Out With The Old | Music | End of the World Blues, or, “We’re some kind of incredible multiplication more successful than the average person”

So dose me up once is not enough 

I can still see the ground
And from this high rise view looking down on you
I'm not the one wasting my time
This is the end of the world news
This is the end of the world news sponsored by God

So sung Tom McRae on a track from his self-titled debut, and the 14 year old me loved the shit out of it. Here was an artist and a song that combined all the things I wanted to do with my own guitar as a pubescent bairn: a simple, but not pathetically simple minor key guitar structure; a set of lyrics almost entirely constructed out of one-line, self-contained abstractions; a voice flecked with sexy, Counting Crows-ish (remember them? HOHOHO) mannerisms that were just English-sounding enough to slip into one’s own choir-trained vocal approach. And so forth. I dug this song so much I remember picking up an acoustic guitar at, potentially, my first ever house party, again aged 14ish, and playing it to a bunch of girls having introduced it as “a song I’ve been working on for ages.” Yeah, I was a little fuck back then.

Needless to say, a couple years later, I had moved on from poor Tom, and could regularly be found sitting at Sandwich Club (those of us who brought packed lunches to school formed a sandwich club. At Christmas, we organised a Secret Sandwich, as opposed to Santa) mouthing off about McRae’s rubbish one-man impersonation of late REM – the worst REM of all the REMs. “Take ‘End of the World News,’ from his self-titled debut,” I’d begin. “The sixth line: ‘to define you the king of the game.’ I’d actually prefer ‘ahead of the game’ to that kind of half-baked, nonsensical attempt to drag a cliché into the realms of originality, like some kind of very, very, very poor man’s Jens Lekman.” Yeah, I was a little fuck back then.

Needless to say, a couple years further on and I’d forgotten McRae had ever existed, his mewing silenced by the bells and whistles of fresher-friendly popgroups like Crystal Castles and Datarock. A state of affairs that remained in place until just over a month ago, when I was sat in my room watching the Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard talking-head bricolages which accompany last month’s set of Bad Seeds re-releases – the Boatman’s Call film specifically. A thoroughly nice-looking man appeared, wearing a jacket and stubble every bit as pathetic as my own (watch this, from 7.45 onwards). Avoiding making eye contact with the camera, he over-emphasised certain nouns in order to draw attention away from his manifest gaucheness – something I’m fully aware I do in artificial situations. “I am the child of two vicars,” he began. “And for me to have somebody who talks about religion in a funny, clever, challenging way – that was a way for me to antagonise my family as well.”

My God, it’s basically me – I mean, I’m a vicar’s son, as opposed to two vicars’ son, but even so. I thought. Along with: I can’t wait to find out who this nice-looking man is, we should probably hang out or something. (The way these Bad Seeds films work is, they don’t caption the interviewees until the very end, so either you don’t know who you’re seeing talk, and therefore judge what they’re saying objectively, or have the opportunity to congratulate yourself on recognising, I don’t know, the bassist from the Veils, a goddam angel who appears on several of these films.)

Readers, it was Tom McRae! I had/have become what I thought I despised. Or rather, I had/have finally recognised what I’d convinced myself I despised for what it was, namely something not unlike myself. (I hope you don’t think this is about me drawing parallels between myself and a chiselled, mega-selling troubadour, it’s honestly not, try to bear with me.)

What a cliché. But here’s my point which is, I’m pleased to admit, very much a case of dragging a cliché into the realms of originality: admitting to myself that I’m probably more like Tom McRae than I’m not like Tom McRae helped me to come to an important conclusion: growing up culturally, musically, literally, coming to the end of one’s immaturity, isn’t about turning into one’s father/mother, like the lazy stories say: it’s about turning into one’s father’s/mother’s son/daughter. (Which, for the sake of readability, I will henceforth refer to as: becoming one’s father’s son. Because I’m a boy, silly.) Growing up is about acknowledging that the musician you’ve contrived antipathy towards because of his unashamed emotive directness is probably the kind of musician you’d have become if you were any good at music-making, and more handsome. Growing up is about recognising that the things you properly value have much more to do with the things that your parents value than you’ve hitherto been willing to admit.

It’s not linear. My father is a vicar, but I’m not especially keen on hymns (except for bona fide pumpers like this). When I really interrogate, say, my love affair with Nick Cave though, documented extensively on these pages, I realise that it’s the way he integrates a profound respect for liturgical poetry, along with an underlying willingness to be touched by a spiritual sublime, into a model of songwriting that is also violent and decadent and culturally enriching and gorgeous and chaotic and dense and sexy – I realise it’s the presence of what my dad does within that, which makes it so important to me. Nick Cave legitimises my somewhat all-over-the-place views on religion to the point that I’ve made peace with the significance of what my dad does in making sense what I do (on the face of things, utterly different. But actually not that different at all, really. I just use fuckwords more).

Anyway, this is all getting a bit heavy, and self-indulgent, so to close in the traditional Silkworms manner, HERE’S A SILLY LIST TO PROVE MY POINT. Vicar’s offspring ancient and modern who turned into their father’s sons as they reached artistic maturity. But first, a quote from (another’s vicar’s son – whose latest record is a classic vicar’s son’s album, all about friends of his father’s who have died and so forth) Mick Harvey, the original and greatest of all the Bad Seeds, on this very subject – taken from an interview I conducted with him on (of all days) Easter Saturday:

We do tend to excel apparently. They do say that, I’ve read an analysis of it, the sons and daughters of Anglican ministers. And it’s quite extraordinary, what they go on to – I can’t remember what the figures are but we’re some kind of incredible multiplication more successful than the average person. I don’t know why.

EXAMPLE THE FIRST, Hobbes

Son of: The Reverend Thomas Hobbes, vicar of Charlton and Westport

Early life: Many, many accusations of atheism.

Maturity: “Atheism, impiety, and the like are words of the greatest defamation possible.”

 EXAMPLE THE SECOND, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Son of: The Reverend John Coleridge

Early life: The Lyrical Ballads, washed down with a fuckton of laudanum

Maturity: ‘On the Constitution of the Church and State, according to the idea of each’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

EXAMPLE THE THIRD, Tim Westwood

Son of: Bill Westwood, Bishop of Peterborough

Early life: “You can’t come to the kingdom and not see the prince.” S. Dogg

Maturity: “Honestly, baby, I get love out there, pure and simple.” T. Westwood

EXAMPLE THE FOURTH, Kings of Leon

Sons of: Ivan Leon Followhill, a United Pentecostal Preacher

Early life: “You’ll plead, you’ll get down on your knees / For just another taste.”

