Words And Guitars

apologies for the rather trite title. it is, however, one of my favourite Sleater-Kinney songs and relates better to this post than any other phrase i could think up. i haven't had a cup of tea yet this evening. can't start without a cuppa . . . ah, much better.


Now, this post will be concerned entirely with a few all-girl groups and their inate ability to create, inside of their songs, various instrumental and vocal conversations to go along with the main idea of the song. Ripping in, pulling out, delving deep and making up bullshit for you to run over the next time you listen to the songs.

First up: the Shaggs.

The Shaggs were three sisters from New Hampshire whose father bought the girls instruments and drove them to a studio to record them at their peak in the late 60's. Of course, "Philosophy of the World" ended up being one of the most gloriously inept, naive and dreadful albums ever put to tape. The songs have no meter, no rhyme, are held together only by eldest sister Dot's tenuous grasp on completing a story or idea. One of the best lyrics I've ever had pass by my ear, though, surely has to be "all the fat people want what the skinny peoples got/and the skinny peoples want what the fat peoples got" sung completey out of tune with any worldly chord.

Inside of the songs though, inside all the terrible playing the girls were talking. Every awkward twang, every hacked at drum beat was part of a larger conversation the girls were having with each other, with themselves and with whoever might chance upon their recording. Shit, I'm finding it really hard to give sense of how they did this. They weren't conscious of any of these ideas of course--they could barely speak properly--they just run over their guitars, ran over their drums, touching every note, every piece of skin they knew how. Talking with them, listening to them; asking them questions, responding with the only answers they knew.

Moving through the years, this converstation between a tight-knit group of friends and their instruments became for so many listeners a perfect contact, like sparks and shards electricity shooting from guitars, spinning out and rolling from throats. Whereas a group of men in a band is trying to show off who's the biggest, who's the loudest, who's wearing their cock right, their instruments pushing and pushing to explode a group of girls are going to let their harmonies and guitars make every scream, coo and call allowed. And not allowed.

Take a boat to London, late 70's, outside the Rough Trade shop. Amassing records by punk lovelies the Slits and the Raincoats. Acting out their lives, reproducing their telephone stories and love moods for songs running through dub to pop to waylaid sprite-punk.

Ari Up of the Slits hollering, ranting, discombobulating around the microphone with her best friends telling story-songs about what they did that day, who they spoke to and what they said. Every sentence, every paragraph of song on "Cut" is filled with lovely tappings, scrapings, active musical conversation.

Likewise for the Raincoats. Though they might sing in shriller tones and barely hit their notes on anything they sing or play they speak gloriously through song, and FOR EACH OTHER more than for us.

(Favourite 7" in my stack - 'Our Lips Are Sealed' by the Go-Go's. Perfect pop song from former LA punkers; singing about who's talkin' about 'em: "Can you hear them?/they talk about us/Telling lies/Well, that's no surprise.)

Sleater-Kinney, named after a freeway off-ramp near Portland, carried on wonderfully the tradition of soft to screaming holler over specks of guitar and drum carrying open ideas rather than firing male stoppages all over you. But they get over all of you: over and under and through to every inch of you. Its the wailing that gets me most of the time. That heavy holler, pained and free and aching for ears.

I type ambiguous because I am tired. Basically I love all girl bands. They speak to each other that extra bit easier than any other kind of band. They don't have to show off, they don't care if no one is listening; they'll speak forever in their glistening tones for themselves, for their friends, but mostly for me.

Hard Time Killing Floor

Over the last few months I've really struggled to be able to listen to the small amount of Delta Blues recordings I've collected over the past couple of years. I guess the listening kind of stalled after I had attempted to read one too many white, middle-aged blues 'thinkers' books. You know, the kind who are enamoured by the myth and romance of discovering a group of dirt-fucking-poor, beaten down musicians in your own country, just a couple of days drive from their cosy Atlantic coast cities. This book in particular was one by a Jewish blues guitarist from New York who travelled down to Clarkesdale in the seventies with a mind to help the townsfolk remember their blues tradition. Almost every person he encountered had never heard of Robert Johnson and the image of this pale gangling performer and his band trying to organise a concert of traditional blues songs in a Mississippi church hall was hard not to get a little squirmy with its complete lack of cultural understanding and sympathy. Colonialism will probably exist as long as people around, it'll just continue to take on stranger and more absurd forms.

