Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone
Page 9
Like his hero Robert Smith, Havok is not really interested — from an artistic point of view — in the outside world or its problems, his subject matter comes entirely from his turbulent inner life. The letters that make up the band’s name stand for A Fire Inside, and it’s this fire — and never the candidate on TV or the war in Iraq — that their songs attempt to describe. From inside, outside can just fall apart. Here is where AFI finds its common ground with emo.
Davey Havok’s estrangement from twenty-first century society, from the world as it is, has driven him to the bleakest extremities of nineteenth-century thought. ‘It is against a sense of a hostile, alien and valueless reality that romanticism mounts its various strategies of escape,’ writes Alex de Jonge. ‘It is the reality of the romantic age that inspires some of the richest and most ambitious attempts to deny reality that the west has known.’2 Two centuries later, reality is still a big problem, and the poet’s attempts to escape its grip are no less ambitious. The Black Parade is one such attempt, AFI’s Decemberunderground is another. Where, or when, is this ‘Decemberunderground’? On the band’s website, Havok explains:
It is where the cold can huddle together in darkness and isolation. It is a community of those detached and disillusioned who flee to love, like winter, in the recesses below the rest of the world.3
Who are these detached and disillusioned? They are those, like young Werther, who are cursed with an excess of feeling and an inability to make compromises. Real people, emotional people. Decemberunderground, Havok told Rolling Stone, describes ‘a sort of exclusive, unique type of feeling that certain people have’. These lucky few, he says, know a special love: ‘…it’s that strange love, it’s that dark love, it’s that cold love, it’s the outlook that it’s completely different than what most people perceive as something maybe even positive.’4
What most people perceive as positive, if the images on TV are anything to go by, is equilibrium, a sense of stability. They want money in the bank, a good school for their kids, a holiday once a year, white teeth and a tan. To the romantic, such people are a mystery. Mary Hays, in 1777, did not envy their quiet uneventful lives. She preferred misery to calmness — because at least when you’re miserable you’re feeling something. She would much rather suffer the ‘exquisite distresses’ that result from her attachment to feeling than lead a normal life.
Davey Havok’s lyrics are full of these exquisite distresses — intensely pleasurable feelings derived from a surrender to sadness. He’s a connoisseur of misery. Like his hero Robert Smith, he’s found that not only does he not fight it anymore, he actually looks forward to it. He admits in ‘The Interview’ that he’s always ‘waiting for disaster’. Later we find him,
Swimming, bathing
Drowning in sorrow.5
Here is that ‘cold love’ Havok described earlier. The idea gets a further workout in the first single from December-underground, ‘Love like Winter’. ‘Warn your warmth to turn away,’ he sings, ‘here it’s December everyday.’6 In the song’s big-budget video, Havok is seen dressed in his customary black, his face the usual whiter shade of pale, wandering through a snow-bound forest in the depths of winter. Like Young Werther, he seems quite at home in this frozen landscape — if nothing else, it suits his mood. Life has turned cold for the storm-singer, and his feeling for nature can now only be satisfied by scenes of decay and desolation. The nu-folksingers can have their sandy beaches — he’s only at home where it’s dark and cold.
As the snow whirls around him and the storm clouds brood overhead, our singer starts to hallucinate — he sees, as though in a dream, a beautiful woman walking toward him, dressed in a hooded cloak. They share a moment together, an unspoken understanding. Could it be that he’s found true happiness at last? Has he finally found a way out of his dreadful solipsism? Has he realised that impossible romantic dream, an actual connection with another human soul, someone with whom he can be alone — together?
Well, yes and no. The beautiful woman pulls back her hood — she has removed the last of her defences, the way has been cleared for a pure union of souls. And in that very instant, when the singer’s happiness seems assured, catastrophe strikes. The ice gives way beneath his feet, he sinks into the freezing darkness. And as he struggles, his exquisite distress is made more exquisite by the reappearance of the beautiful woman, holding him down under the water. She smiles, and holds him in a tender, but deadly embrace.
In real life, the woman is a model from the Ukraine. In an interview for a making-of special, the video’s director refers to her as ‘the ice-bitch’.7 But to Davey Havok, she is nothing less than ‘the beautiful physical embodiment of hopelessness’.
Alone and Palely Loitering
IN 1816 SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Thomas Keats began receiving letters from a mysterious French girl named Amena Bellafila. She claimed to have met him — though he didn’t remember meeting her — through a mutual acquaintance, Thomas’s school friend Charles Wells. The letters were written in a curiously old-fashioned idiom, like Elizabethan sonnets — Amena told Tom that he was her knight in armour, that he would rescue her, and that she, in turn, would soothe him. Tom travelled over France trying to find her, but never could.
