By Mark Mordue
The Rolling Stones song ‘Emotional Rescue’ is a seduction song thinly veiled in romance. The urgency and strut that it exudes, Mick Jagger’s startling use of falsetto – it’s all about getting a woman to leave her husband and join him in bed.
By surrendering to her desires and to his, the singer will come to that woman’s emotional rescue. It’s likely to be a very temporary liberation, however. As Jagger hints early in the song, “Don’t you know promises were never meant to keep.”
There are often gaps between what we say and what we mean, of course. Some conscious, others subconscious. Our listening can involve similar arts of opportunity and self-deception. There are messages we don’t want to receive. Others we need to have, whether they are present in what someone says or does – or not.
Our emotions are rarely singular, and pass over us like one cloud hiding another and perhaps another again. The argument would be we should use our mind to read that weather more clearly, to make sense of those feelings that impel us, and then to see ourselves and perhaps act more wisely. Or to surrender – because we want to surrender – to something that at first glance is irrational, wild, destructive or thrilling, as the case may be. To be rescued, as it were, from the rational world that dulls us and even imprisons us.
Art is a kind of tarot for our feelings, a set of stories and symbols through which we can see ourselves. In Shakespeare’s time the connection was more ordered and universally understood, a universe of bodily humors from which character and all human destiny stemmed.
Though we lack such an elaborate and living map of the self today, I find I am still able to read another map, a map that is not fixed but somehow flowing, visible within the arts available to me. And that through these encounters I can examine what my feelings are – and even reinvigorate them by listening to music or reading a book when modern life seems to extinguish those sparks.
In a recent interview, Laura Marling – the young English singer most often compared to Joni Mitchell – declared herself to be an anti-romantic rationalist, to be all about logic over feelings. Marling is a woman barely 21 years old who’s produced a supreme second album entitled A Creature I Don’t Know (oh the irony). It’s hard to recall a record of such up-tempo and annihilating dispensations emerging since Chrissie Hynde appeared on the scene with The Pretenders some 30 years ago. Though arising out of an English folk-pop background, Marling’s voice also echoes the smoky, side-on snarl of Hynde at her best. Her lyrics are not only literary, they venture into a dark yet ultimately optimistic aloneness that seems rare: neither soporifically happy, nor darkly cliched. She works towards stripping away illusions about romance while sustaining a deep poetry and sense of mystery to her lyrics.
At the same time I started listening to her new record and absorbing her world-view, I found myself hurled backwards – somewhat nostalgically – by the documentary Autoluminescent. A depiction of the life and loss of former Birthday Party guitarist, Rowland S. Howard, Autoluminescent takes some of its hard-edge romance from the influence of 19th century French poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud, both of whom Howard echoed in his looks, lyrics and ambience.
In the documentary, Howard talks about writing his first important song, ‘Shivers’, when he was only 16. He had noticed his schoolmates indulging in their emotions to hysterical extremes. It was all too much. Thus the withering lines of a jilted young man who might well be Howard himself: “’I’ve been contemplating suicide/but it’s really not my style.”
Howard could look back at the song and laugh at his own bravado, and his insight into excess emotion. “Says me”, he observes wryly in the documentary, “a guy who has always had a glass heart on his sleeve.”
Howard died last year of liver failure brought on by complications wrought by hepatitis C, contracted from intravenous drug use as a young man. Ultimately Autoluminescent is about promise unfulfilled, but it’s also about the great things Howard gave us as a musician and songwriter. It’s a legacy at once genuinely tragic and yet luminous, leaving you with a far-from-singular feeling – one that might best be described as ecstatic grieving.
A great artistic encounter brings something truthful to how we feel about ourselves and see the world. It’s a mysterious tension – an overlapping, contradictory richness – that somehow makes sense without ever reducing things to an easy answer or summary. It may be this is the only emotional rescue we can ever count on. In the meantime, we continue to seek our freedoms in the strangest ways – as often as not in spite of ourselves – jolted back into awareness by a wave of music, a line of poetry, a painting, a song … then continuing on our way.
