by Mark Greif
You can see a closed space at the heart of many of Radiohead’s songs. To draw out one of their own images, it may be something like a glass house. You live continuously in the glare of inspection and with the threat of intrusion. The attempt to cast stones at an outer world of enemies would shatter your own shelter. So you settle for the protection of this house, with watchers on the outside, as a place you can still live, a way to preserve the vestige of closure—a barrier, however glassy and fragile, against the outside. In English terms, a glass house is also a glasshouse, which we call a greenhouse. It is the artificial construction that allows botanical life to thrive in winter.
Radiohead’s songs suggest that you should erect a barrier, even of repeated minimal words, or the assertion of a “we,” to protect yourself—and then there proves to be a place in each song to which you, too, can’t be admitted, because the singer has something within him closed to interference, just as every one of us does, or should. We’ll all have to find the last dwellings within ourselves that are closed to intrusion, and begin from there. The politics of the next age, if we are to survive, will include a politics of the re-creation of privacy.
[2005]
* * *
* Stanley Cavell used to say that the first impulse opera evokes is to wonder where in the physical singer the immaterial song can be located. In live performance, the striking thing about Thom Yorke is how small a person he is. Not only is his voice excessive, beyond human averageness, it is moored to a smaller-than-average body and onstage persona that seem to dramatize the question, in his music, of where voices come from—from individual people or the techniques that surround and overmaster them.
PUNK: THE RIGHT KIND OF PAIN
Where does rock come from? “Rock”: I mean the music that comes out of the sixties, the music that is hardened, toughened, accelerated, then complicated, softened, disassembled, in decades that followed. Begun again—pastiched, mashed up, mimicked, reduced, and expanded once more—even up to the present moment.
“Rock,” here, is not the same as rock ’n’ roll, or rock and roll, whose origins lie in the 1940s and 1950s. Rock ’n’ roll came from the electrification of two previous popular musics: rhythm and blues, earlier known as “race” music (meaning African-American music), and country and western, known earlier as hillbilly music (meaning the music of poor rural whites, inheriting Scottish, Irish, and English traditions, but already possessing a significant admixture of the music of African-American slaves and former slaves). It came, too, from the new possession by whites, recording music largely for teenagers, of black music, in a contest of appropriation and racial assertion, drawing together such figures of different character as Elvis and Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly—but not quite Muddy Waters or Ray Charles.
How strange that to become “rock,” it became in a sense more electrified, or re-electrified, louder and capable of distortion; with more instruments besides guitar now electrifying, too; became “white” in a different way, too, by a transit through England back to the United States. It made a transit, too, in America, through the “folk revival,” thus through leftist and antiracist politics, the university, and a highbrow popular audience that otherwise respected only jazz—and lapsed back into a seemingly apolitical “children’s” music associated with a musical whitewashing. That is why folkies were so infuriated when Dylan, their kiddie hope, “went electric” at Newport in 1965, not because they disliked the sound of electric guitars (surely they would have had Charlie Christian and Wes Montgomery records in their jazz collections).
The thing that rock could do, and did, was to engage a different realm of feelings—feelings that, for all the millions of people who have felt them, and tried to specify them, are still hard to put your finger on. Say, as a first step, that rock separated itself from rock ’n’ roll in the purification of its name: taking out the looser part, the dominated part, the recoil, the reaction, the passive side, the “roll”; taking out, therefore, the part that made the name balance, promising you familiar motion, of dance, of a boat or cradle, but most of all of sexual intercourse. (I’m hearing in my head Muddy Waters’s version of a common blues called by different artists “Rock Me,” “Rock Me Baby,” “Rockin’ and Rollin’,” “Rockin’ Chair Blues,” etc.: “Rock me baby, rock me all night long / Well I want you to rock me baby, like my back ain’t got no bones.”) It became a music, in its origins, of the white middle-class world, as rock ’n’ roll was not. It is the music that comes from the Beatles, and their particular mutation; and from electric Dylan, and his particular mutation, too; but it is not that alone. It does not occur within the 1960s as a chronological period, but with the sixties—that world event. Something we understand as political, and emotional, and technological, and economic—when science fiction became reality, as it has been since.