I probably first heard the blues when I was about seventeen late late late one night at a friend's basement room in Hobart. My other friend was their goading our host to play his Charley Patton songs. He had a discman plugged into a tiny one speaker transistor radio type thing. We sat on the floor and drank and smoked and listened to Patton's aching low moan and along with other blues. One was particularly memorable: a holler blues by a ragged lady singer that was titled 'Pig Meat Mama.' They had some of the most sexually charged purely animal lyrics I've ever heard: "I'm a pig meat mama/pig meat is all I crave."

Since then I guess you could say I skirted the edges of early country and delta blues. Finding songs through reading and seeking out the artists that were mentioned most and held in high regard by other (predominately white) blues appreciators and seeing it as integral part of--vomit--'the History of Rock.' It also helped having Jack White and the Rolling Stones talking in such reverential tones about the blues players they had encountered and reinterpreted.

Now, this is probably the only black american music I have sought out in my few brief years as a music, er, seeker. And I've had to come to terms with why I'm more likely to respond a group of sexually and emotionally retarded white kids clutching guitars with their stick-thin arms than I am to, say, a brash, bouncing Hip-hop jam. Its was pretty easy to understand really: I'm a skinny white kid who gets fucked up about girls and not a streetwise black American dude intent on owning everything 'real big.' I can understand and appreciate the Hip-hop but there isn't much in it that speaks even in the slightest way about my own or my friend's lives.

Not so with the blues.

Part of the reason why so many white folks have fallen for the blues, and delta blues in particular, is because the artists are all dead. Anyone scared of exploiting the music or artists or of re-doing their songs have less worries than if they were alive and wanting a stake of the prize. Not that this would that much of a concern. It wasn't one of Alan Lomax's. The image of this white dude dragging his tape recorder around the cotton fields and juke-joints and churches of the deep South to collect hours and hours of black music and artist interviews is still a hard one to swallow. The mindlessness of walking into a Negro bar in the middle of a southern summer to copy down the list of songs on the jukebox and take notes on how people were dancing has an odd insensitivity to it. Or getting an interview and recording from a blind, homeless guitarist busking on a street corner for nothing more than survival or just his malted milk. Of course Lomax exploited these people out of love, I guess, and with a mind for posterity: an intellectial vision for wanting to keep a culture that was always going to disappear alive somehow in the annals of American history.

The same sort of cultural preservation exists here in Australia, too, with plenty of art graduates and art dealers travelling to remote Indeginous communities to help set up galleries and artist spaces with an idea to inject the funds from sales of works back into the same community. This is done with a lot more reverence and respect than whatever a Lomax or a Scorcese was attempting to record. Its the same white colonist vision, yes, but it is becoming--thank christ--a more measured and sympathetic one.

I made sure I pulled out all my blues music before writing this to help remind myself of why I listened to and sought it out to begin with. And it was all still there. All the songs were still filled with those sad, hopeless stories of travelling and friends and hilariously masked sexual exploits. The African-Americans being forced to create their own coded languages so that they could get by in the white man's world whilst still being able to relate to each other their own tales and senses of humour is surely one of the world's saddest and most troubling linguistic lineages. But after listening long enough to the dusty, scratchy 78 records repackaged and resold and finally being able to decipher the code and actually understand what the artists are singing about is definitely one of the most satisfying thing about the songs.

Robert Johnson mashing down on his little vehicle's starter motor, Charley Patton not being able to make it up to the hill country during a flood because he's been barred by the authorities, Son House watching his girlfriend being lowered into her grave. All these images are intensely personal, expressions made out of desperate, broken necessity as opposed to poses made for the artist's own ego boost--the source of pretty much any white musician's catalogue of performances.

