Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  The prevailing mood of Pinkerton is not so much of despair as of resignation. ‘Tired of Sex’ is a nightmare reversal of the usual rock star brag about all the girls the singer slept with in all the different towns he played. This is not the Don Juan of the Spanish legend or the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera, but the Don Juan of Byron, who looks back over his many conquests with an air of melancholy detachment. The joke in Byron’s Don Juan is that the great seducer is always the seduced — he doesn’t really have to try. This is the scenario of ‘Tired of Sex’, where the singer sounds mostly perplexed about his many one-night stands, and finally, disgusted. He feels he has been taken advantage of but, like Byron, his pose of static detachment prevents him from running away. ‘Thursday night I’m naked again,’ sings the tired-sounding rock star.4 What’s the point? In ‘Why Bother?’ the singer reveals that he’s just as tired of love as he is of sex. He could ask that girl out, he could pick up the phone, he could lean in for a kiss. But he has already been disappointed so many times that he can’t quite bring himself to try, he has already spent enough time chasing happiness to know that it will always elude him. So he gives up. He ignores his urges — which in any case are no match for his inertia — and resigns himself to solitude.

  Schopenhauer would say that the singer is right — love is not worth the trouble. The problem with love, according to Schopenhauer, is that it’s inseparable from the sexual drive, and the sexual drive is part of the great, destructive tide of birth, struggle and death that pushes life along its purposeless course. The sex drive is will manifested in the individual, and since will for Schopenhauer is always negative, allowing oneself to be driven by instinct can only lead to no good.

  In the world of rock and roll, this amounts to heresy. Rock ballads — with their we gotta and I wanna — place a lot of faith in instinct. ‘We gotta get out while we’re young’, ‘we gotta hold on to what we got’, ‘I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day’ — belief in the power of instinct is the legacy of fifty years of rock music. No wonder Cuomo sounds so confused when he sings in ‘Butterfly’, ‘I did what my body told me to’. In chasing his Butterfly, he merely followed the advice of a thousand radio hits — do what you feel, listen to your body, go for it — and the result was tragedy. ‘Tired of Sex’ and ‘Why Bother?’ present variations on the same theme. He acted naturally, according to instinct, and all he got was…more unhappiness.

  Schopenhauer would say that a moment like this is a step on the path to true wisdom. We must accept that the butterfly will always get away, that our goals will always melt into the air when we reach them — like Robert Smith’s girl in ‘A Forest’. In Pinkerton the singer has come to realise that happiness can only be found in a state of non-willing, which his new attitude of resignation and renunciation (‘Why Bother?’) will allow. This, as Schopenhauer himself knew, is easier said than done. The so-called ‘Buddha of Frankfurt’ had a surprising number of affairs and one-night stands, presumably because — like Cuomo — his inertia made him an easy target.

  Wagner gave Schopenhauer a number of reasons to dismiss his Tristan poem. Even if Schopenhauer had managed to overlook the problems of style and the fact that Wagner wrote grand operas (which Schopenhauer mostly hated), there would still be the hurdle of the composer’s insistence on love as a form of salvation from suffering. For Schopenhauer, love is the reason we suffer, and it ensures that we continue to suffer. In this, Schopenhauer is not, like Andy Gill from The Gang of Four, trying to say that love is a superstition which is perpetuated by love songs and grand operas, and can be unlearned. Schopenhauer accepts that our desire for love, like all our other urges and emotions, is real enough. But the fact that we are created with the desire for happiness and dumped into a world of flux and chaos in which that happiness must always remain out of reach is, for him, yet more proof that life is hell, and that it would have been better if the human race had never been born. Human life, Schopenhauer writes in his essay, ‘On The Emptiness of Existence’, ‘is basically a mistake’ — and the proof of this lies in the simple fact that no matter how hard you try, you can’t get no satisfaction.5

  Mick Jagger: Man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy.

  Satisfaction

  ON 9 MAY 1965 Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night with a riff in his head. He grabbed his acoustic guitar, hit record on a cassette player, and got down sixty seconds of the guitar part he’d caught on the tail of his dream before going back to sleep. ‘The next morning I played it back,’ Richards later recalled. ‘Amongst all the snoring I rediscovered and found the lick and the lyrical hook I’d come up with to accompany it.’1 The words that had formed in his mind as he’d bashed out his dream riff in that Florida motel room were ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’. Sitting by the pool the next day — with a cocktail in one hand and a cocktail waitress’s phone number in the other — Mick Jagger took the riff and the chorus Richards had written in his sleep, and turned it into a song which expresses better than any other the suffering of the world and the impossibility of happiness. But ‘Satisfaction’ was not just a song. As the Rolling Stones’ former manager Andrew Loog Oldham has pointed out in his memoir, 2 Stoned, ‘Satisfaction’ contains, in embryo, the entire culture of the late ’60s and everything that came after — the profound refusal of the modern world that would characterise most of the important statements of rock and roll from this point on. Keith Richards, according to Oldham, ‘changed life as we know it’ in his sleep.2

