by Camden Joy
Now I naturally know how this sounds of course one receives much encouragement as a child that is based on apocryphal rhyming nonsense, even patently false fairy tales and superstitious conjecture, yet too is there that share which comes out in the end to be absolutely true. UNBELIEVABLE TRUTHS Mixed-Up with BELIEVABLE LIES: One hears for example of Easter bunnies and ESP and massacres on Saint Valentine’s Day, of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and Tom Dooley, hears that the government will keep any bank from failing, that we are free men created equal, that it’s bad luck to use the scissors in the house, that women shoot one another to death, that men can fly, that men have in fact To The Moon Flown and Upon Its Sea of Tranquility Walked, that the majority will decide what is fair, that Jack sold a cow for a handful of worthless beans, that I want to rock and roll all night (and party every day), that the state encourages our pursuit of happiness and wants us to do what we want whenever we want and we can even earn extra coinage by putting our teeth beneath our pillows while we sleep, that they made Susan B. Anthony dollars and $2 bills for a short time and then just stopped FOR NO REASON but there is NOTHING suspicious about it AT ALL, that once a year groundhogs determine the seasons, that army colonels and church men are virtuous, that in Chocolate Town all the trains are painted brown, that once a poodle in a microwave was exploded, that man comes from genetically altered monkeys named Adam & Eve who were deposited here by flying saucers, that the rich write the rules and the rest of us tag along, that POWS remain in the hands of the commie VC, that in the hand of our last chance lies the stabbed-up heart of our Lord Jesus Christ the messiah, that your insurance company wants to hear what you think, that Jackie Wilson (or Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding or Ray Charles or James Carr) and not Al Green is the greatest record album singer that ever was, that a pair of sneakers tossed over the power lines in front of your place means another angel just got her wings, and that we all go to heaven but for those who don’t brush their teeth or make their beds or clean their rooms and that sometime in growing up white boys and black boys shed skin, trade color, and become men. Most of these—as I say—seem preposterously far-fetched yet many turn out to be accurate—and as for the last, one need only compile a clean set of experiential data (KEEP LOOKING you will see) to learn how little separates “Wasp” from “Blood” and verify the fundamental actuality of invibiosus dermal melanism.
It then becomes ridiculous how as honky kids we learn words like buck nigger but no appropriate response (peckerwood ball-face), how we are left ignorant as to how best to insult our original race, after our color has switched. I grew up a vanilla cracker blue-eyed devil boy and one day very soon I’ll become a bongo-lipped porch monkey, a rugheaded Hershey bar-colored man, but I will never have learnt to snap back at the poor white trash, at the pink whoogies who corner me with butterhead, jig, raisin, chungo bunny, splib, I will be left in the dark, so to speak, not knowing enough to bite back with hay eater, marshmallow jeff chalk-headed whitey, my spears will be as toys to them and helpless my body theirs to enslave—
Oh Sob Not for ME but rather for ALL OF US—for 96% of our good people now do not vote, 64% cannot read, 37% cannot cook or clean, almost everyone tells BAD JOKES—what has this land come to—what of the confetti eggs and air conditioning, the better TV, these things that were promised us as children, where now is that “CAN DO” zeal which mapped the impenetrable regions of this dark continent and did so much to cleanse and structure our formerly primitive plains and uninhabitable mountainscapes, the variegated textures of this land, now everyone costs something and nobody will sleep with me, this is no revolution (despite what the white people sports car commercials say)—The Advertocrats are making fools out of us! (And they dare to call LEON SPINKS a drunkard!) And my shoulder’s got a kink in it and WHEN! WILL! I! BE! BLACK!