Maturity: Good one.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Wider Reading | Don Paterson Namechecks Silkworms (sort of)

The Jocks and the Geordies from the Beano, your classic 

farty wee boys in gang-huts

Whilst it’s nice to know you’re even on the radar of a man who, to at least one Silkworms editor’s mind, has written at least three of the ten finest collections of poetry published over the last decade and a half or so, there was an overtone of chastisement in Don Paterson’s acknowledgement of our site in Saturday’s Guardian Review:

Facebook and blogs have helped enormously, though the blogs are still split between responsible, informative and entertaining sites such as Katy Evans-Bush’s excellent Baroque in Hackney, and too many anonymous others which resemble farty wee boys’ gang-huts, and where membership is conditional on hating the right people.

He’s talking about us. I’m certain of it. The sensation is part sadomasochistic thrill, and part reminiscent of a daydream I keep having in which I finally get the opportunity to meet Nick Cave, interviewing him maybe (the nearest I’ve got so far was an interview with the other members of Grinderman a few months back) and he calls me an arsehole or something. The famously hostile Zane Lowe Culture Show interview probably has something to do with this – if you can watch it to the end, you’re more of a vertebrate than I:

ZL: …a bidda Ziggy Stardust, just perhaps conceptually in the record, in the sense that there appears to be a certain character emerging…? I don’t know whether that’s a good observation or a bad one…?

NC: The Grinderman songs are extremely personal. It’s not as though we built some kind of alter-ego, which brings back the Ziggy Stardust thing: it’s not, it’s absolutely NOT our intention.

Nick later looks Lowe in the eye and murmers, ‘interviews are hugely counter-productive.’ It’s a curious thing, suspecting that the people you admire most in the world probably wouldn’t like you.

SKS

Wider Reading | Nick, Harry and Hermione's Magical Mystery Tour

A month or so ago, I wrote a not short piece about music what one inevitably ‘reads’ differently because of the cultural and emotional residue circling the, say, TV show it has become associated with, mainly as a way of introducing a single question I ended up putting in CAPS to show just how important it was to me: WHY THE FUCK HAS NICK CAVE ALLOWED FUCKING HOLLYOAKS TO USE ‘RED RIGHT HAND’ IN A FUCKING TRAILER FOR ITS FIERY LATE NIGHT HALLOWEEN SPECIAL THING?

And so imagine my bemusement upon discovering that, throughout an invented scene in the middle of the atmospheric but underwhelming new Harry Potter film, a Cave song called O Children – an unreleased album track from the second CD of the Bad Seeds’ grandiose 2004 double-header Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, I should say – foregrounds proceedings in a way no other individual song has throughout the entire, primarily orchestra-accompanied franchise. Mental. And surely, at a time when Nick’s relationship with popular culture, civilised society and so on is beginning to look a little too comfortable for comfort, the worst Step Too Far yet…

Well yes and no. Firstly, the scene doesn’t work, doesn’t work at all, the dancing – like everything hairy little Radcliffe and Hermione’s world-of-their-own eyebrows do, indeed – is weird and embarrassing. Not to mention ambiguous, but not in a good way, because you get the feeling the two wee multi-millionaires have been told to act companionship and mutual reliance with just a hint at the potential for something more in order to make sense of (the now stacked) Ronald’s Lord of the Ring­s-esque paranoia a few scenes later – but that it’s a direction way too sophisticated for their no-longer-adorable (in)capabilities to handle. Then there's the way the song, with little if not nothing in common with the rest of the score remember, sorta bursts out of the radio to take centre-stage – it's too stylistically jolting for the emotional manipulation of its chord structure and gospel sentimentalism to take effect, basically.

And what of the actual specific choice of song? Here’s what director David Yates has to say on the subject, according to the Brisbane Times (and fair play to the Brisbane Times for actually pursuing this story):

Yates says his music adviser Matt Biffa sent him about 300 songs to consider for the sequence. ‘Every one was wrong,’ he says. ‘And then I came across that Nick Cave piece. There is just something about it that is really poignant and melancholic and yet incredibly uplifting. There are very few pieces of music that can deliver that odd dynamic – that can make you feel very soulful and a bit lost, and yet have this wonderful undertow that can also lift you up. It had to be Nick, basically.’

The producers duly sought Cave’s permission to use it. ‘And he was so cool about it. I never spoke to him personally, but I understand he was pretty happy.’ What Yates would love, he says, is to work with Cave scoring a smaller-scale film than a Harry Potter spectacular. ‘He seems to be able to create music that never ever feels like the same mathematical pattern but yet hits the same emotional spots. I think he’s really smashing.’

To be fair to the guy, I actually think a lot of what he says here is true, if a little bit this is how the music makes me FEEL rudimentary. What it doesn’t explain, though, is the specific choice. His comments mainly refer to Cave’s work as a whole – rather than a song with a connection to the Potter kids that kinda makes sense the first time you hear it, all O CHILDREN, LIFT UP YOUR VOICE, but after a bit of careful listening comes bearing some pretty inappropriate connotations. A case in point is the third verse:

Forgive us now for what we’ve done
It started out as a bit of fun

…so far, so okay, but what’s this I see, immediately after…

Here, take these before we run away
The keys to the gulag

THE KEYS TO THE GULAG?! Suddenly all that rather crowbarred-in ethnic purity imagery and propaganda and soviet-style leadership stuff in the later books begins to dominate in a way that it, well, shouldn't. I mean, how many people read Harry Potter for the political allegory, really? But I don’t reckon Yates really listened that hard anyway, I get the feeling he just liked how the song made him feel all happy and melancholy at the same time, heard the word ‘children’ a couple times and thought GENTLEMEN, WE HAVE OURSELVES A WINNER. Without asking himself, wait a minute, this piece of music is meant to inspire Harry and Hermione to dance inside their magic tent as though the world outside isn’t ending etc; but who in their right mind hears an album-closing Nick Cave ballad and goes, fuck this, I MUST DANCE?

It is, to cut a long story short, a decision that makes shit all sense; an interesting enough stylistic choice obviously made in isolation and clung to, regardless of the fact it makes shit all sense in its wider context. And it's a choice that also reflects a common misconception about Cave’s recent work, which is that its increasing melodic accessibility makes it an appropriate accompaniment to any number of banal situations – an assumption that belies utterly the if-anything-increasing musical and lyrical sophistication that exists within the pretty tunes. It’s just a bit less confrontational than it was back in the day y'see, that’s the only difference.

