In the British and Scots-Irish ballad tradition, from which today’s country music developed, men are mobile, roaming free while women endlessly wait, abandoned or pinned down by duty. The brooding mother is poisoned with cynicism: “All men are false”; all men lie, seduce, humiliate. The daughter, however, sees her absent, derelict father from an appreciative distance: he’s a “handsome devil,” predatory and amoral but charismatic and irresistible. He collects hearts like scalps. His scattered conquests, still infatuated, are like dazed prisoners in a chain gang. His emblem is the coldly metallic—the chain’s iron links as well as the mother’s fetishistic dagger, portraying the penis as impersonally wounding to women, defined as the “tender” and vulnerable. Gender is inescapably polarized.
The song, just four stanzas long, has a wonderfully lucid design, beginning in the present, jumping backward to sketch in the past, then returning to the present. There is no future—or rather the future is murdered by the mother’s bitterness and her daughter’s renunciation. Torn by pity and loyalty, the daughter chooses her mother’s paralyzed state of endless war, a stubborn mountain feud. The two are self-entombed with suffocating bad memories. There will be no more risky love and thus no children or posterity. Time stops.
Although only 19 when she recorded this debut album, where she accompanies herself on acoustic guitar, Baez already had exquisite vocal phrasing as well as a mastery of poignantly modulated dynamics. Other ballads on the album also work well in the classroom, such as “John Riley,” the homecoming tale of a seafarer so changed by seven harsh years away that he is unrecognized by his faithful betrothed, or “Mary Hamilton,” a complex saga of seduction, infanticide, and execution on the gallows that may descend from a seventeenth-century scandal at a royal court.
While Joan Baez has unfailingly impressed, her colleague and sometime flame Bob Dylan has not. To my dismay, Dylan was a very hard sell in my classes throughout the 1980s. His voice struck many students as thin and grating, while the relentless hyper-verbalism and attack style of his protest songs seemed out of sync with the times. That thankfully changed in the 1990s, probably because of the impact of aggressively political rap, which had become hugely popular among white male teenagers trapped in the blandness and materialism of suburban shopping-mall culture. Dylan’s message-heavy intensity seemed relevant again, a recovered stature happily sustained in the new century.
“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Dylan’s 1965 breakthrough radio hit, is actually a proto-rap song in the rural “talking blues” tradition. Its delirious barrage of satiric blows at a surveillance society of corrupt authority figures, economic exploitation, and assembly-line institutions speaks directly to our time. I have repeatedly used the song to demonstrate how much can be packed into a very short space (two minutes, twenty seconds).
But Dylan’s true masterpiece, in my view, is “Desolation Row,” the more than eleven-minute song that closes Highway 61 Revisited (1965). I submit that this lyric is the most important poem in English since Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (which influenced it) and that it is far greater than anything produced since then by the official poets canonized by the American or British critical establishment. The epic ambition, daring scenarios, and emotionally compelling detail of “Desolation Row” make John Ashbery’s multiple-prize-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) look like the verbose, affected academic exercise that it is. I have written elsewhere (in regard to the selection process for my book on poetry, Break, Blow, Burn) of my rejection of the pretentious pseudo-philosophizing of overpraised contemporary poets like Harvard’s Jorie Graham, none of whom come anywhere near the high artistic rank of Bob Dylan.
“Desolation Row” is so long—four printed pages, taking three class days to discuss—that I rarely do it now. But it is a stunning achievement, with all the passion and vision missing from today’s writers in virtually every genre. When I first transcribed the song for classroom use, its elegantly symmetrical structure leapt into view: ten triads (sets of three stanzas), each ending in the rhythmic refrain, “Desolation Row.” As recorded, the song is accompanied by acoustic guitars that begin quietly and become lashingly emphatic.
Modeling himself on his mentor, the working-class bard Woody Guthrie, Dylan has chronically concealed and denied his wide reading. “Desolation Row” uses Rimbaud’s hallucinatory surrealism to fuse T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land vision of Western civilization to the comic archetypal mythologies of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Bible, Roman history, fairy tales, Shakespeare, and Hollywood movies fly by. Dylan’s muse here is, I believe, Billie Holiday: “As Lady and I look out tonight / From Desolation Row.” He is listening to a record by Lady Day (as she was reverently called by jazz musicians) and has assumed her melancholy insight and personal trauma as his own.