—these voices won’t stop sobbing, I am inside someone who hates me—My soul is free black, as pure black as night bending to embrace thee—and in mammals and birds (according to Gloger) melanin pigmentation acts as a barrier against the effects of sunlight (namely, ultraviolet rays) and limits the light entering the eyeball—OH Brothers and Sisters I Want to See Life This Way OH When Will I Be Black—The secret, it’s all in the elusively heard tickings of biological clocks, that gradual stringing of beads of time which takes us here from there and eventually turns us into The People We Admire—which is to say that although time it’s passing my IMPATIENCE it’s growing and I can see myself I’m singing in the choir of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Tennessee beside Minister Al Green but I must wait, for when I see myself this way—happy-voiced in song—I notice I AM BLACK and I so love myself once I notice this, it’s a manner of love which seems almost to blister one’s lungs with its full-on intensity, like when some plant you pass sends out its invisible spores and envelopes your world in rosy-misted scents and you catch fleeting glimpses of a beautiful woman’s hand reclining on the screen door’s other side—LA LA FOR YOU—like when a soft dusk falls—that sweetest of angels—to collect up in his wings the angered smoking ruins of your soul, one feels tall, well-rested, soft to the touch, light, at ease, one’s shoulder has no kink in it—LA LA FOR YOU—a moon so chalky full it makes one’s extremities tingle, the nightingales all seem to be chirping “What Is This Feeling” or “Let’s Get Married” one possesses confidence in one’s readership one gossips with strangers freely about the president—LA LA FOR YOU—the friendly wave of a tree branch, the hum of a departing pleasure-craft lifts high one’s spirits, one again recalls kindly care-free Marie at the corner candy counter (so fine! that’s right, her!) and our absolute duty to confide everything we know to care-free Marie (right on!)—LA LA FOR YOU—one trusts oneself despite all we know about oneself, this LA LA FOR YOU is all the love we need for when wearied peoples ask, “Who can even make a living anymore?” there is that love of preacher Green to remind us, “I guess there’s no good reason for living; but I’ll keep on living for you, babe (there’s nothing else to do, babe).” Yes indeed! Once, when I was younger—I am not yet eighteen now and this was back some time—I tried to make a living by starting a business with a friend. We wanted (naturally enough) to be advertocrats, big-time mercantilist publicity pugs, so we studied up on advertocratic lingo (frankly it all read like nonsense to us) and after great consideration we everywhere distributed mailers that said, but these met with absolutely no response no one came to us wishing help in pushing their sports cars away so then as further samples of our wares we manufactured envelopes which carried a date and were made to fit precisely over the heads of parking meters and read, but again the windows remained dark within our house of opportunity so then we put up posters which said, But still there was no answer of any kind so then we put up posters about our lost dog except they went like this, but again of course nothing so then lastly (we were desperate and desperately broke!) we put up bomb diagrams but still no one came calling needing our assistance except for the constables—which after all these failed brainstorms hit us like a double whammy!—like it wasn’t bad enough spending the time and energy on these posters and mailers and receiving zero customers in reply—but now (that the Advertocrats should have held their enforcers in check for so long, now this amazes me) here come the constables—to outline our so-called predicament—to tell us they sense some seditious pattern to our flyers—and even though this is all like total horseradish they will not believe we are serious aspiring merchant-class capitalist advertisers and instead they pan our work by terming it ‘cheeky and troubling’ though in the same review we are later held to be ‘well worth watching’ and all I could think to do was to quote the mighty Eugene V. Debs who—as a young black brother—once defiantly expressed himself to a belligerent white constable thusly: AS I see it—it is me versus the REST of the World and IF be hanged to my death for this I must THEN be hanged to my death I shall—and the whole time that I was looking at this very picky constable with his big snooty hands on his big snooty hips I was also wanting to inquire WHO CAN EVEN MAKE A LIV
ING ANYMORE (I guess there’s no good reason for living unless you’re gifted with a voice supple and gracious as preacher Green)—but I said nothing, for as a white boy my voice was not much and, as I said, I was then much younger and lacking in the necessary confidences.
We have once more run out of space Brothers and Sisters (breathe your damned sigh of relief Marie! and nervous little adverto-enforcers everywhere) and so in abbreviated conclusion I reiterate this last teaching: Locate Cable Access Fifty-Three, do not pay parking meters because that coinage washes immediately up to the subjugators of our desire (Sefton Delmer’s constables) (are we so sure that Hitler has lost his war?), and push your sports car away.
It is, none of it, so simple as black and white.
Publisher’s Note: These posters appeared July 14–22, 1996, concurrent with Macintosh’s second annual New York Music Festival. They measured 48” × 72” and were painted in oil-based browns and blacks utilizing a variety of hog-bristle brushes.
