Lee "Scratch" Perry

Where to begin? Where to end? Not necessarily in that order. Empire is all about knowing where you begin and end. Euro-Christian notions of progress, of historical development: Alpha to Omega. Yet so few of us live this way. We stumble from pillar to post, from post- to pre- without plan or premonition. Sometimes the means justifies the means. So Lee “Scratch” Perry – the Upsetter – brings the horns back again. He sets the hum that wasn’t supposed to be there against the skanking upbeat that was, justifying nothing but having done it. Mean means. Means mean.

Every form is a philosophy. European music insists on rational permutations of an initial theme; on compositional complexity and resolution. Such music lords over its listeners and its musical others, driven by its need to express superiority. It recognizes that superiority is a fiction like any other and exerts it in form: political form, cultural form, legal form, economic form.

In Kingston, in the late-1960s, Lee Perry and King Tubby and a handful of others began to strip the vocal tracks from popular reggae records, pumping up the rhythms and taking liberties with delay effects. They called these new mixes “versions.” The style that emerged – treating the fundaments of a song as a tabula rasa – became known as “dub.” (For a definitive account, see Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae.) The blank canvas became, not a space for adding new materials, but a space of subtraction. What is already there is the material and carving it away reveals eddies and ripples hidden beneath the vocal melodies or the organ chords. Something altogether new is discovered in the tangles of the strands of canvas, in the muck of the gesso. Such music has no need for any notion of superiority. It is but a version, a derivative of another thing, equally strong, equally meaningful, equal.

In the ruptures and corruptions of the smooth surface of the steady rhythm new things grow and glow like lichens in a sun-deprived crevasse. One accepts as rule of law that nothing rises to perfection, but that flaws are points of departure, new possibilities hiding in the folds of the canvas. As one pearl of Kingston wisdom puts it: “Every spoil a style.”

No one understood this better than Lee Perry. In his hands, a bad electrical line buzz could become the basis of a new song. When he felt burnt out, he burned his studio – the Black Ark – to the ground – presumably to find something new in the absence he was creating. He produced many of Jamaican music’s most important sessions, including early recordings of Bob Marley and the Wailers and sent those recordings – without the band’s knowledge or consent to Chris Blackwell at Island Records in London, thereby launching Reggae’s biggest star. He also produced the Congos’ great Heart of the Congos, possibly the highpoint of Rastafarian-influenced vocal group reggae – a record of recurrent epiphanies and lasting effects. Perry’s music launched a thousand ships. His use of the studio as a musical instrument in its own right, not merely a capturer, but a creator of sounds, is now taken for granted. But it wasn’t when he started fucking around and fucking shit up.

One of my favorite Lee “Scratch” Perry tracks is “Corn Fish Dub,” as it appears on the album Super Ape. The song seems to emerge out of a fog that is half-physical, half-mental. A distant guitar echoes into itself like a dream that can’t decide to get started. Against that, vocals drift in absentmindedly. Then a muted bell is struck, its attack truncated. Sometimes, it rings out on the one, resonating and echoing: raindrops on the trembling surface of a pond. Other times, the bell swallows itself at its inception and disappears into the space it has engineered for its own pulse. A recurring descending chromatic guitar line gives the song the faintest of shapes. But mostly it is an atmosphere, the bell a firing-synapse across the expanse of mental space and time. Into that flexing envelope everything is swallowed and from it everything is regurgitated, both beginning and end. All revealed as equally origin, equally destination, equally contingent, equal.

