War & Peace. Long.  Really long.  It’s not easy to find one song to go with a 1,200 page novel (not even really a novel- Tolstoy insisted it was something entirely different than a novel) about Russian aristocracy, love, and historical philosophy during the Napoleonic Wars.  My first instinct was to pick a really long song.  That makes sense, right?  But the song should also reflect Tolstoy’s extremely verbose (but delightfully entertaining) writing style, his ability to be true to life while being entirely fictional.  On top of that, the song should have a philosophizing tone, for sure.  And it, too, should probably question its own form.  Is “the song” even a valuable way to make music now that MP3s no longer limit their length the way records did (within reason)?  I think Tolstoy would have liked this question.  And would have had 300 pages of ideas about it.

I was initially leaning toward Joanna Newsom- she has some long songs- when I remembered Dan Bejar’s (Destroyer’s) “Bay of Pigs.”  A fourteen minute song about a historical event?  Yep.  Written in Bejar’s whimsical and verbose lyrical stylings?  You bet.  I’m not sure that Bejar is reinventing what a song is in the same way that Tolstoy believed he was reinventing the novel, but Bejar certainly works outside of traditional song structures, and isn’t afraid to stray from the old fashioned radio-friendly three-minute track.  Dan Bejar is definitely a bit more fanciful than Tolstoy, but I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, which is definitely one the most poetic versions out there.

It was hard to choose something current for War & Peace.  It seems like it should be a 19th century Russian composer.  If I can’t picture it playing during one of the many ballroom scenes, it doesn’t quite fit.  But still, I think if Sofia Coppola were to do a modern-day hipped-up film version, “Bay of Pigs” could definitely be on the soundtrack.

MP3: “Bay of Pigs” – Destroyer (Courtesy of Stereogum, because the song is ironically  too long to upload to my blog’s server)

1973-5: the years in which everything stopped making sense.  Thomas Pynchon published his long, confusing, disgusting, mesmerizing, break through novel Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973.  Two years later, in July 1975, Lou Reed released his long, confusing, disgusting, mesmerizing, and potentially break through record, Metal Machine Music. This pairing couldn’t be more obvious.  To be honest, I haven’t actually finished the novel yet, but as I’m wading my through the seven hundred odd pages, I can’t help but think about Lou Reed’s un-masterpiece.  As governmental trust fell apart in the wake of the optimistic 50s, early 60s and the end of the Vietnam War, and traditional values were thrown out in favor of Civil Rights and birth control, both of these artists created works obsessed with man-made technology and unconcerned with appeasing the people taking them in.  In Gravity’s Rainbow we feel the paranoia of the parabola- a rocket’s path and the meanderings of a cadre of characters trying to find some meaning in the technological deaths of WWII.  In Metal Machine Music we hear Lou Reed thumbing his nose at listeners with his nails-on-the-chalkboard conceptual proto noise album.

The defining characters of both might be how very unpleasant they are to experience.  Both are, as I said, obsessed with technology.  Obsessed with pasting together the familiar in a disconcerting way.  Obsessed with towing the line between grossly funny and brilliantly groundbreaking.  I still can’t really decide how to feel about either.  When music and literature become formal experiments, how successful can they ultimately be?

Both the album and the novel are indeed more than formal experiments, but both pieces of art sacrifice something of their soul in order to be groundbreaking.  This blog post isn’t prepared to defend the truthfulness of that statement, or why that’s true, but it’s obviously no coincidence that the last quarter of the 20th century was ushered in by unintelligible magnum opuses by the biggest names in books and rock.  The world really was getting blown apart, and a paranoid novel about the atomic bomb and an album of electronics and guitar feedback were just about the only things that made sense enough to be nonsensical.

I’m not really saying much here, other than that I think it would be great to write some type of dissertation about paranoia and technology in the early 70s and how that’s represented across multiple art forms infrequently examined side by side.  As per the usual, though, Lester Bangs has already said pretty much everything there is to say in his brilliant 1976 essay, “The Greatest Album Ever Made” (Oh my gosh, he wrote this essay months after the album came out- can you imagine an album still having that much discussional impact months later now?  Not even Merriweather Post Pavilion garnered such thoughtful time lapse.).  Just imagine he’s writing about Gravity’s Rainbow, too.  Here’s an excerpt, but you can read the whole thing here:

“In his excellent liner notes, Lou asserts that he and the other speedfreaks did not start World Wars I, II, “or the Bay of Pigs, for that matter.” And he’s right. If everybody took amphetamines, all the time, everybody would understand each other. Either that or never listen or bother with the other son of a bitch, because they’d all be too busy spending three days drawing psychedelic lines around a piece of steno paper until it’s totally black, writing eighty-page letters about meaningless occurrences to their mothers, or creating MMM. There would be no more wars, and peace and harmony would reign…

Almost all music today is anti-emotional and made by machines too. From Elton John to disco to Sally Can’t Dance (which Lou doesn’t realize is one of his best albums, precisely because it’s so cold) it’s computerized formula production line shit into which the human heart enters very rarely if at all. At least Lou is upfront about it, which makes him more human than the rest of those MOR dicknoses. Besides which, any record that sends listeners fleeing the room screaming for surcease of aural flagellation or, alternately, getting physical and disturbing your medications to the point of breaking the damn thing, can hardly be accused, at least in results if not original creative man-hours, of lacking emotional content. Why do people go to see movies like Jaws, The Exorcist, or Iisa, She Wolf of the SS? So they can get beat over the head with baseball bats, have their nerves wrenched while electrodes are being stapled to their spines, and generally brutalized at least once every fifteen minutes or so (the time between the face falling out of the bottom of the sunk boat and the guy’s bit-off leg hitting the bottom of the ocean). This is what, today, is commonly understood as entertainment, as fun, as art even! So they’ve got a lot of nerve landing on Lou for MMM. At least here there’s no fifteen minutes of bullshit padding between brutalizations. Anybody who got off on The Exorcist should like this record. It’s certainly far more moral a product.”

MP3: “Metal Machine Music” – Lou Reed

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a book about a future city that is made entirely of glass.  A few centuries have rolled by, a hundred-year-long war has been fought, and now everything is completely different.  Humans are called by numbers, not names.  Everyone wakes up at the same time, goes to bed at the same time, and works at the same job.  The entire population is contained in one enormous glass bubble, blocking out the sun and any potential outside influences, though for all the inhabitants know, nothing exists outside the bubble.  D-503, the main character, is a man whose world follows entirely mathematical principals.  Nothing cannot be explained in mathematical terms.  He finds himself falling in love, though be believes it’s a sickness, and his world unravels from there.

As you can tell, I’ve been into dystopias lately.  A horrible future or parallel world where individual autonomy is given up for order and safety.  Zamyatin’s novel, published in 1917, is even more unsettling than most dystopias I’ve read.  Perhaps it’s because of the Russian translation, or merely just the fact that it’s Russian, Zamyatin’s writing style is cold and distant and disconcerting, like literary vertigo.  It’s entirely different from the way people write now.  Despite that, because of that, the reader more fully recognizes the human emotions we share with the alien-like D-503.  That’s why I think this Truman Peyote song is a good fit for the novel.  Not because it’s “futuristic” or “electronic” sounding, but because the track begins with steady, dark, mathy type buzz.  At points, it seems as if it’s going to be some sort of industrial-techno influenced piece.  But then, it takes off (like the Integral! like D-503′s imagination!) in a chorus of human voices that are really quite lovely.  A very fitting musical path for this very influential novel.

MP3: “Anotherother” – Truman Peyote

I can’t do either of these men justice in this little column.  That’s why they have to go together.  I finished Slaughterhouse Five nearly two months ago, have read multiple books since then, and have still been stuck on the proper song with which to match Vonnegut.  I usually have a few vague ideas for these posts after finishing a book, and when they don’t work it’s almost always because I don’t feel that the tone of the music matches that of the novel.  For Vonnegut, on the other hand, the problem was that no one was cool enough.

I’d escaped high school and college without reading any of his work (I think the title of Slaughterhouse somehow always kept me from reading it- I was imagining some sort of cautionary meatpacking tale, a la The Jungle).  I wasn’t surprised to find that the novel was truly incredible (when he passed away in 2007 I remember being impressed by how universally loved he was), but wasn’t expecting its humor, the brief phrasing of Vonnegut’s writing, or his fascination with science fiction.  What a book!  What a writer!  What a personality!  Billy Pilgrim is such a pathetic, wonderful 20th century hero- completely neurotic, demasculinized, caring.  An apolitical figure in a very political book.  Kilgore Trout is a fabulous allegory, metaphor, recurring character.  I can think of few books, movies, songs, anything that tackle the weighty topic of war with such humor and humanity.  I’m pretty sure the days of men like Billy Pilgrim are behind us, but I’m glad that Vonnegut has allowed him to exist in these pages.  So it goes, right?

I’m no book critic, but I think you get the picture.  I thought it was real good.  Still, no songs I knew seemed economical enough, funny enough, or classic enough to qualify for Slaughterhouse Five.  Yesterday I was hanging around my apartment and needed to quickly throw on some music.  I scrolled from the top of my iTunes until I reached the first suitable band.  I ended up in The C’s.  The Clash.  I immediately felt like an idiot for taking so long to make the connection.  Joe Strummer is the perfect artist to match with Vonnegut.  A cult of personality, unquestionable importance in 20th century popular cultural discourse, the blending of genres (reggae and punk, science fiction and war stories), brief phrases made all the more powerful by their brevity, personal hero to many.  If Joe Strummer was a punk, one not impressed by the music’s fashion but instead with its potential to affect change and change minds, then Kurt Vonnegut is a punk, too.  Vonnegut may be the original punk.  I think of all the pairs I’ve written about so far, these two are the most likely to get along.  Besides all the aspects of their writing they have in common, both men seemed to have a tremendous sense of humor, and I can imagine them finding quite a lot to talk about.

Instead of the Clash, though, I was most reminded of Joe Strummer’s final album, Streetcore, with the Mescaleros.  This is where the tone part comes in.  The Clash do make a nice fit with Slaughterhouse, but this posthumous album seemed to have more in common with the book.  I purchased Streetcore in high school, not really having any idea who Joe Strummer was (even more embarrassing fact: I didn’t realize Redemption Song, the 6th song on the album, was a cover until college), and listened to the album a lot.  I just read the very mediocre Pitchfork review of the album from 2003 (also never heard of Pitchfork until college) and fully undertand that it isn’t necessarily a good album, but I loved it.  This is the first time I’ve thought about Streetcore in a long, long time, so I thought maybe you’d like to know about it, too.

As Strummer’s last recorded work, it deals a lot with fitting in everything he wanted to do in life and a lot about death (though he was only 50 when he died in 2002).  If Billy Pilgrim could experience time in a non-linear way, traveling around from section to section of his life, then a Mescaleros album is an interesting choice to represent Strummer.  Not necessarily his best work, but his last, from what surely was an interesting time in his career: not over, but in all likelihood past its prime.  Those are some of the most tragic, revealing parts of Pilgrim’s life, lying in his bed trying to let the magic fingers lull him to sleep.  Not that that’s what Strummer did at all, but it’s an interesting time of life, especially for an aging punk rock star.  As if Strummer survived the war of fame and the 70s instead of WWII, and was dealing with the consequences.  So many of his comrades didn’t make it out alive.  I’ve singled out “Burning Streets,” if only for the similarity in theme: the bombing of Dresden, the image of London in flames.

Vonnegut and Strummer are two men who definitely belong in the unquestionably cool club.  You can criticize them, but there’s no doubt that their best contributions are some of the most genius works of art of the last 50 years.  I wonder if the two ever met?  I’m sure they were both aware of each other in their lifetimes.  I can’t imagine the conversation they would have if they were able to speak today, but I do know that it would be cooler than anything I’ll ever be able to say about them.

MP3: “Burning Streets (London Is Burning)” – Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros

Drawing By Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy

I did not enjoy Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  It was tedious.  There were a lot of dark thoughts about humanity.  There was a lot of Catholicism.  There was a lot of Irish history.  There was a lot, a lot of manhood.  And unless I can get in a time machine and go back to college and take that modernist literature class that will explain otherwise to me, there wasn’t actually a whole lot of discourse about becoming an artist that I understood as such.  So what song to pair with this novel?  I don’t make a habit of listening to music that I don’t like, and it felt wrong to pair a song that I loved with a book that I’ve essentially come to loathe.

That’s when I thought of The XX.  They’re the perfect partners for Joyce.  In a similar vein to the way Portrait is wrapped up in its Irish-ness, The XX are somehow essentially British.  There’s a foreign mopiness to both that my personality can’t seem to access. There’s something esoterically melancholy they tap into across the pond, which cuts across the centuries.  Maybe it’s the weather.  Perhaps Morrissey or Joy Division would also be good choices in that sense.

Joyce and The XX share qualities as writers, too.  Portrait is structurally fascinating, as is The XX’s sparse electronic rock.  Portrait is no doubt a novel of extreme literary merit, but Joyce’s best work was yet to come.  One will probably be able to say the same for these British teenagers.  Moreover, both works have similar tones.  The XX are obsessed with sex and probably a little self-flagellating.  Is Stephen Daedalus, also?  Check.  An oppressive humorlessness?  Check.  The moods of the band and the novel seem to match, and I think that’s why I find both ultimately unappealing: they take themselves SO seriously.  The only part of this comparison that doesn’t fit is The XX’s female perspective.  In an ideal Joyce-band matchup, the musicians would be all male to the point of one-sided absurdity.

In the end, I have to admit that there’s probably a deeper reason why I see these two as a pair in my dislike.  I came to Portrait too late in the game.  Without a class to help me analyze its passages, quite a lot of the meaning I’m sure went over my head.  I found it boring because I didn’t fully understand it.  I say I don’t like The XX because they became so popular before I had a chance to fully digest their unique sound.  Both Portrait of the Artist and The XX’s music are smart and innovative and, however you can manage to qualify this, artistically “worthwhile,” (what would Daedalus have to say on this, I wonder?).  I look forward to reading Ulysses in the near future, just as I look forward to making a renewed pact not to dismiss music because it is popular.

MP3: “Crystalised” – The XX

How could you pair In Cold Blood with anything but “Folsom Prison Blues?”  Capote’s prose is astonishing, much in the same way Cash’s voice is singularly recognizable.  Both quickly get to the point, mercilessly straightforward, but somehow lush with description and depth.  Both have deep voices that  cut to the quick of what it means to be human.  Though “Folsom Prison Blues” may be too obvious of a choice, it makes sense in that way.  In Cold Blood is one of the single most popular and critically regarded books I can think of, much like Cash.  I was, in fact, shocked the other day to hear a friend admit they didn’t much care for the singer.  I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like In Cold Blood. I can’t believe I’d never read it before, and as my friends and family saw me going through it, nearly everyone commented on how much they loved the book.  If “Folsom Prison Blues” is an obivous choice, I can only say that it’s an obvious book- one I fell absolutely head over heels for.

Besides, can’t you just see Perry strumming on his guitar in Mexico, ironically humming the tune?  The lyrics just as easily could be “I slit a Clutter’s throat in Kansas, just to watch him bleed to death.”  I guess that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it though, huh?

Somehow I missed out on Brave New World in high school English class.  In some ways, I’m very glad that I did.  Having a college history degree behind me really helped to see how astounding it is that this book was published in 1932.  Though I can’t imagine what Huxley would have made of the Internet, many of his visions of the future are unsettlingly perceptive.  I’m not saying that we’re anywhere near the communistic, soma-guzzling society portrayed in the classic novel, but the class structures, sexual roles, and religious capitalism seem to be far too prescient to have been written even before World War II.  On the other hand, maybe it’s only indicative of the fact that human nature doesn’t really change.

At first, I tried to choose a song for the book that seemed futuristic.  I lingered on Excepter and Black Dice for their disorienting futuristic sounds.  The new Flaming Lips album would have worked, too, had I not just chosen a Flips song for White Noise. But none of those seemed quite right.  Even though Brave New World is about future times, it’s just as much about the present day.  Then I thought of Dirty Projectors.  The female vocals on the newer tracks seem to fit right into the novel.  Gorgeous, alluring, but strangely alien and mildly frightening.  Nowhere are these vocals more appropriate to the novel than on the Stillness Is the Move B-Side, “Wave the Bloody Shirt,” whose title made me think of the whipping and hanging at the end.  Perhaps Dirty Projectors are a bit of an obvious choice, but I thought maybe not that many people had heard this B-side.  The electronic glitches are far more plastic than much of the Dirty Projectors we’re used to, and the vocals give it a human quality.  Still, the entire track comes off a bit empty, just as the lives of the “civilized” citizens of London do in the novel.  Plus, both Brave New World and Dave Longstreth are pretty strange entities.  I like how these two work together.  The track, plus the real obvious choice for this book, below.  I’ll have my SXSW Top Ten up tomorrow!

MP3: “Wave The Bloody Shirt” – Dirty Projectors

MP3: “Soma” – The Strokes

I would very much like to be at a dinner where Don DeLillo, author of White Noise, and Wayne Coyne, wacko frontman of The Flaming Lips, meet each other.  I think that they would turn out to be two of those people who seem wildly different from each other, but wouldn’t get along because of how similar they actually are.  DeLillo’s point of view is a tad too depressing and pretentious for my point of view, so I’d have to root for Coyne.  But I can just hear the arguments that they’d have.  On the topic of death, DeLillo would pontificate about the value of everyday lives in relation to death, and Coyne would insist that all we need focus on is loving each other right now.  Both would actually agree perfectly with each other, but would have such different terms for saying it that they’d never realize.  Besides, DeLillo could never stomach the absolute strangeness of Coyne, and Coyne would never tolerate the academic stuffiness of DeLillo long enough to take him seriously.

Or at least, this is what I imagine having just read White Noise and being a nearly life-long fan of the Lips.  Both White Noise and “Do You Realize” probe the obvious but philosophical aspects of life.  The song speaks in obvious platitudes, like, “Do you realize that everyone you know one day will die,” while the book operates in a similarly themed but more complicated way.  It investigates death through Jack’s complicated feelings, thoughts, and troubling relationship to Dylar.  What they both have in common is art’s ability to take the most basic things in life, in this case death, and equalize them into something completely human and beautiful.  The similarities with their obsession with technology are also strikingly similar, especially since they represent times over ten years apart.  Something about the dense particles of the cloud remind me of the electronic elements on the album, noise particles spreading out over space like paint from an aerosol can.

This was one of the most obvious pairings that’s ever come to mind while reading a novel.  There are a few ways, though, in which I don’t believe they fit.  DeLillo’s writing style is minutely claustrophobic, tight and stilted.  There’s something unnatural and cold in the way he has his characters think (I don’t think I would like any of them very much should I meet them in person).  The Lips, on the other hand, tend towards to the grand, the wide open, reaching their aural tentacles out as far as they can into the “white noise” that precedes their music.  Something quieter and less ostentatious also would have fit DeLillo, but I do like to think how the two are similar enough in intent to question exactly what the other is doing.  That’s a dinner party I definitely want to attend.

MP3: “Do You Realize??” – The Flaming Lips

I just finished Mrs. Dalloway on an airplane ride to Indiana (this trip was why I was sadly absent from blogging over the weekend).  I decided to read it simply because I never had before, and I knew it was supposed to be very good.  I wasn’t nearly as blown away by it as I thought I would- some beautiful images, good musings on life, and inventive prose to be sure, but still just a tiny bit less than I was expecting.  I think that’s the only way that Virginia Woolf and Beach House don’t line up in my eyes.  Beach House isn’t even the tiniest bit overrated (though who knows what with the hype for the new album right now), but I thought of their music immediately as I was reading Mrs. Dalloway.  It’s very beautiful, but somehow alien and difficult to decipher at times.  Dreamy, filmed through gauze, so everything is prettier, but questionably real.  That’s exactly how I feel about Woolf’s beautiful prose, and can think of nothing even remotely as good to pair this novel with.  I went with D.A.R.L.I.N.G. for its quiet optimism, but nearly any Beach House song would do.

MP3: “D.A.R.L.I.N.G.” – Beach House

It’s been a light show week.  Good thing I’ve FINALLY got my next NYRM Literary Society entry ready!  I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay nearly two months ago, but I’ve been really struggling to find the proper song to go along with it.  I knew it had to be a band with at least a little sense of humor, but also a great weight to them.  A band with an historical sensibility, but with strong roots in New York.  No one really seemed to fit Chabon’s wry, funny, nostalgic prose.  After asking nearly everyone I know for suggestions and wracking my brain for week, it finally hit me yesterday in the shower.  Oxford Collapse is as close a band as I can think of.  They have a pleasant, punky sound, but there’s a lot more to their songs.  Plus, they take themselves just seriously enough.  Kavalier and Clay is entertaining enough to be a page-turner, but smart enough to be a critical darling.  Just like Oxford Collapse.  Their recent break-up-before-their-time gives the band’s music a nostalgic feeling that goes well with the novel.

I picked “A Wedding” in particular because of the way it starts.   The weaving string lines are sparse but rich, just like the way the Golem, Kornblum, WWII, Judaism, magic, comics, you name it, are woven together in the novel.  Plus, you can’t beat the lyric, “Catch a glimpse of her,” as a first lyric.  It’s exactly like Joe’s first glimpse of Rosa.  ”And all the words we couldn’t find, all the rehearsed lines again, in 2010,” despite being the wrong year, reminds me of the second third of the novel, how much time passed without anyone saying how they really felt- or  being unable to, anyways.  Plus, the ideas of weddings and family connections are so central to the novel’s plot, that it all seems to work together.

I know that this song/band doesn’t really have the feel of weighty gravity of time passing in 20th century America for recent immigrants, but can you think of any one song that does?  Oh, maybe Destroyer’s Bay of Pigs, come to think of it, but that doesn’t quite fit the feel of the novel to me.  Anyways, that’s why novels are novels and songs are songs.  Can you think of anything better?  Help me out on this one!