Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

  Bowie’s interest in Weill’s music was part of a larger fascination with Weimar culture. He was (and still is) a keen admirer of expressionist painting and film — the set designs for his Diamond Dogs tour were strongly influenced by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Metropolis. Later, when glam rock went mainstream, he said he felt very upset that ‘people who’d obviously never seen Metropolis and had never heard of Christopher Isherwood were becoming Glam Rockers’.6 In the summer of 1976 he and Iggy Pop moved into an apartment in Isherwood’s old neighbourhood, the Schoneburg district of Berlin. On the cover of Heroes, he made an explicit homage to the expressionists, posing in imitation of an Erich Heckel painting he’d seen at Die Brücke museum. In the photo, Bowie’s hands are raised at an awkward, theatrical angle, bent out of shape by the stress of modern life. His face has been reduced to a black and white mask, his cheeks are hollow, his eyes have a haunted look.

  This portrait of Bowie is also a very close cousin to the one of Iggy Pop on the cover of The Idiot — an album Bowie produced and played on while the two were living in Berlin. On ‘Nightclubbing’, the pair takes us with them on one of their nocturnal escapades through the divided city:

  We’re seeing people

  Brand new people

  They’re something to see.7

  The brand-new people do brand-new dances, he tells us, ‘like the nuclear bomb’. This, as you’ve probably guessed is the dance of the damned. Why not twist your body out of shape and wreck yourself with pills and liquor? With everything collapsing, anything goes.

  Bowie’s timing was, as usual, impeccable. The same year, the Sex Pistols declared that, in the face of the apocalypse, morality was bunk. ‘When there’s no future, how can there be sin?’ asked Johnny Rotten. ‘We’re the future,’ he insisted, pointing to the nocturnal freaks crawling out of the city’s garbage, ‘your future!’8 Sure enough, Iggy’s new people had appeared, growing out of the city the way Cesare seemed to grow out of the expressionist décor in Caligari. Drawn by the aura of sin and subversion around the Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a strange crowd of teenagers from the London suburb of Bromley joined the group’s entourage early in 1976. Siouxsie Sioux was eighteen at the time, and was determined to propel herself as far as possible from the stifling conformity of Bromley. She’d already tried to find work as a model, but the agencies had rejected her because she was too skinny and wore too much make-up. Anyone else might have been disheartened by this, but Siouxsie was already cultivating a personal style that had nothing whatever to do with the blonde, healthy, suntanned look the agencies were after. She’d first seen the light three years earlier while lying in a hospital bed, recovering from a serious illness. Switching on Top of the Pops, she saw David Bowie singing ‘Starman’. It was, as Siouxsie’s future collaborator Robert Smith once told Richard Kingsmill, the sort of thing that changes lives.9 Bowie looked deathly pale, painfully thin, generally unwell…and fabulous! Siouxsie cheered up instantly. ‘I’d lost so much weight and got so skinny that Bowie actually made me look cool.’10

  By the time she’d fallen in with the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie had turned ill-health into a fashion statement — and something more, an existential protest against bourgeoise comfort. Pale skin and dark eyes said to the world: ‘I am a creature of the night — I stay up too late and punish my body in unthinkable ways. But I do it because I will never settle for the half-life of the suburbs, the stifling comfort of work, dinner, TV, sleep, work…’ Siouxsie and her friends — John, Blanche, Tracey and Berlin — knew they were better than this, and set out to prove it in every way. ‘The only thing that was looked down upon,’ she told Jon Savage, ‘was suburbia. I hated Bromley: I thought it was small and narrow-minded. There was this trendy wine bar called Pips, and I got Berlin to wear this dog-collar, and I walked in with Berlin following me, and people’s jaws just hit the tables… People were scared!’11

  Berlin was only fifteen years old, but had already reinvented herself as a Weimar-era nightclub singer in bowler hat and fishnets. Cabaret, as Norman Lebrecht has observed, thrives in societies in decline12 — which is why Bowie used it as one of the harbingers of the apocalypse on Aladdin Sane. Berlin from Bromley sensed this connection between England circa 1976 and Germany 1929 intuitively. ‘I can’t tell you the parallels between those days and Goodbye to Berlin,’ she told Jon Savage. ‘We were living it out, the whole bit.’13