And rock’s advent, whatever the origins and causes, has something to do with the possibility of new emotions and satisfactions from this music, beyond those of dancing and sex, time or movement, beyond daily and imminent pleasures, beyond things that could exist outside the music. The music would no longer be concomitant with ordinary reality. It might represent something only autonomous and unfolded, radiant, inside itself—available today uniquely in music—which one yet wishes could be brought into the world. It began to promise something total. Something incommensurable with dailiness. What is that thing?
—
I have been worrying recently about something at the end of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, from 1952. I admire the novel. I also take it to be one of the great prophetic books of the half-century that followed the end of World War II. It knows the new rise of the United States to global supremacy, it sees the American artistic and political world we still know, and it knows the flaws and doubts and corruptions that have never left us. So I have been wondering about a small detail of its prophecy.
The novel’s ending is familiar. The unnamed narrator, an African-American migrant from the South, has become embroiled in radical politics in New York City, specifically in Harlem. The official white world of Jim Crow and factory labor has misused him. So has the official black world of the university and respectability. The Brotherhood, a left-wing party not unlike the Communist Party, promised the narrator cosmopolitan antiracist fraternity but betrayed Harlem’s blacks and misused the narrator, too. Ras the Exhorter, a black nationalist of the old Marcus Garvey school (evocative, too, of Malcolm X, who emerged a few years later), is out to kill the narrator as an obstacle to nationalism and the creation of a separatist racial identity. The impossible conflict of the end of the book, politically, seems to be this three-way impasse between invisibility to the white majority, the ineffectiveness (or, say, in the McCarthyite 1950s, just the ending) of organized radical left-wing parties, and the self-limitation and self-destructive purism of cultural nationalism.
The thing that haunts me is that there is, actually, one other alternative route glimpsed at the end of Invisible Man, which I hadn’t noticed or fully understood when I first read the book as a teenager and in my twenties and didn’t know enough history. Ellison was able to see something, with his incredible perspicacity, as he was composing the book at the end of the 1940s, catching it as another possible vision of the future—possibly, even, the real bearer of history out of this impasse, though it seemed almost too crazy, or trivial, for him to say openly. The narrator finds it underground, literally—down in the depths of the New York subway.
What about those three boys, coming now along the platform?…Their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips in trousers that ballooned upward from cuffs fitting snug about their ankles; their coats long and hip-tight with shoulders far too broad to be those of natural western men…the heavy heel-plated shoes making a rhythmical tapping as they moved…Who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious? The stewards of something uncomfortable, burdensome, which they hated because, living outside the r
ealm of history, there was no one to applaud their value and they themselves failed to understand it….From time to time one of them would look at his reflection in the [subway car] window and give his hat brim a snap, the others watching him silently, communicating ironically with their eyes….One held his magazine high before his face and for an instant I saw…the cover of a comic book.
The people he is seeing, of course, are youths—hipsters—in their original incarnation: African-American youth, wearing zoot suits, snap-brim or porkpie hats, double soles or horseshoe taps, disappearing from legitimate society into a maze of “jive,” signs and countersigns, and the subliterary arts: comic books, specifically, a sign here that stands in contrast to the kind of novel that Ellison is writing. You’ll miss what Ellison is saying if you don’t know the meaning of specific bizarre fashion codes, held in vernacular memory but rarely recorded in histories, of the kind that would come to mark not “culture” but “subculture.” They aren’t listening to music here, but we know what kind of music they’ll come to be associated with—not the earlier jazz of Armstrong and Ellington, which Ellison openly admired as part of the process of collective culture creation (he was himself a skilled musician, a horn player), the “hot” jazz for dance and public display, of New Orleans and Kansas City, and the great jazz orchestras, but the new late-1940s music being developed in clubs on Fifty-Second Street or uptown at Minton’s, “cool,” hermetic, hostile—bebop. Though this music, too, would later be recognized for its participation in high art and high culture—not least for its technical difficulty and virtuosity—and we forget how antagonistic it was before it mellowed and attained a wider mass audience (as would also be the pattern for post-bop, free jazz, and some fusion later). The role it played at this moment was of a kind of withdrawal from the other cultures on offer. Call the thing as a whole by the familiar word “subculture”—signified by bizarre clothing, odd talk—but revolving around, and counting for true deep meaning and joint experience upon, some new, indigestible form of popular music.