Each triad of “Desolation Row” exposes the lies, limitations, cruelties, or collateral damage in different sectors of society: politics, law enforcement, and racial injustice; heterosexuality (set in a hostile gay bar); religion; science; psychiatry; the legitimate theater; corporate careerism; universities and English departments. Desolation Row is a state of mind, a self-positioning at the margins, where the artist identifies himself, like the Romantics, with the dispossessed, the outcasts and losers.
In the final triad, after a mournfully piercing harmonica solo, Dylan himself appears, addressing someone whom I suspect is his mother. She has probably sent him a chatty letter about his Zimmerman relatives, whose name he had long cast off. Dylan the artist, taking Lady Day as his foster mother, bids goodbye to his old identity and to books and letters and everything processed by social norms. He will seek truth, if it is ever to be had, in direct experience and spiritual intuition.
After many experiments and permutations, “Art of Song Lyric” now has a dual trajectory. I begin with the Appalachian ballad tradition from its politicization during the violent unionization of Kentucky coal-miners in the 1930s through the protest-oriented folk movement shepherded by Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan’s controversial turn to the electric guitar, then a symbol of commercialized rock ’n’ roll. Folk-rock, Dylan’s creation, lasts barely five years but produces innumerable lyrics of high poetic quality, from Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” to Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s dreamily jazz-inflected yet ominously apocalyptic “Wooden Ships” (co-written by Paul Kantner).
Next we follow the African-American tradition from its roots in West Africa to the emergence of the blues in the rural South. YouTube has become a tremendous resource for video clips of West African “speaking drums,” call-and-response group singing, and melismatic vocal technique (probably Islamic in origin) that survived in American blues. The powerful religious current in African-American culture surfaced in the Negro spirituals (a fusion of blues tonalities with Protestant hymn measure) that white audiences first heard from the Fisk Jubilee Singers on international tour after the Civil War.
The blues spread into jazz and torch singing and then Chicago electric blues, the crucible of rock ’n’ roll. The British blues revival of the 1950s and ’60s produced great bands like the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin. Simultaneously, African-American soul music merged gospel singing with secular, romantic themes and, in Marvin Gaye’s landmark What’s Going On, a topical social consciousness.
James Brown, “the godfather of soul,” shattered European song format by returning popular music to West African style, an endless stream of exclamatory riffs over heavy, “funky” bass and percussion that gave birth to disco. In the 1970s, lyrics lost importance in hedonistic, producer-driven disco; with a few exceptions, political content vanished. But the invisible mastermind d.j.’s of disco clubs took their dual-turntable technology to the streets and by the late 1970s had created rap (influenced by Jamaican “toasting”) in the Bronx. Elements of rap had long existed in African-American culture, where rhythmic speech as performance was already recorded in the 1920s and probably had antecedents in the
recitations of African griots (tribal bards).
Rap spread globally in the late twentieth century and, under the general rubric of hip-hop, now dominates music industry sales. It helped inspire the poetry slam movement, which began in Chicago in the mid-1980s and went national in the ’90s. Rap as an incantatory, improvisational form descends from the “dozens” or “snaps,” a competitive African-American game of escalating put-downs, cheered on by the group. Its fast pace and bouncing internal rhymes have enormous propulsive vitality. As an artistic style, rap is energizing and confrontational rather than contemplative or self-analytic. The voice is so weaponized that admission of fears, doubts, or ambiguities can be difficult. Themes are sometimes scattershot or undeveloped. Nevertheless, rap’s extemporaneous channeling of colloquial speech is so robust and dynamic that it makes most contemporary American and British poetry seem stilted, stale, and cloistered.
