vol #2: Unnecessary God
Including Zorn-pilling, big band, a Japanese label reissue, “a knack for eidetic scenes,” a plea to watch Last Angel of History, and fuckin’ Conway Twitty.
Welcome back to 3x3.
We took a longer break—because we wanted to and we don’t have to answer to you or, frankly, to anyone: Fuck off. No, sorry. Seriously, welcome back. We’re guilt-ridden.
Real reason for delay: Both of us, now it seems like forever ago, went together to the Big Ears festival in Nashville. It was incredible. After each trying to write about that experience—and about a big disagreement about Meredith Monk playing in a Church [Jacob found it false—even sacrilegious (pathetic Catholic Jacob!!); Jack adored its singularity of creative expression]—we finally decided to give up on doing a Big Ears re-cap and just do a 3x3 again.
But…I (Jacob) do need to say one thing about my time there. That is: I love John Zorn. Jack showed me the path. I regret not following it sooner. Zorn’s performance was the most daunting musical experience of my life. I levitated.
I am not going to explain John Zorn because I do not think I have the authority or that anyone, in fact, can do it; the appealing part about his overwhelming catalog, his itinerant ideas, and his shifting music is that it actually does seem to warrant and (even more it allows! it earns!!) personal immersion. Dunk yourself. Get baptized. Cult of Zorn.
(Yes, these are two interesting pieces here and here to get the gist. NB: You have to buy CDs of most of his music. Here’s some live Zorn to get you through.)
(JwD: The best way to really get into Zorn is to see him play a crowded, windowless DIY space with a broken air-conditioning system in Bed-Stuy on the hottest day of 2019, where he is the oldest person present by several decades. Also, Chris Weingarten listened to his entire discography on a young streaming service called Qobuz in 2020, where it may still be available—not sure.)
In any case, back to the shit.
JwD #1—
“O.W.” — Mary Lou Williams
One night in 1954, Mary Lou Williams looked God in the face and walked off stage. In the middle of a rousing performance at the legendary Parisian cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit, she became overwhelmed by the greed and selfishness biting at the edges of her musical life. The emptiness of it all. She ended a song, stood up from the piano, and at age 44 disappeared from a wildly successful career in jazz. More than three years later, she returned from the void as a kind of nun, her life as devoted to Catholicism as music. “I didn't really stop on my own,” she remembered. “I just—something carried me away. I began praying, and I never really thought about playing anymore.”
I’m interested in second acts. Both within and without artistic contexts, I am very moved and inspired when people well into their adulthoods take their lives in radically different directions. It can be easy, even in one’s mid-20s, to feel locked into a chosen path, a career, a city, a life. There is stability and comfort in that possibility. But there’s also terror in it: Is that all there is? So people like Joseph Yoakum—a traveling circus performer who did not begin drawing until visited by a dream at age 71, and whose show I saw last year at MoMA—and my friend’s dad, who rerouted from years of career struggle and a difficult divorce to living on a sailboat in the Caribbean, are beautiful reminders that there is always still time for change.
By the time she ditched the cabaret , Williams’ life had already showcased far more than two acts. Beginning when she was a teenager, she had been one of the most important arrangers of the swing era, working just behind the scenes as a “shadow composer” (writing and arranging) for Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Earl Hines’ big bands. But she was probably best known for her sly and rollicking piano-playing, with a left-hand raised in boogie and an ear turned toward the future. At least one contemporaneous critic ranked her ability to swing as better than the peerless Art Tatum’s. When she toured with her husband John’s band (no, not that John Williams. And not that other John Williams either), she was initially used as a kind of Mariano Rivera. “I'd wait outside ballrooms in the car,” she said, “and if things went bad and people weren't dancing, they would send somebody to get me and I'd go in and play…and things would jump.”