Two years later, Tom was dying. The doctors said he had tuberculosis, but he fancied he knew better. In October 1818 he told his brother John the truth — he was sick because his heart was broken. He was in love with Amena Bellafila, but Amena had disappeared. He was dying of unrequited love.
John Keats was twenty-three and a promising poet. He was utterly devoted to his younger brother and never left his side during these final days — but something about this ‘Amena Bellafila’ made him uneasy, and he took time to make some investigations regarding Tom’s disappearing French girl. The results confirmed his worst suspicions: there never was an ‘Amena’. The letters were fabrications, written by Charles Wells in exaggeratedly feminine handwriting, and composed in the mock-Elizabethan language of his and Tom’s schooldays. After Tom’s death, Keats finally got to see the letters for himself. ‘It is a wretched business,’ he wrote to his other brother, George. ‘It was no thoughtless hoax — but a cruel deception.’1
A few days later Keats wrote to George again. If he was still preoccupied with the cruel trick played on his dead brother, there was little sign of it. Keats described the review he’d just written of a new parody of Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, A Tale, and shared his thoughts on a diorama of the North Pole he’d recently seen. Then, in the middle of all this casual chat, he copied the stanzas of a poem he’d just written called ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. It was a ballad, told in a style that showed the influence of Wordsworth (who was probably on Keats’s mind because of the review), as well as another of Keats’s heroes, the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser.2 The poem’s action is set in the depths of winter — the leaves have fallen off the trees, the birds are silent. In the midst of this desolate scene, the narrator meets a knight-at-arms ‘alone and palely loitering’, who tells the tale of how he came to haunt this particular patch of frozen ground:
IV
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful — a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.3
The knight tells of a forest idyll — he made the lady a garland of flowers and set her on his ‘pacing steed’. She said, ‘I love thee true.’
IX
And there she lullèd me asleep
And there I dream’d — ah! Woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill side
X
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried — ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
XI
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me her
e,
On the cold hill’s side.
XII
And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.4
‘La Belle Dame’ condenses a number of Keats’s fears and preoccupations. Much like a dream, it seems to give form to anxieties even the poet himself was not consciously aware of at the time — though some of the motifs are more easily recognisable than others. The knight-at-arms is most likely a version of Tom, dressed up to suit the conceit of the ‘Amena’ letters, ‘haggard and so woe-begone’ from a long illness exacerbated by a broken heart.5
It follows, then, that the ‘Belle Dame’ is Amena Bellafila. She certainly fits the part — a vision of perfect love which turns out, as soon as the knight falls asleep, to be a trick. The knight’s terrifying dream expresses the full extent of Keats’s horror at his brother’s death. Tom had died broken-hearted, feeling that the happiness he’d sought had been denied him. But the worst of it was that this happiness had never really existed. In the end, as Keats’s biographer Robert Gittings points out, the lady in the meads is no simple allegorical figure representing Tom’s disappearing girl.
She is, when all literary hints from other sources, when all the accidental events of Keats’s day-to-day life are exhausted, the symbol of the eternal fusion between love and death.6
A Forest
THE JOURNEY INTO despair that Robert Smith made between 1980–82 began with a walk in a forest. The first single from Seventeen Seconds was already a fairly gloomy proposition, and not the follow up to Boys Don’t Cry that most critics were hoping for. Julie Burchill, writing for the NME, accused Smith of ‘trying to stretch a sketchy living out of moaning more meaningfully than any man has moaned before’.1
Burchill was right on two counts — ‘A Forest’ is full of moaning and full of meaning. The song describes a dream in which the singer hears a woman’s voice calling his name. He follows the sound into the trees, and the band takes up the theme, conjuring the feeling of a headlong rush into a dark world. Electronic whooshes zip past like drifts of fog. But as Smith searches for his mysterious lover in the forest, a terrible thought occurs to him:
Suddenly I stop
But I know it’s too late
I’m lost in the forest
All alone
The girl was never there
It’s always the same
I’m running towards nothing
Again and again and again and AGAIN!2
‘A Forest’ illustrates an important idea in romantic thought. Many of the romantics — Rousseau and Wordsworth being the clearest examples — idealised nature as a symbol of all that is good, pure and true in human nature, and a standard by which our behaviour can be measured. But there is a flip-side to this, in which the romantic individual, having rejected society, runs out into nature and finds that he is not really at home there, either. Since he is now out of options, his philosophy becomes one in which reality itself is hostile. His goals — happiness and love — exist somewhere outside of the world.