Mark Mordue is the 2010 Pascall Prize Australian Critic of the Year. He is currently working on a biography of Nick Cave.
The Melbourne Writers Festival begins this week and the Wheeler Centre is pleased to be presenting an adaptation of Shaun Tan’s award-winning ‘The Arrival’ in partnership with the Festival. On Friday night at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Ben Walsh’s 10-piece band, the Orkestra of the Underground, will perform a live score to projected images of Shaun Tan’s mesmeric illustrations. Watch a preview here.
Image by Douglas Cason Arts/Flickr
For those who are mourning the premature passing of a great and troubled talent, here are a few readings on the incomparable, late Ms Winehouse, courtesy of the Guardian, the New Yorker, the Nervous Breakdown, the New York Times, not one but two pieces from Slate, and this from Russell Brand.
Let us know if you’ve read something great about the great soul-pop diva.
Two landmark figures in the history of jazz visited Melbourne recently as guests of the Wheeler Centre and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival. Jean-Hervé Peron and Tony Conrad both spoke at community radio station 3RRR’s Performance Space. The events received rave reviews from observers, particularly the interview with krautrock pioneer and professional eccentric Jean-Hervé Peron, so even though we weren’t able to film the conversations, we’ve uploaded audio recordings of both events.
Jean-Hervé Peron was a founding member of the krautrock group Faust, of whom music writer Julian Cope has written “[t]here is no group more mythical”. All Music Guide writes of Faust that no group has exerted greater influence on ambient and industrial music. But as you will hear, Peron is much more than just a pioneering musician.
Jean-Hervé Peron Speaks
(Click to listen.)
Tony Conrad was a no less influential musician. Conrad was, according to All Music Guide, the pioneer of ‘Eternal Music’, “a droning, mesmerizing performance idiom that employed long durations, amplification, and precise pitch to explore new worlds of sound”. Conrad “forged new creative directions that proved enormously influential on successive generations of artists ranging in background from pop to the avant-garde.”
Tony Conrad: Music and Mathematics
(Click to listen.)
Last year, Casey Bennetto penned a hymn to the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. With today’s announcement behind us and the Easter weekend before us, we thought it was time to raise our voices once more.
Turntable image by Johnny Magnusson via WikiCommons
Crikey’s Bernard Keane wrote yesterday about the reasons behind the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissenting voices. It comes at a time of widespread criticism of 69 year-old singer-songwriter Bob Dylan following his first appearance in mainland China. Dylan was happy to have his set list vetted by government officials anxious to avoid a show of political dissent by one of the leading figures of the 60s counter-cultural movement. According to one report, there were worries he’d try to protest the arrest of Ai Weiwei. Here’s a review of the concert.
The anti-Dylan critics have not spared him their vitriol – Azar Nafisi accused him of hypocrisy. Maureen Dowd vented her spleen at Dylan in a widely reprinted op-ed column: “The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout,” she wrote. Her column generated much online noise, such as here, here and here. Here’s an especially interesting one with good background on the crackdown.
The affair has also provoked discussion on what exactly Dylan’s political position might be. As Charles Saar Murray pointed out in The Observer, Dylan was never entirely comfortable with the way he was co-opted as radical baby-boomers' voice of choice: “The notion of Dylan as a hardcore political activist and polemicist, or as a dyed-in-the-wool man of the left, is not only antiquated but was essentially erroneous even in the early 60s.”
Anyone who’s ever seen Dylan live will agree with a telling point made by The Guardian’s Mark Lawson: “his renditions are now so idiosyncratic and his inter-number mumbling so impenetrable that it remains entirely possible that he performed both of his most famous protest songs, and made an impassioned plea for the release of Ai Weiwei, without either Chinese censors or audience noticing.”
