Category: Music

This Song by Richard Thompson.

These lines:

They came in the thousands
From the whole human race
To pay their respects at his last resting place

I have always had a bit of contempt for Elvis.  I grew up in the 1960’s (born in 1956) and Elvis, to me, was a mere pop artist, a performer of other peoples’ songs, a teen idol, and a ridiculously bad actor.  By the time I was 12, I was listening to Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and had just been introduced to Leonard Cohen’s brooding debut album, “Songs of Leonard Cohen”.  I loved poetry, and songwriters.  I loved the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Homeward Bound”, “Suzanne”.   Elvis, in comparison, seemed trite.  Elvis, in comparison, was trite.

The Beatles began to earn my respect with “Rubber Soul”;  clearly influenced by Dylan, songs like “Girl” and “Norwegian Wood” showed a growing artistic maturity that Elvis never evidenced.  Elvis, by this time, was playing Las Vegas, a monument to crass consumerism and treacly kitsch.  He was singing “My Way”, the consummate boring establishment hymn to self-sufficiency and arrogance.

That hasn’t changed a lot.  His body of work still seems trite to me.  And the massive public adoration, to me, is a testimony to his insignificance: the majority of people are superficial and easily led and manipulated.  Elvis was the product of the “star-maker machinery” and never transcended that existence.  He became rich– though his managers and agents siphoned off most of his fortune– and built a mansion and drove a Cadillac and surrounded himself with parasites and embraced all the worst symbols of capitalist privilege.  Some biographers find it tragic that he continued to perform long after his health began to fail.  He continued to perform because he was stupid and greedy.

He died, appropriately enough, on the toilet, exerting himself against massive constipation, tanked to the gills with prescription drugs, which one doctor said he prescribed to him in order to keep him away from illicit drugs.  On the toilet, he had a heart attack and fell forward.  He weighed 158 kilograms (350 pounds).  Even more ridiculous than Elvis himself, is the weird regard in which fans consider his last fatal moments.

His only Grammy awards were, weirdly, in the category of gospel.  The man famous for arousing the sexual desire of millions of young women, only received awards for hymns to the almighty.  I thought that was trivial too.  And ridiculous– what does a man like that really believe about God and religion?  What does it say about God and religion that it meant so much to a man like Elvis, who bought more than 100 Cadillacs in his lifetime and wore religious jewelry because he thought it might, in a pinch, ensure his salvation?

I’m not sure what Richard Thompson thinks of Elvis.  (I just found– to my shock– that Nick Cave, for example, is a fan of “Superstar” by the Carpenters, and “To Love Somebody” by the BeeGees, two of the most anemic pop hits ever recorded).    I’m not even sure– given this song– what he thinks of Elvis’ fanatical followers: he’s too good of a songwriter to lay it on thick.  If anything, he seems sympathetic, if you ignore the subtleties.  But she puts on a pink dress as if she was young again (which makes her seem ridiculous in the imagination) and she is clearly delusional (she thinks she’s married to Elvis)  and, finally, they have to drag her away.

All right– maybe that’s not so subtle.

In 2019, we are confronted with large numbers of peoples denying that global warming is real, embracing Donald Trump and Brexit and neo-fascism and every idiocy imaginable– the thousands from the whole human race.  They are frightening.  They adore Elvis and their massive pick-up trucks and their guns and ATVs and lottery tickets and beer.  “Deplorable” is not the right word for them: it suggests we expect better of them.   But Trump and Fox News have convinced them that their ill-formed conceptions of the world are true and right and deserve to prevail in the political sphere, and that complex information that confuses them is fake.  They are convinced that those intellectual elites who used to be deferred to because they were intellectual elites are only out to trick them out of their pick-up trucks and guns and Elvis and even their genders.

From a viewer of this video.

Seems like yesterday I was in my 20’s listening to this Goddess on the radio for the first time, driving around in my Toyota pick up to meet a date. The 90’s… it… life, was so simple. Life was just easier, I had the world at my fingertips, I could have done anything I set my mind to. I had it made, I just didn’t realize it then. What happened? College, career, marriage, loved ones passing on, kids… Divorce. Hair turned white, joints ache when it rains… LOL! Now, I’m looking at retirement in the next few years and relocating South, single again. Where the hell did the time go?? I wish I could start over, go back in time, go back in my old truck, hearing her on the radio for the first time. Sometimes we don’t appreciate the simple things in life or realize how good we have it. Life goes so fast. Appreciate the good moments and people in your life… as nothing lasts forever.

