Ideas As Viruses

On a late Spring evening, while staying in China to learn putonghua, a group of foreign students, of which I was part, were relaxing on top of the common dormitory of the ‘scholarship students’, a 5-storey brick building lodging the lesser or not well off who were here for the same reason I was. Standing there, a German, Japanese and USAn, and also a Chinese student we managed to invite (normally they have to sign a register at the entrance of a dormitory) to be included our conversation. Of course, it was the year Hong Kong was handed back to China from the UK, and the exchanges revolved around that subject, that quickly gravitated down to the heavier aspects: the Brits’ blackmailing, the Chinese surrendering, etc. Nationalism ended up at the heart of our exchanges (i.e. what makes a German, German) and then the Chinese student dropped the N-word. No, not that one. He asked the question quite simply: “What caused Nazism to emerge in Germany?” The German student, a biological chemist, answered first, since he felt like it struck a chord and also because maybe he wanted to end the discussion rather quickly. In any case, the German explained the emergence and rise of Nazism mainly for historical and political reasons. He talked about the links between nation-state and the rise of Protestantism, of the Holy German Empire, the failure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the Republic of Weimar. Then, the USAn chimed in and started to talk about economic causes, such as the deutschmark devaluation, structural changes brought about the rapid industrialization, the impact of the Great Depression… I was not talking, I was listening because I was interested in the point of view of other people unknown to me, even at my home university. Before the Chinese student was able to ask another question, the USAn student turned towards the Japanese, for his opinion. He smiled, a bit shy, and asked if anyone objected to his answering the question. The German told him he was interested by what he had to say. For the Japanese, the rise of the Nazis had everything to do with cultural and natural factors linked to having strong leaders tied with long bloodlines and the harsh environment, that the Japanese also had a culture that tended to exclude other races and groups, and it was thus natural that Japanese would want to associate with Germans, that they would impose themselves on their archipelago and, despite the Meiji reform, the hegemony was inevitable, like Nazism was in Germany. Then everybody turned to me, since I hadn’t said a peep, which was unusual. I sipped my green tea crowded by wet leaves and answered. “There are physiological diseases, there are psychological diseases, and there are sociological diseases. Nazism is a sociological disease but as in the three levels of conscience, the germ or the virus often is pre-existent, dormant. If the right conditions are in place for the disease to develop and spread, and even sometimes annihilate an organ, before infecting others. Someone can catch a cold without even sneezing but if he is tired or if he has a peculiar form of the virus, that person will be sick. Similarly, some ideas can circulate in certain societies or among certain groups and stay dormant until the ideal conditions emerge to facilitate its spread, regardless of politics, latitude, religion, language. Some ideas are like viruses. They develop in fertile ground, can spread rapidly. In the case of Germany, all the right conditions made it ripe for that ideology to make ravages: uncertain political climate, runaway debt, poor and working classes bubbling with rage, national shame for losing the war, the Great Depression, hijacking the scientific knowledge to justify segregation, fear of Communism. No nation, no empire is safe from this kind of upheaval. Not even the US. Who knows? In 15 to 20 years there might be another Tian An Men in Washington, while China will be brought to its knees by the Tianjin Cough.”

Nobody replied, and for a few seconds there was silence. The Chinese student laughed nervously at the last words, then the USAn raised his glass and said with his loud voice: “Meanwhile, we have to watch out for the 800 pound gorilla that might collapse.” I replied: “Are you talking about the US?” after which the German, the Japanese and the Chinese all laughed.

Today, I still think about that discussion, and the path taken by Humanity. I never read William Burroughs’ idea of the verb as virus. The more I age, the more I see education as a vaccine, and the more I see those who mistrust education and vaccine as ‘propagation agents’ and not only as ‘provocation agents’, as they often wrongly consider that physiological, psychological and sociological diseases are divine messages or agents.