Perry’s brand of magic realism was heavy on the magic and light on the realism. His own music lives on a surreal plane with spaghetti westerns and Japanese b-monster flicks: worlds in which the mundane bends around Morricone twang and warbling theremins. These worlds are unheimlich – unhomely, uncanny – doubles of our world with a few of the screws removed, ropeless pulleys, unkiltered pistons chafing against time, yardarms fallen to the dust amid sheltering puffs. Everything could be true. But no more true than what we – on a daily basis – take to be true. The rules of music and manners are not much use here. And Scratch ignored them both with equal insouciance. He was a mischief-maker extraordinaire; a true trickster. The kind who realizes that only the trick is true. We rarely honor our debt to the trickster, the holy fool. He’s dismissable. We can take what we need from him, but leave him safely behind, obscured by madness, smoke, magic. Scratch won’t go away that easily. His music is his remains and in it multitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Watts

Conflicted is the only way to feel about the Rolling Stones. They’ve now spent forty years as a satire of their first fifteen. It would be easy to write them off. But those first fifteen years produced so many moments in which their workaday methods produced little fission miracles. It’s no more and no less than honest to scratch one’s head and ask “why?” about everything from Tattoo You onwards. The tours especially are exercises in embarrassment. Not just Mick’s tights or Keef’s pirate cosplay, but the spectacle, the rehashing, the nostalgia trip(-up). The real crime is that all they had to produce was fumes and that they obliged. They became a multi-national corporation whose product was a knock-off of the product they used to make. They plagiarized themselves on a conveyor belt of plug n’ play records and misdirection theatrics.

Charlie Watts sat behind it all, gazing down like the chief executive whose fashion he adopted. He avoided the rough and tumble of the factory floor, choosing to frame the fray within the boundaries of his modest kit. On some level, Charlie was the only thing that allowed the Stones to retain some small room legitimacy. You could still imagine him on the bandstand at the Checkerboard Lounge or even perched on a corner stool at the bar. The same imagining could never apply to Keith or Mick.

But, truth is, Charlie was a jobber. He just wanted to play. When he joined the Stones he was also a member of numerous other bands. As Ben Sisario reported yesterday in the New York Times,

“I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2000. “I thought they’d last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.”

Charlie could have been just as happy (but a lot less wealthy) playing in a jazz trio at Ronnie Scott’s. He bred prizewinning Arabian horses. This fact says a lot about who Charlie was: He collected vintage cars even though he never learned to drive. Even though Mick and Keith courted him like starstruck suitors, he was lucky to catch on with two such manic, motivated drivers. He wasn’t so much their motor as their mechanic, keeping the machine musically and emotionally humming.

So I feel honest acknowledging that I’m conflicted too about Charlie. I admire the commitment to the cause, even if his commitment always seemed easier than Mick’s or Keith’s who each could have managed without the others. I appreciate the simple core that Charlie insisted on maintaining at the eye of the musical and theatrical storm, while also feeling that he was rather dull as a drummer. Sure, there’s that slightly behind the beat thing that everybody mentions. But he certainly didn’t invent that and one feels that a whole bunch of other drummers could have done what he did and most of us would never have noticed. He has, in fact, missed out on a healthy handful of sessions over the years and most are unaware or unsure if what they’re hearing is Charlie. (E.g. Is it Charlie on “Gimme Shelter?”)

Still, he rolled with the Stones and that is no small feat. Putting up not only with two boundless egos, but also shifting with his bandmates’ whims from blues to riffs to psychedelia and eventually a stilted, percolating disco. My favorite Stones’ stuff is the bootleg compilation known as Sympathy for the Disco, outtakes from the late-70s. Only one track is harvested from the 80s, 1981s “Come On Sugar.” It’s the last thing the Stones did that still suggests searching and yearning for something new – or more precisely, some new configuration of the parts they pilfered from Black music. What makes Sympathy for the Disco so good is how wrong they get it. If it’s the disco they’re aiming at, they land curled up in a shopping cart outside in the parking lot, having been thrown out by the bouncer after six too many Wild Rose shots. These tracks are disco-adjacent and skewed by the Stones’ obscenely rich, British, princes-of-perversity sensibilities. The misfire makes this music utterly unique, unlike any funky White weirdness being produced by post punk kids in New York’s No Wave at the same time.

Charlie’s playing is great throughout but never more so then on “Come On Sugar” where his contribution is primarily a heavy kick drum shadowed ever-so-slightly-later by an enveloping hi-hat closing around the beat like an oyster shell around a pearl. The snare drum intervenes like a curse, damning the unreachable trapped within. It’s inspired even if it’s just the work of a guy who’d play whatever you put in front of him.