To complete the spectrum in “Art of Song Lyric,” I do a brief survey of the major genres of hymn, aria, lieder, cabaret, and musical theater. But my primary goal is to give historical shape and context to the enormous body of modern popular music that young people now hear in random digital isolation, without the framing commentary by d.j.’s in the old era of radio airplay. High-level song production is becoming depersonalized, with beats invented by digital whiz kids being handed off for slapped-on lyrics—an assembly-line contrivance then dropped in the lap of a star vocalist. The integral artistic bonding of music and lyrics is weakening. There is one solution, perhaps the only one: immersion in the lost poetry of music.
* [Salon.com, March 31, 2016.]
3
ON RIHANNA*
The songs I most admire on Rihanna’s latest album, Anti, are “Desperado,” “Never Ending” (with its lilting old Caribbean sea chanty refrain), and “Love on the Brain,” a piercing aria of retro-soul grand opera. Only the husky, soul-baring Adele right now is matching Rihanna’s emotional intensity and authenticity.
My favorite Rihanna song is probably the hypnotic “Pour It Up,” from Unapologetic. I think it is a true work of art, with a chilly avant-garde edge. The stunningly sensual strip-club setting of the official video has unfortunately distracted people from the eerie power of the song itself, which is about a state of mind rather than a banquet of vibrating flesh.
Certainly, I applaud the steely exhibitionism of the regally enthroned Rihanna and her phalanx of twerking pole-dancers: the video correctly represents strip clubs as citadels of female power, not as pig-stys for rutting male buffoons, as they were once routinely portrayed by feminist puritans. For an article called “Woman as Goddess” in the October 1994 issue of Penthouse magazine, I took a woman journalist on a tour of New York strip clubs to demonstrate how admiring and visibly cowed the men were in the pagan presence of a dynamic woman dancer. Men’s money in that ritual environment does not control women but rather the opposite: money is the poor tribute by which desperate men win a dominant woman’s momentary attention.
When one listens to “Pour It Up” without the video’s luscious visual stimulations, its infernal soundscape (almost like the jittery electronic soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) is overwhelming. We are in The Twilight Zone, where a leading woman artist who grew up married to idyllic nature on a sun-drenched island is wandering in a murky, directionless urban world of overwhelming wealth and material display. No recent song to my knowledge has so directly confronted the contemporary search for meaning—which too many people have deflected into the toxic flux of an insanely polarized politics.
Rihanna is virtually the only performer today who consistently intrigues and fascinates me. My exacting high standards were formed by the golden age of the entertainment industry, which began in the 1920s (with jazz, radio, and sound movies) and which precipitously declined by the late 1990s, as the Web achieved hegemony. It’s as if the Muses have abandoned us: look at how painfully clumsy a proven genius like Madonna seems as she struggles to regain the creative brilliance and global impact of her early years, when every taboo-breaking video she released was electrifying.
At a time when too many Hollywood actors are hopelessly depthless and try to compensate for their mediocrity by hijacking arts-celebrating ceremonies for clichéd political rants, Rihanna exudes the complexity, mystery, and magic of classic stars like Ava Gardner, a country-girl renegade who lived and loved spontaneously, her stormy melodramas periodically erupting into the news. I love to monitor Rihanna’s transnational doings via the Daily Mail, with its pap shots of her enigmatic predawn exits from nightclubs or her grand arrivals in full drag at glittering events. What maverick fashion smarts she has—that startling profusion of sculptural looks and the ingenious array of accessories and makeup in dazzling rainbow colors. Rihanna is an instinctive performance artist born for the camera.
I wrote two cover stories on Rihanna four years ago, one in The Sunday Times Magazine in London and the other in the magazine supplement of La Repubblica in Rome. There is a piquant saga attached to the London piece, in which I warned that by increasingly Instagramming fabulously sexy photos of herself to taunt her bad-boy ex, Chris Brown, Rihanna was ominously headed down the same path as Diana, Princess of Wales. The charismatic Diana seduced the media and skillfully used them as a propaganda tool against her errant husband, the callously adulterous Charles. But then Diana was stalked nonstop for years by the ravenous media wolf pack—leading directly to her fatal 1997 car crash in the Alma tunnel in Paris. In its resumé of my article, the Daily Mail published the most sensational of Rihanna’s Instagrams (from the superbly atmospheric fireplace series taken by her longtime close friend, the gifted Melissa Forde).