But we can’t help but wonder: what if Dylan knew exactly what he was doing? What if he decided that the power of poetry is potentially more seditious – in a slow-burn kind of way – than any short-term grandstanding? It seems appropriate to end with what a young Chinese man who attended the concert made of it all: “People say he’s out of date, but he has experience and wisdom. He’s a sheng ren – a sage, like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King.”
Update: Here’s a report on Dylan in Australia in which he describes being in Australia as “like a feeling where the windows are closed and you can’t open them”. Oh Bob, you ol' charmer you.
Photograph of Finnish accordionist Lässe Pihlajamaa via WikiCommons
Michel Houellebecq, the bête noire of French literature, has just released a single entitled ‘Le Film de dimanche’ (‘The Sunday Film’). It follows on from an album he released in 2000 and has been reviewed positively (available here).
There’s always been a crossover between writers and musicians. Homer’s epics were sung, after all. The list of writers-turned-musicians also includes Nick Hornby, Amy Tan and Patti Smith.
And it cuts both ways. Lately there has been no shortage of musicians turning writers. The rock and roll autobiographies of Keith Richards and Patti Smith have been global bestsellers. Bob Dylan recently signed a multi-million dollar, six-book publishing deal. There’s been a spate of them in Australia too, including memorable reads from Stephen Cummings and Paul Kelly. Next month, Dave Graney publishes his memoirs, 1001 Australian Nights. Indeed, on April 28 Dave will be coming into the Wheeler Centre at lunchtime to deliver a Lunchbox/Soapbox on the topic ‘Social networks and the unknown’.
The cover of Dylan’s first volume
Readers who enjoyed Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One can look forward to the publication of volumes two and three, NME reports. In the kind of deal more often seen in the music industry than in publishing, the folk-rock legend has committed to writing six more books.
Two of them will follow on from the first volume of Chronicles. In typical Dylan style, volume one trumped the expectations of many by staying mute about the mid-sixties, when Dylan’s fame and influence were at its peak. Two more will be spin offs of the singer’s oddly affecting digital radio show. The Theme Time Radio Hour explores mid-century American popular music thematically – program themes include baseball songs and songs about drinking.
Details of the final two books remain unknown. If Dylan decides to take up fiction, it wouldn’t be for the first time: at the zenith of his career, he wrote a novel called Tarantula which, because of an accident, wasn’t published until 1971. In 2003, Spin magazine judged one of its sentences the most unintelligible ever written by a rock star.
Click to watch video.
The link between music and literature is as old as the hills. In ancient Greece, storytellers sang their Homeric epics. These days, it’s almost commonplace for rock stars to publish their memoirs, novels and poems. Meanwhile, the literary canon about the musical canon grows by the day.
Music and literature are two sides of the same coin. Our panel of musicians and musicophiles – Oz rock legend Shane Howard, singer Ali McGregor and conductor Richard Gill – explore the many ways these two arts continue to inspire one another.
Singer/songwriter Clare Bowditch
When I was a teenager, the road to ‘success’ was fairly well paved. You joined a band, rehearsed your guts out, started playing small gigs, recorded a couple of songs onto your four-track, burnt them onto CD, sent them to community radio stations, started playing slightly larger rooms, and then tried to convince your husband’s brother’s friend’s cousins lover who worked for a record company to come down to your show and sign your band. Then Molly played you on Countdown the same week your album was released, people bought your album, and you instantly became a rock star. Forever. All pretty straightforward, right?
Not that ‘we of the late 90s’ did it that way – not at all. The gig and recording parts were fine – I had that ‘down’ from 17. It was the “record company” bit that freaked me out. Record companies were full of bastards, who wanted to change me. Or if they didn’t want to change me, they certainly wouldn’t think I was thin enough. Not that I’d ever spoken to anyone from a record company. At all. I’d rather not think about it, and keep making music. That was my attitude.