THIS POSTER WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE
APPEARED ON 13TH STREET NEAR FOURTH AVENUE, FACING SOUTH
LATER APPEARED ON 8TH STREET AT ASTOR PLACE, FACING NORTH
APPEARED ON BOWERY AT 4TH STREET, FACING WEST
LATER APPEARED ON AVENUE A NEAR TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK, FACING EAST
APPEARED ON 13TH STREET AT FOURTH AVENUE, FACING SOUTH
APPEARED ON BROADWAY NEAR UNION SQUARE, FACING SOUTH;
APPEARED ON ST. MARK’S PLACE NEAR SECOND AVENUE, FACING NORTH
APPEARED ON 3RD STREET NEAR SECOND AVENUE, FACING NORTH
APPEARED ON BROADWAY NEAR UNION SQUARE, FACING WEST
APPEARED ON BOWERY NEAR 3RD STREET, FACING WEST
APPEARED ON BROADWAY NEAR UNION SQUARE, FACING WEST;
APPEARED ON FOURTH AVENUE AT 14TH STREET, FACING EAST
APPEARED ON 8TH STREET AT ASTOR PLACE, FACING SOUTH
APPEARED ON BROADWAY AT 13TH STREET, FACING WEST
APPEARED ON 3RD STREET NEAR SECOND AVENUE, FACING SOUTH
TOTAL SYSTEMS FAILURE
AS ANYBODY WHO HAS FLIPPED past Rolling Stone’s editorial page to read their business section recently can attest, popular music is undergoing what those in the know like to call, “really something.” All the record company people who signed the good indie bands and orchestrated bringing us the very best music of the ’90s are being put on ice in favor of rootless meanies who favor brand-name ballads, dance crazes, and tits. It’s perhaps true when people paraphrase the Clash these days that, “Even if the Beatles flew in today, they’d send no limousine anyway” (although people declaring such usually forget that the Beatles seemed harmless at the start, which is how they got so big; they began as Backstreets and became Beasties). So far, in my debatably short life, I’ve been lucky enough to see punk fall out of fashion not once but twice (it was better the second time because effects pedals caught up with the theory, and deadpan wit entered the rhetoric; at long last, wise-asses got the girls). We had some good times, didn’t we, back when smart, sloppy groups had their shiny moment, back when the paying public seemed to’ve come over (at last!) to our way of thinking? Then the record companies ran out of Nirvana specialty reissues and Sonic Youth did not make another Daydream Nation as the talented British folk/dub Fellow Travelers dispersed and their leader Jeb Loy Nichols reentered on the set of Good Will Hunting disguised in the robes of a soft rocker and stupid Mark E. Smith assaulted his wife at the Quality Hotel Eastside while Elvis Costello refused to even acknowledge any of what was occurring and forfeited his place in the pantheon and memorable, generational-defining classics were on the tips of tongues like the Breeders and Uncle Tupelo and the Campfire Girls and Belly and the Dirt Merchants when instead the band members turned on one another as Nick Cave and Morrissey became jokes and Bob Mould and Mike Watt continued on cluelessly and the gifted pop band Christmas came back as the highly successful, utterly irrelevant smug swingers Edison Combustible and traditionally deserving songwriterly dues-paying types like Vic Chesnutt and the Fastbacks somehow could not get a commercial purchase on the popular imagination as everybody from Girls Against Boys to the Posies to Pearl Jam to the Foo Fighters to Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 to Archers of Loaf to Guided by Voices never figured out how to do a whole album, entirely important from start to finish, forgetting that the point of pop stardom is to bring together huge clumps of otherwise unaffiliated folks, and Pavement couldn’t follow up the Pacific Trim EP with the requisite jubilant breakthrough (their Let It Be) and Cat Power and the Mountain Goats defiantly clung to Dylan pre-’65 and just would not let themselves fucking go and Tom Waits was too late with The Black Rider and Cracker waited too long to make The Golden Age and Yo La Tengo were inexplicably overlooked (how does that begin to happen?) and the fetish for releasing crappy home demos—whose very lack of finish lent them the steady hiss of a gradually disappointed public—succeeded only in stealing mid-decade credibility from keenly perfectionist pop stars like Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Lowe and They Might Be Giants precisely when they issued their masterpieces. What a decade of sleight-of-hands and comic mistimings this has been, as we emerge with none of our alt-spokesmen standing, and their industry support utterly squeezed out between urban enthusiasts and country-western fans. Only a few years back you’d catch major-label A&R kids speaking like mature individuals who’d survived relationship counseling, saying that certain acts had to be nurtured, talking about honesty