And yet. And yet I remain bemused, rather than pissed off in the way that I was about the Hollyoaks farce. Indeed, I came out of the film curious about Yates’ and MATT BIFFA’s (what a name) little experiment – curious generally, in fact, rather than bored or infuriated, as I had been after previous HP movies. About, say, whether the little Beedle the Bard animation sequence worked (I think it did). About why the kidz didn’t cast spells at the eyelinered men what caught them and took them to Bonham Carter, as they had done with every other enemy. And so on.

And I’ve decided this curiousness reflects well on the film, because at least it gave me the opportunity to have a little think etc., rather than just wishing I was a wizard etc. My little think took in many things, including potential reasons why the coming together of Potter and Cave might be considered a good – or at the very least, coherent – thing. Some of them were quite convincing. So I wrote a couple down.

One, the Harry Potter films should be regarded as an entertaining record of British performance talent, our beautiful locations, our ability to trump Hollywood production values etc. rather than works of cinematic art. With this in mind, featuring the work of one of our most important musical/literary imports is only right – he joins, remember, National Treasures Jarvis Cocker and Jonny Greenwood after their extraordinary cameo in The Goblet of Fire. All together now, Get it on like an angry spectre, who’s definitely out to get ya. Sounds like a Grinderman song.

Two, we’re not talking about Red Right Hand here, we’re talking about a relatively obscure and, to be honest, not particularly excellent album track that few people are going to have much of an existing relationship with and, more importantly, even fewer people were likely to foster a relationship with before the new Harry Potter came around. Ergo, the film isn’t going to spoil the song for a bunch of people, and neither is an association with HP doing it that much of a disservice, because it wasn’t that good in the first place. A victimless musical crime, in other words.

Three, an old and rather uninspiring debate here but it should be broached: like Shrek before it with People Ain’t No Good and some Tom Waits stuff, HP has the potential to introduce the work of Nick Cave to a whole new audience – something it’d be vulgar to criticise, however vulgar the new audience. There’s a load of Nick Cave-related chatter on various Potter messageboards, which is a remarkable thing. Here’s a graph of the extra views that some Italian dude’s blog, featuring a translation of O Children’s lyrics, has got in the past week or so:

Pretty telling, especially insofar as it suggests Potterheads are actually giving enough of a shit about this MYSTERIOUS SONG to work out what it's saying, as well as what it's accompanying – which is great.

Four, some girl I met at a festival told me that her favourite song for accompanying the act of physical intimacy is the Bad Seeds’ bouncing, scary-fairground cover of Tom Jones' Sleeping Annaleah. It’s not unlikely she was taking the piss but if not, heavens above! It seems making statements about what is and what isn't an appropriate use for a Nick Cave song is the proverbial fool's game. So I'll give it a rest.

SKS

Quote | Music | Nick The Stripper As Reader: the story continues

Alas, due to busy weeks and not enough sleeps I fear a few too many of my Silkworms mixtapes have concerned themselves with a rather prosaic musical-literary intersection – the literary reference slash quotation in song. And not as discriminatorily as they should have, neither. The Nick Cave tape, Nick The Stripper As Reader, is a case in point: yes, it acknowledges that there is a debate to be had about whether Cave is a mere quasi-intellectual, taking only poets’ names to stuff affectedly into his lyrics, rather than actually interrogating their work through the medium of song. But it doesn’t break down the evidence on either side of the debate – doesn’t suggest that there might be both a good Nick Cave The Musical-Literary Critic and a bad Nick Cave The Musical-Literary Critic, and therefore doesn’t take the opportunity to begin to point to the tropes that might actually define each. And, in turn, good musical-literary criticism generally. This being QUOTE week, I figured I’d do that now: take a couple handfuls of examples from the tape and argue the why, the whether and the wherefore of the goodness or badness of their readings.

Track 3, Hiding All Away / Track 9, No Pussy Blues / Track 7, There She Goes My Beautiful World

You searched through all my poets
From Sappho through to Auden
I saw the book fall from your hands
As you slowly died of boredom

‘Sappho through to Auden’ is a false canon, doesn’t make sense thematically, alphabetically, chronologically – it’s entirely motivated by a half-decent half-rhyme. To file, perhaps, alongside the rhymes in Cave’s Babe I’m On Fire: midnight stalker, Garcia Lorca, hit man, Whitman etc. Perhaps there is something to be written about this, specifically – it reminds me of Peter Blegvad’s suggestion, in the Believer interview I’ve drawn on before, that:

Rhyme is the constraint I’m most addicted to…I had no idea what I wanted to say before I lost myself in the process of composition. Until fairly recently, I regularly experienced an almost physical appetite to make music, to strum and mumble until something shapely evolved from it.

But anyway, said Hiding All Away's half-rhyme does just about justify its first half with its anarchic dismissal of 2500 years of poetry, which second-guesses a listener response along the lines of, oh dear, here he goes again, arbitrarily listing some writers he likes – via its admission of such a practice’s utter boringness. It’s a clever save but hardly a positive approach. A smarter example of a similar technique – Cave listing literature as one of many useless things, in order to sidestep flowery pretension – comes in No Pussy Blues:

I read her Eliot, I read her Yeats
I tried my best to stay up late
I fixed the hinges on her gate
But still she just never wanted to

Because here Cave isn’t just being protectively ironic and self-deprecating, he’s also being cuttingly sardonic – about the way a peripheral literary edge is utilised, particularly by a certain type of musician, to get girls. It’s simply not an issue of literary engagement on any level. Indeed, such an approach destroys literature – turns it into a set of stories about drunken, fuck-happy men with pens, and proper thought and writing and work is subsumed and anodised, just as hipster culture has subsumed and anodised Western counter culture generally… I digress. Basically, I think it’s fair to recognise in this approach Cave’s acknowledgement of a tired technique at, at the very least, the Abattoir Blues stage of his career – it wouldn’t be fair to accuse him of buying into it, basically.

This is important, because it has to be established before There She Goes My Beautiful World can be appreciated as anything other than over-egged ridiculousness:

John Wilmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox
Nabakov wrote on index cards,
at a lectern, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box
And Johnny Thunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gauguin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent's hospital

Firstly, there is obviously a straightforward framework of meaning here: geniuses do their ‘best stuff’ when they’re ill, mad, depressed or dying. And possibly: isn’t it amusing the way we think of the muse, or art, in romantic, beautified terms when the human reality is so different. And possibly: does genuine romance therefore need a ‘book of ideas’ to poeticise it? Won’t it be better if the carbuncles of poetry are kept out of proceedings? All very erudite, interesting and enjoyably ambiguous thinky stuff – but not in a way that justifies such a ludicrous mass of reference-point showing off.