But unlike most of the stars of the 30s, she and 40s, Williams refused to be left behind as the big band era died out. In the liner notes for a reinterpretation of one of her compositions released last year, the jazz musician Chris Pattishall anachronistically compares the work’s ever-evolving style to channel-surfing and Madlib’s “kaleidoscopic” beats. The description also fits her refusal to settle on a sound across her career. '”No one can put a style on me,'” she once told Whitney Balliett. “I've learned from many people. I change all the time. I experiment to keep up with what is going on, to hear what everybody else is doing. I even keep a little ahead of them, like a mirror that shows what will happen next.”
By the mid-40s, she was writing and playing in what would come to be known as Third Stream, a style that straddles the jazz and classical traditions. Listen to Zodiac Suite, completed in 1945, and you can hear her giving birth to the spacious and strange, blues-rooted bebop that would come to define her student Thelonious Monk’s iconic sound. And yet it’s right-field enough in its composerliness that, for example, the New York Philharmonic was willing to perform it last year. You can also hear this side of her legacy in the snatches of astral stateliness that actual nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou would be playing more than two decades later.
When Williams walked off stage, she said she heard sounds compelling her to pray every day. When she returned to Harlem, she spent most of her time doing exactly that at Our Lady of Lourdes, a Catholic church not far from her home in Sugar Hill where she had once hosted daily salons for the top jazz musicians in the world. Though she was on sabbatical from music at the time, she invited many of them to come to the cathedral with her. Thelonious Monk supposedly fainted when he entered the church. Miles Davis started calling her “Reverend Williams.” But prayer couldn’t keep her away from music forever. “I’d go down and meditate in that church and hear some crazy arrangements,” she said. “They come so fast I can’t write them.” Two priests—and Dizzy Gillespie, a high priest of bebop—convinced her to return to jazz in service of the lord. (You can hear a snippet of Mary Lou talking about this period at the end of this recent Moor Mother song. Jason Moran is on the keys.)
Mary Lou’s Mass is her Catholic jazz opus of this religious period. Choreographed by Alvin Ailey, and featuring a massive choir of students from four different Catholic schools around the city, in 1975 it was performed as a jazz mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. This was something that would have been unthinkable until the liturgical reforms of Vatican II just a few years prior. (Her student Eddie Bonnemère had presented what is considered the first jazz mass ever in 1965.) 3,000 people showed up to St. Patrick’s for Mary Lou’s mass, and the atmosphere was electric. Trumpeter Ed Polcer was in the audience, and reportedly yelled out from the crowd: “This is the way Bach used to do it! And now we can do it, too.”
I haven’t had the privilege of engaging with the work as Bach used to do it, but the album version melds and flits between searching spiritual jazz, gospel, Catholic liturgical music, and the God-rock show tunes that became a huge success with Godspell around that time. And then there’s “O.W.,” which stands apart not only from the rest of the project, but also from any category I’ve tried to fit her in so far. Maybe the closest fit is the kind of mid-century South American vocal pop made by musicians like Aldemaro Romero.
Boldly firing in as the album’s second song, O.W. is driven by vocals with no lyrics. Maybe it’s scatting, but it sounds little like what that term probably calls to mind. Instead, after a dinky flute intro, we’re flung into a series of harmonized staccato “Ba”s that grow increasingly wild, like candy-flipping sheep on speed. We’ve stumbled into the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland—maybe the insane Czech version from 1988 (which rocks, by the way). The teacups and kettles sing, hiss steam, and soar all around. Everything is accelerating. You may begin to suspect that you are being transformed into a mad tea party implement as well. Let it happen. Hear the unbridled vocal crescendo that begins at 1:44, which disregards countless rules about how you’re supposed to sing. I can imagine the Muppets performing it. It’s improbably good, and over in a flash.
Catholic has come to refer to the doctrinal hierarchy emanating from the Vatican, but it once held a broader meaning: universal, all-embracing. The word got linked to Catholicism as we know it as it attempted to aggregate all the various early Christian churches into one holy, universal congregation. That wide embrace is the Catholicism of Mary Lou’s Mass. No one can put a style on me.
