Here's a piece I wrote for the latest TQ, about chance and randomness in song lyrics -:
Our enemies comprehend only the language of blood. The time for the pen has passed and we enter the era of the sword. Words are dead.
The above quotation is taken from the radical Kuwaiti dramatist Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Al-Hamlet Summit, a re-working of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, based on an uncompromising engagement with issues concerning the contemporary Arab world. In this specific case, the concept of state censorship and the line of demarcation between freedom of speech and apostasy. This is not the subject I wish to discuss in this piece, but Al Bassam’s words are pertinent to the concepts of both chance and randomness in what could loosely, or indeed glibly, be referred to as song lyrics in the No Audience Underground.
From my perspective as both a consumer and creator of experimental music, as well as a writer of poetry and prose, both fiction and non-fiction, it seems to me that Al-Bassam’s statement that “words are dead” is a succinct appraisal of the overarching attitude to song lyrics displayed by many practitioners of our craft. I am unclear why this is the case; perhaps the uniquely talented F. R. David nailed it on his 1983 magnum opus, “words don’t come easy to me?” It appears that most experimental music, whether electronic or acoustic, could best be described as instrumental, so lyrics and words in general have little or no value in the genre. Even such skilled vocal stylists operating in this oeuvre as Mobius appear to use the human voice as an instrument, rather a tool for narrative exposition, where patterns of sound are more important than any hint of a didactic lexical meaning.
However, at a micro level, words are proximate to essential when it comes to naming pieces. Of course, numerical titling has a long and continuing history; from baroque chamber music to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and on to the present day, compositions without words have regularly been given a numeral title that stands alone, without words. I understand that and appreciate the decision of any artist responsible for choosing such an approach, but I must admit to delighting in the more creative names given to instrumental pieces by other, perhaps, more mischievous practitioners. Who doesn’t love the images conjured up by titles such as A Carrot is as Close as a Rabbit gets to a Diamond (Captain Beefheart), Big John Wayne Socks Psychology on the Jaw (Hatfield and the North) or Knee Deep in Shit (Rip, Rig & Panic)?
My own musical practice is as part of BARTHOLOMEW cusack. Alongside the electronic wizard Chris Bartholomew, who has the allocation of talent in the duo and is the real creative force behind this project, on 50% of our compositions, my role is to recite spoken word pieces, which I will discuss anon. The other 50% of our compositions involve me, a self-confessed anti-musician, coaxing noises from either a six string or bass guitar. At this point, I could digress extensively as to whether the No Audience Underground and associated adherents are actively campaigning for the abolition of guitar music, but I won’t. What I will say is that the noises I make with electric stringed instruments are planned rather than randomly generated, even if there is no possibility of these sounds being transcribed in musical notation. These pieces are not songs in the established sense, but neither are they free improvisations; the planned and rehearsed nature of their genesis makes each of them sound distinctly different from each other. Initially, Chris and I did not identify these pieces with titles, preferring instead to use descriptive terminology along the lines of “the one with the harmonics” or “hammer-off” to delineate these separate creations. However, as we continue along the tortuous road towards the release of our music on CD, the need for titles became a necessary aspect of the creative process, in order to identify these distinct instrumental / wordless pieces. And this is where the concepts of chance and randomness come to the party.