No, to understand that element as good musical-literary referencing it has to be understood, I reckon, as Cave turning something uncreative into something creative via a shameless surplus, a piling up that transcends its component parts. Rather like the po-mo (lol) comedian who tells an unfunny joke, then another unfunny joke, then another, until you begin to laugh at the unfunniness because the self-conscious perseverance is funny, even if the jokes aren’t. Cave does the same with language generally in There She Goes… The best couplet in the entire song is pretty idiotic, but works because the sillyness is piled on with a self-conscious perseverance that becomes enjoyably poetic:

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet
brother, and blow it
If you’ve got a field, that don’t yield,
well get up and hoe it

…followed by…

I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts we both know it
That you weren’t much of a muse,
but then I weren’t much of a poet

Irony, however, is something of a safe haven – an easy way of sidestepping embarrassing mistakes, but also far too passive to result in a great deal of insight when it comes to actually bringing something to a literary source with music (which couldn’t be brought by merely reading it). We need to consider Cave’s more serious, intense efforts – for there are many. Of course there are. It’s Nick Cave.

Track 4, Brompton Oratory / Track 12, We Call Upon The Author / Track 5, Wings Off Flies

The literary reference/quotation in Cave is often used to establish mood – which is fair enough, and certainly better than only citing something to ‘tie our colours to culturally established masts,’ as Phil wrote about brilliantly on Tuesday. Mood is a much better reflection of the way literature interacts with one’s own day-to-day experiences than direct quotation, I think. The way, say, every chapter of every Inspector Morse book (I’ve only read one, mind, when I had swine flu, but I know this to be the case) opens with a classical quotation, as though to say, rahrahrah every human experience can be understood via the canon rahrahrah  is as pretentious as it is unrealistic. Here’s an elegant example from The Boatman’s Call, Brompton Oratory:

Up those stone steps I climb
Hail this joyful day’s return
Into its great shadowed vault I go
Hail the Pentecostal morn

The reading is from Luke 24
Where Christ returns to his loved ones
I look at the stone apostles
Think that it’s alright for some

What I really like about this, and what makes it representative of the double purposes that I’m hopefully making apparent in Cave’s literary lyrics generally, is the way the literary reference ties into the song’s narrative gently and efficiently, sans crowbar. And, more than that, does so in a way that is kinda irreverent (‘alright for some’) towards the literary text – refreshing, when people so often quote texts as though their contents have some sort of sacred, irrefutable value to everything. The song grows out of the text, rather than losing itself within it.

This is something Cave does a lot, most famously in We Call Upon The Author:

Bukowski was a jerk!

A response, supposedly, to people coming up to him all the time and being all like, hey Nick, you heard of Bukowski, he’s really great, you’ll love him, fucken idiots. Anyway, this is followed immediately by two more references:

Berryman was bester
He wrote like wet papier mache,
Went the Heming-way
Weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

The first of which is particularly brilliant, with its inclusion of a reason why Berryman was better within its very language – a Berryman-esque coinage like ‘bester’ after a very Bukowski-reductive ‘jerk’. So many references next to each other is just about justified because the song is, of course, about ‘the author’, although ‘Heming-way’ is a bit shit. ‘Weirdly on wings and with maximum pain’ is a terrific marriage of Berryman and Hemingway’s writing styles though, I reckon.

All this is relatively recent Cave, however. What of the early experiments, the ones made around the time of his fairly unreadable first novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel? Irony is still ever-present, a refusal to acknowledge that he himself is buying into something passé via an acknowledgement of its passé-ness. And so Wings Off Flies’ take on one of the most oft-quoted fragments of Shakespeare there is – ‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to gods; they kill us for their sport’ – sorta mocks its own project:

Insects suicide against the window,
and my heart goes out to those lil flies
There’s a buzzin in my ear
but its more of her black-mail, ham Shakespeare and lies
Wings off flies, she loves me, she loves me not.

Ham Shakespeare. It’s also worth noting that during this period, Cave drenched everything in such a melodramatic haze that it kinda justified crude, obvious literary reference as a necessary stylistic component. Based on the fact that it was precisely this that made And the Ass… unreadable, though, he couldn’t have got by on this alone.

***

Perhaps the key to understanding why, as generally seems to have been established here, Cave’s literary references and quotations are pretty difficult to criticise, are so self-justifying, is Loom Of The Land from 1992’s Henry’s Dream. Or more specifically, the SongMeanings.com debate about whether or not it’s a song about a paedophile, a paedophile murderer, two innocent kids in love or what. Not that the debate is particularly insightful, but it highlights one thing: by inserting a line from Lolita into the lyrics of the song, ‘the elms and the poplars were turning their backs,’ Cave immediately brings a new dimension to it, one that makes us read it more carefully, one that ensures we find new meaning in previously dismissable parts, one that above all enriches the song – however ambiguously, however grotesquely. And crucially, he does it subtly. He doesn’t, I don’t know, call the female protagonist Lolita, something shite like that. Something shite like that which would spoil the rest of the song, rather then improve it.

Cave’s literary referencing makes the component parts of his songs better, it doesn’t merely cement them, establish them, pretentiously tie them to masts. And this, I think, is quite rare in music. Certainly it doesn’t seem to be the case where Regina Spektor is concerned, a lady whose songs made me want to revisit Nick The Stripper As Reader this week, to work out what it was about her quotation that I found annoying, where I found it compelling with Cave.

Possibly it’s just prejudice towards the kinda Zooey Deschanel, [500] Days of Summer nauseating smug vintage-tinted hey, don’t you just love Kerouac bullshit that I can’t help associating poor Regina with (which is less her fault than others’). But when I map Regina’s famed literary referencing, I can’t help feeling it’s just a bit static compared to Nick’s. Take a song like Poor Little Rich Boy:

Poor little rich boy, all the world is okay
The water runs off your skin and down into the drain
You’re reading Fitzgerald, you’re reading Hemingway
They’re both super smart and drinking in the café

That’s not good, is it? I mean, two very GCSE literary reference-points whacked together in order to confirm an intellectual core to the song’s general kooky, literary-sexy spirit? Nah mate. A more interesting example is Pound Of Flesh, which has all the ingredients of a compelling reflection on anti-Semitism, with notorious Jew-hater Ezra Pound asking Regina for Shylock’s pound of flesh:

Ezra Pound sat upon my bed
asked me which books as of late I’ve read
asked me if I’ve read his own
and whether I could spare a pound
of flesh to cover his bare bones
I says, man, take a pound, take two
what’s a pound of flesh between
friends like me and you?
what’s a pound of flesh among friends?