People like to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about there being no second acts in American lives in order to immediately dismiss its wrongheadedness about any number of people, including Fitzgerald himself. But the line comes in an essay about what he calls “the Metropolitan spirit,” and its indomitable metamorphoses: “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days.” Not quite so naive in context. Fitzgerald’s city is a small-c catholic one, and with such diversity, there will always be new alleys down which to venture. Your neighborhood getting played out, “bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses, and a new expression ‘Oh yeah?’” Bebop feeling spiritually empty? Try the next block.
“What news from New York?”
“Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.”
“Nothing more?”
“Nothing. Radios blare in the street.”
—
JR: Classic New York City writer—can’t help jotting down some thoughts about a trad Cath? Sorry…bad joke.
This is a fantastic song. A great one. I’ve done my little dips into Mary Lou Williams. But this led me to her album with Cecil Taylor—the live one recorded in 1977. Lovely. This record, Mary Lou’s Mass, I had not heard; it’s my favorite so far.
And your analysis is interesting: The little time I spent with Mary Lou I found… frustrating—I found some of her religious recordings maddening when I first heard them. I grew up around enough gospel music to find the piano too jazz-y. I wanted more call and response. I wanted bombast. I wanted more like “The Lord Says.” Bang. And the lack of that, and the perfection (frankly, yes, perfection) of the other thing she is doing sort of sent me spinning out.
But you correctly note, she converted to Catholicism. When I grew up as a Catholic, we did not have the soaring heights of gospel. We had a demure chant, an atonal attempt to sing. We were boring people, correct in our understanding of Christ.
And so I think what I am trying to sum up is the fascinating nature of conversion—and the part you’ve correctly hit on that I can feel in how I operate within the world (as someone who, true or not, feels like I am constantly having life altering revelations)—and that is that…as much as we do change (and surely she did) we also carry with us the past, we remember it, accidentally, as she does the muscle memory of how to hit the keys of the piano. You said it better in your last paragraph. The past is never past—it’s just stuck within us as we try to be a new type-of-guy. (Wow imagine Faulkner reading that and killing himself?)
Also, we should make a list of party music to Jesus pipeline? Al Green. Clipse. Goes on and on.
JR #1—
“No Right Turn” — Roller Coaster
In 2013, a Japanese record label reissued this album from No Right Turn, a 1980s English folk act that had gone electric—or, as happened at the time, added prog rock elements. It’s a diddy. Jam? Bop? Fun times.
The song is also basically unknown. It is not on any streaming services. It doesn’t have many “views” on YouTube. I only found it because of the cool album cover—the hook in the top right is fantastic; it caused me to stop when skimming through “new releases” at the radio station where I DJ’d in college. Poptimism is fine, whatever—but I do still like the idea that I have a band that no one else really knows. Secrets are fun. Sneaking around with a song like this, that’s how I feel. Even now, I often forget about “No Right Turn.” Then, for some reason, I’ll recall our time together. This often coincides with dancing. Like everyone else but the select few: I am bad at dancing, I love dancing. And it’s sort of this intoxicating thing, a fling—the times and way I’ve danced to this song. I go back to it alone. I listen again. I dance around my room.
The beginning brings me down to this spot where I can dance alone. The song engenders this idea of descent, of drawing me into a special place to then float me back up. (Down, up, down! like a roller coaster—got it!)
It’s worth noting that simple, but effective, opening. Bass to start, the guitar (four seconds in), second guitar (fourteen seconds in), drums (twenty-four seconds in), vocals (thirty seconds in). Nice and clean. Ramp on up. Everything operating well on the machine until an angular guitar part at like 2:45. And then there is the phrase “roller coasting” that’s used once, which always reminds me of Chuck Berry “motorvating.” Who can’t love the “ew, ew” at 2:35?
I try to show this to people occasionally. It never works. It might only be for me. Maybe I should stop? Maybe I should not have written this? It’s like a summer crush. Not worth explaining. “Your heart starts spinning / you’re upside down / Roller coasting love going round.”