Over the years, one of the things I’ve observed in Australian contemporary music is, things change. For one, there’s this little thing called the internet. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but back in the early 90s this singer/songwriter called Ani DiFranco started using it to good effect and managed to completely side-step that whole “record company” hoopla, and release her own albums. Sold a few million. Well done on that front.
Then a little closer to home, a young busker called Johnathan Butler hopped onto the independence train and, after joining forces with friends The Waifs, decided they’d also release their own albums: once again, bombs away, the experiment worked. Two thumbs up on both counts.
Whether you like these musicians' music or not, you have to agree, they certainly shook things around a little. Respect where respect is due.
Which brings me back to how I overcame my fear of record companies. There’s nothing like ‘being vulnerable’ to make you open to suggestion. This is true for me and it’s true for record companies. My vulnerability came in the form of little life journey called “parenthood”, where one realizes that they’re going to have to make a living at precisely the same moment they become incredibly short on time. Flexibility is a plus. As is “Setting a Good Example”, such as meeting people before you hate them.
At the same time, record companies realised they weren’t immortal, artists were no longer willing to enter into long, inflexible, stupid, paralysing record contracts which exploited them. The result was that my management were able to negotiate for me a little thing called a licensing deal, which is where I retain the ownership of my music but allow a third entity to release my music on my behalf. This is why, after three independent albums, we decided to sign a deal. We do what we’re good at (songwriting, singing, recording, touring) and they do what they’re good at (marketing, promoting, gathering random sums of money into small herds for me to shepherd). Works for everyone.
The only rule today is that there are no rules. Although the question of “How to make your living out of music?” once pretended to have an answer (that little story I presented at the beginning), in reality, it’s always been a hard hard game, both in the mainstream and on the fringes. The great challenge of our time is not “how to make people buy CDs again”, but whether or not we so-called “Creatives” can adapt our thinking in time to embrace the complexity and possibility of an age where, really, the mainstream is dying. On the surface, this rapid change appears to threaten our very existence. In reality, doesn’t it just push us ever closer to the question of whether true creativity still exists. And if so, can we muster up a little? Ever heard the saying ‘Adapt or Die’? Worth keeping in mind, me thinks.
I’ll end with a brightening trend: I don’t really see the ‘terror of success’ that those of us coming up through the ‘90s ranks’ had to suffer. This generation of musicians seem far more confident that whatever they negotiate, it will work for them.
It’s gonna be a fascinating decade.
Promotional image from The Cockatoos
Victorian Opera is staging an uniquely Australian opera, The Cockatoos, based on a Patrick White short story.
Sung in English, the opera looks at a relationship in crisis as Olive and her husband Mick haven’t spoken for years communicating only by notes, until a stray cockatoo breaks their standoff. Librettist Sarah Carradine based her work on one of White’s best known short stories and the young cast (all under 25) hope to bring new life to this classic just as Opera Australia did earlier this year with Peter Carey’s Bliss.
Glasgow’s indie record label Chemikal Underground is moving into short stories, according to the Millions.
The label that broke bands such as Arab Strap and Mogwai has released an album of short stories called The Year of Open Doors with an introduction by Irvine Welsh. The stories by Scottish writers are significant because according to Welsh “collections of this ilk, that allow emergent writers to be showcased in print, are increasingly rare”. Writers include Ryan van Winkle and Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat reading his literary foray, “The Donaldson Boy” (audio file only).
By selling the collection for download its means that Scottish writers can find an international audience, either as individual stories (for 60p each) or as a whole album for UK£10.00. Using musicians like Moffat will also create a crossover appeal to non-traditional readers.
Campaigning Premier John Brumby has announced that a $24.7 million headquarters for contemporary music will be established in Melbourne.
The organisation will host Australian Independent Records Labels Association and youth music organisations The Push and FreeZA. The Age reports that the new Australian Music HQ will be located in the city and feature live gigs. The proposed package also includes support for music venues including an offer to “match dollar-for-dollar investments such as sound-proofing, acoustic treatments and improving sound systems”.