Better Than Nevermind - No. 11 : Unsane - Unsane

Unsane – Unsane (Matador)

 

Nobody wanted this album. The sleeve itself was a repulsive for most except crazy me. I bought this album because of the name of the band and I wanted to know what kind of music such weirdoes would make and I wasn’t disappointed… The album starts with Organ Donor, tribal drumming, unintelligible vocals and noisy guitar works on a driving bass. The drums are stellar, relentless, suffocating and hammer the rhythm like a drunk madman angry at bunch of nails. It segues right into Bath, slower but sturdier, with solos of feedback alternating with the riffs, the drumsticks are flying all over the place while the bass drum stays as steady as an evil jackhammer, and the sound finishes with a wind of feedback imitating the voice. Maggot begin with white noise, but the trio cuts it short with a voodoobilly of bent chords and pumping bass. It takes a while before the vocals kick in: I told you/It don’t mean a thing/Do what you’re told. Distorted shouting and shredding riffs form a hypnotic pattern which lingers until the fade out. Cracked Up and Slag offer more of the same, but at greater speed, especially the former, the drummer Charlie Ondras flailing around as if trying to kill a thousand bees at the same time, and the latter has the bass and guitar so distorted it is as if the musicians are playing with brass knuckles on burning sheet metal. Side 1 ends with Exterminator, a slow dirge with meandering moray eels of wah-wah pedal feedback hovering around syncopated beats that hiccup from time to time. The dirge becomes an orgy of feedback and distortion, the only constant being the low bass until the song restarts and repeats the pattern without vocals, the whole mess melting like a rotted core emitting the background radiation of a nuclear meltdown. The first track of side 2 is a masterpiece of noise rock, Vandal-X has the furious drumming, garbled lyrics (except maybe for Shut up/Fuck you), throbbing bass, incisive guitar riffs, the perfect soundtrack for an evisceration with a rusted knife. HLL starts with a cloud of fuzz that explodes in a shitstorm of riffs like a runaway train always on the verge of derailing until someone pulls the plug, literally (I thought the vinyl had stopped). Cut and Action Man sound almost normal, especially the latter, but the vocals are still sounding as if Chris Spencer is having his nails pulled out. Pete Shore’s bass is so distorted and low it manages to come close to numbing all feelings in my brain. With White Hand, the trio closes with a hypnotic ballet of ringing guitars, like alarms blaring the end of the descent into chaos, the bass and the vocals sometimes indistinct of each other. Unsane indeed…

Better Than Nevermind - No. 10 : Type O Negative - Slow, Deep and Hard

Type O Negative - Slow, Deep and Hard (Roadrunner)

Should I be stranded on a desert island, or better yet a bunker deep underground in Scandinavia, and I could bring only one heavy metal album, I would bring the definitive magnum opus brought into the declining western civilization by Pete Steele and his merry menagerie of demented demons. A short blurb in an issue of Reflex had attracted my gaze and I immediately went and ordered that slab of doom from Dutchy’s. It got side tracked by grunge and My Bloody Valentine but couldn’t resist having the cathartic dark sludge engulf my ears and my brain. With the first track the quartet plunges the listener right into the abyss of the tortured soul of a man who has lost everything, but most of all his woman. Countless rock artists and even metal acts have done (and sometimes overdone) the narrative, Type O Negative not only takes it up a notch, it catapults it in overdrive over to nothingness. This album is this ride until it gets sucked into the void of depression. Each <song> is further divided into acts, and are therefore better understood as suites, that gravitates from thrash cavalcades and rigmaroles to Sabbath dirges to doom-laden implosions, the vocals alternately shouted, screamed or sung in a deep baritone voice, all bathed in gothic overtones thanks to the keyboards and sound effects. All the clichés of heavy metal are blended in this horrific, terrifying, depressing and sad tale of a man incapable of coping with life's worst nightmare.