It just doesn’t follow it up though, doesn’t follow the potential symbolism through to any coherent extent. And therefore the literary reference-making becomes little more than a way of asserting a grounding of intellectualism behind adorably nonsensical lyrics, the worst kind of static musical-literary reading. Compare this with the Hold Steady’s similarly anecdotal but far more successful John Berryman reference in Stuck Between Stations and you’ll see what I mean.

The most important bit of evidence of all, though, is Regina’s Apres Moi, which includes an impressive but problematic Russian rendition of Boris Pasternak’s poem ‘February’. Yes, it makes sense in the context of the song (‘apres moi le deluge, after me comes the flood’ – Madame de Pompadour’s famous phrase is a pretty decent summary of ‘February’s content) but in singing it in Russian to an English audience, she risks turning the reference into just another vocal eccentricity, the thing she’s renowned for and the key stylistic feature of Apres Moi as a song. She risks looking like she’s saying, see, the silly noises I make aren’t just silly, they’re also literary and clever, like everything I do is literary and clever, aren’t I clever.

If she wanted to include Russian in a song for the sake of sonic effect, which based on the exaggerated manner in which she sings her four Pasternak lines and the fact multilingualism isn’t a standard ingredient of her songwriting project – she can’t, in short, claim that writing in her native tongue is that important to her, based on the evidence of her entirely English records – which based on all that, seems to be the case. Well doing so via poetry seems, to me, an act of uncreative, piggybacking theft rather than creative, multimedia engagement. It sounds nice just isn’t a good enough reason to stick poetry in song, just isn’t fair on the original writer. Regina could learn from Cave. We all pretty much could, to be honest.

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Swamp | Mixtape | Vol XV, Narrative for Orchestra

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Music As Reading: Mixtape XV, Narrative for Orchestra

For a background to this mixtape, a rather hysterical and dreadfully organised set of paragraphs are available here. To summarise, it is intended to be a reflection on the way that we can’t help but read certain songs forever tied up with the television show/ film/ whatever narratives that we’ve seen them accompany/ introduce/ symbolise/ whatever enough times that this connection has become the point of the song, whether we like it or not. Such tracks, indeed, represent an act of Music As Reading that we’ve all engaged in, subconsciously or not, at one point or another, and deserve to be recognised as such. Lyrics and even mood are discarded and the connotation is king! Half of the mixtape will illustrate the various points made in those aforementioned paragraphs, the other will introduce a few other particularly compelling examples – for the potential scale of this mixtape is enormous, but citing examples such as the Star Wars theme and Singing in the Rain would be a waste of everybody’s time.

We’ll begin then, to pay lip-service to this week’s theme, with Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ along with another of his recent tracks, ‘More to Life (C’Mon C’Mon)’ to demonstrate that ‘Bad Things’ probably isn’t as good as we think it is. Then we’ll draw out the strand of teenage association via Remy Zero’s ‘Save Me’, Mates of State’s decent attempt to make ‘California’ listenable and Simple Mind’s ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ to demonstrate that this has been going on for some time in a teen-sense – since 1985’s Breakfast Club, certainly. We’ll then explore four of the five versions of The Wire’s ‘Way Down in the Hole,’ two versions of Twin Peaks’ ‘Falling’ (the Wedding Present cover proving that even when a band with a significant, important, connotative identity take on one of these songs, the narrative prevails) and finish off with Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ in order to state, in less explicit terms, I hope it was the fucking label what sold it to Hollyoaks. ‘Red Right Hand’ also offers a useful segue into Cave’s cinematic soundtrack work, an unsurprising example of music acting, beyond its original context, as a vessel for narrative – considering that Cave wrote a soundtrack for the audio version of his most recent novel and just generally has form here, as regular readers will have noticed. Then, by way of conclusion, three other examples of this phenomenon manifesting in film: Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ from The Spy Who Loved Me, mainly because of Alan Partridge. Bernard Herrman’s Psycho work for straightforwardly evocative reasons as well as the fact that when he combined all the cinematic fragments into a single composition he called it ‘a Narrative for Orchestra’. And the Door’s ‘The End’ because, despite the fact it was the final song played at the band’s last ever gig i.e. represents a fabulously important musical-biographical punctuation mark (and a staggeringly appropriate one at that), one can’t hear that without first thinking of Kurtz/Brando. A fitting final testament to the power of the imposed filmic narrative. And one that comes full circle, in terms of its relation to this week’s theme. For Apocalypse Now = Martin Sheen, in blackface, in primeval swamp, as much as it = anything, right?

TRACKLIST, Y’SAY?

Bad Things – Jace Everett (True Blood)
More to Life (C’mon C’mon) – Jace Everett
Save Me – Remy Zero (Smallville)
California – Mates of State (The OC)
Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds (The Breakfast Club)
Way Down in the Hole – The Blind Boys of Alabama (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – Tom Waits (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – The Neville Brothers (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – Domaje (The Wire)
Falling – Julee Cruise (Twin Peaks)
Falling – The Wedding Present
Red Right Hand – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (NOT Hollyoaks)
The Proposition #1 – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Proposition)
Song for Jesse – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Assassination of Jesse James...)
The Road – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Road)
Nobody does it Better – Carly Simon (The Spy Who Loved Me)
Psycho: Narrative for Orchestra – Bernard Herrman (Psycho)
The End – The Doors (Apocalypse Now)

Swamp | Music | Somebody saaaaaaaaaaaave me from Remy Zero's other songs

So, True Blood eh, eh, pretty sexy right? Pretty naughty? Pretty fucken outrageous? Move over Twilight, let’s have the grown-ups come and play for a bit, eh? Who needs vampires as symbols of 19^th century Christian (or, indeed, 21^st century Mormon) sexual repression when you can have sexy vampires doing sexy stuff through a veil of HBO production values, eh, beautiful lighting and a script so knee-deep in irony and literary camp it springs a boner you can be proud of, eh, a boner to talk about in seminars, eh, eh, know what I mean, more like semi-nar, know what I mean, eh?

Maybs. The one thing we can all agree on, however, is that the True Blood title-sequence is the tits, an intent-laden feast of well-chosen filters, asymmetrical fonts, and impeccably cut (see, say, the superspeed rotting fox) flashes of ridiculously atmospheric footage both reliant upon and inverting Louisianan cliché – y’know, hicks, gospel churches, SWAMPS, that sorta thing. Along with Jace Everett’s rattlesnake-flecked crooning on ‘Bad Things’, a song we’re all pretty sure is as rad as the cinematography it accompanies, because both halves gel so well. A sultry, dirty, swampy song representative of all of the best things about naughty, sexy, exotic True Blood, then.