It’s a long way from the protests to save live music that besieged Victorian Parliament back in February. Helen Marcou who helped organise the protests as part of SLAM (Save Live Australia’s Music) could see what a change this represents. She told the Age, ‘'Contemporary music has finally been acknowledged by our good mates in power.’'
Andrew Weldon looks at record stores. This cartoon is taken from If You Weren’t a Hedgehog…If I Wasn’t a Haemophiliac.
Music writer Mark Mordue
When I think about poetry, about my need to read it and reflect on it and even express the odd poem here and there as if there were a more pure or direct voice in me that had somehow been switched on for a moment I recall that it arrived in my life through pop music and rock ‘n’ roll when I was barely more than a boy.
The sounds of popular culture were never just a beat to me. They became a form of melodic literature as vital as Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, or the poetry of John Keats, WH Auden, Robert Lowell and Kenneth Slessor that I was schooled in and ‘learnt’ to love so profoundly.
Indeed I see now that rock ‘n’ roll primed me for Keats’ romanticism and Auden’s rhymes, as well as Lowell’s confessional devastations and Slessor’s alienated urban shades. That I became so involved with Hamlet precisely because it was Shakespeare’s most rock ‘n’ roll work – for behind its iambic pentameters lies the rhythmic appeals of a young man in black, a grieving rebel who might well have been an Elizabethan James Dean in his day.
Flip forward to England in 1965 and what was Bob Dylan, really, but an electrified Hamlet come to life on those same old theatre stages, a hot soliloquist with a bad attitude and an acoustic guitar instead of a sword sheathed at his side? As the DA Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back reveals, Dylan even had his loyal Horatio (friend Bob Neuwirth) and an Ophelia that he tormented (lover Joan Baez), as well as a Polonius whispering in his ear (manager Albert Grossman).
Despite Dylan’s typically elusive response to a question at the time as to whether he was poet – “I think of myself more as a song-and-dance man” – the Beat writer Allen Ginsberg immediately recognized the young artist’s importance. In the Martin Scorcese documentary, No Direction Home, Ginsberg talks of Dylan’s arrival on the scene and what the older poet witnessed about his performing presence: “He [Dylan] became identified with his breath, like a shaman, with all his intelligence and consciousness focused on his breath.”
It’s a brilliant evocation of what Dylan personified from the very beginnings of his startling career: a shift in poetic life away from the page back into the ether of song. In Ginsberg’s word, Dylan transformed himself into “a column of air”.
Dylan himself was influenced by this same singing awareness – by what he called the ‘fearless’ rhyming of Cole Porter, by the archetypal power and conviction of Woody Guthrie’s folk ballads, by country music and the blues as much as the literary work of the Beats or TS Eliot or Rimbaud. And yet despite this history and ‘breath’, an idiot wind invariably continues to blow in from another direction, debating whether lyrics can ever be regarded as true poetry? As if everyone from Dylan to Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed must submit, cap-in-hand, to the demand their songs work silently and alone on the page if they are to qualify. A matter not helped by those hard-cover editions of lyrics from rock stars that, yes, all too often, read as lifeless if not a little pretentious and gaudy in their packaging. ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy’: And Other Misheard Lyrics by Gavin Edwards and Chris Kalb probably hitting a truer note than most when it comes to the reality of how we appreciate lyrics day-to-day.
Mark Mordue is one of Australia’s most respected critics and was awarded the Pascall Prize for critical writing earlier this year. This is an extract from an essay he originally published in the Griffith Review, which appears in full on his blog, The Basement Tapes.
Hardie Grant Books has released The 100 Best Australian Albums, a book that attempts to define our nation’s best popular music, and perhaps start a few arguments.
According to Bernard Zuel at the Age, a book that attempts to create a definitive list is a"guaranteed conversation starter and brawl provoker".