In the 1989 film 25x5, Charlie is asked about the previous 25 years touring with the Rolling Stones. “Work five years, and twenty years hanging around.” It was the work that mattered to him. But he was willing to hang around waiting for someone else to count off. It’s telling that the Stones will now tour without him. They’re still counting off, even if Charlie’s done working.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Neil Peart 

I know this will come off as indiscreet. Speak well of the dead, goes the admonishment. Yet, as the tributes pour in for Neil Peart, dead yesterday of brain cancer, I find myself surprised by the widespread willingness to sing the praises of this particular drummer and lyricist. Alan Greenspan, notwithstanding, no one has better promoted the wicked worldview of Ayn Rand than did Peart. Via the lyrics he plugged into Geddy Lee’s Muppetian falsetto, Peart regurgitated the vile vomit of Rand’s so-called “Objectivism,” draped in the shimmery adornment of dystopian futurism. Randian me-firstist discourse is, of course, the cornerstone of the neoliberal revolution that took hold under Reagan and Thatcher but which now infects nearly every aspect of our media, our values, our law, legislation, and “reason.”

Rand’s philosophy make sense as fodder for a music aimed at teenage boys, answering to the narcissistic mandates of pubescence and the demands of Western, waged “manhood.” All selfishness and bootstrapping, Peart’s lyrics paint a picture of a world dependent on the freedom inherent in individual choice-making. (Exhibit A: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,” from the song “Freewill” on the 1980 album Permanent Waves.) Conveniently, it ignores all the implicit and explicit limitations imposed on individual’s choices due to gender, race, and class. In this respect, Rush’s lyrical worldview bears a decided resemblance to the legislative worldview of conservative lawmakers and to the economic worldview of free marketeers. This is no coincidence. Peart’s thinking shares a bloodline with those whose faces would adorn the Mount Rushmore of the not-so hypothetical hyper-patriarchal United States of AynRandica: Milton Friedman, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Ryan, Clarence Thomas. (Bless their stars that the Randians can plausibly nominate a Black man to provide convenient cover for objectivism’s endemic White supremacism.)

Some point out that Peart later dismissed his infatuation with Rand, telling Rolling Stone, “That was forty years ago. But it was important to me at the time in a transition of finding myself and having faith that what I believed was worthwhile." Unfortunately, the damage was done. Literally millions of teenage boys – turned on by Rush’s mixture of power balladry and proggy semi-sophistication, and by Peart’s machine-tooled percussive excess, perfectly composed to be mimed on the dashboards of anything from a tricked-out Trans Am to your mom’s Malibu Station wagon – were introduced to objectivism by Peart (notably via his liner notes to Rush’s 1976 album, 2112, which cite “the genius of Ayn Rand”).

And, still, there are those of us who cling to the fusty belief that, quite apart from the drummer’s intentions, art actually *means* something. We maintain that in the workings of the work, the comings-together of means and method, the collisions of reference and rationale, something emerges that says something, does something, feels like something. Art must take responsibility for this something. And, while one might be tempted to say that the artist, in turn, must take responsibility for the art, I don’t think that’s quite right. Because, as Barthes informed us fifty years ago (plus two), the artist is wholly a product of the art. Not the other way around. Whatever Neil Peart is to us, he is an effect of Rush’s music. Despite all disavowals, Rush’s music always hewed to a particular conception of mastery, expertise, and sophistication (but not too much sophistication – for god’s sake, it’s not King Crimson).

Remember back in 2012, when Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President, tapped Paul Ryan, throwback-conservative congressman from Wisconsin, as his Vice Presidential running mate? Remember when Ryan confessed to cranking Rage Against The Machine while pumping iron? Remember when Rage’s guitarist, Tom Morello, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone, condemning Ryan and asserting that Ryan was, in essence, a bad listener for misapprehending the meaning of Rage’s music? What’s at issue in this musicological debate is the question of how music makes its meaning. Morello says, listen to the lyrics, dude. He wonders which songs are Ryan’s favorites, “Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of ‘Fuck the Police’? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!” For his part, Ryan says he likes the music, but not the lyrics. The thing about Rush is that, regardless of whether you’re a Morellist or a Ryanian, you’re in a pickle. If you attempt to move past Peart’s Fascile (facile-Fascist) wordsmithing, you’re confronted, unfortunately, with the problem that is Rush’s music.