—
JwD: Not just for you; we got ourselves a little love triangle here now. The form/content match is perfect, the bassline’ flourishes are charmingly goofy, and the flam-heavy messes in the final chorus are my favorite drum fills I’ve heard in a minute. One of the song’s lines—“It goes round and a round, around and a round, like some crazy record but I love that sound”—are closely related to something you don’t hear so much anymore: a love interest spinning you ‘round like a record. What was the last major example? Maybe Flo Rida’s “Right Round” in 2009, wich vestigially contained most of the grammar without any of the metaphor. And I’d told myself I wouldn’t mention skeuomorphism again in 3x3…
JwD #2—
“Robeson” — Saul Williams
“You are a planet hugged by a rainbow, forgive me.”
In Neptune Frost—Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s sci-fi cyber musical movie from earlier this year—the rapping is mostly unbearable; the postcolonial, queer, and surveillance critiques are thinly strung together and surface-level; the plot an afterthought. But the film gleams in its interstitial moments: its industrial, electronic score and psychedelic, glitched out images spike through the narrative, recalling the visual style of John Akomfrah’s Last Angel of History. Which you can and absolutely should watch on YouTube right now instead.
Last Angel is an essential early primer synthesizing various strands of Afrofuturist thinking through interviews with a young Greg Tate (RIP), Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, George Clinton, Ishmael Reed, Derrick May, A Guy Called Gerald, the Otolith Group’s Kodwo Eshun, and several more artists and thinkers. These interviews are juxtaposed with the musings of a cryptic cyber-antihero called the Data Thief and incredible futuristic 90s aesthetics. At one point, the Data Thief wonders: “Isn't it strange that in the second world war, computer technology was used to aid and abandon the military-industrial complex—but by the end of our century that technology has mutated, devolved, and diversified to such a degree that African-American musicians young Black British musicians can use computer technology to construct a soundtrack to the end of the industrial epoch?”
Strange indeed, and the kind of troubling historiographic inquiry undertaken by Saul Williams’ 2001 song “Robeson,” which is a much better entrypoint into his artistic talents than his debut movie. “I lay propped on a pillow of eagle feathers on a couch / framed with the skeletons of my uncles and great uncles. / I did not intend to close my eyes, but when I did…”
The song shares with Williams’ filmic output a knack for eidetic scenes (Neptune Frost’s most unforgettable shot is of someone wearing a kind of bicycle as a hat, spokes whirring). The first verse opens with the Shakesperian “I slept once, the dream has yet to end,” and cascades into dream imagery more vivid than the sheriff’s monologue toward the end of the end of No Country For Old Men, which itself includes the indelible line “when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon.” Whereas here’s Saul, still in his 20s, exhaling enjambment: “The night is falling on the moist palms of children too weak to bear its weight/ the stars are visibly breathing / in fact they almost look as if they are chewing gum.” Take that, ‘mac.
I could go on excitedly quoting the lyrics, but the song’s true excellence lies in its urgency, the drumbeat of the tribunal. Saul somehow makes “I’m wearing a backpack” into the most intense line I’ve ever heard. There is also a bizarre appearance of Ayn Rand character John Gault, an enigmatic meditation on Paul Robeson, and a horrifying appropriation of “yes, yes y’all, you don’t stop.” What more could you want?
—
JR: I adore this song. It’s been loosely in the rotation since I heard it, as is a lot of early Saul (and as a lot of later Saul has not been, sadly). All his dynamism and storytelling is on display. His work has always been so energetic, urgent, and experimental, that I think it will have dips. I can imagine him having the best record of the year or the worst—and I think by the time we die Saul Williams will release an album that fucks up my life completely. Just hasn’t happened lately. Anyway. Interesting career. At times, more interesting than good, to be frank. Whatever the case: As a white kid from North Carolina, I should mention that I am pretty sure the first time I heard someone explain reparations to me enough that I understood it…was Willaims in his incredible, and most popular, song.