I thought it was a moving post.  Not especially eloquent but heart-felt, by someone who was obviously moved by this old video of Hope Sandoval performing this simmering, heated, intimate ballad, offering, in a sense, to “fade into you”, to commit everything she has to a man or woman who absorbs her.

It’s a fantasy, of course.  Here’s it’s evil twin, and a song that is truly one of the greatest pop songs of all time: Leslie Gore singing the scariest love song ever: “You Don’t Own Me”.  Listen to that thundering piano at the beginning: the sound of impending doom (to the boy she is singing to).  I don’t need you.  I am completely self-sufficient and autonomous.  If I hang out with you, it will be purely by my choice, and when I choose otherwise, I will walk away without a second thought.

“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen.

I was brought up in a pretty traditional Christian environment that regarded all sexual desire outside of marriage as pernicious. You could be a good Christian or you could be a slave to earthly desires, but you couldn’t be both.

Then one of my older brothers brought “Songs of Leonard Cohen”, Leonard Cohen’s first album, into the house.   I have no idea why I put it on ever but I did.  And I was mesmerized by the entire album but especially “Suzanne”. The first verse is about desire: Suzanne takes you down to her place by the river and feeds you tea and oranges and gets you on her wavelength and so on. I got it. Then the second verse: Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water… and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him, he said all men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them. Cohen linked the two, the fact that only “drowning” men could really grasp the spiritual significance of his “lonely wooden tower”, and that this drowning was linked to being immersed in Suzanne’s seductive “tea and oranges”, in her “wavelength”.  That blew my mind.  This was a Jesus I had never heard of at church or Saturday morning bible school.  What was he doing in a song about “Suzanne”, a strange woman who lived near the harbour and obviously offered more to you than just tea and oranges.

You are drawn to both Suzanne and Jesus because they “touched your perfect body” with their minds. Your body was not corrupted by either Suzanne or Jesus, but made perfect by both.  It was the most mysterious and allusive image in the song: your perfect body.  It suggested to me a state of transcendence, of moving beyond the shabby physical reality of sweat and moles and smell and hair into a kind of ecstatic sensual encounter that made everything beautiful.

I began to believe that the two forces were not in opposition but were intimate companions on the quest to realize yourself as fully human, as a complete person, to become perfectly aware of beauty and spiritual truth. I began to believe that conventional Christian morality was, in comparison, petty and legalistic, a culture of sad equations and inhibitions, and that sexual intimacy can and should be a sacred experience.

A few years later, I saw a film, “Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen”, a short biographical piece by the National Film Board of Canada.  At one point, Cohen was going to read some of his poetry.  And off-camera director or technician said, “now remember, Mr. Cohen; no dirty words.”   Cohen showed umbrage and said, “there are no dirty words. Ever.”

No, there aren’t.

I think that towards the end of his life, Cohen began to believe his own press, and began to cater to his audience of worshipful wannabes.  I think he began to believe that there really were “dirty words”.  Pity.

As for myself, I’m not compromising.  There are no dirty words.  Ever.

[whohit]Suzanne[/whohit]

Like most pop, they lead with attitude: often, as in hits like “You Oughta Know” and “All I Really Want,” the furious sarcasm of a smart, spurned woman who recognizes her superiority but takes little comfort in it.

Wow.  I had no idea that it was so difficult for women to enjoy their superiority.   I suppose the discomfort comes from having a difficult time persuading men to recognize their superiority.  We need more men to acknowledge that they are inferior to women, and to recognize that they really ought to learn to comply with womens’ wishes.  Women–like Donald Trump and his acolytes– look at the world and think to themselves, “they think they’re so smart”.  They really believe that the spectrum of complicated nuance and depth that smart people allude to doesn’t exist.  It’s all a charade, the purpose of which is to make people like them feel stupid.

The leading quote is from a review of a musical based on the songs of Alanis Morrisette, which were written with the “assistance” of producer Glenn Ballard.  (I suspect that the producer, as many producers do, conned Ms. Morrisette into sharing credit because of a few alterations and some development and arrangement of the recordings.   I’ll bet she’s even grateful.)

I’ll be sure to catch it if it comes to my town.

[whohit]Spurned Intelligence[/whohit]