By some strange alchemy, my Sunday Times Magazine cover story was published by chance on the very weekend that Rihanna arrived in London to debut her fashion line. Returning to her hotel early Sunday morning after a heavy night of pub-crawling, she found the newspaper waiting outside her room and was amazed to see herself linked on the front page to the legendary Diana, whom she loved. She tweeted two images to her millions of followers—the magazine section lying on her bed and the front page where she was flagged above the headline—the big surprise that greeted her when (as she tweeted) she “came home drunk” to her hotel.
There is a melancholy coda to this story. Rihanna’s conservative, church-going mother in Barbados eventually saw the sexy fireplace photos and came down hard on her. Rihanna told Elle magazine, “I’m not afraid of any person in this world but my mother—I’m terrified of her….She went crazy on me….I felt like I got my ass whipped in front of the class in school.” So Rihanna’s blazing career in ultra-sophisticated soft-core online porn seems, alas, to be over. If I played any role, however small, in that major cultural loss, I do publicly repent here and now!
* [“Uncensored: Camille Paglia on Rihanna, Identity Politics, and Sexuality,” interview with Alex Kazemi, V magazine, March 27, 2017.]
4
THE DEATH OF PRINCE*
I would certainly classify Prince as a major artist of the late twentieth century, but I must admit some disappointment with how his brilliant career developed or failed to develop over time. His great period was his early one, from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when he created a brand-new sonic landscape and used the emergent genre of music videos as a flamboyant medium of performance art. Musically, he downscaled Rick James’ massive macho funk chords into a bewitching web work of intricate rhythms, intimate and sensual. As a sexual persona, he borrowed transgender motifs from Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix and refashioned himself first as a half-naked s&m rent boy and then as an aristocratic dandy, dripping silk and lace.
There is both a Mardi Gras and voodoo element in Prince: all four of his grandparents were born in Louisiana (and photos of his parents suggest they were at least partly Creole). He was one of the most photogenic people on the planet: his personal magnetism and artistic intensity verged on the eerie and mys
tical. But it’s clear that, like Michael Jackson, Prince became a prisoner of his own fame. I was horrified by the aerial views of Paisley Park published after his death: I had no idea Prince was living like that—in a lavish windowless bunker as characterless as an office park. Paisley Park is of course mainly a recording studio, but as a residence, it looks like a set for Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.”
No music fan who lived through Prince’s sensational Purple Rain period in 1984 will ever forget it. We were all drenched in the florid extravagance of his swashbuckling self-presentation and the searing confession of his half-crippling melancholy. The long, climactic title song of that movie still has a tremendous, near-religious charge. But then what? By the late 1980s, Prince remained highly productive, but there was a lapse in originality, and very few of his songs ever reached the top of the charts again. Changing his name to a love symbol seemed like a silly stunt to me, and I wasn’t impressed by a multi-millionaire writing “slave” on his face as a gesture against his record company.
The news about Prince’s death two weeks ago was announced while my “Art of Song Lyric” course was meeting. We were in fact doing the period from James Brown through soul, disco, and funk. I was incredulous when I got back to my office and saw the shocking headline on the Drudge Report. At our next class, I immediately showed Prince’s “Kiss” video (1986) to demonstrate what pure talent looks like. What a low-budget masterpiece that beautifully edited video is—nothing but dance, gesture, seductive rhythm, and witty warmth.
And then I showed a new discovery, a Patti Labelle song from 1989 that I hadn’t heard in decades and had completely forgotten—“Yo Mister.” I had no idea that Prince had written, produced, and played on that powerful song about a young girl dying of a drug overdose until I read it in the Daily Mail after his death. In the video, Patti is shown (like a deus ex machina on a Philadelphia balcony) condemning the girl’s hard-hearted father as he stonily walks away from her grave in the Louisiana countryside, where a New Orleans funeral march is being performed. This song, with its complex church bell reverberation, suggests the serious, avant-garde direction that Prince’s later career could have taken but unfortunately did not.
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