So for argument’s sake the top ten list is:
For Zuel the top ten has only one surprise – the Avalanches Since I Left You, which he describes as an “often genius mix of electronica, hip-hop, samples and [its] nagging pop appeal made it a hit around the world”. The list was careful to include 10 female performers after the Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time was criticised for its lack of women. But lists like this are about creating conversations.
Music fan and broadcaster Myf Warhurst has gone in the other direction, selecting her worst Australian albums. Her pick for worst album? The Bert and Patti Family Album from 1977 in which Warhurst in which “Australia’s TV royalty gave us their version of Making Whoopee… in which Patti sings, ‘Some think Bert’s not much but I like his gentle touch.’”
The book has created debate across the internet with online magazines like Mess + Noise featuring long comments threads on what should be on the list.
Broadcaster Vijay Khurana
Nick Hornby loves pop music. This we know. From his record store-owning High Fidelity protagonist Rob, to 31 Songs, his collection of essays about his emotional relationships with his favourite tunes, he’s a writer who often writes about pop. But can he make it himself?
Lonely Avenue is a collaboration between Hornby and US musician Ben Folds. Now, before you get giddy and imagine that Nick Hornby has “Done a Joaquin Phoenix” and given up his word processor for a synthesiser and a drum machine, I should tell you his contribution is strictly a literary one: It’s lyrics by Hornby, music by Folds, and performance by Folds and his band.
This idea of a novelist and a musician collaborating is a fascinating one (just imagine some of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth songs set to music by Kanye West. “Old Tom Bombadil / is a merry fellow…” YES!) In this case, the two artists in question seem to be very well suited to one another, and have spoken in the past about being fans of one another’s work. Hornby brings his greatest strengths to the new format, especially his humour and effortless ability to create memorable characters. And the album is full of characters, both real and imagined.
“Levi Johnston’s Blues” is about the ex-fiancée of former Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol. Johnston found himself suddenly and violently thrust into the media spotlight during the last presidential campaign, and the song is an imagining of the voice he was denied during the furore of the time.
“Password” is a betrayal song, focusing on a suspicious boyfriend trying to hack into his girlfriend’s email account. The unravelling of the plot is clever, and the emotion of the story is deliberately undermined by the ridiculous spelling-out of various words the protagonist is trying as possible passwords.
“Saskia Hamilton”, a love song from a writing student to the American poet, hints at another level in the collaboration between Hornby and Folds: the possibility that Hornby plays little jokes on Folds by giving him a certain first person voice to perform. In this case, Folds is lumped with a lot of bad student poetry, including having to rhyme “Saskia” with “Shakespeare”.
What’s most impressive about these Hornby lyrics is his ability to create memorable characters and humorous or tragic situations in such a drastically shorter format than what he’s used to. This challenge has an echo in Folds’ subsequent task of fitting Hornby’s words into the rhythm and structure of the music. As Folds said to triple j’s Zan Rowe in a recent interview:
“There are times when you have to cram in words in order to make this work, but I find that just adds to the tension of the moment… This is the moment where the narrator of the song has more to say and less time to say it in – that’s the way life works.” (Listen to Zan Rowe’s interview with Ben Folds).
Liking Lonely Avenue will depend a lot on your affection or otherwise for Folds’ music. If you like it as I do, you will get a lot out of these quirky, playful and surprisingly emotional stories.
Vijay Khurana is broadcaster at Triple J with an interest in books, crosswords and radio. This review is cross posted from the Bookshow Blog.
Whether it’s Lady Gaga or a song from the 60s you heard in a supermarket, certain songs get stuck in your head. In Germany they’re known as ‘Ohrwurm’ (or earworm in English) – those inescapable songs that you can’t get out of your head – until now.
The website Unhear it promises the “latest in reverse-auditory-melodic-unstickification technology” so you can kill those earworms. Their method is that they replace your earworm by selecting another from their collection of “equally catchy songs”. In fact Unhear confesses that they can’t completely cure the earworm: “So really all we’re doing is making you forget your old song by replacing it with another one… sorry.”
