by Steve Almond
In the end, I finished up my story and got the fuck out of the ghetto and stayed the fuck out of the ghetto (to quote Naughty by Nature) and shut up about my hip-hop fetish, much to the relief of all involved, though I did eventually convince my editors to let me write a story about Lastrawze, a miserably earnest profile I assumed would vault them to stardom. A few weeks later, Nookie informed me that one of the Strawze had gone upstate on gun charges. They were never heard from again.
Interlude:
Winter in America with Gil Scott-Heron
This is as good a time as any to acknowledge Gil Scott-Heron, the great unsung prophet of American music who is often and stupidly hailed as the “Godfather of hip-hop.” He is, if anything, its inventor. In 1971, Gil released “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” the first song to fuse the tradition of the street preacher with that of the soul singer. “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang would not be released for another decade.
I saw Gil in concert only once, flying from Miami to Washington, D.C., for the chance. I remember almost nothing of that trip aside from the fight I got into with my soon to be ex-girlfriend. It was the sort of fight you relish in the late stages of a long relationship, when you’re both hunting for an excuse to hate each other’s guts. She took me to this Dominican restaurant that made the best chicken on earth—it certainly smelled that way—and we got up to the counter and she ordered a whole chicken without even consulting me. Wait a second, I said, do you like dark meat or white meat? What does it matter? she said. And I said, It matters because I like dark meat, so if you like dark meat too then we should order by the piece and she sighed the Monumental Sigh of Womankind and said, Fine, I’ll eat the white meat! and placed the order and both of us stared at the chickens twirling helplessly on their spits. And of course when we got home she reached for a piece of dark meat and of course I said, See, I knew this would happen and she said, What? then shook her head and we proceeded to the feature attraction, starring the Woman Who Refuses to Think About Anyone Else and the Man So Petty It Boggles the Mind, which lasted for the next thirty-six hours, until I was scheduled to depart, without a farewell, and sort of intentionally peed on her toilet seat.
Why is this my dominant memory of that visit? Why does my mind so dependably seize on the awful? This was a weekend I’d been looking forward to for months, because I’d revered Gil Scott-Heron since my uncle Pete gave me The Best of Gil Scott-Heron as a high school graduation gift, back in 1984.
I had no idea what to make of the record at first. It did not sound like “Cruel Summer” by Bananarama. Nor did it sound like “Shark Attack” by Split Enz. The arrangements baffled me. Was this Latin music? Funk? And what of the strange instruments (flute? timbale?). Gil sang beautifully—when he chose to sing. But more often he delivered the words in a sly chant that confused and enthralled me. It’s the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His was a masterpiece: deep, resonant, slightly muddied by the South, learned but playful. It was like listening to Richard Pryor and Malcolm X and Barry White in three-part harmony. “The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia,” he explained, in the track “B-Movie.”
They want to go back as far as they can even if it’s only as far as last week. Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards. And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment…. Someone always came to save America at the last moment, especially in B movies. And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future they looked for people like John Wayne. But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan. And it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at like a B movie.
I’d never heard anyone explain, in language so simple and persuasive, the phony messianism of the Reagan Revolution.
Gil was so prescient as a social critic that people didn’t understand what he was talking about half the time. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” was (and is) happily misunderstood as a call to arms. In fact, it was a jeremiad about the narcotic effects of screen addiction, how Americans had been lulled into a moral fugue by their televisions. The song was composed in 1970.
More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.
If this makes Gil Scott-Heron sound didactic, the fault is mine, for it is the unique talent of the prophet to convert rage into poetry. Gil did so by creating a musical lexicon that ranged from Marvin Gaye to John Coltrane, from James Brown to Tito Puente. “Shut ’Em Down” may have been about nuclear power plants, but it was also a joyous hymn, complete with horn charts and gospel singers. “The Bottle” managed to turn the ravages of addiction into a salsa party.
But I wanted to tell you about the weekend in question, my one and only encounter with Gil. Clearly, it would have been impossible for him to live up to my hopes. Like any good Drooling Fanatic, I expected an ascension. Why not? The club was small and we had good seats.
But Gil.
Gil was a wreck, a muttering wreck, jittery, coked up, or tweaked out on some other cruel amphetamine. He looked skeletal. He couldn’t remember the words to his songs and so resorted to vamping. Between songs, he delivered semicoherent soliloquies in which the essential topic was his own desolation.
It was this desolation (I think) that makes me remember the fight about the chicken, which epitomized my own failures, emotional and otherwise, the death of hope being the central drama of that weekend.
I was devastated. I was devastated because I have a birth defect, or possibly some other kind of defect, wherein I expect my musical heroes to shower the air with lilies of patience and wisdom. It didn’t occur to me that prophecy—a heightened sensitivity to our moral lapses, a compulsion to declaim—might arise from internal distress. Certainly not in the case of Gil, whose precision as an observer of American folly was the equal of Twain, and who enjoyed the refuge of music.