Maybs. Listen to one of the three Jace Everett albums on Spotify, though, and you might, like me, begin to suspect something different. Because they’re just not very good. His tracks have names like ‘More to Life (C’Mon C’Mon)’ and ‘Lean into the Wind’ and sound like a cross between Louis XIV, mid-noughties strutting tweeny gimps Rooster and (the admittedly achingly romantic) Chris Isaak. (Chris Isaak, it should be acknowledged at this point, puts in a sparkling turn in the otherwise mediocre Twin Peaks film, Fire Walk With Me, a fact which might become more relevant a few paragraphs down, but that I mention now in order to scream the following from Rooster’s proverbial rooftops: PEOPLE SHOULD TAKE CHRIS ISAAK’S ACHIEVEMENTS MORE SERIOUSLY.)

Which makes me think that perhaps ‘Bad Things’ isn’t very good either. It makes me think that ‘Bad Things’ was, in fact, an excellent choice for a show that endeavours to cartoonise Louisianan culture (albeit ironically, amusingly, sexily and so on) because it is, in fact, a cartoon, synthesised and soulless version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival swamp-rock and low-slung blues influence that it wouldn’t exist without.

But it’s become so jumbled up with the content that it parenthesises – content far better, in many ways, than it – that we listen to it differently and, more important, hear it differently. People assume the relationship that exists between a title-sequence track and a show/film/whatever is almost entirely an issue of establishing mood, of utilising the atmospheric power of music (and, invariably, visual bricolage) to do what would require mindblowingly good writing if it were to be similarly done with dialogue or action in an equivalent thirty seconds (see Generation Kill, a title-sequence-less piece that did just that). And certainly, when only a fragment of Everett’s song appears in a context that means one doesn’t ever really listen to it properly, it does, as ‘arry Redknapp would have it, a job.

But the relationship is, surely, just as much about a show/film/whatever’s plot, and an individual’s response to slash memories of it, imprinting themselves upon the title-track to the extent that they begin to read it as much as they listen to it. It goes, I think, both ways. Indeed, such songs as Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ strike me as an important example of Music As Reading occurring without Music As Readers being aware that they're even doing it. With that in mind, this week’s mixtape will be a collection of tracks so well-suited to their show/film/whatever that this process can only occur. But before constructing that, let’s break this idea down a little further.

The OC is a perfec example, a fact attested to by the Simpsons’ curious take on the show what aired as part of another just-not-quite-right new(ish) episode last night. One wouldn’t have actually known that it was supposed to be a satirical reference to the show if it wasn’t for the music, such was the sequence's arbitrariness – Wikipedia seems to think it features a guy dressed up as Snoopy because Ryan Atwood played Snoopy in a school play once or something. To be honest, maybe it wasn’t about all this at all, but with the opening chords of Phantom Planet’s ‘California’ such a tidal wave of OC connotations flood one’s consciousness that, assuming one spent their mid-teenage years caring about such things like me, it’s impossible to think of anything else.

Dreadful song though. By a dreadful band – like Mr Everett, one need only listen to an entire Phantom Planet (I mean, really, ‘Phantom’ fucking ‘Planet’, who thought that was a good idea) record to realise that. But I can’t bring myself to despise it. See also Remy Zero’s ‘Save Me’ off-of Smallville, a show I don’t even like that much. Sounds like somebody emphasising, in song-form, all the worst things about U2 but again, one can’t help but read it differently to other music. It’s this, I think, rather than the ‘burden of having one song everybody knows’ that's usually discussed, which makes the rest of bands like Remy Zero’s music unlistenable. It is, in fact, universally unlistenable, but one doesn’t actually listen to that all-important ‘exception’.

I guess The Wire is the most interesting way of testing this theory. Does (can?) one draw an education-focussed narrative out of Domaje’s version of ‘Way Down in the Hole’ (Season 4) or a political emphasis out of the Neville Brothers’ version of the same song (the preceding season). Not explicitly? Not surprising, really, considering David Simon’s opinions on the relationship between music and cinematography:

I hate it when somebody purposely tries to have the lyrics match the visual. It brutalizes the visual in a way to have the lyrics dead on point. ... Yet at the same time it can’t be totally off-point. It has to glance at what you’re trying to say.

And is there not a pretty substantial GLANCE behind the fact that Domaje are five Baltimore teenagers soundtracking the Wire series specifically about teenagers – a musical glance, indeed, designed to act as a vessel for a viewer’s specific responses to that series?

Twin Peaks is another important example. I was explaining to somebody the other day, half-cut, my own theory regarding Twin Peaks’ uniquely obsessional appeal, namely that something within its extraordinary textured atmosphere fuses with what’s going on in one’s own real life, parallel to your watching of it for the first time – to the extent that in one’s memory a gorgeous fragment of art that you’ll never see for the first time again becomes entwined with a part of your life that you can’t reclaim, whether happy or bleak. The combined effect representing a great remembered shimmering donkeypunch of nostalgia – and one is therefore compelled to return to its source, again and again.

Well, when I stumble across Julee Christie’s ‘Falling’ (seldom by design, it hits me too hard) I hear within it Laura Palmer and Dale Cooper et al but also the week I spent revising for my finals and watching Twin Peaks with my girlfriend in a little house in Leamington Spa. I honestly do. I read the song in order to tap into that narrative. Whether I like it or not. I haven’t read Maria del Pilar Blanco’s recent collection of essays, Popular Ghosts: the Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture, but I can only assume this concept is the background to that book’s decision to dedicate several paragraphs to ‘the haunted soundtrack of the Twin Peaks TV series.’

Romanticised nonsense y’say? Maybs. Really, this was all just a very long way of introducing the only question anybody’s got any business asking this week, so such a judgement is a bit of a moot point: WHY THE FUCK HAS NICK CAVE ALLOWED FUCKING HOLLYOAKS TO USE ‘RED RIGHT HAND’ IN A FUCKING TRAILER FOR ITS FIERY LATE NIGHT HALLOWEEN SPECIAL THING? That is an imposition of a narrative onto a song that makes Wilhelmus de Rijk’s bread-knifing of Rembrandt’s Night Watch in 1975 look like a favour to us all by comparison.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Wider Reading | Cypress Grove, the Gun Club and mixtape foreplay

Cypress Grove, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and two acoustic guitars

This week’s mixtape, which will go up either tomorrow or Friday, is a pretty special one – it’s been put together by a chap called Cypress Grove, personally responsible for one of the most interesting takes on the ol’ mixtape/compilation/coversrecord/etc. blueprint I’ve ever come across. Silkworms obviously had a responsibility to therefore get the man to give us his interpretation of the Music As Reading mixtape project. And get it we did.