  In his essays, Schopenhauer accounts for the prophetic nature of dreams by explaining that the dreamer, in his unconscious state, is offered a glimpse of the world as will. The baffles and blinds that our conscious mind put around to convince us that life has some structure and meaning are removed, and the dreaming philosopher glimpses the truth of things.3 Wagner would bestow this ability on the musician as well. He claimed, in his famous essay on Beethoven, that the dreaming artist hears sounds which provide him with staggering insights into the nature of reality. Later, in his conscious state, the composer must act as the mediator between these terrifying cosmic truths and his unsuspecting audience.4

  This is the difficult role the Rolling Stones take on in ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, a song which pulls back the curtain on a world without meaning for just as long as we can stand it. The verses describe Mick Jagger trying to impose his considerable will on the world, the chorus informs us of the result: nothing. There’s a lot of pushing, a lot of shoving, a lot of trouble; and no satisfaction. ‘It was my view of the world,’ he later explained, ‘my frustration with everything.’5 In three verses, Jagger dispenses, one by one, with humankind’s traditional consolations. Knowledge, material comfort and sex — none, he decides, are worth the trouble. Even fame, which the singer had worked so hard to get up until this point, turns out to be one big hassle. Doin’ this and signin’ that — who needs it?

  Here, ‘Satisfaction’ differs from earlier teenage anthems like ‘Summertime Blues’ in one very important respect. In the older songs the singer couldn’t get what he wanted because he didn’t make enough money or because his parents were a drag. But the singer in ‘Satisfaction’ has already broken free of all those limitations; he’s a rock star with money, fame and power — and none of this has made him happy. And since being a rock star is about as good as it gets in 1965, the singer is forced to conclude that all the other goals he might move himself to pursue will turn out to be just as unsatisfying. ‘Satisfaction’ is not about how the singer can’t get his shirts white or make out with the girl — the disgust in his voice tells us he knows, before he’s even tried, that neither will make him happy for longer than thirty seconds. The sheer grinding monotony of Keith Richards’ riff drives the point home — as soon as we reach our goal, a new one will appear, and the struggle will resume.

  This kind of thing, according to Schopenhauer, is all the proof we need that human life is pointless. Our achievements leave us feeling unsatisf
ied precisely because they are, in a cosmic sense, unsatisfactory, our lives have no meaning or significance because the world is in a constant state of flux, and our efforts to impose our will on the world are doomed to fail. The world has its own way of telling us this through the feeling we call boredom.

  That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence itself is valueless, for boredom is nothing more than the sensation of the emptiness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us. As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something — in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it)…6

  Howard Devoto: Life is hell.

  Boredom

  IGGY POP KNEW all about boredom. On the first two Stooges albums — the self titled debut of 1969 and the towering Fun House released the following year — the singer sounds like a worn out Mick Jagger, whose frustrated attempts to impose his will on the world have reduced him to a near-vegetable state of inertia. Iggy can’t even be bothered to advance an argument on the level of ‘Satisfaction’ for why life sucks. All he can do is blurt out two monosyllabic words. These two words, as it would later turn out, said more about the human condition in the late twentieth century than anyone had managed before or since: ‘No fun’.

  In ‘No Fun’ Iggy weighs up his options: ‘Maybe go out, maybe stay at home, maybe call mom on the telephone’.1 Who gives a fuck? Looking into the future, he sees no hope for improvement. In ‘1969’ he reflects that he had no fun in 1968 and that he will most likely have no fun in 1969. He gloomily rings in the New Year; ‘another year with nothin’ to do’.2What about girls? What about ’em? For all his snarling and yowling, when Iggy sings about sex on The Stooges’ early albums, he’s mostly passive. Again, he sounds a bit like Mick Jagger, but he’s nothing like the strutting Don Juan of ‘Little Red Rooster’ or the eager lover of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. In ‘TV Eye’ the singer is a victim — it’s as though he’s frozen on the couch while the girl fixes her predatory stare on him. When he does get horny, his come-on is framed as a submission. Jagger wants to be your man, Iggy wants to be your dog.

  In the first phase of their existence, The Stooges were a joke in the music industry and virtually invisible to the public. After their demise, they became a legend. By the end of the ’70s they were the musical and philosophical godfathers of punk, and Iggy’s concerns became the concerns of the entire movement. This put boredom high on punk’s agenda from day one, and punk singers came to insist on boredom as the most basic condition of life. The Slits sang about ‘A Boring Life’, The Clash about being ‘Bored with the USA’. Punks were bored with TV, bored with sex (‘Here we go,’ said a thoroughly ravaged Johnny Rotten, ‘another squelch session’3), even rock and roll itself had become boring. By 1977 boredom was already enough of a cliché for Howard Devoto to send it up in the Buzzcocks’ ‘Boredom’. ‘Da dum-de-dum,’ sang Devoto, thoroughly bored by his own boredom, and even more bored by the boredom of punk — which he ejected himself from in timely fashion only one year later.

  Devoto formed a new band called Magazine, and broke two of punk’s sacred commandments before they’d even played a show. He hired a keyboardist (a jazz keyboardist, to make matters worse), and told the band to play slowly. ‘I don’t like most of this new wave music,’ Devoto told Jon Savage around the time of his great escape, ‘I don’t like music.’4 But he kept making it anyway, because he had a feeling that punk had started as a way of ‘diagnosing modern forms of unhappiness’ — and that there was still work to be done in this area.5 By saying that everything is boring and that there’s nothing to do, punk had opened up a void which Devoto made it his business to explore. His time spent doing nothing (because there’s nothing to do) eventually led him to a great insight, which he expressed in Magazine’s ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’ in 1980. Here, the author starts out with a brief self-portrait — ‘I am angry I am ill and I’m as ugly as sin’ — before going on to explain why: ‘I know the meaning of life it doesn’t help me a bit.’6

  In 1977 Devoto had told Savage that he was ‘trying to find something to get excited about.’7 By 1980 he had given up. In every case — love, politics, social life — Devoto tallied the reasons for doing anything at all and found them wanting. In this, the meaning of life would prove to be no use to him at all — in fact, it made things worse. Because the meaning of life, as Devoto had realised by this point, is that we are born to suffer. ‘Life’, he later told cultural commentator Michael Bracewell, ‘is hell. I don’t think I ever strayed very far from that idea since I was about twenty.’8

  So, in ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’ Devoto announces that he has given up looking for satisfaction, which he knows will always elude him. He can no longer allow himself to believe in the bright dreams presented in movies, pop songs and grand operas — those chimeras of romantic love and ideal happiness that have tormented humankind through the centuries. Not for him, not anymore. ‘Do you remember dreams?’ Savage asked Devoto in 1977. ‘I take pills to stop myself,’ the singer replied.9 ‘In Song from Under the Floorboards,’ he explains why. ‘I used to make phantoms I could later chase,’ sings Devoto. ‘And then I just got tired.’10

  The singer renounces the search for satisfaction, and downsizes his expectations to fit the small dark space under the floorboards.

  Notes from Underground

  IT’S 11 APRIL 2006, Morrissey is onstage at the Olympia Theatre in Paris. ‘This song,’ he says, ‘was written before I was born.’1 He and the band launch into a tough-sounding version of Magazine’s ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’. He’s exaggerating a bit — the song was written a long time ago, but Morrissey is old enough to have seen Howard Devoto playing with the Buzzcocks’ original line-up at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. That night changed Morrissey’s life, and Devoto, with his keen intelligence, literary style and permanent air of dissatisfaction, quickly became a hero for the singer.

  At the Olympia, ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’ grinds to a halt, and the audience cheers. ‘Do any of you remember that song?’ asks Morrissey, a handful of people answer in the affirmative. ‘How?’ chuckles the singer, mock astonished.2Morrissey is making a joke about his age relative to that of his audience — which seems to get younger every year. But there’s a sense in which ‘Song from Under the Floorboards’ really was written before he or any of his audience were born — before Devoto himself, even. Magazine’s outsider anthem is a cover — not of a song, but of a book written in 1864 by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The first paragraph of Notes from Underground reads:

  I am a sick man… I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.3

  Dostoyevsky’s book describes, in the first person, the thoughts and exploits of a mean and miserable man — an ‘underground man’, as he calls himself. He lives in St Petersburg though everyone tells him the climate is bad for his health. He used to have a good job in the civil service, but after he came into some money he decided, not to sell up and move to sunnier climes, but to retire into a small corner of his small house where he now sits, all alone and sick. What’s wrong with his liver? He doesn’t know — and even if he did, he wouldn’t want to get well — the only thing he really enjoys is complaining about how sick he is.

  Dostoyevsky’s narrator is a liar — he makes maudlin confessions to elicit our sympathy, only to admit three paragraphs later that he was only kidding. Did he tell the truth in the first place and then try to cover it up as an afterthought? We’l
l never really know, so it’s hard to get his story straight. But it quickly becomes clear that he was lying about his liver — his illness resides not in his guts, but in his head. He suffers from a serious case of above average intelligence. ‘I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease,’ he says.4

  Intelligence is a terrible affliction for the underground man because he would like nothing better than to be as stupid as an insect. He is, as you’ve probably guessed, a romantic — although Dostoyevsky’s is a romanticism stripped of a lot of the romance. The underground man is not so sentimental as to imagine himself as a butterfly — a lowly mosquito with a simple libido would suffice. But while his prose might be less flowery, the wish behind it is the same as the one expressed elsewhere by Emerson, Keats and Conor Oberst. He accepts that he must live with desire — he’d just prefer not to have to think about it. But the simple happiness of the insect is denied him. Even the simple half-happiness of stupid men is more than he can hope for. He is overburdened with intelligence and further handicapped by a good education. Thanks to this deadly combination, there is no hope of his ever being able to ‘act naturally’. In fact, most of the time he finds action of any kind virtually impossible.