The Ecstasy of Influence

by Jonathan Lethem

  Lovely Rita

  Back to that damn, elusive album. Isn’t part of the half-kept promise of Sgt. Pepper—and “Dock of the Bay”—the chance of a pop music with a credible subject outside of romantic love? Now we’re getting somewhere. And if both artifacts could be described (ungenerously) as monuments to the self-gratifying capacities of their male artists, my preference for “Dock of the Bay” over Pepper (admittedly, it’s a lot easier to love the perfect fragment than the erratic whole) could be that “Dock of the Bay” doesn’t bother patronizing women in passing while it makes its way to the real subject. I don’t know what I want, but I do know what I never want: to hear a soul equivalent of “Lovely Rita,” let alone “Eleanor Rigby.” Soul’s propensity for first-person stories, for righteous complicity over faux-objectivity, went a long way toward protecting it from glib two-dimensional portraiture.

  Good Morning Good Morning

  There are other times when I don’t care about that album, I’m just dying to know what Otis Redding heard when he played Pepper over and over again. Did he sing along? Did he skip this song, or barely notice it, or was it one of his favorites? Did the rooster sounds make him laugh?

  Otis Redding’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)

  Perhaps the purloined-letter aspect of Pepper—the most obvious thing hardest to keep in mind—is the way this ostensible message from the future of music was mired in nostalgia. Nostalgia for various pre-rock-’n’-roll musics; nostalgia for the artifacts of the Beatles’ parents’ worlds; nostalgia for nostalgia; nostalgia, in the end, for itself—manifest on the spot, in the form of a reprise (which is nevertheless not a conclusion—see below). So, in its concern with lost worlds, it seemed to instantaneously wreck the new world it claimed to bring into being. In the wake, what we’re certain to fall back on, after all, is comfort. So, in that sense, “Dock of the Bay” is as far as Otis had to go. Why not just play that song again?

  A Day in the Life

  Otis Redding was twenty-six years old in 1967. Given that I’m thirty-nine and have the audacity to wake up some mornings, drag the comb across my head, etc., and believe that my best work is still ahead of me, I don’t really know how to measure the world it seems to me was lost. I only don’t want to lie to you about it, make up a bunch of song titles, fake release dates, whatever. I’ll just sit underneath those grapes until I can’t stand it anymore.

  —Black Clock, 2004

  Rick James

  Dwell long enough in pop culture’s mind’s eye and you’ll be forgiven or forgotten; watershed glam-funk craftsman Rick James didn’t live long enough to pull off either one. Television comedian Dave Chappelle’s riotous send-up of the performer’s addictions, abuses, and all-around sleaziness managed instead, in the year preceding James’s death, to resurrect and thoroughly reinscribe the musician’s self-inflicted image as a clownish amoral grotesque. Not quite pop music’s Fatty Arbuckle—James’s party indiscretions left no corpses, and after a prison term for the second of his convictions for sexual assault he drifted rather easily back into his recording career—neither did he parlay his romance with the crack pipe into a poignant image of repentance, à la Richard Pryor. And no matter how often he alluded to tastes for white or underage women, he was never as threatening a figure as, say, Jack Johnson, or even Chuck Berry. Not with that panda-bear posture, not with that childish leer. Instead, dogged by how perfectly the term “Super Freak” fit to the cartoon-pimp image he manufactured and then inhabited far too sincerely, James seemed merely icky, and silly.

  What’s lost behind the caricature is, well, only everything I’d like to suggest ought to be recalled about Rick James.

