'Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.'
T.S. Eliot- Four Quartets
Rock music and Death are very close friends.
They live together now that rock music is dead.
That rock music is dead is nothing new. For a long time now it has spoken of Death, desiring his arrival and dancing with his sickly sylphs and weary footmen. Rock music has invoked Death endlessly: on the radio, in the bedroom, in miserable buildings, here, everywhere, rock music has transmitted Death like a virus. We have all seen Death on television. A rock group take along their radio ghost in wires and plastic and perform before the camera.
Here the radio ghost plays. The group don't have to play as their recorded ghost plays for them. Real ghosts have radio ghosts. Jimi Hendrix is dead but I watched him at Woodstock on video. I listened to his performance on my computer. If I do this he isn't really dead. I can resurrect him in fifteen seconds.
Jimi Hendrix is a ghost. We can't call him a corpse.
In the 1960s, Soviet Russia banned rock music. Recordings by The Beatles and other Western subversives were bought on the black market by rebellious youths. The illicit material was often duplicated by holding a radio tuned to a pirate station playing a popular track to the microphone of a recording booth. The low-grade vinyl would then be replicated on X-ray plates stolen from hospitals. As a grim memento mori, the eager youth would ask for 'two Beatles ribs' and then resurrect the group by placing the needle on the cancerous lungs or the busted skeleton of some oppressed Soviet man. The youth listening to rock music is listening to death.
Now all those ribs are rotting; all that music is legal, and that tyrannical government is gone.
Rock music survives on the tyranny of the star, the carefully constructed image of the impossibly sad prince who can't be soothed and so must be gradually drugged.
This drugging, this proximity to death, neutralises the star, nixes their intensity, their creativity. As existence drags on, the threat of silence grows ever greater. The listener has to acknowledge that the star has nothing to say.
The rock star tests voices in front of the mirror.
Death enters through the mirror.
'The source of the depression is not that rock music today is Dead but that it refuses to Die.' Greil Marcus, The Life And Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock N' Roll.
What is different now when we talk about rock music and Death together is that their relationship isn't particularly threatening or even exciting.
Rather than dying or being dead ('being dead' is almost playful. It makes me think about 'being an animal' or 'being miserable', something desired and also a little transient), rock music is now just senile. It dribbles, lives in limbo, not alive but not-quite dead.
So where is Death, we have to ask? Why won't he come? It has to be the worst thing in the world to wait for death.
We're watching the long, drawn-out death of a particular music. As culture loses its centre so does sound. As the world becomes stranger, more confusing, more unnatural, we have to ask not for mirrors and analogues but digital denaturings. What we hear in rock music now is a hollow voice, one which imitates unsure of its sources, singing an uncertain sorrow, enacting a kind of anaemic pastiche. And pastiche, as every good critic of postmodernism knows, is
'The wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language [...] it is a neutral practice of mimicry. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its humour.'
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society
Let's go deep down a hole now, to finish.
The protagonist in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been living underground, hibernating after a riot, living in a Deathlike state. At the end he asks
'Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which really frightens me:
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?'
In a world where music is a series of disembodied voices, without substance, endless and invisible, the singularity is less important, it is quickly replaced. It's these 'lower frequencies' away from the mainstream, against convention, that we must locate and lock down to record, repeat and redefine sound.
In writing about Death we must leave pauses, spaces, silences, passages without communication.
Rock music, when singing about Death, must remember these lapses, this static, those cracks; that each signal eventually fails. Rock music must remember each friendship soon ends once the dialogue has finished; once the virus' work is complete.
And that's all I have to say.
'Piss Christ' by Andres Serrano, Sonic Youth mid-80s (photographer unknown) and Mick Jagger and Michele Breton in 'Performance' by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell. No copyright infringement intended.
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