(JwD p.s.: Also, when I saw Saul interviewed by Marcus Moore at Big Ears, he left for like five minutes three-quarters of the way through the conversation to pee. I was really hoping for a repeat of this Naked Gun scene, but no dice.)
JR #2—
“Once Is Not Enough Kind of Love” — Conway Twitty
The other day I was marveling that Conway Twitty was a definitive sex symbol. Then, I listened to “Once Is Not Enough Kind of Love.” Won’t ask again.
Here’s my list of songs I’d label as classic examples of “fuckin’ Conway Twitty.” The most libidinal of the oeuvre.
Twitty loved sex. Good on him. Over the years, this was hard to admit in the mainstream press. Country has long been misunderstood as both prudish (because it involves, theoretically, Church going rednecks) and derelict (because it involves, theoretically, honky-tonk going rednecks). In reality, people who love Jesus disobey his will. They sin. They fuck. They party. The same people going to the honky-tonk are going to the Church.
The most famous example of this crossover in music is soul: Gospel’s call and response moved to the secular because the kids who learned to play at Church signed to Stax. Country music had a similar commercialization. You can hear the traditions of sacred songs in the Carter Family. But what Twitty was is less identifiable, especially to a modern audience, because it is not an authentic recreation of the music of some “folk.”
Instead, Twitty is a character, like Elvis. He chose to be a country singer; a Larry the Cable Guy of laying pipe lullabies. It’s an act. When he duets with Loretta Lynn, he’s not lying, but he is putting on a show–he’s pretending to be a guy that is identifiable to his fans. Those fans are women; that identifiable guy is those women’s husbands. Twitty is showcasing the best version of that man. Or at least the one they wish they could have in certain moments–the one who would love them deeply; the one who perhaps cannot fully exist because of masculinity and the strict confines of the Church, except in private.
And so by being overtly ridiculous, and sexual, Twitty could break the barriers of what is allowed, in terms of horiness–even if no one could say. It’s like Liberace, in Dave Hickey’s argument. Everybody gets it: that Liberace was a gay man–proudly and incredibly and beautifully displaying it; that Conway Twitty is a good Southern man horny as hell. The outsiders may see something garish, embarrassing, cringe. “Bad taste.” In fact, they are seeing transgression.
That’s why, at least I think, you only occasionally find it freely admitted that Twitty was here to get everyone horny in direct terms. It had to be veiled, despite Twitty himself being very obvious. (“There’s a tiger in these tight fittin jeans.”)
Now, don’t get me wrong. Twitty is not a hero. His act was to enshrine “the family” and its brutal contradictions. The social structure Twitty locked in with his transgression, that he broke but did not abolish, helped all those involved–in that it gives the fucked up cutural forces a setimental, beautiful heart. If you are a certain kind of white person in America, it’s probably true that the Church, the“family,” and Conway Twitty are useful concepts to make life easier. They soothe. And they explain.
Now, that aside: Let me list some euphemisms from articles about Twitty so we can all admire how people avoided admitting he was basically erect for his entire career:
1993 obit: “Conway Twitty, the country and western singer who brought a rich, throaty tone to dozens of steamy ballads over four decades in the music business, died…”
Rolling Stone’s album guide on his duets with Loretta Lynn: “The (usually) thwarted desire is downright audible in these teasing, frisky voices.”
1977, Times: “The singer has one of the richest male voices in the country idiom, and his bluesy colorations, especially a kind of throaty purr, are distinctive. He writes his own songs, and many of them are colorful dramatizations of love relationships, seen from a physical as well as an emotional point of view.”
Oh Conway. You satyr.
In any case, to prove my point–that the appeal of Twitty that sometimes goes overlooked is that he reminds people of their husbands if they were married between 1970 to 1983 and makes beautiful the “family” (for good or more often for bad)–check out these YouTube comments. Only one guy doing it like this:
JwD: Man, I hate this shit. To all those for whom Conway symbolized sex, you deserve better. (I love your insightful writeup here though.)