It would be inhumane not to have sympathy for the stories blues made, the beatings the performers endured. But there is something perverse in making what these people sang about, lived through and sometimes died for into a mysteroius, romantic time and place that is only worthy of white theories and confused attempts to return a music to a people that had a relationship with it that they themselves were trying to get away from. The myths and legendary figures that rock'n'roll has attempted to create with the blues over the last few decades has given audiences much much less of an understanding of the troubles that existed in the Pre-war southern United States. And listening to it myself I can't help but feel guilty for helping to exploit whoever might have been trying to survive by this music back then. Its not my music, has never and will never come close to my own personal experiences and as a result I have trouble with my desire to use it to shape my own further experience, as I do with all music I listen to.

But the music is still made by humans. They're human troubles, human lives, human deaths. And you can't help but feel for it.

beginnings . . .

the blog started this morning when i woke up early on a saturday and couldn't get back to sleep. i lay under the covers for a while, listening to Adam Green's 'Friends of Mine' and sang along intermittently with my sleep-sore voice, got up for a second to whack off to some cartoon lesbians making sexy in their school-girl outfits.

then downstairs to the computer listening to some of the whitest pop music around: Magnetic Fields, Arcade Fire, the Concretes . . . and reading about musicians in England making music that mirrors their slow and inevitable demise . . .

Burial, Kode 9 and the Dubstep activators in South London there have been watching their culture disappear and rearrange and eventually exhume itself as this spectral echo of former, well, not happinesses . . . this isn't music of nostalgia. Its not recreating dub and soul and rave with a look back on brighter times, its putting those floating pieces together and making a ghostly collage of distant echos and slow, affected electronic trails. They're the smoky sinews of a city in a gloriously weighty decline.

Labels like Ghost Box and Mordant Music are also progenitors of this death. Odd samples from children's television programs, a reversion to the pantheistic through acid-folk, and the ghostly dawn-time echoes of a grey grey city all make for a spooky re-editing. Its all a bit wierd and disjointed. Perfectly English. Boards of Canada-style melody, loop and rumble. Intriguing, deathly-pale ambient wonder.

But by far the largest, in terms of ears hearing it, and, I suppose the most accessible of these aural manifestations is Radiohead's In Rainbows disc. Yes, obviously it has been months since this thing came out and made the internest make the news again and again and again but I never seem to hear or read any proper critical words on Radiohead apparent significance. I only just started this blog half an hour ago but these questions have concerned me for some months.

Now let it be known that I was enamoured with Radiohead when I was young and rather impressionable. What is it about guitar wankery and high-flown ideas that makes schools full of fourteen, fifteen year old kids lose their shit and want to get lost in concepts their never likely to understand or properly engage in? Too much time to themselves, maybe? Will someone please befriend these kids! Give them Sonic Youth and Beat Happening and Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine. The ideas in those bands (girls, music, drugs, blood, sex, feedback) are a lot simpler and easier to grasp. But I'm straying from the topic by foisting my own favourites upon you.

I used to like Radiohead is what I was trying to say. I used to like them until I discovered the ideas surrounding punk and noise and the timeless DIY aesthetic and realised that 'OK Computer' was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. A cultural end-point if you will. Kids whacking off guitars for years in their bedrooms trying to re-create what they thought was the hieght of musical excellence and ambition isn't going to move us forward in any way, shape or form.

The band themselves are not - have never been - interested in making music for music to be made in its wake anyway. They've been influential, yes, but never by their own admission. They have, for at least fifteen years, considered themselves, as I said, the hieght of musical excellence and ambition and care little for what comes in its wake. And 'In Rainbows' is no exception.

But I've moved far from my original point with this band bashing. 'In Rainbows', whilst being greedy and posh and just plain English. But its also another musical map that is part of this nation's long, protracted death.

The guitars this time are ghosts of themselves, played by sure hands but dead hands nonetheless. The songs are caverns of the same distress and tiredness that Yorke and Co. have been at us about for years. But here they are calling home the spectres and spirits that haunt their long-familiar cities. They pull these spirits from the their homes haunting the cobblestone corners of a Shoreditch tenement in the quiet hour before dawn.

London is dying. Has been for the last sixty years. But at least there are a few out there who are keen to represent and to wallow in its final, wonderfully protracted demise.