miller and Sloane’s perfect name spoke of the inalterable sense of their lineup.

  The height of my dancing—the apogee—came at a club called Berkeley Square, in 1990 or ’91 it would have been. I’d spent the day at home discovering something new I could do with words—this was when I was writing a novel called As She Climbed Across the Table, a book I associate with my learning to take command of my sentences, to make them dance the way I wanted them to—and afterward gone out dancing with some friends. In the middle of a strenuous sequence of songs Prince’s “Kiss” appeared, and in letting that song take me over, course through my body like a drug, with my dancing perhaps perfectly poised between savvy intention and callow frenzy, my knees and my head and what lay between all about as limber and aligned as my savvy and callow and frenzied sentences had been earlier that day, I found myself pretty sure that I was dancing, say, just about as well as anyone ever had. In fact I had the thought at that moment that though my equal at sentence-writing might be somewhere roaming the earth (perhaps there might even be a few of them out there), and that the same could be said of my dancing—that I might not be the only dancer working at such a high level at this moment in the planet’s history—certainly there was no one alive at this moment who had both written and danced the way I had today. And I’m still almost convinced that this was true.

  Writing about music was famously derided by Frank Zappa as “dancing ab
out architecture.” The whole enterprise may seem precious, overwrought, stillborn. Pop music, archetypal by nature and disposable by design, is fated to slip through the writer’s fingers. And yet some of us keep trying to get near the music with our words, like a dancer assuming some relationship to the music with his responsive body, even if the musicians never know about it. There’s something pretentious about daring to get up on the dance floor in the first place, and something presumptuous, but those of us who do it take courage from the possibility that it is those very pretenses and presumptions that may bring us closer to the desired object, that in fact may give us, even if only briefly, something in common with the makers of the music themselves.

  The terms “jazz” and “rock and roll,” as a great man once pointed out, are only blues musicians’ slang for fucking. The whole history of pop, that half century or more of intricate delirium, is, in other words, a fucking joke, but for me it is a joke I grew up inside, a joke that was also a daydream, a shaggy-dog story, a surrealist fable like Alice in Wonderland or The Phantom Tollbooth, depicting an alternate reality of jokes taken with scrupulous deadpan, a world I wanted to climb inside and flesh out with my own yearning, a realm between audience and band that seemed as sacred as both and perhaps more sacred than either one. In other words, it’s a bloody miracle I didn’t turn out a rock critic. I’m still not entirely sure how I evaded the honor. This disposable stuff I’ve ruined my life letting matter more than my ethical obligations to society at large, as well as my schoolwork and sometimes my relationships: I’m indulging now in the hope that this particular utopian daydream not only matters but is some viable model of a world.