  Berlin knew what a society in decline felt like from Isherwood’s novel. But she knew what it looked like because she’d seen the movie. Goodbye to Berlin had first been adapted as a popular play called I Am a Camera, then a musical with songs by Fred Ebb and John Kander in 1966 (which Bowie saw as a teenager and loved), and finally, as a film directed by Bob Fosse and released in 1972 as Cabaret.14 Joel Grey, who plays the MC at the Kit Kat Klub, was one of the few actors to be retained for the movie from the stage version. In the film, Grey wears a thick mask of black and white make-up that pushes his face into an exaggerated smirk, like an expressionist painting come to life. ‘Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome!’ he sings, by way of greeting the assortment of local scene-makers and gawking tourists who’ve come to see the show. He hams, winks and mugs his way through his duties, a model of ironic detachment and nocturnal sleaze. For the Bromley contingent, Grey’s show stealing performance embodied a whole philosophy of life.

  Liza Minnelli: Where are your troubles now?

  Life Is a Cabaret

  IN Cabaret, THE world is about to end. But in the Kit Kat Klub, it might as well not exist. ‘Where are your troubles now?’ Grey asks the audience after another bawdy, gut-busting tune: Forgotten! In here, life is beautiful…1

  The song the audience have just heard is ‘Life is a Cabaret’, the singer is Sally Bowles — played in the film by Liza Minnelli. In the song, Sally tells a story about a friend she knew in Chelsea who did whatever she liked and never thought about tomorrow. Elsie lived in a tiny rented room and died alone. At her funeral all the decent respectable folk from the neighborhood snickered self-righteously; ‘Well, that’s what comes of too much pills and liquor’.2 But this is not the moral of the story. The moral of the story is: Elsie from Chelsea is a hero. Why? Because life is pointless, work is futile, love is fleeting, and the world is steadily marching toward the brink of war. Again. So why not kill yourself with booze and pills? Why not sin, and sin proudly? At least you’ll enjoy yourself while you’re here. All you respectable folk can do what you like, says the singer, her voice starting to tremble, her eyes starting to pop.

  As for me

  I made my mind up

  Back in Chelsea

  When I go

  I’m goin’ like Elsie!3

  At this point, Liza Minnelli’s performance takes on an almost religious intensity, as she sings us through Sally’s epiphany, the means by which she has learned to transcend her meaningless life and the world’s meaningless collapse.

  Life is a cabaret old chum

  It’s only a cabaret old chum

  And I love a cabaret!4

  Now, as the MC says, life is beautiful. Cabaret is not just about distracting yourself from the threat of social collapse with a bit of harmless fun. It’s about learning to see life aesthetically. It’s about seeing the suffering of the world turned into a song, and then beginning to understand that the song is not only a consolation for suffering — it justifies the suffering.

  If this sounds a little Nietzschean, it ought to. Cabaret — the style, and by extension, the movie — owes a great deal of its character to Nietzsche. German cabaret began with Baron von Wolzogen’s Überbrettl in 1900. Brettl is the German word for the ‘little boards’ upon which the cabaret performers plied their trade — Wolzogen attached the Nietzschean prefix, über, to his company name, to show that, while the boards might be little, the ambitions of his new cabaret were anything but. The Nietzschean overtones, as Peter Conrad explains in Modern Times Modern Places, were absolutely intentional. ‘The Berlin cabarets, explicitly i
nvoking Nietzsche as their founder, encouraged the uprising of rude, savage nature against anaemic society.’5 The German cabaret was intended as a place where one could sin boldly, and reflect on suffering with the mocking laughter of the ‘higher man’. The high romantic irony of Bowie’s ‘Time’, Kander and Ebb’s ‘Life Is a Cabaret’ and Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’ (which Bowie produced), all retain this Olympian perspective — a residue of the cabaret’s original manifesto — which is crucial to their appeal.