All of this makes love complicated for the romantics — and makes it more likely that they will end up confusing love with death and despair, as Keats, Robert Smith and Davey Havok have all done. Love, in the romantic imagination, is pure and natural, part of the mysterious world of feeling and the human heart, which society cannot touch. But to think this is to overburden love with a weight of unrealistic expectations. Ideal love, like nature, becomes one of the romantics’ escape destinations — existing outside of the cares of the world, or as Davey Havok would have it, in the cold regions below. But this, like all the romantics’ attempts to escape reality, is doomed to fail, since there is no real escape from the world other than death. As a consequence, love becomes an illusion, forever out of reach —
The girl was never there
It’s always the same
I’m running towards nothing3
— or fatal, pulling the poet toward oblivion. The singer finds his perfect love, the ice cracks, the poet and his fatal lover sink into darkness.
John Keats: Fallen lemons in my path.
Lemonade
AMONG THE STRANGE brew of ingredients that went into the writing of ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ was a copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy — one of the most popular and most talked-about books of the seventeenth century. Keats’s copy was heavily marked up, ‘almost as if with a personal application to himself’ as his biographer Robert Gittings puts it.1 It was Burton’s book, according to Gittings, that gave Keats the image of the sorrowful knight ‘alone and palely loitering’. It also provided him with the subject matter and imagery of another of his great odes — ‘Ode on Melancholy’. As this poem begins, Keats dismisses some of Burton’s medicinal cures for sadness. His argument is a little like some of the current debates about anti-depressants — wolf’s-bane and the like might leave him in a state of happy forgetfulness, but they would also ‘drown the wakeful anguish of the soul’. What does he need that for? Keats’s answer is simple: poetry.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.2
In ‘Ode on Melancholy’, Keats advises the reader not to drown his sorrows with wine, but to put them to work. This is exactly what Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo did in the mid ’90s — though he got the idea not from Robert Burton or John Keats, but from his mum. When Rivers was having a rough time growing up (which he frequently did), his mother would cheer him up with a little homespun philosophy: ‘If life gives you lemons, make lemonade’.3 One day in 1992 she said it again, and Cuomo turned his mother’s saying into a song. Back when he was younger, he reflects in ‘Lemonade,’ he used to just let his rage and frustration rot where it fell:
Till the day I couldn’t pass
Fallen lemons in my path
So with my mom I now agree
And use the lemons life gives me4
Cuomo had begun to understand that ‘making lemonade’ was exactly what he’d been doing with his recent songs, the songs that would soon appear on Weezer’s debut. With ‘Buddy Holly’, ‘In the Garage’ and ‘Say It Ain’t So’, Cuomo was turning bitter experience into sweet treats; great pain into little songs (or as he would later call them ‘angst muffins’).5
Weezer’s second single, ‘Buddy Holly’ is lemonade of a fine vintage, drawn partly from Cuomo’s high school days (where he and his brother Leaves ‘got the crap beaten out of them’), but mostly from an incident that took place during his time at Santa Monica College. Already in Weezer, Cuomo also enrolled in the college choir where he made friends with a girl named Kyung He.6 The song recalls a day when the Weezer guys were making fun of Kyung He’s accent.
Your tongue is twisted
Your eyes are slit
You need a guardian7
Cuomo, furious at his band mates and feeling protective toward his friend, wrote a lyric which said, in the plainest terms possible, ‘it’s okay to be different — we can make it together’. It was deceptively simple powerful stuff, set to an irresistible tune. Pain had been turned into poetry — more than that — a huge hit which finally made all of Rivers Cuomo’s rock-star dreams come true.
The lesson was not lost on the singer. Even after he’d abandoned the confessional mode of Pinkerton for the classicism of the Green Album, Cuomo continued to recognise the importance of melancholy as a songwriting resource. In 2002 he assured the readers of Spin magazine (in an obvious bit of emo-baitin
g) that he still had feelings ‘like everybody else’, but had carefully compartmentalised them. ‘I like to exploit them and use them for my own purposes,’ he explained.8 A couple of years later, when producer Rick Rubin suggested to Cuomo that he try transcendental meditation as a way of focusing his mind on the recording process, Cuomo was horrified.
‘I sent him a very anxious page, saying, “Rick, no. I cannot get into meditation because it will rob me of the angst that’s necessary to being an artist.”’9
Cuomo’s reasoning was sound — after all, you can’t make angst muffins without angst. But the idea, taken too far, can turn ugly. If great songs come from unhappiness, is it now the songwriter’s job to remain unhappy? Most Weezer fans, after the Green Album, would have answered in the affirmative. They hated the new classical Rivers, with his well-constructed hits. They wanted more suffering and emotional excess, like on Pinkerton, the album he wrote in the mid ’90s when he was incredibly miserable. One fan, lavishing praise on Pinkerton while writing off Weezer’s current output as ‘horrible pop songs’, remarked, ‘depressed people sure do write good music’.10