  1. Despite an aura of heavy-lidded indolence that attached to his long, drug-addled slide from atop the pop charts, Rick James worked harder than most, toiled at his trade, paid lavish dues: sixteen years’ worth by the time of “Super Freak” ’s overnight success in 1981. James might be the Pete Rose of funk; deprived of Sly Stone’s or Prince’s native genius, he scrapped his way to the top. Born (as James Johnson Jr.) in Buffalo, New York, in 1948, James was third of eight children raised on the wrong side of that hard-bitten town’s tracks by a single mother, a Harlem nightclub dancer turned numbers-runner. Already bearing a rap sheet at fifteen, James ran away to the Naval Reserves, then went AWOL on being designated for Vietnam. In Toronto exile he formed the Mynah Birds, an integrated rock band which included a young Neil Young and a future member of Steppenwolf. On behalf of the band, James played his one card: Poppa may have been a rolling stone, but his uncle was also a Temptation—specifically Melvin Franklin, the bass-voiced anchor of the legendary singing group. So, the Mynah Birds were signed to Motown, but an irate manager tipped James’s presence in Detroit to the military police. Motown shelved the demo tapes, and James spent a year in the brig for his desertion. Then came another decade’s apprenticeship; songwriting and arranging for Motown, more demos, more forgotten bands in Detroit and London, and at last, in 1978, fourteen years after his first band, a breakthrough with the single “You and I,” from his debut album. Nor did the effort diminish with success: Along with his own steady output, James was a tireless impresario who created hits for the Mary Jane Girls, Teena Marie, and Eddie Murphy. In collaborations on his own records James gave a leg up both to his elders, the Temptations and Smokey Robinson, and to some of the rappers who had yet to conquer the world. As much for his showmanship and his lunacy, James ought to be remembered for his ambition, his fluency, his professionalism. Among his colleagues and collaborators, he is.

  2. While never an innovator at the level of James Brown, George Clinton, or Sly Stone, the sound that James concocted was sturdy, glossy, and irresistible. Reliant on magpie appropriations, particularly of the sounds of Clinton’s band Funkadelic, James was a consolidator and synthesist, one who punched the funk’s essence into a commercial sphere unknown to his rivals, who never forgave him for it (George Clinton mocked him as “Slick James”). By the time of his commercial and artistic triumph—the album Street Songs, which held both “Super Freak” and “Give It to Me,” his two mightiest singles—the mercurial and opportunistic James was calling his music “punk funk,” which wasn’t so far from the truth. “Super Freak,” above all, was a confection full of vocal mannerisms and twitchy synthesizer hooks that suggested he’d been listening to Elvis Costello, Devo, and the Cars as closely as to his fellow funksters. The sound he fashioned, full of clean guitars, swirly keyboards, and pop hooks, blew open the door that Prince would walk through a year or two later. It also prefigures Rick Rubin’s guitar-and-rap epiphanies with Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, and the sound of Outkast. Not a bad legacy for the Pete Rose of funk.

  3. “Super Freak” itself probably shouldn’t be glossed over too lightly. Consider the lives that hook has lived! Has anyone who ever heard it not succumbed? Can’t you bring it to mind in an instant, now? Boing-boingy-bump, querburp, querburp! As musical memes go, it’s one of the immortals, one which transcended its first incarnation, in “Super Freak,” to become the core of what’s still (sorry, purists) the top-selling rap single of all time: MC Hammer’s “You Can’t Touch This.” When Rick James first heard how whopping a slab of “Super Freak” the rapper had sampled—without James’s knowledge, let alone his permission—he wasn’t at all happy, though oceans of royalties soothed his pain. Hammer’s hit won James his only Grammy, perhaps an appropriate irony for a musician dependent on borrowed riffs himself.

  4. “Super Freak” notwithstanding, if I could free your mind of preconceptions I’d steer you elsewhere to contemplate Rick James’s muddled legacy. Motown belatedly issued, as a bonus to a “Deluxe Edition” of Street Songs, a live disc of Rick James and his Stone City Band playing in Long Beach, California, at their very height, in 1981. Try, if you will, “Ghetto Life,” which in this rendition is stripped of studio gloss, instead is nearly drowned in his fans’ collective roar. Here’s where the promise of “punk funk” is kept: These ragged, furious guitar
s, blended with James’s ragged, furious voice, and ragged, furious lyrics, suggest a reconciliation of Bill Withers, perhaps, or Stevie Wonder, with the sonic insult of Gang of Four or the Fall. James sings:

  One thing ’bout the ghetto

  You don’t have to hurry

  It’ll be there tomorrow

  Sister don’t you worry

  Here, genuine pride and defiance are impossible to mistake. If Rick James had to turn from that place to a glamorous and then a loathsome self-erasure, we can at least recollect that he reached it once.