And here we are forced to realize that, even if forty years ago, Rand was left in Peart’s motorcycle’s rearview mirror, Rush as a musical entity has never separated itself from the core principles of an objectivist worldview. Rush’s music represents a valorizing of technique, as embodied in technical apparatus and virtuosity upon such apparatus. Exhibit B: Neil Peart’s drum kit:

Some drummers play with their bodies. Some play with their brains. (The best combine the two. See the Rock and Roll Eulogy for ClydeStubblefield and Jaki Liebezeit, February, 2017.) Neil Peart plays with his arms. As my friend, Seth Brodsky, quipped, this is “biceptual music,” music of and for the biceps. Like Rage Against The Machine, it’s music for dumbbells. What we marvel at when we marvel at Peart’s playing, is what he can do with his limbs. His drum kit tells us this before he even sits down. Peart’s kit is a text. It reads: “So many things to strike! Imagine this man’s limbs engaging all these objects!” One wonders how he decides that he needs one more piece? That small black cymbal over his left shoulder, for instance? Does Peart lie awake at night, tormented by the fact that his kit presents nothing for him to hit that will produce a frequency of 2600 Hz, sustaining for 6 to 8 seconds? Yes, he does! And that is the source of our techno-obsessive wonder.

Like his kit, Peart’s playing is everywhere-all-at-once. Nary a crevice or fissure in the cliff face of Lee’s bass or Alex Lifeson’s guitar is left unspackled by the daubs and baubles of Peart’s multitudinous double kick drum, his demisemihemiquavers, his flams and paradiddles. Again, the listener’s ear is mesmerized by the techne-dextrousness with which Peart’s spatial detection software tracks down unfilled musical space and pimps it like a Medieval Catholic architect. The meaning of Rush’s music is distilled most eloquently, most unadulteratedly in Peart’s playing. His rototom fills and China crash crashes speak directly to the sinew of the adolescent boy, to the muscle he is so desperate to acquire. The adolescent boy has been taught that this muscle is the key to his happiness and, more importantly, to his self-fulfillment: that is, to the fulfillment of his individuality within the heterogeneous tangle of society. Peart’s are the biceps that launched a thousand Guitar Center drum solos. Peart’s playing is all assertion. It asserts its mastery, its virility, its self-certainty. It is not above stepping clubfootedly on the toes of Peart’s bandmates, just as Rand’s *playing* was not above stepping on others’ shoulders – or heads – to get where it was going.

Again, I realize this will offend some who relish their developmental memories of pummeling the dashboard to “Tom Sawyer” on the Motorola radio. I would never dream of denying you those memories. But development suggests progress, moving beyond the shallow, immediate needs of the moment, to broader sensitivities. Rush’s music and Peart’s playing did not avail themselves of stepping back from visceral responses. Like the objectivist impulses that inform the music, their songs don’t make time or space for reevaluation and realization. Still in the thrall of Rand, Peart wrote the lyrics to “Anthem” on 1975’s Fly By Night.

Live for yourself
There's no one else more worth living for
Begging hands and bleeding hearts
Will only cry out for more

Morellian or Ryanian, the analyses don’t yield much in the way of benevolence. With self-serving autocrats occupying presidential palaces from Brasilia to Washington to Moscow, with an alternative ideology suddenly and realistically available at the highest levels of U.S. government, mourning the passing of Peart’s music feels like an indulgence none of us deserve.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aretha Franklin

Yes, it's just air - air forced across the fallows and folds of the anatomy. But that simple fact does not diminish the astonishment at Aretha's voice. On the contrary, to think that each of us also forces air from our lungs and forms it into pitched syllables. And yet none of us - no other singer who has ever sidled up to a microphone - could make air do what Aretha made it do. In the depths of her lungs, common air is transformed into a kind of electricity. It is fast. It rises out of nothing. And before you can hear it as a voice or a sound or as music, it is already doing its work. The ear pleads mercy before it drops to the earth in acquiescence and approbation. The ear is not worthy. It can't keep up. It has nothing to offer in return. So it simply submits.