JwD #3—
“Tonz ’o’ Gunz” — Gang Starr
Maybe you heard about the mass shooting this weekend. No, not that one—the other one. Sorry, the other other one. Even before the pandemic, for years we had grown accustomed to perpetual ambient din of mass killings. Most of them weren’t deemed worthy of national media coverages Gun bites man again—not news. Any attempt to properly grieve it all would be to self-induce constant madness. And then there was the interregnum of early covid, when we traded our source of large-scale death from bullets to a virus. March 2020, when the novel coronavirus took over my city, was the first month since 2002 without a school shooting—having no schools is one way to stop school shootings, I guess. The rest of the year sustained the dip in school shootings for obvious reasons, but was still the deadliest year of gun violence in at least two decades. More of an acquisition than a trade.
Since then, a fifth of all U.S. gun purchasers were first time buyers. Now almost half of American households are armed, up from only 32% in 2016. There have been predictable, devastating consequences: there were 500 road rage shootings in 2021, up from 300 in 2019. Last year had 700 mass shootings, and halfway through this year Americans had already endured more than 300. Gun violence topped 2020’s record deaths. Even beyond the horrors of Uvalde, “not a single week in 2022 has passed without at least four mass shootings,” as of July. Amid this enduring nightmare, the Federalist Society debate club known as the Supreme Court “dramatically expanded the right to bear arms” this summer, ruling that many restrictions of public concealed carry are unconstitutional. Our legislature responded by patting itself on the back for doing basically nothing.
So it’ll almost certainly all just get worse. In the face of all this, how do you respond? One option, employed by Guru here, is matter of fact resignation. “Tons o' guns, everybody's getting strapped,” he rhymes, as if reciting a particularly disgusting weather report. “Tons o' guns bringing nothing but death. Tons o' guns but I don't glorify / cuz more guns will come and much more will die.” The synths in Pete Rock’s scratch-heavy production shoot off high-pitched screams, matching the terrible atmosphere of Guru’s lyrics and contrasting with his controlled tone. The flat affect is both disturbing and relatable.
This song, released in 1994, is about a different period of gun violence—one that was less likely to touch the concerns of privileged white Americans, even as they pushed for the harsh criminalization of the populations most affected by it. And yet, lyrically, it could have been written this week. Its sampling of a Malcolm X speech connecting violence in the U.S. to the military force employed abroad is particularly prescient, given that some 36% of mass shooters have been trained by the U.S. military (when only 7% of American adults are vets.)
It’s “mad chaos;” it’s getting worse, and there’s no way to stop it, the song says. “What the fuck you gonna do in a situation?”
—
JR: All dead on. Not much to add. You’ve oddly chosen things that have weird nostalgia for me. I had this album growing up. My Dad got into rap, basically, through Gang Starr; one of his obsessions. I remember two things about this song. One is how he says “rude boy”—which confused me at the time. And then later became how I understood rap’s growth from dancehall, etc. The other is that I always thought this three piece set of lyrics had just perfect flow: “I stand in the face of hatred / Letting off mad shots making devils run naked / Tons ‘o guns.” It struck me as genuinely poetic.
JR #3—
“7 & 7” — Turnpike Troubadours
Um. OK. Let’s attempt it.
I read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations the year after college. I think I was down in Arkansas—it was the phase of my life where I worried, deeply fucking concerned, about catching up to all my smart friends because I didn’t read enough. I didn’t take in much information from the book except that a duck can be a rabbit. So, forgive me. But, also—watch this drive—I’m going to try to use that to explain how (to me) genre is both meaningless and vital.
What the hell is Red Dirt music? I try to read a lot about country music. (It’s easy enough—no one writes about it, and few write about it well.) And no one can define this “genre” of Red Dirt. It goes to Supreme Court porn status immediately.