  —The New York Times Magazine, 2004

  an orchestra of light that was electric

  an orchestra of light that was electric how fine a thing would that be? i’d been waiting for and envisioning one wondering what its name would be for all my twelve years and now here one was and its name was the name of the idea itself generic and why not since there could never be two such orchestras. in sublime stupidity i took this for music from the future messaged to me by the occult stations of top forty am radio which to my understanding no one on this earth listened to and which could only be tuned in at night. the instruments and voice stirred and twitched me at some native level. activated me like a robot programmed with feelings. do ya want my love and i did. power chords washed in strings, organized and sugared by a mathematics i couldn’t enter only savor. i could detect the telephone line the music was a far heard thing crushed into nearby radios never as clear as i wanted. i sensed this might be commercial art surrealism slicked by madison avenue guilty and intoxicatingly sweet like a bottle of stolen kahlua but for me somehow idealized a livin’ thing so that my guilt became the secret champion of its fragile science fictional yearning for a future music and defender of its indefensible glamour and finish. when i located some critic who tendered praise for their earliest records as an extension of the beatles’ abandoned work i felt a whoosh of vindication. and when they were lumped like coal in the irredeemable bin of pink floyd boston eagles steve miller that punk convicted of corporatism or worse of vichy collaboration with disco olivia neutron bomb i held out quiet certainty that their turned to stone mister blue sky candy bar compression kept faith with radio miracles and wasn’t completely unrelated to the ramones reaching for spector’s wall that unreachable epic shape as distant as kafka’s castle. never had to speak this defense but kept quiet faith with shine a little love and i did and don’t bring me down and i didn’t. never had to worry about the songs i didn’t like, just the ones i did and this robot candy love never moved closer and had to be resolved or moved further away and had to be renounced and now they live in my jubilant secret ipod and i can’t get it out of my head.

  —Black Clock, 2006

  VIII

  WORKING THE ROOM

  The novel will be at your funeral.

  —NORMAN MAILER

  Once I’d written a few book reviews and literary introductions that I thought stood up as essays, and liking collections of these things by other writers, I started to imagine a collection of my own. I’d call it Working the Room, an urbanist play on Updike’s Hugging the Shore, but also embedding a reference to Mailer’s notorious “Evaluations: Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.” I loved the title so much I had to set it free, to Geoff Dyer. Now what would I call the collection? Shugging the Whore? No. Anyway, once I’d written the Harper’s essay I began planning this more centrifugal book instead.

  Bolaño’s 2666

  In Philip K. Dick’s 1953 short story “The Preserving Machine,” an impassioned inventor creates a device for “preserving” the canon of classical music—the sacred and, he fears, impermanent beauties of Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven, and so forth—by feeding it into a device which transforms the compositions into living creatures: birds, beetles, other animals resembling armadillos and porcupines. Outfitting the classic pieces in this manner, then setting them free, the inventor means to guarantee their persistence beyond the frailties of human commemoration, to give them a set of defenses adequate to their value. Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable and violent, turn on one another, and, when the inventor attempts to reverse-engineer his creations in order to prove that the music has survived, reveal themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony, nothing like the originals. Or has the preserving machine revealed true essences—irregularities, ferocities—disguised within the classical pieces to begin with?

  Dick’s parable evokes the absurd yearning embedded in our reverence toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes “masterpieces” embody in the human realm which brings them forth and gives them their only value. If we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities glimpsed at the summit of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff have to our grubby lives? Conversely, if on investigation such works, and their makers, are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same provisions and defects as the rest of what we’ve plopped onto the planet—all these cities, nations, languages, histories, etc.—then why get worked up in the first place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we may suspect art of being useless in either case.

