Mr. Watson...

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morsel:

Air Supply's 'Lost in love' reminds him of the first time (and one of the few times ever) he saw his mother get upset in public. They were at an unnamed department store, and his mother allowed his sister and him to watch the televisions in the electronics department while she shopped. This was a big opportunity for them, since they were permitted only to watch certain PBS shows at home.

It is unclear how Private Lessons, in all its R rated glory, was playing on one of the televisions in the electronics department of this unnamed department store. The store probably had cable to enhance the television pictures in their electronics department; maybe an enterprising member of the team had added a subscription movie channel to the cable service. (Then again, VCRs were just emerging; maybe it was a tape?) At any rate, the movie was playing in a less trafficked aisle of the department, which his sister and he promptly found.

They settled in on the floor in front of this television just in time for the series of seduction scenes, culminating when Sylvia Kristel, the voluptuous French housekeeper, takes young Eric Brown to bed for the first time. It's quite the soft core extravaganza, with a couple good looks at Ms. Kristel's bare breasts. Above the soft focus and the slow camera pans over silk sheets, the Air Supply classic plays, realizing erotic potential the soft rock song couldn't have known it possessed. (At least, up until the point Ms. Kristel fakes her death right there in bed as part of the plot with the chauffeur...)

Apparently his mother arrived back in the electronics department just in time for a nipple shot. The next thing he knew, she was shrieking at the electronics sales associate she had cornered. He doesn't remember exactly, but it must have ended badly. There may even have been participation from upper levels of store management.

While Air Supply is the subject, he wonders to this day how two men trading couplets (and harmonies) describing a love so consuming they can't find their way out of it reached number three on the pop charts. Sure, they followed with 'Every woman in the world' to throw us off the scent; we know it was just Graham and Russell, alone in the recording booth, maybe some candles...

Stepping out, off the page...

It's no secret that Kate Bush is an incredibly literate musician. Her single 'Wuthering Heights' is a literary reference all its own, as is 'Song of Solomon'. She quotes Tennyson in the notes for The Ninth Wave. And she obviously loves James Joyce. Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses gave me a visceral response the likes of which I've seldom experienced, and I remember my astonishment when I first heard Kate's 'The sensual world' which pays it homage. (As far as Joyce is concerned, one can't forget 'My lagan love', either.)

That obvious degree of literacy is the only reason why this would have ever crossed my mind.

I am on the verge of finishing The Sleepwalkers, a trilogy by Hermann Broch. It's been an interesting read, at times more intellectual than I would prefer in fiction, but a remarkable work, no question. The three inflected sections cover three generations and three world views, setting an incredibly nuanced stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. This is by no means The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich; it traces the cultural, even metaphysical, rather than the political shifts that gradually fomented the culture which supported Hitler.

Near the end of the third section there are a few vignettes that, taken together, made me think of one of Kate's songs. One of the main characters (Huguenau) is a war deserter who scams the town council into a fraudulent investment involving their own local paper. He hosts a town party, during which he dances the waltz on the nearly deserted dance floor near the end of the night. Later, in an act of provocation, he publishes an account linking the local battalion's Major (another main character) to poor conditions at the prison. Shortly after, the Major learns that Huguenau is a deserter, and muses that he had "looked on while the man danced." He reflects:

"Chaos was invading the world on every side and chaos was spreading over his thoughts and over the world, darkness was spreading, and the advance of darkness sounded like the agony of a painful death, like a death-rattle in which only one thing was audible, only one thing certain, the downfall of the Fatherland - oh, how the darkness was rising and the chaos, and out of that chaos, as if from a sink of poisonous gases, there grinned the visage of Huguenau, the visage of the traitor, the instrument of divine wrath, the author of all the encroaching evil." [p. 582]

I know that in interviews Kate has explained that 'Heads we're dancing' was inspired by a friend of hers who enjoyed the company of a man at a dinner party, only to learn later that he was Oppenheimer. [Roger Scott's Radio One interview with her on 10/14/89 is cited.] But I can't help wondering if anything else was sleeping in Kate's subconscious when it came time to write 'Heads we're dancing'.

You talked me into the game of chance
It was '39 before the music started
When you walked up to me and you said
'Hey, heads we dance'
Well I didn't know who you were
Until I saw the morning paper
There was a picture of you
A picture of you, across the front page...