In general, Red Dirt is considered to be Oklahoma artists, descending from Bob Childers, and differentiated from the Texas style of country. Generating a distinct boundary is impossible; even if you can give a list of Red Dirt musicians. Most just agree to this: Turnpike Troubadours are Red Dirt.
I mentioned this at a bar—that I was trying to read about Red Dirt—and someone recommended a self-published book. I found a Q&A with the author. And I was a bit surprised: even he struggles to come up with the genre’s boundary, it seems (emphasis mine):
Q: Is there a certain way that you define Red Dirt music?
JC: I do think that the traits of Red Dirt are honest songwriting...but it's really important that you pair that honest song writing with a good melody and good music. I think Turnpike is a great example. When you listen to a Turnpike song, without them ever saying it or rarely saying it, if you've been to Oklahoma and you've been to the part of the country where the dirt roads actually are red, when you hear them singing, that's what you picture. So if you hear your Turnpike singing about bird hunters or going back to Cherokee County, what pops into your head is: there's an Oklahoma landscape in there...So you do know it when you see it, but the reason you know it when you see it is because where it takes your mind and what kind of an overall experience you get out of it. It really places you back around campfires in rural Oklahoma when you get down to it -- in a really fun way.
OK, so it’s stuff that sounds like Oklahoma basically. Which reminds you of Oklahoma. (Just to be clear how this bends shit: The book’s Spotify playlist begins with a banger of an American Aquarium song called “Tough Folks.” American Aquarium are from North Carolina.)
This is all to say: I think that makes complete sense. When I was in college, I did a paper with some classmates on Little Brother’s first album The Listening. The biggest “aha” moment was when Big Pooh, one member of the Durham hip-hop group, told us that the record was based on their biggest influence: the radio. Local radio as influence unlocks a key to much of how “provincial culture” works in a globalized world. Instead of a tradition passed on through your grandfather, you learn from your local DJ who is showing you music from all over the world. There is the hyper local experience of listening to music in your car, but that music is from all over the world. And so that is how a parochial “folk” music—or to be less up my ass, a genre defined by state borders—can end up meaning musicians all over the country, and the continent. The nation, and its art, is not bounded. It is about how certain sounds create nostalgia for a place. It’s how probably for most of you reading this a song by a musician not from your hometown reminds you of sitting on a swing set in a park near your middle school. The local is global. Listening to a band from North Carolina reminds you of growing up in Oklahoma, seeing Red Dirt. (The same can be dragged over to politics; people’s “local” experience is watching national new–Fox News is both a national news network and your friend in your living room; I actually was thinking about this recently because I was watching this Stuart Hall talk about diaspora.)
So I think that’s the Wittgenstein part of it, which I’m sure I am butchering: Yes, Red Dirt music is from Oklahoma, but it’s also the sound of Oklahoma—which can mean almost anything, to anyone. And so there is not an internal “truth” to be sussed out. Is it the process of seeing in each song something that reminds one of the local experience of growing. One moment duck; one moment rabbit. Both.
Hmm. Might be fucking this all up. But I’m thinking of this paragraph:
“Here we are in enormous danger of wanting to make fine distinctions.—It is the same when one tries to define the concept of a material object in terms of 'what is really seen'.—What we have rather to do is to accept the everyday language-game, and to note false accounts of the matter as false. The primitive language-game which children are taught needs no justification; attempts at justification need to be rejected.”
(Jack you know this better, tell me how I’m an idiot; that’s our dynamic.)
Anyway, I’ve been biking around to this song a lot, just on repeat, for a few weeks. And the chorus is the kind of thing you can sling out in a bit of drawl, pretty loud, as you’re flying around:
I had no clue
I’d be the boy who
Your mama warned you about
That’s been fantastic. I love singing on my bike.