  Literature is more susceptible to these doubts even than music or visual arts, which can at least play at abstract beauty. Novels and stories, even poems, are helplessly built from the imperfect stuff: language, history, grubby human incident, and dream. When so many accept as their inevitable subject the long odds the universe gives the aspirations of our species, degraded as it finds itself by the brutalities of animal instinct and time’s remorseless toll, books may seem to disqualify themselves from grace: How could such losers cobble together anything particularly sublime?

  The Chilean exile poet Roberto Bolaño, born in 1953, lived in Mexico, France, and Spain before his death in 2003, at fifty, from liver disease possibly aggravated by intoxicants. In a burst of invention now legendary in contemporary Spanish-language literature, and rapidly becoming so internationally, Bolaño in the last decade of his life, writing with the urgency of poverty and his failing health, constructed a remarkable body of stories and novels out of precisely such doubts: that literature, which he revered the way a penitent loves (and yet rails against) an elusive God, could meaningfully articulate the low truths he knew as rebel, exile, addict; that life, in all its gruesome splendor, could ever locate the literature it so desperately craves in order to feel itself known. Is a lifetime spent loving poems in a fallen world only a poor joke? Bolaño sprints into the teeth of his conundrum, violating one of the foremost writing-school injunctions, against writer-as-protagonist (in fact, Bolaño seems to make sport of violating nearly all of the foremost writing-school rules against dream sequences, against mirrors as symbols, against barely disguised nods to his acquaintances, etcetera). Again and again he peoples his singular fictions with novelists and poets, both aspiring and famous, both accomplished and hopeless, both politically oblivious and committedly extremist, whether right or left. By a marvelous sleight of hand writers are omnipresent in Bolaño’s world, striding the stage as romantic heroes and feared as imperious villains, even as aesthetic assassins—yet they’re also persistently marginal men, slipping between the cracks of time and geography, forever reclusive, vanished, erased. Bolaño’s urgency infuses literature with life’s whole freight: The ache of a writing-workshop aspirant embodies sexual longing, or dreams of political freedom from oppression, even the utopian fantasy of the eradication of violence, while a master-novelist’s doubts in his works’ chances in the game of posterity can stand for all human remorse at the burdens of personal life, or at the knowledge of the burdens of history.

  In the literary culture of the United States Roberto Bolaño has become a talismanic figure seemingly overnight. The “overnight” is the result of the compressed sequence of the translation and publication of his books in English, capped by the galvanic appearance, last year, of The Savage Detectives, an eccentrically encompassing novel, both typical of Bolaño’s work and explosively larger, which cast the short stories and novellas that had preceded it into English in a se
nsational new light. By bringing scents of a Latin American culture more fitful, pop savvy, and suspicious of earthy machismo than that which it succeeds, Bolaño has been taken as a kind of reset button on our deplorably sporadic appetite for international writing, standing in relation to the generation of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes as, say, David Foster Wallace does to Mailer, Updike, and Roth. As with Wallace’s Infinite Jest, in The Savage Detectives Bolaño delivered a genuine epic inoculated against grandiosity by humane irony, vernacular wit, and a hint of punk-rock self-effacement. Any suspicion that literary culture had rushed to sentimentalize an exotic figure of quasi-martyrdom was overwhelmed by the intimacy and humor of a voice that earned its breadth line by line, defying traditional fictional form with a torrential insouciance.

  Well, hold on to your hats.

  2666 is the permanently mysterious title of a Bolaño manuscript rescued from his desk after his passing, the primary effort of the last five years of his life. The book was published posthumously in Spanish in 2004 to tremendous acclaim, after what appears to have been a bit of dithering over Bolaño’s final intentions—a small result of which is that its English translation (by Natasha Wimmer, the indefatigable translator of The Savage Detectives) has been bracketed by two faintly defensive statements justifying the book’s present form. They needn’t have bothered. 2666 is as consummate a performance as any nine-hundred-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it.