It seems to me that Ellison may have been right about the rest of the American Century. Left-wing parties might well have been the place, previously, in which youth would have organized itself and its passions. Party politics in some form. Association. Militancy. Even violence—but violence channeled, purposeful, even into formal nonviolence. But meaningful left-wing parties, which had existed from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the 1940s, had been trivialized or eradicated, or fallen prey to much bigger history—the history of the United States and the Soviet Union, the Cold War. Then, too, party politics among mainstream parties, in first-world constitutional states like the United States and England, also a meaningful field for youth passions from, say, the Age of Revolutions through the early postwar period, was similarly neutralized and degraded in America and England into a sterile field of television theater—and a place for people without souls, uninteresting people. Instead, real passional life gets organized by subcultures, with music as the expressive center and singers as the charismatic leaders.
There was nothing more irritating, when I was young, than complaints from elders about the loss of real politics, party politics, and the sad decline of the organized left; and paeans to the great old days of all the schismatic leftist parties (Socialist, Communist, Trotskyist, antiracist liberal, etc.)—because all those things seemed so obviously square, lifeless, compared to the feelings and commitments available elsewhere. I think of Michael Walzer’s essay “A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen”—he’s in favor of such citizenship, mind you, but he tries to reckon with the fact that an enormous part of your day, in this better society, would likely be devoted to sitting in meetings. There was nothing in my existence, when young, to suggest the passionate, erotic, violent, world-changing and world-creating possibilities of meetings. Much to my loss.
The music I had in my youth was punk, more properly post-punk—a late variant of rock. I knew it in the years across which post-punk “broke,” too, as it was then said—broke again into mainstream commerce, via grunge and Britpop, and destroyed itself, while seeding new fields. Post-punk was the center of meaning, and social gatherings small and large, and organizing apart from adults and authority, and the only conduit to power, and sublimity, that we could feel and love, while also feeling its fear and destructive power. A force making clear how this world was wrong, how it was not good enough for us yet, for its future citizens. Reminding you that, as the political types say about radical movements, another world is possible.
Now, as an adult, I don’t even have a plausible way to talk about the force that then disclosed everything worthwhile and unacknowledged. Nor is it obvious how to connect its childish revelation with anything in adult life.
I saw a friend recently who, I knew, had been similarly marked by post-punk, though in a different part of the country and a different local scene—in Washington, DC. As an adult he’s become a historian. I think he had once been my union steward. Feeling as embarrassed as if I were asking him about a sexual disease, I wanted to know how he dealt with the puzzle of how much music had meant.
“I know this sounds dumb,” I said to him, “but I sometimes say to myself, when I wonder if I could ever add anything worthwhile to the world, ‘If I could just give them the equivalent, in words and arguments, of the feeling I got when I was fifteen, from one minute of the first Dinosaur Jr. album—’ ”
“That’s what I do, too!” my friend said, unnerving me. “When I want to figure out what to do in a book or an article, I say, ‘If I could just get back that feeling,’ and I put on the first Dinosaur Jr. album.”
It seemed backward. And, looked at coldly, disturbing.
—
I’d like to think a bit about the Velvet Underground.