Certainly, her voice is the irreducible fact of who Aretha was - or at least, of who she was to we who listened to her, we who listened to her voice. But there's something else that accompanies Aretha's life and her voice as a kind of fact; something else that makes her who she is in the collective imagination of millions. As with everything we're prone to call "genius," the fact of Aretha is a fortunate confluence of time and events and consciousness as they come up against a talent and sensibility appropriate to their import. Aretha's voice was a voice that we needed to hear. The anger and righteousness of Black Americans' demands for justice rose with the force and speed of a flash flood. Of course, such energy is never sudden, but always the result of pent up power deprived an outlet. Aretha's voice is the correlate of this anger and righteousness, this force and speed. Her voice, in the space of a vowel or a soft consonant, could go from lying down to standing up. It could fill the space of its container. Moments later, in mid-verse crescendo, it could devastate that container, like an Ali punch from the inside.

Earlier today, a friend posted an article from a 1970 issue of Jet Magazine which reports that Aretha offered to pay the bond of Angela Davis, who was then jailed on a fabricated murder charge. In the article, Aretha says,

“Angela Davis must go free. Black people will be free. I’ve been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people – they’ve made me financially able to have it – and I want to use it in ways that will help our people.”

It's often said that Soul music is secular Gospel; a music which replaces religious faith with romantic love. And much of Aretha's music of the late-60s could be described this way. But reading about Aretha's passionate support of Angela Davis made me think differently about the content of her songs from the late-60s (when Aretha was just in her mid-twenties). Rather than a swapping of romance for faith, Aretha's songs merely depict earthly enactments of the great moral demands of religion. When Otis Redding sang "Respect," it was about a working man coming home at the end of the day and expecting love and dinner and sex and a specifically submissive expression of respect from his woman. When Aretha sang it, it was about something else, something bigger. It was not a plea from the empowered to be recognized as such, but a demand from the disempowered - woman, African-American, colonized, enslaved - to be recognized at all. Aretha's "Respect" is about dignity and justice.

This theme recurs again and again in Aretha's late-60s recordings, often in places where we aren't prone to hear it. "Chain of Fools," is a swampy vamp, combining Pops Staples-tremolo with a vicious funk born of a New Orleans second line. Musically, it is plaintive and bitter and just about ready to burst. At first blush, the lyrics might be taken for the doleful admissions of a mistreated lover. But, given the historical context (the song was released in 1967), how can we ignore the fact that the song begins with the word "chain" repeated 19 times? The singer complains


You got me where you want me
I ain't nothing but your fool
You treated me mean
Oh, you treated me cruel


Of course, this could be the grievance of an abused lover. But it also reflects contemporaneous race relations in the United States. As the song continues, one begins to hear a description of the structural power dynamics of American racism, Blacks forced into weak positions upon which White strength is established.


Every Chain
Has got a weak link
I might be weak, child
But I'll give you strength


The last verse offers a portent. This situation is untenable and "one morning" it will collapse. But, in the meantime, to spite the unconscionable malice of the oppressor, the oppressed will absorb all the punishment, all the degradation.


One of these mornings
The chain is gonna break
But up until then, yeah
I'm gonna take all I can take

The implication, buried not so deeply in the words themselves, is even closer to the surface of the raw wound in Aretha's delivery. She digs in to these lines. In the studio, she has to step back from the microphone in order not to overdrive the helpless diaphragm. As a result, she sounds slightly more distant, yet at the same time, a distortion is introduced - if not of the diaphragm, of the very air itself?