What I had failed to discern (forgive me, I was still in my twenties) was that true prophets are cursed. They wind up stoned to death. Or alone in the desert, naked and howling. We might take as proof the fact that none of Gil’s albums reside in Rolling Stone’s Top 500. Such lists are set aside for the true artists of our time, the Def Leppards and TLCs. Gil has become a curious relic, the original uppity rhyming nigger, though he has no more to do with the contemporary hip-hop stars who sample his tracks than Isaiah did with the idolaters of Judah. He preached—with a great and useless eloquence—against the delusions of materialism and violence.
Gil himself has become a spectral presence, arrested on drug charges twice in the past few years, imprisoned for ten months on Rikers Island. An old girlfriend of his (or a woman claiming to be) described him as a crack addict living amid squalor. Gil denies this. It’s hard to know what to believe. Still, I find myself wanting to defend the guy’s honor. The prophet is an idealist unable to silence his disappointment, who lashes out at the world’s demons at the risk of awakening his own.
His fate certainly came as no surprise to me. It was clear from the moment I set eyes on him in that club. The years had ravaged his face. His long body flicked like a sparrow’s. Time and again he looked in sorrow at a snifter of cognac, which trembled on his keyboard. And when he sang, his voice—once a magnificent gravelly croon-sounded torn.
In Which Mr. Joe Henry (Rather Unwittingly) Becomes My Writing Coach
There was a time when women may have wanted to have my babies. Now it’s just middle-aged men who want my guitar pick. Or want to take me home and play me their Joe Henry records.
—Chuck Prophet11
In the fall of 1995, I fled the world of journalism for the incredibly lucrative realm of short fiction. This meant driving from Miami to the University of North Carolina at Gr
eensboro, a school I had applied to—and I wish I was kidding here—because of its spiffy four-color brochure. As a parting gift, my friend Jim gave me a homemade tape with a couple of Joe Henry albums. This was the heyday of the No Depression movement and everyone was listening to that one Son Volt record. Jim was a staunch No Depression fan, meaning a) he worshipped country music; and b) he was himself depressed.
I figured Joe Henry was part of that scene. I slipped in the tape, but didn’t listen too carefully. Then, up around Pensacola, the song “Short Man’s Room” came on. It was an elegant waltz of the sort that might have been played at a barn dance 150 years ago. The narrator seemed like a harmless eccentric at first. Then the fiddle reeled into a minor key and the second verse arrived.
I drink more than maybe I should
But I don’t go out when I do
I put my feet up in the window
And I ride my dreams like a canoe
Gradually, it emerged that this guy was the town drunk, a lonely old Indian descending into alcohol dementia. I once thought I’d live forever, he explained. I pitched for the Indian leagues/But now I guess I’ve learned some better/You’re only as good as your knees.
There were several reasons this song would haunt me throughout grad school. I was an aging jock living in an isolated carriage house with very low ceilings. I was sufficiently addicted to pot that I eventually stalked my dealer. But the main thing was that Joe Henry had written a short story. He had created a character and induced him to tell the truth. I would spend every day of the next two years trying to figure out how the fuck he did it.
I was entering a new phase as a Drooling Fanatic, a kind of literary apprenticeship. There was no TV in my life. E-mail was something you checked once a week at the library. I sat in a sweaty recliner crapping out rough drafts, with the boom box cranked. I read too, of course. I lay on my mattress and frisked library loaners for The Secret of How Not to Suck. But it was the songs that taught me the most.
I read Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” like it was the Koran. But it took the Tom Waits ballad “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” for me to grasp the essence of an unreliable narrator, how the poignancy of self-deception resides in its erosion. Cormac McCarthy was a dark monster of language. But if I wanted poetic violence, I turned to Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads. For reasons that remain unclear, during this time I read The Executioner’s Song, all 1,072 pages. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Steve Earle had covered the same terrain more movingly in the song “Billy Austin.” It took him only six minutes.
Time was of the essence—that was the point. Us MFA plebs were like grubby windup dolls. Pull the string and we chanted Chekhov’s maxim: cut your first three pages. But Chekhov had nothing on Bruce Springsteen, who opened “Atlantic City” with the greatest first line in the history of pop music: They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night/now they blew up his house too. Was there a single person on earth who could resist the mystery of this line, with its promise of ruin?
I listened to these songs compulsively, as if by osmosis my writing might improve. It didn’t. My characters continued to sit alone in rooms, frittering with artificial woe. They remained dim figures, driven to action not by the defects of their own hearts but by the doomed impulse of all young writers, which is to impress the reader.
What else did I do during those two years? I glommed on to local musicians and hosted hootenannies at my place, during which I stood off to one side curled in a terrified silence. I shaved my head. I threw myself headlong into catastrophic affairs. Songs were the only regular company I kept and the only thing that tempered the self-seriousness with which I was afflicted. To hear the Smoking Popes croon “Let’s Hear It for Love” was to realize that erotic turmoil was not a subject suited solely to tragedy, but a variety of cosmic joke.