—
JwD: Forget me; the whole dynamic of the Philosophical Investigations is Wittgenstein himself coyly telling us how we’re idiots. I took a seminar on it my final semester of college, and in class the professor seemed to inhabit Wittgenstein’s own persona. He would respond to student inquiries with a wry question suggesting we were confusing ourselves with our own terms. Maddening and hilarious, it was the perfect capstone to a philosophy degree to be taught that, actually, there are no philosophical problems. Late period Wittgenstein uses a therapeutic approach to discharge supposed dilemmas. “What is your aim in philosophy?” he asks himself. “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”
To bring this back around, Wittgenstein might go further than saying the meaning of Red Dirt lies simply in its variable uses. Asking the question in the first place assumes there is some kind of an essence, however complicated, that can be articulated—“(The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)” There’s a sort of zen mysticism to his thinking in this era. Q: “How does the philosophical problem…arise?” A: “We think.” So what’s Red Dirt music? Shut up and listen, he might reply. Bike around and yell out the chorus! There, you’ve already got it. That’s what it is. Be free.
As Jacob knows too well, country music—Red Dirt or otherwise—is far outside my wheelhouse. The wheelhouse, I’ve learned, is the room on a boat where the skipper steers. It evolved into our contemporary usage through 20th century baseball argot, where it referred to the meat of a batter’s strike zone where they’re most likely to hit a homer. (Baseball and whaling, about as inside Old America’s wheelhouse as it gets.) A finance writer once explained the term’s popularity as a business world cliche to the Chicago Tribune: “Whenever someone wants to say, ‘We would be good at this,’ or ‘We have potential here,’ they say, ‘This is in our wheelhouse,’...What they mean is, ‘This is a promising area for expansion.’” Which is funny, because in the context of country music and other art, it’s things outside my wheelhouse that offer the most potential for my own expansion.
That’s all to say that I’m continually trying to grow and appreciate what country has to offer, and that I’m still struggling with it—including with much of the musical architecture of this song. But the refrain that you highlighted really moves me. In its not-quite-apologetic grappling with who you’ve become, it reminds me of the chorus of a long-beloved Against Me! song: “No mother ever dreams that her daughter's gonna to grow up to be a junkie / No mother ever dreams that her daughter's gonna to grow up to sleep alone.” It’s a confounding lifelong project to become who we are—let alone realize it. I had no clue. Well, ain’t it strange?
Housekeeping/announcements:
— Update from JwD: Stepped on my good headphones recently. Please keep me in your thoughts.
— Updates from JR: Ran sub 5 in the mile and think I’m going to try to get sub 3 in Philly marathon, quitting cigs is a success (and honestly great, couldn’t recommend more), wrote some blogs, edited some articles (think this one is good, this one too, and this one), found a new favorite book (Nixon Agonistes), and I’ve now lived in New York City officially for 1 year, wow. Last thing:
On an overly personal note, my aunt recently passed away. It has been extremely difficult time for our small family; it was a sudden death. I’m extremely proud of my father, who has gone through hell picking up the pieces. These things are never simple.
My aunt lived a complex life, one that cannot be explained quickly or fully. So let me just say this: She was a true fighter. Despite obstacles that would have left me unable to move, Irene battled. She fought and did live a life of dignity when so much wanted to steal that from her. And she was more that; she was funny, kind, and overtly unique. This week—as I’ve helped with some logistics/remembrances in DC—the people who interacted with her (at work, her pharmacist, etc) said again and again (or I have been told they said) that she was “authentic.” What higher compliment can be given? A real person.
I say all this here in this music letter to get to this: My aunt, like every Rosenberg, had her deep and abiding obsession(s). And my Aunt Irene’s was…Jon Bon Jovi. She adored him.
Over the past month plus of just doldrums, bad-life-shit I have been mudding though with my Dad, I have really tried to listen to Bon Jovi—to get where my aunt was coming from. And, I’m sorry, none of it works for me. Not even a little. None. I can’t find a single song. Each time I try it, makes me really miss her. Because she saw something in the world that I cannot: that Bon Jovi rocked. And now no one else is here to explain it like she would.
In any case, there will not be a funeral. Consider donating to the JBJ foundation in her honor.