Another song, "Think" - one of the very few that Aretha wrote - also lends itself to this double-reading: on the one hand, that of the jilted lover, on the other, of those systematically disenfranchised and degraded. The lyrics echo Du Bois who said that anti-Black racism provided a “public and psychological wage,” for poor Whites who were "compensated" for their own disenfranchisement by being able to think themselves superior to Blacks. Aretha sings, "Let's go back, Let's go back / Let's go way on way back when." So this is a developmental diagnosis. It's been there since the start. And while Aretha confesses, "I ain't no psychiatrist / I ain't no doctor with degrees." She also declares, "But it don't take too much high IQ / To see what you're doing to me."

The song then pleads with its listener to reject the restraints of the past, of history, of nation, and race, and privilege:

You better think (think)
Think about what you're trying to do to me
Yeah, think (think, think)
Let your mind go, let yourself be free


And just as "Chain of Fools" wouldn't allow us to miss the point, repeating "chain" nineteen times consecutively, "Think" hammers home its key idea, repeating the word "freedom" twelve times in a row.

The freedom the song demands isn't just her own. She implores the listener to think. Because freedom can't be granted it must be achieved. Blacks' lack of freedom isn't a Black problem. As James Baldwin said,

"We have invented the nigger. I didn't invent him. White people invented him. If I am not the nigger, and if it's true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? Well, he's unnecessary to me, so he must be necessary to you. I'm going to give you your problem back: You're the nigger, baby, it isn't me."


Trying to make other people lose their minds
Well, be careful, you're gonna lose yours


Aretha's demands don't rest principally in the words in the way that I can present them here. Again, it's in the way she pours her astonishment and her outrage into the words, into the elasticized contours of the syllables and slurs. How can White America think that this situation could possibly be right? How can they think it's sustainable? How can they not understand that sooner or later the whole fetid excrescence is going to explode in their throats, denying them the air that Aretha takes and gives more powerfully than they could ever dream of?

Aretha is the Queen of Soul. She made Soul in her image and in the image of the struggle. She made it about demands for equality. Hers is not faith replaced by fantasies of romantic love, but about sacred justice brought to bear upon the profane exigencies of her time and place, about America in the twentieth century and about overcoming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark E. Smith

It’s there from the start. From “Repetition” on Early Fall. The Fall is the most complete aesthetic statement in all of rock and roll. Repetition repeats. Wheels within wheels. Waking up, eating, shitting, going to sleep. The patterns repeat: chew, chew, chew, swallow, chew, chew, chew, swallow, ad nauseum. And the nausea too. And history. Bloody history. Nausea. Mark E. Smith never aimed to make music to make us feel better. For forty years of the same and the same and the same, he aimed to make us queasy. Bent over and sipping hungover breaths through gritted teeth. Afraid to open our mouths or eyes too wide, for fear of letting the world seep in. Smith always knew that the most dangerous infection is the most pervasive. Through, I dunno, maybe 60 albums (it depends how you count them), The Fall’s music has desperately repelled the disease of liquidity; of assuming the shape of its container (drivers). Like a gas (man), it escapes. Like a solid it stubbornly stays the same. Errant vowels at the end of words and squeals of malfunction in the midst of boggle-jumble-phrases (“Rowche Rumble,” “Smile” (just “Smile”), “Eat Y’self Fitter”). The anti-matter James Brown. Jesus Christ in reverse. Because art rarely prompts us to ask both the question “how does he do that?” and “why does he do that?” The first question suggests technique-inspired wonder, while the second implies confusion regarding intent. So, if we do ask both questions, it’s about the bad taste of excess (cf. Neil Peart). But with Mark E. (the Marquis) and the rotating cast of Fallers, the questions are begged by the depth of an obviousness we could never have imagined. Like Lester Bangs said about somebody else, The Fall are all about “musical ideas that may not be highly sophisticated (God forbid!) but are certainly advanced.” It’s the nose in front of your face. Out there, in front. But so hard to see, until you smash into the mirror. Sometimes you need to break the thing wot breathes just to remind y’self of how difficult and dangerous it can be to put on airs (or put up with ‘em, or put ‘em in you). Be careful what you wish for, lungs. The first time I saw The Fall I’d taken mushrooms. Rethought the notion of “psychedelic music.” (And “psychedelic.”) (And “music.”) The way he squatted with his back to me the whole time. Another time, the carry bag man lost hold of a shopping bag full of lyrics on the festival stage. Sheets of words deserted him in the wind. He tried in vain to repatriate them to the bag – the odd jobs concatenations that somehow sat upon dumb dogmatic bass lines and befuddling, scudding drumming like a vested monkey riding a rodeo horse. Most of them got away. Like the time he told the recording engineer that the drummer didn’t deserve more microphones than his own single vocalist allotment and made him take the rest away. Or the time he tells the lighting guy at their hometown Hacienda “Donald, stop those lights flashing or I’ll break your fucking neck”and then recites, simultaneously into the microphone and into a school cassette recorder “he tried to induce epilepsy. I, and my strong personality, was having none of it” like those were just the lyrics of the song which maybe they were because how did he do that? / why did he do that? His tongue was so deep in his cheek it came out the other side, which is either the opposite cheek, the opposite of cheek, or maybe the listener’s cheek, or maybe the very idea of the idea of having one’s tongue in one’s cheek, such that it is swallowed back down the throat which is what can happen during induced epilepsy, the gag reflex, and nausea. Or asphyxiation. Rock and roll must now be officially dead, right? Kidding-not-kidding. Fuck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holger Czukay