The Velvets are, of course, one of the two bands from the sixties most often claimed as predecessors of punk. (The Stooges would be the other.) One step to the side of the major canon of rock, inaugural figures of a different canon, their influence has a different basis than initial mass popularity.
The Velvet Underground consisted in its main incarnation of four musicians. Lou Reed was the songwriter, singer, guitarist, and front man. John Cale, an initiate of the minimalist and dissonant musical avant-garde under the tutelage of New York composer La Monte Young, played viola and bass guitar. Maureen “Moe” Tucker, a self-taught teenage percussionist, drummed initially without cymbals or pedals, standing up, and remained one of the only female drummers in rock. Sterling Morrison, the band’s fine second guitarist, faded back, mostly because he had little to do with the constant Reed-Cale tension and creative drama. (Post-VU he became a professor of medieval English and a tugboat captain.) Cale came from Wales. All the rest were from Long Island.
The band gigged together without outside interference for one month—December 1965. They’d begun a residency at Manhattan’s Café Bizarre, when Andy Warhol, already enormously famous, arrived to put the group on retainer for his own purposes. His canny lieutenant, Paul Morrissey, seems to have known of them through Cale, and the overlap between the underground film world and the avant-garde musicians who worked as film accompanists. Andy needed rock music for his upcoming “Exploding Plastic Inevitable” sound-and-light happenings, where he hid the band behind the likes of Edie Sedgwick doing the watusi and Gerard Malanga dancing with whips. He also had them accompany his own films, and generously purchased studio time for them to record a first album, supplying the famous banana cover, prominently signed “Andy Warhol” and without the band’s name. (You had to find it on the LP jacket back.) Warhol (or Paul Morrissey) also inflicted Nico upon them, a blond German model and songstress with statuesque looks and a heavily accented, Weimar-era vocal delivery. Nico had won over the Factory with her celebrity and drive. She came with European film–world credentials from a part in Fellini’s La dolce vita, and was now determined to get into music.
From the initial Warhol embrace, the Velvet Underground man
aged to sneak away without utterly alienating their patron. The Velvets lasted one album with Nico, a year and a half with Warhol, two albums (nearly four years) with Cale, and four albums with Reed, who anyway wrote all the lyrics. Reed himself finally retired, to let the remaining players limp on without him, moving back to Long Island “to work as a typist for his father’s accounting firm.” (I know all these details from an excellent book about the band by Richard Witts.) This makes a romantic finale, but of course Reed was back in New York within the year, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, to declare himself a poet, and start reading his poetry (including song lyrics), and by the end of 1972 he had recorded and released two solo albums. The grim song cycle Berlin followed in 1973, and he enjoyed fame and stardom, more or less, for the rest of his life. Cale during the same period had produced and played on Nico’s early solo albums (from 1967 and 1969), and Nick Drake’s, and released his own solo records in 1970 and 1972 and the much-admired Paris 1919 in 1973. The never-repudiated Warhol connection and Reed’s, Cale’s, and Nico’s steady careers kept the Velvet Underground always in public memory.
The imagination of the Velvet Underground dwells in bedrooms and residence-hotel rooms, at parties and afterparties—or wishing for parties (alone, now, in one’s bedroom). “If you close the door the night could last forever / Leave the sunshine out and say hello to never” (“After Hours”). It stakes its name on a fantasy of an underground world of S&M dungeons and shooting galleries that provides a pleasure, for the listener, on the same order as reading “underground” books from the hip-Gothic tradition of Sade, Bataille, Genet, Burroughs, and Hubert Selby Jr. Reed rewrote such books, essentially, as songs. The literal example is his “Venus in Furs,” a musical setting of a book remembered because it earned its author the honor of having masochism named for him. Reed puts in the protagonist of Sacher-Masoch’s book (Severin) and its principal action (flagellation and waiting for flagellation), and the Velvets provide a drone sound track.