Singer/songwriter/ad man, Ben Birchall
Okay, I’ll admit it. I dance with the devil. He’s good looking, he pays for the drinks and he’s got the best record collection.
I’m a musician and I work in advertising.
But I’m on a dancefloor that’s fast filling as a new generation of musicians struggle to cope with a changing media landscape.
Advertising has always used music to sell. Waltzing Matilda was co-opted by Billy Tea in 1903. In the US, old-timey country radio shows were created by the sponsors, with popular musicians happily shilling the products. Like Hank Williams Snr on Mother’s Best Flour Show in 1951.
The idea of ‘selling out’ is largely a Baby Boomer construct. It would have been unheard of for Dylan to sell lingerie. Or the Beatles to sell sportswear. So they didn’t, at the time. But the boomers had the luxury of mass media culture and un-copyable records on their side. You could actually make money out of music.
Fast forward to 2010. Last week, the number one album on the ARIA charts sold 3600 copies. Music has become something we expect to own for nothing or stream for free. Add to that splintering audiences with the onset of digital TV and radio and it’s harder than ever to reach people. There’s no more Beatles on Ed Sullivan moments. Hell, there’s barely any Custard on Hey Hey It’s Saturday moments.
So our generation reaches the audience however it can. Little Red cash in on ANZ, Super Wild Horses get us into Bonds undies and Tame Impala check us into Crown.
Can we blame them? Impresarios with huge advances don’t knock on garage doors any more. But someone’s gotta pay for the studio. In my guise as an adman, I helped a friend place a song in a yoghurt ad I’d written. The money helped to pay for a home studio that he’s created three beautiful, homespun albums in. They might not exist without it.
The question is becoming not if, but how. You can do it well, as Radiohead showed us or you can do it horribly, as Jack White proved for Coke. It’s a matter of selecting what we endorse the same way we choose what we buy. But if musicians make music that’s true to them, however it’s consumed, they can make sure they’re leading and the devil’s following.
Ben Birchall is a musician and 3RRR Breakfaster who works in advertising. He is chairing Ethically Speaking: Advertising.
Dr Samuel Johnson has been an active Twitterer for some time but recently he has published a new dictionary based on our modern world.
Of course, it’s a fake but as an extract from the Quietus shows, author phoney-Johnston Tom Morton has captured much of Dr Johnson’s humour especially when defining hip-hop right down to the characteristic spelling. Here’s the basic definition: “Hip-Hop is oft defin’d as rhythmick Oratory set to a Beat; heralded as the inventive Poetry of the Streets & then condemn’d for all the Ills of Mankind.”
There’s a discussion of hip-hop artists (“equal Part a Town-Crier, Poet, Peacock & Highwayman”). But Mortons seems to have most fun translating lyrics into Johnson-ism, such as Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” as “Tis like a Jungle out there, oft-times I wonder how I keep from going UNDER. Push me not, SIR, I am close ‘pon the Edge. I try, most ardently, not to lose my HEAD”. Or take his re-working of Kelis’ “Milkshake”: “My Milk-Cart brings all the Rakes unto the Yard forthwith, and verily, it is better than THINE”.
Clare Bowditch on a recent album cover
It began last night when singer/songwriter Clare Bowditch watched our latest Feminism Has Failed video. She tweeted about them, “Also, are there any males out there who care to identify as feminists? Or is that q. moot? THAT could be an interesting chat!”
And it seems like a few people agreed with her that there was a chat to be had. Age columnist Ben Pobjie replied “I identify as a feminist. In fact, I said as much earlier today on Twitter, coincidentally enough.” Another tweeter, aleta_k declared “A feminist doesn’t need ovaries; needs to believe that ovaries should not be an impediment to fair treatment”
The debate turned when martydownunder tweeted: “We live in 2010 and not 1955. No need for feminism to exist apart from helping women in Muslim countries.” He could have been referring to Somalian activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s thoughts on feminism in the Muslim world.
