Youssou N’Dour duets with Dido. This is the ecumenicalism of the G8 concerts which marks inclusivity without implication; the Other remains Other; the ‘and’ of N’Dour and Dido links those whose identities are supposed to remain as they are. Of course, it is N’Dour ‘s identity which is thus lost, since he is included only as he is made to reduplicate rock (or pop) positions. Not a simple tokenism, this ‘and’ is not yet the ‘and’ of becoming, where the being of the terms of the relation are themselves wagered. Nothing is played for and nothing won; everything remains the same and on the plane of the same. This only confirms the idea of the G8 which still exclude the fearsome (to the West) multitudes of China and India, countries whose GDP is, I think, already higher than some of those within the G8. Always the ‘and’ in which nothing is wagered. Always the fear of hybridisation and the multiple. ‘They’ are to be kept safely ‘over there’ – so too is Africa presented as an undifferentiated morass, the great basket-case.
In the film Rock School, Jack Black’s character says to the children he is teaching to assume ‘rock positions’. And so they assume them, having learnt rock is not a matter of aptitude but of attitude. For the dinosaur rock stars of the G8 concerts, it is also a question of rock positions, of those topoi which reassure the stars and their audience that rock is being done. Rock stars keep their part of the bargain; for their part, the audience lift lit lighters into the air.
Against the blandness of corporate rock, there is the counter-temptation to affirm some poor otherness – to require, say, of Cuban music that it purge itself from hip hop, to require the Other to parade before us in her Otherness. Simple exoticism and a refusal of the relations which exist between the Others and ourselves gives us an ‘and’ which links pre-defined terms. But an ‘and’ which implicates each term, a Cuban hip hop born such that Cuba and hip hop are each remade …
I listen to Yat-Kha’s Re-Covers, which contains covers of songs from the rock canon performed by a Russian throat-singer. H., who lent it to me, tells me the singer considers this technique as analogous to a kind of vocoder – part of a repetoire of techniques used not to transform this music into the pure Other, entertaining exotica (entertaining in its exoticness; the tribe dancing before the Queen), nor even to return to us (the ‘West’) in a new form. Performed, rather, out of the love of a canon which repeats what was in those songs revolutionary (the singer of Yat-Kha speaks, apparently, of albums difficult to find in Soviet Russia, of mounting cardboard LP sleeves on his mantlepiece) in the first place not for us but for anyone.
Does the same happen with Cat Power’s Covers? She is an American exotic, rare plant indulged enough to demand that lights be turned on over the audience and that the stage become dark, that she can whoop and holler for an hour rather than play any songs. The audience forgive her. Their secret pleasure: here is Madness paraded before them. Just as Gide and others went to see Artaud. Fortunately, like Artaud, Chan Marshall (Cat Power) is more than that.
Will Oldham was first understood as a kind of savant – the backwoods idiot who, like the banjo-player of Deliverance, was yet able to play a stirring music. When he was revealed not to be, some said he was only an actor (the same was said of Gillian Welch); Will Oldham had been exposed. Only the mask he wore then, at the time of ‘The Ohio River Boat Song’ was dropped almost straightaway; the tinny Days in the Wake was followed by Viva Last Blues, an album of exuberant joy.
Will Oldham wears many masks because he knows there are only masks. No secret is hidden beneath them. Just as The Ramones only wanted a hit (according to H.), there was no calculation behind any of Will Oldham’s transformations. So too with Greatest Palace Hits, recorded under the name of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Listening to it again now, an album in which Will Oldham covers songs by his earlier incarnations, Palace Music, Palace Brothers etc., I hear not betrayal but its opposite: he refuses to play the Other for us. Refuses, then, the consolation of that distance which would allow him to assume either rock positions or the anti-rock of the pure exotic (Cat Power at All Tomorrow’s Parties last year).
In interviews, Will Oldham will reminisce about those concerts where audience would sleep alongside performers, and where bands would play in the context of a whole day where they would mingle, not as performers, with those who came to listen to them. Big Black, Black Flag: these were Will Oldham’s forebears. One cannot use the word punk for these bands directly, perhaps. But punk was reborn with them just as it was reborn with Will Oldham. But what is born? What is named by punk that must be linked to that name and not to another? Or is the punk a non-synonymous substitution for other words for what can be called new in music and elsewhere?
Banal reflection: music is often presented as the exotic Other of philosophy. It can appear as despised formlessness or as inspired formlessness; one position is the opposite of the other. It can be deployed as a metaphor of the all, the harmonia of a hidden order, or as the chaos of the all, the breaking apart of things and their words. No surprise that for Heidegger, it is poetry which still holds the position of highest art. That, I think, because it is in words that being (earth) presses forward; that what comes to us does so as to reveal the weight, the materiality of words which are otherwise too quickly volatilised in the circuits of what are taken too quickly to be the circuits of communication.
The poet’s cliche: words are the worn-out coins that call for the new gold standard, the poem, which will return words to their worth, drawing them back into that relation with things which might give us the world or a new worlding of the world. But what of music – ‘pure’ wordless music, music without programme notes? Too formless. Unless it is deployed – the philosopher’s temptation – as a word for the sonorous qualities of language itself, of the rhythm or the weight of words. Music is thus made to overflow itself, irrigating the fields of the philosopher, appearing as it is withheld, a name for the ever-fertile earth from which everything might grow.
One might fear it is tamed in this way – that music disappears becoming, once again, pure Other, close to the ineffable, to that of which nothing can be said. But surely music must admit of metaphorisation. Surely it must allow itself to be transported so that it can spoken of and written about in a manner which is not completely meaningless. But surely, too, there must be an irreducible content to music, something which resists this transportation and remains resolutely non-discursive. Perhaps it is that music both gives itself to meaning and withdraws from it, that music is both light and anti-light, that it is light and also that darkness which can be seen in light.
Between the rock position and the abandonment of rock positions, between the same and the exotic other, between sensibility and signification music refuses itself to us. It means, but it also preserves meaninglessness within meaning. It is thus that it pushes forward. Aesthetics, the word, has sonorousness as its root (aisthesis – aio, to hear, aemi, aistho, to breathe, exhale; the Latin audio). Could it be that music is common to all the arts (that the Muse of music is present for each of the Muses)? Could this be a way of understanding once again the primacy of music over the other arts? Or is simply to strip music of itself, to stop listening, or to listen only with the soul’s ears (like the soul’s eyes in Plato), hearing only form, only patterns and not the grain of the voice, its timbre and its sonorousness?
How to think music not as a term of a relation (music and us) but as a name for the unknown pole of that relation (the relation to music as the the relation to the unknown, the inexpressible)? And how to do so without letting music itself, the ‘there is music’ to disappear?
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