By way of an introduction to Grove’s comp pedigree – while you’re, y’know, waiting for the actual tracks – here’s a wee article/interview I did for the New Statesman a few months back (bastards never printed it) profiling both him and We Are Only Riders, his to my mind groundbreaking album. I’ve pasted it in whole, as it was, don’t currently have time to check it for any now-broken links or now-outdated comments so apologies if there are any of those, such is life.

Sam

***

26/02/10

As is so often the case, a compelling candidate for the (yes, pointless) title of best record of 2010 was released in the first few weeks of the year. We Are Only Riders: the Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project came out mid-January. You may well not have noticed: it was generally rewarded with unhelpful 150-odd word reviews in the forgotten corners of the broadsheets (such as this one) and an eager but rather quiet online response from blogs, zines and musicians (i.e. the people what actually know their shit) – see the comprehensive list of comments slash quotations on the record’s myspace page.

A great shame for at least three reasons: firstly, it is a magnificent piece of work. Jeffrey Lee Pierce was the principal creative force behind, arguably, the coolest band of all time, The Gun Club, the altcountry-inventing punk pioneers adored by the likes of Deborah Harry and Jack White (“why are these songs not taught in schools?” the latter once asked an interviewer) – a tragic figure whose alcohol-induced demise, a year or so shy of his fortieth birthday, occurred in the wake of his bassist-lover’s decision to elope with his drummer. An elegant tribute to JLP’s cut-short life and work appeared, in fact, in the New Statesman way back in 1999 – “Pierce and his various line-ups played like men looking to spit in death’s eye,” observed Richard Cook.

We Are Only Riders is, ostensibly, a tribute record – to Pierce, breathing new and eclectic life into a scattering of hitherto unreleased tracks discovered, in his attic, by one Cypress Grove, a friend and collaborator, on a scratchy, barely-audible tape the two men recorded together in the early 1990s. Over a three year period, Grove invited an intimidating assortment of friends and admirers of Pierce to re-arrange and re-record these songs and others. The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project ended up utilising the talents of Nick Cave, Harry, Mark Lanegan, Barry Adamson and the Raveonettes to name but a few. A humdinger of a tribute record then. All the more so for the riskier contributions it features, from lesser known (in these here parts, anyway) artists – hickabilly hero Johnny Dowd, say, or the criminally underrated Lydia Lunch – which in various cases overshadow the big names’ efforts.

Second, it represents an extraordinary labour of love. The album took Grove a full three years to put together. Speaking to him, I got some idea of why that is, via an anecdote detailing his attempts to get Jack White involved:

‘I diligently pursued Jack White right from the beginning. I first tried through his management. That was going nowhere. Then I got a couple of leads – people who knew someone who knew him at one time. Again, nothing came of it. I was convinced that if he got to hear about the project that he would want to do it, and the only way that was ever going to happen was to speak to him personally. So when he was in London with The Dead Weather in June, I thought this is the best chance I will ever get – I will know where he is at specific times. I knew he was playing a live BBC session at Maida Vale, so I went and hung out there for hours. I eventually asked the doorman what time the band were coming out (pretending to be their driver!) and he said they left ages ago through the back door!

‘A few days later he was playing The Forum in Kentish Town, so I handwrote a letter (being aware of his distaste for anything digital) and headed off. I strolled round the back and as luck would have it the support band were just unloading their gear. So through a mixture of timing, luck and guile I managed to walk past the bouncers on the stage door and into the venue. There were about 20 other people in there I guess, and I was aware of being found out at any moment, so I watched the soundcheck as nonchalantly as possible. I rushed to the front and pitched him on the project in about 30 seconds. He looked initially dubious till I told him Kid Congo Powers was involved – then I had his attention. He was really into the whole concept of the project and seemed keen to do it. But Kid went to see him a few weeks later at his Washington DC show, and he said he would have to pass as his other commitments were too great and he simply didn’t have the time.’

It took, apparently, nine months to find a free day to get Nick Cave into the studio. Debbie Harry, the best part of a year.

Thirdly, and most importantly, though, the record also hinges on an intriguing innovation – with implications, I think, for the future of the cover version, the mythical ‘lost song’, the compilation record and musical ‘conservation’ as a whole. Recognising that recreating the songs as Pierce intended them would be an impossible, and apocryphal, task, Grove decided to organise recordings of three utterly different versions (by three utterly different artists) of each of the tracks on his original tape, so as to recreate something of JLP’s widescreen creative vision that would have, certainly, been lost on a single track – and make these the spine of the record. In short, nine of the sixteen tracks that make up We Are Only Riders are, in fact, only three tracks. Here’s how Grove himself explained it to me:

‘I am told that the multiple versions idea is quite a bold concept, and that a lot of people didn’t think it was going to work. I am pretty sure that it has never been done before, but I am willing to be corrected. For me it is the central concept, the core of the album, and the only intelligent way to deal with the material that I had at my disposal, in order to be satisfied that Jeffrey would be proud of what we were doing.

‘We were trying to achieve an approximation of how Jeffrey might have finally realised the songs himself, had he lived to do so. I have a friend who restores paintings, and he was given a portrait of someone’s great great grandfather in a military uniform to restore. It was in really bad condition and parts of the painting were missing. So in order to restore the painting to how it once was, he had to research military uniforms of the time, and use contextual cues from the rest of the painting. The end result may not have been entirely as the painter had originally intended, but it was a sympathetic restoration, and he brought his best mind to the work. I approached the Jeffrey tapes that I found in much the same way. We have only vague notions of how Jeffrey might have finally completed these songs, so here are three artists’ opinions on that. They all knew or admired Jeffrey, and the answer is probably close to an amalgam of all three versions.’

We Are Only Riders is an audacious, respectful, imaginative record that has the potential to change, for good, people’s ideas about what they are entitled to do with music which doesn’t actually belong to them. It deserves as big an audience of serious listeners as possible.

Bees | Music | Blow Job Betty

Nick Cave’s Grinderman side-project has been universally described, alongside The Death of Bunny Munro, as the noises a mad-gifted man makes when he grows old disgracefully. And No Pussy Blues, the former’s best-known track (‘I thought I’d try another tack / I drank a litre of cognac / I threw her down upon her back / But she just laughed, and said she just didn’t want to…I got the no pussy blues’) not to mention the opening paragraphs of the latter’s third chapter (‘beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically-shaped cumulus, loads of fucking girls are up for it, big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, young ones, old ones, give-me-a-minute-and-I’ll-find-your-beauty-spot ones’) make it pretty bloody easy to see why.