While Appalachian eefing has been a recognised Tennessee bluegrass singing technique for 150 years or more, scat singing an integral part of trad jazz from the very outset, and lilting a vocal element of sean nos Irish folk music for at least three centuries, the more cerebral arts have also sought to appropriate popular cultural tropes, by incorporating random vocal soundings for a considerable period of time. Improvisation and spontaneity have long been central to creative wordplay in the avant garde. Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Manifesto of 1920 proposed cutting words from a newspaper and randomly selecting fragments to write poetry, a process later enthusiastically adopted by William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and other Beat Generation writers as Cut-Ups. For Dadaists, the apogee of their contribution to literature was the tonal poetry of Hugo Ball. His work attacked traditional literary concepts such as: structure, order and the actual meaning of language. Probably his most famous poem was I Zimbra, which was fashioned into a rock song by The Talking Heads on their stunning 1978 album Fear of Music, though it could be argued that Ball’s text could equally have found a home on the band’s later Speaking in Tongues set -:
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A
bim beri glassala glandride
E
glassala tuffm I zimbra
Bim
blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa
glallassasa zimbrabim
A
bim beri glassala grandrid
E
glassala tuffm I zimbra
Gadji
beri bimba glandridi
Lauli
lonni cadora gadjam
A
bim beri glassasa glandrid
E
glassala tuffm I Zimbra
In seeking to name the instrumental pieces for BARTHOLOMEW cusack, I attempted to incorporate elements of chance and randomness in a list of potential titles. As already stated, discussion of how these concepts can act as the stepping off point for longer prosodic or poetic pieces for recitation or declamation will follow later. Here, at the micro level, we can find memorable names from chance events in the world around us. Take a look at this list. Hopefully, at least 3 of them will be married up to non-vocal pieces on the forthcoming BARTHOLOMEW cusack CD -:
1. Dromedary
2. P.C. Callum Smith
3. Thomson’s Gazelle
4. Abattage
5. Chloe’s Urinal
6. The Big Budgie
7. Desimineni
8. Mucladnee
9. Nice Little Outfit
10. Don’t Forget the
Fucking Cauliflower
All of these phrases introduced themselves to my consciousness through chance or random events. Well, apart from the first one, which is culled from an as yet unwritten poem of mine that will include the line “I’m a Dromedary in a herd of wild Bactrians.” P.C. Callum Smith was the name of a smiling neighbourhood Bobby who was handing out flyers and business cards outside my local Sainsbury’s to announce his arrival on the patch. As all nature lovers will know, Thomson’s Gazelle is the best named animal in the entire world. Google translate suggests that Felling, the scenic little fishing village on the South bank of the Tyne where I arrived in the world, can be rendered en Francais as Abattage.
I have always loved misspellings, mispronunciations and misreadings; my step daughter’s return from university for the holidays saw me fail to grasp the word “arrival” on the calendar in the kitchen and assume she was purchasing a pissoir, for number 5. A disgruntled fan of some other team put Newcastle’s improvement down, not to Eddie Howe’s superb management, but to the existence of a large, feathered wallet, on the BBC Football discussion forum. In the company of Chris, I always try to pronounce musical terms correctly; luckily, I’ve not had to refer to a note half the length of a semiquaver just yet, while a YouTube documentary about street fighting men in County Limerick made reference to “My Uncle Anthony” at one point.
Finally, there are some phrases that simply must be preserved, such as my partner Shelley describing a summer t-shirt and shorts combo that I wore on the first decent day of the year as a “nice little outfit,” which made me feel like a toddler. Best of all was the instruction barked by an irate pensioner to his son, outside a fruit and veg shop in Blaydon Shopping Centre. Tragically, the shop has been pulled down, but the words live on.
Finally, at the macro level, junk emails have proved themselves to be a rich source of lyrical inspiration, which I’ve exploited ruthlessly in my creative writing activities. If both Al-Bassam and F. R. David are correct in their assertions, where can the creative artist go to find lyrics? In the same way that Carl Andre’s famous pile of bricks stopped being a functional object and became a work of art at the precise moment he called it a work of art, then words found in unsolicited junk emails, often randomly generated and badly translated by computer software, take on a poetic quality when used for artistic purposes. For instance, this poem was an amalgamated rewrite of two unsolicited emails, which will appear in my forthcoming chapbook of poetry and prose, tentatively entitled Violent Heterosexual Men. The title is the subject line of the two emails -:
We may obtain information about
you from other parties for any of our purposes.
We may share information about
you with other organisations as the law also allows this.
You are not allowed find out
more about our purposes, how we use personal information or your rights in this
matter.
The law allows us to check the
information you provide to improve our knowledge.
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