Later mmebonbon countered with “We need feminism! Our parliamentarians still cat-call female members. What a disgrace in 2010”, while greyswandir argued “Then why is there still such a huge pay gap between men and women in equivalent jobs?”
Clearly this is a debate we need to keep having.
For
Against
Michael Nolan, co-editor of Kelly’s book
If writing about music is like dancing about architecture (as satirist Martin Mull’s regularly misattributed quip goes), then writing about a life in music, and accompanying it with a soundtrack recorded at the concerts that sparked the idea for the writing in the first place, is like… well, one way or another, it’s sure going to wear out some dancing shoes. Which is to say that when Paul Kelly came to Penguin with his ‘mongrel memoir’ and plans to release a box set of CDs of live solo or duo performances, it was obviously a great opportunity to build something beyond the pages of a simple book.
The genesis of How To Make Gravy was in Paul’s A–Z live shows, for which he performed just over a hundred of his songs alphabetically over four nights. His writing follows this format, touring his songbook and using the lyrics as a jump-off point for tales of friends, family, music and life. Numerous possibilities presented themselves for keeping the words and music entwined, as they unquestionably are for perhaps our best-loved songwriter and storyteller.
The book has a musical mirror in The A–Z Recordings box set – every chapter has its own unique soundtrack – and its discrete stories could be set free to live lives of their own (as a couple already have, having been published in The Monthly). There was also the opportunity to include a rich variety of illustrations, beyond the biographical photographs and memorabilia you’d expect; from an image of a 17th century painting, to a late-medieval fresco or other musicians whose careers were an inspiration. Paul really covers some ground – stabbing a finger in the index randomly finds you scrolling through Eastwood, Clint; Eco, Umberto; Eddy, Duane; Edison, Thomas; Edwards, Kutcha…
Pairing the hardback with The A–Z Recordings in a handsome slipcase was an irresistible proposition, making it possible to listen to the stripped-back versions of the songs as you read. The eBook edition offers digital portability. But the multimedia capabilities of the app are where the concept of ‘a book’ really expands, inviting you to happily lose yourself in Paul’s music, recollections and free-wheeling curiosities.
That penetrating gaze that stares out from the book cover comes to life as Paul greets you in a video to explain how the project’s ideas came about. Meanwhile, the app scans the reader’s device for versions of each song and makes them available to play as an accompaniment to the chapter. The first six songs from The A–Z Recordings are included and the rest are easily downloaded. (I won’t spoil the enjoyable surprise of a further app feature.)
And for an artist whose identity is founded on such a distinctive voice – so Australian and dry, like a crow calling on a still Sunday afternoon – it seemed unthinkable not to record him reading his book. Paul’s writing is very oral, so his readings have an easy, storyteller rhythm – before long you feel as though you’re sharing a window table at The Espy, spinning yarns.
A selection of audio narrations will soon be available for download, offering five or ten minutes in Paul’s candid and entertaining company. His self-effacing nature was later affirmed when we learned he’d also recruited several well-known Australians to record some chapters in their own idiosyncratic voices (I won’t reveal who just yet, though I’ll admit Paul declined my suggestion of having Bob Hawke recalling his campus gigs, or singing ‘Maralinga’ on a train with Tuvan throat singers.)
A conundrum in the audio recordings was what to do with the lyrics. What was written to be sung might not get across properly read as text, and Paul can’t help but feel for the missing melody. If he sang them a cappella, though, you’d have a hundred new Paul Kelly songs released simultaneously. We’re still thinking about this one – perhaps the answer is to have someone else read them as a form of poetry.
None of this would be much more than commerce – added extras – if not for the fact that all the elements act in the service of the storytelling. The words and the music gave Paul not only the structure of his project but the reason for it, so finding ways to present them together seemed an important part of the process.
Michael Nolan is a writer and editor at Penguin Books Australia.
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