  In the brief period of optimism preceding the crash of 1929, Brecht and Weill re-imagined the cabaret as having a constructive social function. Cabaret during this time took on a strong left-wing flavour. But the presence of Nietzsche in the cabaret’s history explains why the genre tends to appeal to those with an aristocratic, rather than a democratic attitude to life and art. In Stardust, Tony Zanetta remarks on Bowie’s superior attitude to his audience at his first Ziggy shows — so different from the ‘I’m just a regular guy like you’ image cultivated by the Californian bands of the day. Bowie, says Zanetta, ‘projects an upper-middle class patrician quality, and seems impressively elegant.’6 This aristocratic quality in Bowie made it very easy for him to slip into the role required of him in a song like ‘Time’, that of the aloof observer to whom suffering is merely a form of play. It also made him an important reference point for those who were caught up in the energy of punk, but unable to relate to its democratic ideals. The Clash used to invite their fans, en masse, to sleep on the floor of their hotel rooms after shows. Siouxsie and her Banshees were having none of it. ‘I mean, no!’ laughed a horrified Steve Severin in Simon Reynolds’ ‘Rip it Up’…, ‘we’d let them stay out in the rain!’7 When Siouxsie says that the only thing she and he friends looked down upon was suburbia, she echoes Nietzsche’s horror at ‘the mob hotchpotch’. ‘Oh disgust! Disgust! Disgust!’ wrote the most un-democratic philosopher in 1884.

  In 1972 Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret were ideal companions. Both offered a view of a society on the brink of collapse, and both suggested an aesthetic view of suffering as the solution. Both end heroically — the world is shown to be cruel, dangerous and corrupt, but the hero takes the stage for one more song with a great ‘nevertheless’. Liza Minnelli’s ‘Life is a Cabaret’ and Bowie’s ‘Rock and Roll Suicide’ both insist that tragedy will redeem us and justify our suffering. But where Ziggy Stardust ends with a grand flourish of strings and a decisive ‘home’ chord, Cabaret strikes a more ambiguous note.

  ‘Where are your troubles now?’ asks the MC. ‘Forgotten!’ We have to admit he’s right. The singer has stood up on stage and said ‘yes’ to life — to all of life. In doing so, she has become that thing that Nietzsche could never have imagined (because he was scared of women) — a superwoman. Here is a woman, we think, who cannot only cope with madness, death and societal collapse, but actually enjoy it — even laugh at it. We imagine, as we watch her, that we might be that brave and that bold. And here, in the cabaret, where everything is permitted, it seems possible. To be always a yea-sayer, to take the worst that life can throw at us and laugh at it.

  But as Nietzsche knew, being a yea-sayer is not the same as saying ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ or ‘it’s all good’. To know whether you have what it takes to be a superman or superwoman, you have to be able to grasp suffering on an endless loop, you have to be able to swallow the notion that the war you have just lived through will be followed by another, and another and another. Now, as the MC goes backstage to wipe off his make-up, Fosse’s camera pans around the bar, and our new aesthetic attitude to life is put to its most gruesome test. Refracted through the prism of a whisky glass, we can see a group of men in brown shirts with red armbands sitting in the corner of the bar. Life, Fosse seems to be saying, will not be beautiful much longer. Can you say yes to World War Two?

  Mother War

  GERARD WAY FIRST saw Cabaret when he was just ‘a little kid’.1 It didn’t just happen to be on TV one night, it was shown to him — as part of a broader education in art, theatre and music — by his grandmother, Elena Lee Rush. The film had a tremendous impact on him — the sound and style of Kander and Ebb’s songs, the atmosphere of the Kit Kat Klub, and the strange combination of power and fragility in its leading lady. All of these things would stay with him forever, and would go on to shape his own music in important ways. Right from their humble beginnings, My Chemical Romance stood out from its punk and hardcore peers because of Gerard’s exaggerated sense of melodrama, and his understanding of the importance of wardrobe and make-up. In fact, Gerard was still avidly studying Cabaret as My Chemical Romance wrote and recorded The Black Parade — and it shows.

  There are plenty of stylistic references — the hot jazz rhythm and Sprechstimme of ‘Dead’ and ‘House of Wolves’, the demented Bavarian oom-pah of ‘Mama’ and ‘Blood’, the jaunty phrasing of ‘Teenagers’. But the influence goes deeper — beyond the surface of the music and into the realm of ideas. The Black Parade is full of suffering, but in almost every case Gerard presents his pain as a show. He invites his audience to watch the spectacle of his demise with the knowing wink and insinuating leer of Joel Grey’s MC. He knows they’ll get their money’s worth. ‘Gather ‘round piggies and kiss this goodbye,’ he sings in ‘The End’, ‘I’d encourage your smiles I’d expect you won’t cry!’2 His tone is mocking, superior and ironic…most of the time.

