Outside

Why Will Oldham? What is uncanny about his singing? Trying to answer these questions and others, I run up against the apparent conservatism of song itself.

Does the singer’s voice ‘hold’ sound, fixing it? Does it compel instruments to follow it, confining them into to a regular metre and doubling or accompanying the vocal melody in its own melody? Does it, above all, arrest the becoming of music because of its sheer discursivity? A lyric signifies too quickly, and this is the trouble: the voice is thereby prevented from becoming another element of song, one among others in a democracy of instruments. You are like me, say the lyrics, and we speak in the same language. You love like me and laugh like me; our experiences are commensurable and measured by the same economy of sense. And the voice, too, is like our own; its timbre is accidental and singing itself is no longer sound, no longer intensity, but simply a vehicle of sense.

But what if there were a song where the lyrics withdraw themselves from this measure? Where what speaks is not an experience shared, if this would presume the identity of the terms of that sharing, but one which turns each aside from the community of good sense and common sense? What if the circuit of communication were interrupted thereby and forced forward was the singer’s voice as sound, as intensity, as that timbre irreducible to the general equivalent of what is called sense.

Wild sense, or sense freed from signification – wild sign that will not allow the singularity of the voice, the timbre of the singer to be substituted by anothers. Listening, you hear a voice that is not your own; you share nothing with the singer except that your voice, its timbre is likewise singular. A wildness compounded when the meaning of the lyrics withdraw themselves from the listener’s capacity to identify with their narrator. When they redouble sound as it flees from the general equivalent of sense. When it is darkness that is seen and sung about and the words are only the traces of a withdrawal that has already occurred.

Art music has known this for a long time; it would be easy to list those composers in whose music voice is an element of sound, or those improvisational practices in which a voice becomes pure intensity. Why am I drawn to the music of Will Oldham?: this is my question, and the one I’ve been trying to address for the past few days. And further: why am I drawn to it in the same way as I am drawn to Kafka’s writing?

Kafka’s prose is elegantly simple. It is a prose, Flusser comments, of a certain kind of official German – one now deliberately made to convey events unofficial. It proceeds calmly and narrates calmly, but because of this calmness, its apparent officialese, the strangeness of what it narrates becomes more intense. The tension is clear: clarity meets obscurity, the day meets the night …

And with Will Oldham? His music might recall a folk tradition; melodies and motifs are sometimes borrowed; sometimes you say to yourself: but I have heard this before; the idiom is clear. But as it were against this idiom, against a naive notion of the folk, of the vernacular, something else happens.

This is not so suggest that folk music is static or unchanging, that it would confirm the eternity of a people who never made it to modernity; folk already renews itself; it responds, it is responsive; it does not mourn the disappearance of a people so much as keep place for the one which may come to appear.

Will Oldham, too, transforms what he receives. He is not nostalgic, though his lyrics will seem to come from another time, from a language Old Testamentary as if he were still the child-preacher he played in Sayles’ Matewan, and a language, too, of an obscure people lost somewhere in the folds of greater America. But Will Oldham is not the banjo player from Deliverance and he is a man of the city as much as the boondocks. What has inherited? Fragments of older idioms, parts of folk and country, but parts, too, of punk and new wave, of those independent bands who toured America in trucks and slept side by side with their listeners.

All of this is alive in his music, and all at once. It is a world, it seems to belong to a world, to have been born from one. But what is this world? Not our own, for does not permit us to identify with what is sung. There is his voice first of all, and the drama of its breaking as he throws it against guitars playing in a key too high for him to reach. A breaking voice, a voice that tears itself into a kind of keening: a voice high and wild and strange, but whose strangeness is always set against what is also sung more calmly. Verses, choruses, reprises: there are these. There is a clear structure to his songs. A structure not to be broken but suspended.

There is a kind of wailing, a suspense – but one which depends on the structure of the song and of what is expected of singing. Will Oldham is not an outsider artist and an outsider singer, but he lets the outside sing in what is inside, he allows the song to open itself to forces which do not permit of identification. Forces which explicate the song, turning it inside out, or exposing how it was already made of strands of the outside and that all songs and all voices are similarly attuned: strings across which the outside sings. Aeolian harps played by the winds which cross from the outside.

There is nothing virtuosic about his singing or his playing. He is not Bjork, admirable for that of which her voice is capable and of the risks she allows it to endure. Will Oldham’s voice is nearly our voice, his playing nearly ours so that some will complain that he can neither sing nor play. He whines, some will say, he sings out of tune. His voice is like ours – non-singers, non-players – and that is the point. Close to us, he is also removed from us; he brings the outside near, even as the outside is always far.

That is his voice. But what of the lyrical content itself? I have written about it before. As W. wrote, objecting to this, why don’t you just listen to it and write of what you feel? No doubt. I suppose I was looking in those lyrics for clusters of indices, for what would provide images for the becoming of his singing, for names for its movement. What patterns emerged? Violence and obscurity; troubled intimacy and sometimes grace. Departure and arrival; secret places and hidden enclaves; the equivalence of the word God and the word fuck: all this is present.

What is figured in those lyrics? What sings through Will Oldham? What reaches us, his listeners, who are fascinated by his songs? I’d say only what removes them from the common currency of sense. What presses forward in sense and by way of sense, but escapes it. The unknown – is that the word? The outside? Only if it permits us to name that chaotic interval which breaks our present from the future. Only if it names that small apocalypse in which what is revealed is the depth of the night.