Lester Plays Vegas (April 30)

[koganbot]

On one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977

I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.

So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.

If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.

Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.

Comments

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I think your comparison to "Man Who Sold the World" is a pretty good one -- it wavers just before returning to the root (actually the major third, signifying "returning home"). Also important is the IV-I or iv-I "returning home" of "Amen" in many hymns.

When I explored the music theory behind "I Luv Your Girl," it was important to note how Dream sustains the tension musically, never really giving us a home to return to -- instead using a series of suspended chords to ramp up our expectations but (somehow) never really making us aware of what we're missing.

It would be a mistake, though, to say something like "The-Dream uses suspended chords to ramp up our anticipation; so if you use lots of suspended chords, you will ramp up anticipation." That's the "know about the car but can't drive it well" analogy, I think, that following theory to the letter doesn't predictably ensure results. Theory can, after the fact, clarify things about what it is that's moving you, but it can't necessarily tell you about whether a similar thing will move you in the future. Like a journey, there's too much other stuff aside from the car and its mechanics that determine the success or failure. You can drive an amazing car to pick up the dry cleaning, too (the function of suspended chords in smooth jazz, maybe?). (Writing is the same way.)

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

As I write this, I'm now thinking I need to write an essay that compares "Luv Your Girl" to "Blame It" based on use of suspension and root. "Blame It" is similarly structured and (more obviously) references "I Luv Your Girl." I honestly hadn't noticed the similarities until I just tried to think of another song that uses a similar strategy.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[koganbot]

I think your comparison to "Man Who Sold the World" is a pretty good one -- it wavers just before returning to the root (actually the major third, signifying "returning home"). Also important is the IV-I or iv-I "returning home" of "Amen" in many hymns.

Just to make sure we're on the same page. I'm guessing that "Man Who Sold The World" might be an example of Van Der Merwe's contention that melody became free from harmony, since the repeating riff in "Man Who Sold The World" doesn't itself lead us to the next chord, and the one that follows, and the one that follows etc. (since the riff is repeating, not leading). So, is that what you think makes my comparison good, that it's a good example of melody not being tied to the needs of the chord progression?

Btw, without the chord progression moving under the riff, so to speak, a whole lot of the excitement of the riff would be lost. And you can't have just any chords. So the chords and the riff are still interdependent; but the melody was able to give up its role in leading the way to the chord changes — if I'm understanding Van Der Merwe right and if this is a good example of what he meant.

The reason I ask if we're on the same page is that the returning home of "Amen" doesn't seem to have anything to do with that particular point, about "Man Who Sold The World" being an example of melody being liberated from harmony. Or does it? I don't understand. "Amen" seems to be an example of returning home, which the "Man Who Sold The World" riff isn't. Or is your "Amen" comment related to something else, "Pop Goes The Weasel," for instance, and it happens to be stuck right next to your "Man Who Sold The World" comment but isn't meant as a continuation of it?

I've long thought that your "I Luv Your Girl" analysis is one of the best things you've written; maybe in the top two, along with "Kill Me, Kill Me, Kill Me: 001/964," an Ashlee screed of yours.

Re: i clicked "like" on maura's comment

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

I may have conflated two different points in those two sentences. "Amen" is related directly to Pop Goes the Weasel. But "Man Who Sold the World" does resolve to the minor at the end of the riff (before Verse 1 starts). But the pleasure in it is related to the tension before it resolves -- in our expectations of where the melody should go (given the harmony) is what makes the riff work.

Listening to "Man Who Sold the World Again," actually what it reminds me of is what makes a lot of Aly and AJ choruses and some other teen confessional tick/kick -- the use of the major third (if we're thinking in a major key) also doubling as the fifth in the minor key. "Rush" is a good example. The melody line is similar to the riff in "Man Who Sold the World" when Aly and AJ sing, "Don't let nobody tell you your life is over," starting minor (vi), then IV, then landing on I. But the tension is in that major third/perfect fifth (in the minor key). That tension happens all over teenpop, is in fact a hallmark of the confessional rock sound.