It all comes down to the throb. At the heart of every indispensable experience: that insistence made manifest as periodicity, as repetition. It keeps coming back. It keeps coming back. It inveigles. It urges. It persists. Eventually, the distinction between it and whatever had previously been taken to be “normal,” or “permissible,” or “advisable,” fades away. Its intrusion becomes, at first, simply tolerable. But soon enough it vanishes, like the pendulum of the grandfather clock in my childhood home. Friends would say “how do you live here with that constant ticking?” And I would say, “what ticking?” completely incapable of hearing it. Finally, it becomes necessary. The throb;  the very movement of time, the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide, the interstellar hum.

Holger Czukay conjured but one thing from his bass: that throb., Holger’s playing is the most primordial retort to the seismic shufflings of Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming. Together, they perform the dialectics of brass tacks and gilded roses. At one end of the tether, Jaki (who died inJanuary) unwinds the coil, spinning Mandelbrot sets of pulses, spaces, and emphases. At the other end, Holger winds it all back up, tightening the twine into an impossible concentration of matter and energy. Like no other rhythm section, the two of them invent the boundaries of a self-sufficient, and practically endless, musical universe. Anyone who loves Can, whether they know it or not, loves Holger and Jaki mostly. In their spars and scrimmages, entire languages emerge, expend their capacities, and die. They construct in time what Borges’ Library of Babel constructs in space.

What’s more, Can as we know them – and let’s not beat around the bush: they are without a doubt one of the six or seven most significant bands to ever make rock and roll – are largely a product of Holger’s structural vision and ability. He recorded their long sessions, listened to and indexed the fathoms of tape, and edited (by hand; pre-digital) the sessions into ur-compositions, throbbing (again) with the inevitability of being born or dying. He had been a student of Stockhausen and had taken the master’s tools and employed them as weapons against the dogmatic, hectoring didacticism of “serious” music. At roughly the same time that Teo Macero was cutting and splicing Miles Davis sessions in New York to create In A Silent Way, Czukay was chopping up Can sessions at their Inner Space studio in Cologne and assembling a new music that was composed after it was performed.

There is little else in the listenable world that survives repetition as Can does. Their own deeply hewn repetitiveness allows successive listens to act more on the music than the music does on the listening. Jaki and Holger did what rivers do, appearing to follow the contours of the land, when in fact the land is forever yielding to the river. Eventually, rivers either head underground or empty into the sea. In the first case, the river carves ever deeper, hollowing stone, blazing subterranean trails that only the river itself can follow. In the second case, the river disappears into something greater than itself; something more powerful, more extensive. I have no trouble believing that either of these cases (or both) describes where Jaki and Holger have gone.