One of my favorite songs of that era, by a long-forgotten band called the Bogmen, featured a lisping narrator who ricochets between bitter harangues against his ex-girlfriend and tender confessions. The music was geeky R&B of the sort Kool & the Gang would have produced if the Gang had gone to Montessori schools. I must have listened to “Suddenly” a thousand times, and every time I reached the final line (Suddenly, I have found myself alive) it roused me. I was trying so hard to absorb this idea: that all our defensive postures boiled down to human longing.
A Brief Disclaimer
Let me assure you that—despite my highfalutin exegeses—I realize how pointless it is to parse song lyrics. Most people simply don’t give a shit about the words. I myself spent years not giving a shit about the words. Or worshipping words that were shit. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.) The fact that I can recite Styx’s “Renegade” from memory sort of says it all.
I was also an early devotee of R.E.M., whose lyrics were for years famously unintelligible. A few hardcore fans eventually managed to decode Michael Stipe’s mumbling, the result being lines such as There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads “react.” Did this discovery dim our devotion? Not one splinter.
This is because our gut response to a song derives from its melody and rhythm. The right tune can revive the baldest clichés and lend dignity to all manner of piffle. It is also why I feel such elaborate gratitude when a musician bothers to treat the language with care. I’m grateful to Bob Dylan for the line The wind was howling and the snow was outrageous, with its pained internal rhyme. I’m grateful to Mike Doughty for flicking an ash like a wild, loose comma and to John Prine for noticing that the wind was blowing, especially through her hair and to Antje Duvekot for her wistful declaration with all the sand that gets into this world, we should all be motherfucking pearls.
Because honestly, these folks don’t have to bother. Most rockers have made a fine career out of rhyming platitudes. In fact, there’s a decent argument to be made that songwriters generally screw themselves when they cavort with literature. Which brings us, unavoidably, to this….
Interlude:
A Mercifully Brief Survey of Prog Rock Lyricism
Progressive rock is what happens when pop stars get a hard-on for high art. It’s what happens when they ditch guitar-based blues music in favor of symphonic suites composed on synthesized flute with a 13/7 time signature. More than anything, prog represents the profound danger of literary influence on popular music. Let us examine the case of Jon Anderson, a high school dropout who got his start on washboard in a skiffle band and dreamed of playing professional soccer but who instead joined the band Yes and started wolfing down Eastern philosophies.
“We were in Tokyo on tour,” Anderson explains to his fans, “and I had a few minutes to myself in the hotel room before the evening’s concert. Leafing through Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, I got caught up in a lengthy footnote on page 83…. So positive were the Shastras that I could visualize then and there four interlocking pieces of music being structured around them.”
I know what you’re thinking: who are these Shastras and where can I find their albums? Alas, Anderson is referring to a series of esoteric Buddhist texts. Fortunately, Anderson didn’t just read this footnote and forget about it, as so many rock stars might in the addled minutes before a show. No, he used the footnote as the basis for an epic double album entitled Tales from Topographic Oceans, which Yes released in 1973.
What is Tales about? It is perhaps more efficient to discuss what it is not about. It is not about dropping out of high school. It is not about skiffle. It is not about soccer. It is about, well, here’s a tiny taste:
Craving Penetrations Offer Links with the Self Instructor’s Sharp And Tender Love as We Took to the Air, a Picture of Distance12
I’m not sure it’s possible to fathom such profundity, even with a self instructor’s help. But I’ll try for a translation: Help! I am being held prisoner by a penetration-craving Yogi! The reason these words seem to be arranged at random is because I have to speak in code. “Tender love” means genital fondling. Wait. Shit. He’s coming.
Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman was so bored by the record that he once ordered and ate an entire Indian meal on top of his Hammond organ during a performance. When I heard this story, I thought I might be in love with Rick Wakeman. Then it came to my attention that Wakeman himself released a solo record called Journey to the Centre of the Earth based on the Jules Verne story and recorded, I’m afraid, with a full orchestra. My favorite passage is entitled “The Battle.” It features a clash between two giant sea monsters “rising out of the angry sea” and ends with this pulse-racing play-by-play:
Crocodile teeth, lizard’s head, bloodshot eye, stained ocean red
Journey sold fourteen million copies. Jethro Tull’s 1973 concept album Passion Play was a number one record in the United States despite—or perhaps because of—lyrics like this:
And your little sister’s immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George
If you want to understand where the defiant musical ineptitude and proud grunting of punk rock came from, you have only to look back to prog, a genre built on the spectacle of overcompensation. You will find the spirit of prog in the lute compositions of Sting, the agonizing tirades of Trent Reznor, and yes, even in Toto’s searing cultural explorations—wherever there are insecure rock stars maxing out the credit card of their own talent.
How Writers Sing
The lesson here is pretty obvious: musicians should wear their literary influences lightly. Having said this, I’m equally sure the opposite isn’t true. Literature can and should aspire to a musical condition.