and commitment, that audiences required respect, that expectations had to be patiently shaped. . . . Well, such talkers are no more, replaced now by bottom-dwellers dwelling on the bottom line who treat imaginative singers and songwriters with contempt, like one night stands. As a side consequence, not only have I been purged from the demographic that once used to nourish me, but also my demographic itself has been purged. People assure me the future is online and the underground will rise yet again, but lately my legs are cramping up, I’d like to sit down, so fuck you, how long am I supposed to wait? Should I be satisfied that Ween is nearly a household name? Am I to feel gleeful that Elliott Smith appeared at the Oscars alongside Celine Dion and that the money we paid for the song “Man on the Moon” now brings it back to us in movie form? That Royal Trux got $1,000,000 from Virgin (but still nobody knows who they are)? Or hey, what about this: Eno and Bowie promised a gigantic collaboration starting in 1995 with Outside—uh, well? Feel they no sense of betrayal? I can march up and down my aisle of favorite ’90s records and almost all I see are artists who guaranteed something they didn’t deliver or just got screwed (the one exception, I can be persuaded, is the Beastie Boys), or wonderful acts like the Lilys and Neutral Milk Hotel and Red Red Meat and Lambchop and the Spinanes who would’ve significantly altered our beloved revolutionary popscape had they been promoted with muscle and brains, or deserving music-makers in full possession of Dylan’s proverbial head-full-of-ideas-that’re-driving-them-insane like Mark Donato and Life in a Blender and Death Cab for Cutie and Very Pleasant Neighbor who couldn’t even get their discs into shops.
Let me flash my headlamps more brightly at the confessional on-ramp to which I’m rhetorically hauling ass—namely, I like this band called Spoon. They’re three fellows from Texas who in 1998—after a record and a half on a small-ish label—made A Series of Sneaks for Elektra. Sneaks has all the sounds of crushed fury and longing that I love, the thick-tongued words that appear super-significant but once deciphered only make sense in a found-object-collage-ist sorta way, the songs a minute or two in length. It’s a record that stinks to high heaven of unbridled ambition (remember ambition?), reminiscent of Bruce Sterling—or some similarly pirate-minded attackist author person—assuring the Times that he wasn’t trying to do anything with culture except take it over. But would the takeover be worth celebrating? Despite Sneaks’s old fashioned enthusiasm about itself, Spoon were quite cognizant of all the ways that ’90s rock was supposed to bring us together but hadn’t, because the breakthroughs didn’t break through, or the geniuses croaked or choked.
I mostly listened to Sneaks to imagine the singer guy’s face, a face I heard as resembling the young Joe Strummer, the young Paul Westerberg. The sneer, the hopefulness; the clouded gaze lit with fiery dawn. In truth, there lives no face not beautiful when painted in colors of passion and pride. Behind the brow furrowed in suspicion, in back of the scowl and the fed-up stubbornness, he sings as if understanding all we have riding on him, wanting more than anything to honor that.
By now you’re assuming I’ve made up this record because 1) you’ve never heard of it, and 2) things that good get heard. They don’t, though. A lot of good bands don’t get signed, even more good bands make bad records, still more good bands make good records that’re distributed or promoted badly. Out of nowhere our tastes change and we confound the moneymen. The music market is just the dance of so many random intangibles. . . . The record companies alertly stand to the side, conducting polls and dictating memos, as baffled as anyone about why we’re sick of Alanis now but not yet over Britney, why we fickle folks like what we like. It’s akin to the stock exchange really, a scene of bluffing gamblers, or a bunker full of addictive liars or con men guessing at the dreams of the customers—as Joseph did with Pharaoh—to thereby establish a wise reputation. Case in point, something went wrong, terribly wrong, with Spoon: before their imminent classic Sneaks ever had its chance to be “worked,” some god gave them the finger. They were cut from Elektra’s roster only four months after Sneaks came out. (Four months! Jello pudding snacks have a longer shelf life.) Of course, it’s not just Spoon, that’s what I’m saying—everyone who looked or sounded “indie” suddenly couldn’t summon up enough sales to make big the eyes of the bigwigs. Spoon, for one, were not surprised, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t hurt.