They say that the Devil is a charming man
And just like you, I bet he can dance
And he's coming up behind
In his long tailed black coat dance...

There was a picture of you
A picture of you in uniform
Standing there with your head held high
Hot down to the floor
But it couldn't be you
It couldn't be you
It's a picture of Hitler...

Sting may be the only pop musician out there who has a chance at being better read and more likely to show his literary influences than Kate Bush. Maybe I give her more credit than she deserves as, to quote Henry James, "one of the people on whom nothing is lost." But I am fascinated by the way these passages from The Sleepwalkers resonate with 'Heads we're dancing'.

Kate Bush official website

Miguel de Unamuno

Though your head tells you that your consciousness will one day flicker and go out, your heart, wakened and illuminated by a vast anguish, will teach you that there is a world where reason is not the guide. Truth is what makes us live, not what makes us think.

Our Lord Don Quixote, p. 255

BEL CANTO - INTRAVENOUS

I heard Bel Canto for the first time at college, while riding in a car. Miami University in Oxford Ohio may not enjoy the highest profile, but in indie rock circles, few radio stations (college-associated or otherwise) have as much clout as WOXY. They have covered indie music with astonishing breadth and admirable penetration for decades. At some point I heard them play the title track from Bel Canto's second album Birds Of Passage, and it made a strong enough impression that when the car ride was over, I went to investigate Bel Canto more thoroughly.

To describe their music, one might refer to both Depeche Mode and Cocteau Twins, but as intriguing as that combination may be, it doesn't quite do Bel Canto justice. They were at the time a fearless Norwegian trio who approached electronic music with a pastoral, ethereal point of view, and a handful of languages at their disposal, selecting English, French or German (or none of the above) almost as they might select an instrument.

When musicians whose first language is not English make the effort to compose and sing in English, the results can be quite mixed. There's no point in listing some of the more laughable failures; more interesting are the times when a foreigner's perspective on English yields unusual, even poetic turns of phrase which are hard to imagine a native speaker devising.

Language is a factor in 'Intravenous'; the title itself is mispronounced on the one occasion we hear Anneli Marian Drecker sing it. 'Trauma' is pronounced to rhyme exactly with 'coma'. But there aren't any comedies of syntax; rather, a handful of cliches are rescued through seeming unawareness that they were cliches to start with. The overall effect of the lyrics is a rich impression of the semi-conscious state of our narrator, as she wavers between life and death on the operating table.

The chirping metronome that starts the song is an abstracted EKG, under which the lilting keyboard parts give the impression of whales. When Anneli begins to sing, her lyrics push and pull against the strong meter of the arrangement, dragging behind it, then snapping back onto the downbeat. It is a dreamlike state, at times brooding, and at others lucid and urgent. 'Send me a message / Escort me through the passage / into the dark side of life / Let me slip into the eternity / I sense a light, a cave so bright...'

The theme of this song is darker than the experience of hearing it. A woman who has suffered great injuries is kept alive but comatose, artificially and with great effort. From her suspended state she realizes the kind of life she would have if her caretakers succeed: low in quality, low in substance. And she can feel the alternative almost palpably; the relief of death is much more attractive to her. Her song is a silent plea to the doctors to give up, and let her go. 'Skip over this emergency / Forgive my sins, don't force me in / to live like a phantom / Still, this is nothing random / I'm meant to suffer and wait / But one minute more and it might be too late.'

That could be quite melodramatic, but here it doesn't have that effect. The most dramatic device is Anneli's switch to the higher octave in the second verse, which does increase the tension. As listeners, we are powerless to help her, but held in a strange stasis that is calm because she sounds calm.

The ethics of valuing life, and the thorny examples that test those ethics - abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, living wills - are the stuff of headlines. 'Intravenous' feels about a million miles away from all that. It's intensely personal, and tragic in a much more sophisticated manner. This song does not provide a winning scenario; whether she dies or is maintained in some vegetative state, she has lost, and so her point of view is explicitly that of choosing the lesser of two evils. Movingly, the song never gives us closure; despite the urgency of her last line, 'I'm losing time', it fades away, leaving us to ponder.

Bel Canto official website