Actually, Cave is growing old considerably less disgracefully than, I don’t know, Ronnie Wood, with his face like a smoker’s lung and his soggy phallus not even wedged between the thighs of a Kazakhstan-born teenager anymore. Cave is happily married to that lady off-of the front of the Roxy Music best-of. Cave has charming twin boys who play silly games with the Bad Seeds. The middle-aged Cave is, really, only as disgraceful as the sexual content in his work – by which token Craig Raine, Sebastian Faulks and innumerable other joylessly gentile writers can also be considered dirty old men.

Which does a disservice to dirty old men the world over, right? Cave only gets this shit because he has a beautiful moustache.

Anyway. What’s important here is that an important facet of Cave’s latter-day ‘disgracefulness’ is a casual misogyny that manifests, time and time again, in the phraseology he uses to address babes. And at least twice on the first Grinderman record, this means references to his ‘honey bee’. Harmless enough, until the context is thrown into the mix:

…She’s my honey bee and here she comes
Cancer rabies SARS
Hairy beards and hurtling stars
Won’t somebody touch me?
Won’t somebody touch me?
Honey bee lets fly to Mars
Buzzzzz buzzzz buzzzzz…

On second thoughts, maybe this song isn’t about a chick after all. But we’re too far in to worry about that. It being Bee Week, then, and what with my Silkworms column increasingly resembling a weekly celebration of Nick Cave, here be a Honey Bee Let’s Fly To Mars-inspired celebration of borderline-sexist slash reallyreallysexist approached to addressing women in poetry and music. Derek Walcott and his wandering hands would surely approve...

Louis XIV’s Finding Out True Love Is Blind

Pitchfork did such an unsurpassably good job of rinsing the first Louis XIV record (astonishingly, there was a second) penning it in the form of a conversation between singer Jason Hill and his doctor…

-Good morning, Mr. Hill.

-Doctor Bolend, what's going on man! It’s been too long, man.

-Long indeed, Mr. Hill.

-Almost as long as my dick!

-That’s nice, Mr. Hill. Looking at your file, I see it’s been three years since your last check-up. How have you been feeling?

-Better than ever man. I'm so healthy I can drink more than pregnant hookers in heat. I’m so ripped I can stick needles in my arms, then stick needles in my needles’ arms. I’ve fucked so many girls in the last five minutes that I’m gonna be orgasming straight through May. And don’t even get me started about how many girls I’ve fucked in the last five minutes.

…that I’m going to list some of the terms of feminine address in their biggest hit, Finding Out True Love Is Blind, and leave it at that:

‘Chocolate girl’
‘Your little Asian friend’

‘Carrot juice’
‘Your vanilla friend’
‘Miss little smart girl with your glasses and all your books’
‘Brown girl’

Und so weiter.

John Berryman’s Dream Song No. 4

Filling her compact & delicious body

with chicken paprika, she glanced at me

twice.

Fainting with interest, I hungered back

and only the fact of her husband & four other people

kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying

‘You are the hottest one for years of night

Henry’s dazed eyes

have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon

(despairing) my spumoni. –Sir Bones: is stuffed,

de world, wif feeding girls.

–Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes

downcast…The slob beside her     feasts … What wonders is

she sitting on, over there?

The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.

Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.

–Mr Bones: there is.

The entire Mötley Crüe back-catalogue

The following are the lyrics to the Girls, Girls, Girls (1987) track All In The Name Of… I suspect the, turns out, criminally amoral Mötley Crüe could do and did do better than ‘honey bee’ but unfortunately I can’t bring myself to listen to their awful, awful songs:

She’s only fifteen
She’s the reason – the reason that I can't sleep
You say illegal
I say legal’s never been my scene
I try like hell but I'm out of control

All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll
For sex and sex I’d sell my soul

Pretty, pretty so innocent
She says you ain’t seen nothing yet
Brings me a dirty, dirty magazine
There she was for all the world to see
I try like hell but I’m out of control. All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll
For sex and sex I’d sell my soul

Says to me daddy
Can I have some candy
Wanna be your nasty
Anytime you want
You know you can have me

All in the name of rock ‘n’ roll.

The entire Charles Bukowski back-catalogue

Extract from The Most Beautiful Woman In Town from 1983’s The Most Beautiful Woman In Town & Other yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwn:

Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not. And Cass danced and flirted, kissed the men, but except for an instance or two, when it came time to make it with Cass, Cass had somehow slipped away, eluded the men…

Lord Byron’s objectifications

As everybody knows, where literature was concerned, Byron was only in it for the snatch. She who Walks In Beauty, not to mention Lara and his Beautiful Quaker – that shit’s obvious. More interesting is the fact that when he’s talking about Newstead Abbey and The Vision Of Judgement, he’s almost certainly still thinking about the puss.

But all of these pale into insignificance when placed alongside the frankly extraordinary thing that is Too $hort’s Blow Job Betty. As one youtube commenter put it, ‘I love this dude. He’s the reason white women over 30 hate rap.’ Bukowski, you, sir, are a pussy compared to this guy (actually, LyricsFreak seems to suggest, shockingly, that the below is the work of five different hands…)

…Too $hort baby, I'm so hard
Pimpin' these hoes on the boulevard
But I'm not here to tell ya bout me
I got a little story bout a nasty freak
She's the kind of girl you think about in bed
Blowjob Betty givin' real good head
Bust a left nut, right nut in her jaw
Sperm on her cheeks is all ya saw
She could blow more head than a whale blows water
Blowjob Betty make your dick get harder
She's a one of a kind, a hell of a girl
A trip and a half around the world
Catch her gettin' busy, bitch wouldn't stop
She's the kind of girl that'll make your toes pop
Every time I used to see her, I would know what's up
Blowjob Betty better blow me up
I remember the day when I first met her
Bitch kinda loose so I knew I'd get her
Walked up to her said
"my name is $hort, just what
you've been lookin' for"
Pimp is my game, I do it the best
Hoe fuck with me, she don't get no rest
Well after that, I G'ed the freak
I used to stop by and fuck about twice a week
And from the very first time I went to her house
Walked in the door and stuck my dick in her mouth
$hort Dog'll get bitches anytime I wanna
Got a big dick and lay it right on her tonsils
Only stick it in about half way back
Cause if I put it all in, it bust straight through her neck…

The likes of the above examples, ladies and gentleman of the jury, testify to the fact that Colony Collapse Disorder constitutes the great ecological challenge of our time. A world without the honey bee would be a world without misogyny. To work, then!

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor