Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  The artist’s stance as misunderstood prophet only grew more entrenched as the twentieth century got under way. ‘Our age seeks much,’ wrote composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1910. ‘What it has found above all is: comfort. That permeates full-scale into the realm of ideas and makes it too comfortable for our own good.’3 When Schoenberg talked about lighting a fire under the Viennese bourgeois’s comfortable behind, he wasn’t just striking a pose. Schoenberg was many things — a rebel, an outsider, a pretty good expressionist painter, a great musical mind and a hugely influential writer and teacher, but no-one could make a case that either he or his music were in any way pleasant. Nor was he popular; in fact, he often seemed to go out of his way not to be. Aside from some early efforts in commercial dance music, Schoenberg was swayed very little by the currents of popular taste, critical opinion or his own economic situation. He was influenced, as far as possible, by only one thing: himself. He set out his case for self-expression at all costs in a letter to the painter Wassily Kandinsky in 1911:

  …art belongs to the subconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill…4

  In this, Schoenberg was very much a product of the Viennese milieu that produced Kokoschka and Gustav Klimt. Like them, he believed that the purpose of art was to ‘show modern man his true face’, and that the artist had no hope of doing this if he was not, first and foremost, honest with himself. He felt he could no more ignore the dictates of his heart and his emotions than a biblical prophet could ignore the voice of God.

  In his music, Schoenberg faithfully and unflinchingly presented his appalling truths — the things he saw in the darkest recesses of his heart. But he found that, by and large, the people who heard them turned away — closed the door on his truth and settled back into their easychairs. Now he knew he was right! Of course his art was terrifying to them — life is terrifying. The more uncompromising and truthful Schoenberg was in his art, the greater his isolation from society became. But he kept going, because he believed in only one kind of truth — subjective truth. And even as his own psyche began to fall apart under the strain, he found himself more and more determined to confront the fact of his own crack-up in his art, because here, he felt was the greatest thing he had to offer the world.

  In 1912, Schoenberg found the perfect vehicle to express these anxieties. He was commissioned by a Viennese actress named Albertine Zehme to compose some piano music for a recitation she was planning. Her songs were to be adaptations of a series of poems by the Belgian Albert Giraud. In Schoenberg’s hands, Pierrot Lunaire became, as the expressionist painter Paul Klee put it, ‘a mad melodrama’.5 Pierrot, being a clown, is in the entertainment business. But he chafes against this — he stops doing comedy and starts expressing his emotions because he feels he has important truths to share with humanity. The audience, predictably, hates this. ‘Do something funny!’ they demand. Funny? Pierrot climbs up on an altar and rips open his clown-suit:

  The hand, consecrated to God,

  tears the priest’s habit

  to celebrate the gruesome eucharist

  by the dazzling glare of gold.

  With a gesture of benediction

  he shows to the fearful souls

  the dripping red Host

  with bloody fingers: his heart —,

  to celebrate the gruesome eucharist.6

  The spectators would much prefer that the sad clown put his horrible guts away and got on with the business of making them laugh. But Pierrot will not be deterred. Of course they would rather be pleased than appalled, of course they hate him for showing them what they would prefer to see hidden. But he has a heart that is bigger and braver than anything they can throw at him. ‘Look,’ he seems to be saying, holding this still-beating heart out to the people. ‘This is what I am prepared to do for you.’

  Gerard Way strikes a similar pose in ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’. The singer looks around at the chaos of the world, and tries to make sense of what seems like madness. He sees ‘the rise and fall, the bodies in the streets’, and a great tide of misery and hate. But these horrors only make him more determined than ever to carry on showing the world its true face. This, after all, is his job. Gerard — who once confessed he was ‘addicted to truth and honesty’ — fulfils the role society has demanded of artists since the late nineteenth century — to be the bearer of bad news. In a conversation with Liza Minnelli in Interview magazine in 2007, Gerard made his position clear:

  I think we just went into it with the attitude that we’re going to be different to everybody else because we’re simply going to be ourselves. We’re going to sing about things that other people wouldn’t sing about…that is to say, we’re going to sometimes put extremely difficult subjects in pop music…7

  Gerard means to make us uncomfortable. He knows we’d like it if he just sang about ‘driving a truck, smoking weed and objectifying women’ — as he put it on another occasion.8 But he knows that what we need is the truth, and that this truth is, by nature, unpleasant.

  Sprechstimme

  IN PIERROT LUNAIRE, Schoenberg portrayed a performer who was out of phase with his audience’s expectations by giving his singer music that was out of tune. This was no accident — Schoenberg knew what he was doing, and had already been doing it for a couple of years. Back in 1864, Wagner’s Tristan had suggested, with its famous opening chord, that the rules of music could be broken if they could no longer contain the force of the composer’s emotion. Strauss, inspired by Wagner’s example, would bend musical relationships further out of shape in Salome. But it was left to Schoenberg to break the chords that bind forever with his first atonal works in 1908.

  These pioneering works of Schoenberg’s were sometimes referred to as ‘expressionist’; and like the painters with whom he associated, Schoenberg found that by allowing his emotions to dictate the form of his music in defiance of all rules, he had completely alienated himself from his public. But as with Wiene’s canny use of Expressionist décor in Caligari, Schoenberg discovered he could get away with his mad music within the context of Pierrot, since he was using it to express madness. Here, this style had a right to exist, and Pierrot was — unusually for Schoenberg — a hit.

  But atonality wasn’t the only trick Schoenberg had up his sleeve in bringing the eerie emotional world of Pierrot to life. Instead of arranging Giraud’s poems as songs, Schoenberg gave his vocalist what he called ‘Sprechstimme’. Here, the singer talks in rhythm over the music, suggesting — rather than singing — the pitches, and only occasionally holding sustained notes. Again, within the context of Pierrot, this unusual technique worked a treat. As Allen Shawn puts it in Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey:

  What pushes [ Pierrot Lunaire] over the edge into the world of the sublimely bizarre is how the music combines with the singer who isn’t quite singing. Here, a kind of universal madness has been fixed on paper with clarity and art.1

  Appropriately for a meditation on the divide between art and entertainment, Sprechstimme was a technique Schoenberg had become familiar with when he was employed in show business. Between 1901 and 1902, the young composer had worked for a cabaret company — Baron von Wolzogen’s Überbrettl — writing popular songs for drinking and dancing. Later, after he’d made the most gut-wrenchingly confessional music of his early career, and then forced himself to confront the fact that people just wanted him to be an entertainer, he would refer to his cabaret music again, pressing it into service to describe his painful alienation from his audience. The Sprechstimme technique he’d learned writing for the cabaret was used to suggest a singer who was somehow dangerously detached from his material, and by extension, his life. Schoenberg’s music for Pierrot Lunaire is cabaret gone horribly wrong — the singer was supposed to pull out his hits — but what’s this? He’s pulled out his heart!

  Today, musicians routinely espouse Schoenbergian philosophy. Billy Corgan echoes his insistence that
‘one must express oneself’ (‘I do feel a responsibility to articulate what I feel’) and draws the same conclusions from this as Schoenberg — that is, that if the artist’s emotions lead him into territory that is alienating or confusing to the listener, then the listener had better suck it up. Corgan insisted that the future of rock and roll lay in music ‘so emotionally explosive it’s hard to listen to’.2

  But, as we’ve seen, not one of the thousands of kids in Zero shirts at Lollapalooza had any trouble listening to Corgan’s emotionally explosive music. In fact, they wanted him to keep exploding. The situation of Pierrot Lunaire was reversed; here, the audience insisted that the singer rip out his heart. This demand for emotional intensity nearly killed Robert Smith in the early ’80s, and it scared Rivers Cuomo away from emotional music for almost a decade. In the meantime, the modern misery industry grew to spectacular proportions. In Saves The Day’s ‘Jukebox Breakdown’, Chris Conley — who was starting to feel like some kind of automated human unhappiness dispenser — accused his audience of conspiring to kill him.

  All you want from me

  Is a broken heart

  and a mouthful of blood.3

  Yes, we do! said the kids in the crowd. Schoenberg didn’t know how easy he had it. He railed against his audience for wanting the happy clown when he was dying inside. He had to rip out his heart to show them just how bad he was feeling. But in the twenty-first century this situation is reversed. The modern emo audience demands nothing less than the artist’s still-beating heart, served up fresh, every night of the week for the length of a twelve-month tour.

  Needless to say, ripping out your heart on a nightly basis is hard to sustain. By the end of My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade, Gerard Way is starting to feel the long-term effects of all this soul-baring and blood-letting. On the album’s final number, he sings:

  Give them blood, blood,

  gallons of the stuff

  give them all that they can drink and it will never be enough.4

  The situation is terrifying, but Gerard sings this in a light, jaunty ironic way — you can almost see him tipping his hat and twirling his cane. The arrangement has just a touch of dissonance to indicate the artist’s impending crack-up, and Gerard deploys a little Sprechstimme to give the song that weightless ‘I’ve lost too much blood and I’m getting dizzy’ feel. The music is pure cabaret — a small group wheezing out a steady oom-pah. Gerard’s voice is even put through an effect that makes it sound like he’s singing through a megaphone — a popular means of getting the audience’s attention in the pre-amplification days of the literary cabarets. But the effect the band are aiming for is not so much the Überbrettl of 1901 as the Troika circa 1930.

  Siouxsie Sioux: Brand new people…

  Everything Collapses

  MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE weren’t the only post-emo outfit to revive the spirit of the literary cabarets in the early twenty-first century. The Black Parade appeared hot on the heels of Panic at the Disco’s debut album, A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out — a record shot through with hot jazz rhythms and dressed to the nines in high literary style. Songwriter Ryan Ross poured ironies on his agonies and crammed so many sub-clauses into his parentheses that singer Brendan Urie just barely managed to fit the words between the beats. And yet the band always kept their cool — Ross’s tales of bad sex, cheap laughs and existential boredom were presented with a lip-sticked pout and a mascaraed wink. Emo kids the world over fell head-over-heels in love.

  Caberet, as music writer Norman Lebrecht has observed, thrives in societies in decline. This might seem odd at first. Civilisation is falling down around your ears — is this really the best time to be drinking absinthe until two in the morning and experimenting with make-up? But for the cabaret singer, there is no better response to social collapse. Panic at the Disco know this instinctively. ‘Looks like the end of history’, sings Urie on Panic’s 2008 single, ‘Nine in the Afternoon’. ‘Oh, no — it’s just the end of the world.’ Urie delivers these lines like he’s seen it all before, and will see it again. In a sense, he has, and he will.

  In Berlin, following the end of the First World War, the world was also about to end. Faced with a pile of war debts — debts which the shattered nation was in no position to repay — the German chancellory came up with the novel solution of simply printing more money. The value of the Deutschmark plummeted, and the moral standards of the capital fell quickly in its wake. Dostoyevsky, it seemed, had been right. The modern world’s shopkeeper philosophy had effectively replaced real values with monetary ones. Now that money was worth nothing, life had become meaningless. ‘Standards and values disappeared,’ writes musicologist Douglas Jarman. ‘Berlin was transformed into the Babylon of the world.’

  But the collapse of morals turned out to be good news for the owners of nightclubs, where — as Jarman observes — business continued as usual. In the Berlin cabarets of the early 1920s, jaunty, jazz-inflected pop tunes told tales of political subversion and sexual perversion. Even after the mark stabilised in 1923, and Germany regained some sense of order, the cabarets continued to flourish as hotbeds of satire and sleaze. But after the Wall Street crash of 1929, Germany’s economy spiralled out of control again. Predictably, in the cabarets, business boomed. Once again, all bets were off, and everything was permitted, with the sole exception of bourgeois conformity — the cabaret’s arch-enemy.

  In 1931 — with unemployment creeping toward the six million mark and the capital edging toward civil war — an English expat named Christopher Isherwood described a typical night on the town, in his novel, Goodbye to Berlin.

  The couples were dancing with hands on each other’s hips, yelling into each other’s faces, streaming with sweat. An orchestra in Bavarian costume whooped and drank and perspired beer. The place stank like a zoo.1

  Christopher’s closest friend in Goodbye to Berlin is a nightclub singer called Sally Bowles. Sally seems to survive on a diet of Prairie Oysters and cigarettes. She refuses Christopher’s offers of more substantial fare by saying:

  I just don’t want to eat anything at all. I feel all marvellous and ethereal, as if I was a medieval saint or something. You’ve no idea how glorious it feels… Have a chocolate, darling?2

  Like many of Christopher’s friends in Goodbye to Berlin, Sally has lost the trick of acting naturally, if she ever had it. But to compensate, she has become very good at acting — and not just on the stage. Sally is unconvinced by life — reality seems unreal to her. Nazi Putsch or Communist Revolution? Eat and live or starve and die? Have another chocolate, darling? But despite Sally’s inability to take it seriously, reality won’t go away either. So Sally — being a consummate professional — has resolved to put in a convincing performance.

  Isherwood had no way of knowing it, but his snapshot of Berlin on the brink would go on to become one of the founding texts of glam rock. Isherwood’s portrait of a decadent society in decline in Goodbye To Berlin, his characters’ ironic, detached attitude to life — even the book’s title — would provide David Bowie with the atmosphere of his sequel to Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane. In Goodbye to Berlin, the news is all bad; one newspaper headline reads

  EVERYTHING COLLAPSES.3

  And this is precisely the reason why no-one seems to care very much about anything besides having a good time. In the face of the apocalypse, what else can you do? Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust had begun with the news that the world would end in five years. Now, in Aladdin Sane, Bowie announced that there was no reason why you shouldn’t do whatever you liked. Life was simply a tragedy, which would soon be over. Might as well have some fun. ‘Panic in Detroit’ describes a society in its death throes — the kids turn up at school and find that their teachers have simply stopped work. Sure, children are the future — but what if there’s no future? The kids scream, run out into the street and start smashing things. Bowie reports on this with his usual combination of alien detachment and high melodrama.

  On the album’s best song, ‘Tim
e’, Ziggy puts the fate of humanity into perspective. It’s a cabaret number — the singer sits on a bar stool smoking a cigarette while pianist Mike Garson throws Schoenbergian shapes over his keyboard, complicating ‘Time’’s Weimar-jazz arrangement with expressionist dissonances. ‘Time!’ sings Ziggy,

  He speaks of senseless things

  His script is you and me4

  ‘Time’, like many of Bowie’s songs, betrays the influence of composer Kurt Weill — a songwriter who virtually epitomised the cultural world of the Weimar Republic. In his memoir, A Little Yes and a Big No, the painter George Grosz recalled that ‘you could hear [Weill’s] songs everywhere you went in those days’.5 Weill inherited the Wagnerian ideal of music-theatre as a means to repair a fragmented society. But he had no time for Wagner’s emotional excesses. Weill replaced the Ring of the Niebelungen with the Threepenny Opera, the most famous of his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. The opera’s best-known song, ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’, is typical Brecht–Weill. It observes the worst aspects of human behaviour in a society on the brink, but does so over a tune that once heard, never leaves your head. Later in the 70s, Bowie would record Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’, perform many of his songs live, and come very close to starring in a film adaptation of The Threepenny Opera.