  Gerard didn’t learn all of this by sitting on the couch watching Cabaret on video — a lot of it he learned the hard way, by treading the brettl. Here, again, he had his grandmother to thank. Elena didn’t just introduce him to musicals — she gave him the confidence to star in them. Elena encouraged Gerard to try out for the leading role in his school’s production of Peter Pan — she made him a costume and everything. This was another milestone in Gerard’s life. ‘I discovered I could sing,’ he later recalled, ‘which was pretty interesting.’3

  What’s even more interesting is that Gerard should find himself, in 2007, telling this story to Liza Minnelli, the star of Cabaret. Liza with a Z has a few Peter Pan anecdotes of her own. ‘When I see you,’ she says to Gerard, ‘remind me to tell you about the dress rehearsal for Peter Pan with Sandy Duncan.’ Liza and Gerard are pals now (‘you are my new baby, who I adore’ she gushes) since the legendary actress made a guest appearance on The Black Parade.4

  Minnelli’s cameo appears in ‘Mama’ — one of the strangest, fiercest and most emotionally raw songs on the album. ‘Mama’ begins with the sound of a city under siege, the muffled crack of distant explosions. The band picks up the rhythm implied by the steady fall of the bombs, and pretty soon they’re playing a song. Gerard steps into the spotlight and — in the time-honored tradition of the avant-garde artist — tells it like it is. ‘Mama,’ he sings, ‘we’re all gonna die.’5

  It’s not just a figure of speech. The song is addressed to Mother War, a Shiva-like goddess of destruction who forms part of the pantheon of The Black Parade. On the album’s inner sleeve photo, she stands alongside the band and the other characters from the album wearing a Victorian gown and a gas mask. Like the Belle Dame of Keats’s poem, or the embodiment of hopelessness in AFI’s Love Like Winter video, Mother War is a variation on that great romantic obsession, the femme fatale — the eternal fusion of love and death.

  In ‘Mama’, Mother War is played by Liza Minnelli. She tells the singer, her voice muffled through the gas mask, that she wishes he would call her his ‘sweetheart’. But the singer resists, because he’s seen through Mother War and the things she promises. She’s the personification of the will to war in both society and the individual, the collective insanity that drives people to commit murder in the name of their country or their religion. The singer has had enough of it. He’s seen the truth — that there’s no glory in war, no victory, no eternal reward for the soldiers or anyone else, just a pile of corpses as far as the eye can see. ‘Mama’, he sings, pouring on the scorn, ‘w
e’re all full of lies, Mama we’re meant for the flies.’6

  Here, something goes badly wrong with Gerard Way’s ironic detachment. He wishes he could be Ziggy, observing human suffering with his Martian cool, or Nietzsche, admiring the strength and power of the ‘will to war’ in a troop of soldiers marching off to battle. But he can’t stand it. His disgust cracks the form of the song — Sprechstimme goes out the window, he starts howling like a dog or a baby, ‘Ma-Maaa!, Ma-Maaaa!’ The world is going to hell, and everyone just keeps drinking and dancing. Why won’t anyone listen to him? More importantly, why won’t they do something? This is not the aloof stance of the artist tyrant, but the rage and disgust of a man who, having set out to change the world, finds himself trapped in the music hall.

  This is where we leave Gerard as The Black Parade draws to a close — stuck in the endless limbo of entertainment. He ripped out his heart to show the audience the truth of modern life, and they just sat there and clapped, and yelled for an encore. He sounds crushed, because he’s realised — as Nietzsche always knew — that tragedy doesn’t improve the world. The audience in the club or the opera theatre are redeemed, but outside the world will continue to suffer. It has to, so that the artist’s tragic attitude to life can be maintained.

  Gerard Way will not accept this. He loves art, but he’s too democratically minded to be able to stomach the idea that it justifies the suffering of the world. The engine that drives My Chemical Romance is powered by the perpetual push-and-pull of Gerard’s contradictory impulses — his desire to create tragic spectacles on the one hand, and his need to help the world on the other, his love of the emotional and the irrational versus his determination to make a difference in the real world. The Black Parade is, in a sense, an album length rewrite of ‘Life is a Cabaret’, a record in which the hero takes everything the world can throw at him, and does his best to celebrate suffering, to always be a yea-sayer. But in ‘Mama’, looking around the bar and listening to the bombs fall outside, he realises he can’t say yes to a third World War. Is there some way, he wonders, of making art and making a difference? This after all, is why Gerard started the band in the first place. On the morning of 11 September, 2001, Way had officially renounced art for art’s sake, and resolved to help the world.