Better Than Nevermind - No. 9 : Slint - Spiderland

Slint – Spiderland (Touch & Go)

Even 20 years later, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to describe Slint’s music in layman terms. Simply put, Slint is to 80’s rock what Velvet Underground was to 60’s rock music: a unique band made of brilliant musicians that would have far more influence after its breakup than during its brief existence. Spiderland was an enigma for me as much as VU the first time I got my hands on White Light/ White Heat. It grew on me slowly, and I couldn’t escape going back to it, like a stylistic black hole, an event horizon of all rock music experiments and beyond, from progressive (especially the Canterbury school) to punk to hardcore by the way of kraut rock. Spiderland is more than a mere hybrid though – it is a true syncretism-with-idiosyncrasies, like a new math theorem based on former calculations but reinventing the language and breaking new ground. The math comparison goes beyond the mere surface. The whole geometry of the album, the inner workings are quite the complicated beast. The record starts with Breadcrumb Trails and a deceptively simple guitar riff superimposed on syncopated drums and a barely audible. The pauses are deliberately inserted and the song erupts in dissonant guitar and wails, morphing into a caterpillar of fuzz that slowly ascends and descends mounds of floating riffs before the chaos lingers and the original motif comes back. A palindrome ? A sonic metaphor for the title ? The second song starts with sparse drums at martial yet still syncopated pace, the guitar and bass are trading empty spaces like a nonchalant couple entropic ping pong balls. The same acidic guitar tone tears those spaces in a non-haphazard way. A long introduction for their version of a hardcore interlude? The pattern is reiterated but at some point half deflated to become a skewed rock shuffle that _sounds_ standard yet wobbles on the not really off-key bass. The insertion of drumstick clicks to punctuate the change in jagged riffage brings to mind an orchestra of outer beings speaking a complicated alien language but with rock instruments that they have learned. The meandering becomes again expectative before they leave the listener with a simple guitar reverb. The following, Don, Aman starts like a Tom Waits soliloquy but with guitar strings instead of piano, less the alcohol encrusted growl. A few drops of chords then the buildup of strumming and whispering is slow and brooding, mesmerizing even, a few sparks of electric guitar, another voice in the distance. At two thirds of the song, the pressure cannot be contained and one of the guitar becomes distorted even though the strumming pattern remains the same, only to be subdued again, like a Sonic Youth song losing steam, until the story comes to a closure, the guitars and the bass interlace and fade out. Is that a guitar coughing at the end?. The second half of the album starts quiet and subtle before the instruments chime in, guitar interplays on strummed bass short chords. The first real singing is intoned, solemn and melancholic, almost glacial. The pattern of subdued guitars and bass, slightly distorted if at all, with floor toms followed by chiming arpeggios and melancholic singing has molded another archetype in rock, that was present in its basic elements but only congealed with Slint’s intuitive playing, and the plaintive voice backed only by drums and sparse microchords, as if a drizzle of notes permeated the air, and a buildup that becomes a hiccup to another soliloquy, on of the singlemost unnerving and genius event of the song and album, as is the tinny almost inaudible cascade of picking. My head is empty/My toes are warm/I am saved from harm gives way to the envolee we were expecting, that delivers punches of flams and bursts of distortion only for a few seconds before simmering back to the cauldron of subdued emotions. The penultimate track also simmers in a bubbling stream of nonchalant riffs and downtempo and all that quiescence is deafening. For Dinner… is a low rumble of ember timbres that meander in an Antarctic stillness which the instruments cut asymmetrically until all that remains are echoes of electric waves shimmering on razor thin ice shingles. The record ends with one of the most brilliant rock songs recorded, Good Morning Captain, a chiming ticktock of the guitars interlaced with dropped bass notes, stopped by the mumbling of the vocalist, supported by a clunking drum percolating with microbursts and short fills, the simple bass chord suddenly an off key lifeline to a bloom of fuzz that gets swallowed back and forth by the drumming into subdued chiming to fuzz to quiescence in a surgical opening of a clockwork heart of an ice and foil golem struggling to crawl forward. The strings jittering signal a reactivation, as the whispers and declamation is drowned in skewed dynamics, distortion and the last gasps of guitar riffs and drum rolls envelop the screams: I’ll miss you!/I’ll miss you! A true masterpiece has unfurled from our ears and buried itself into our consciousness. Rock music would never be the same.