Deep Voices #25
And strike, and strike, and strike, and strike
Deep Voices #25 on Apple Music
A few weeks ago, Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor Paula White gave an enthusiastic, desperate prayer for his reelection. Aside from the fact that it did not work, it’s a bizarre and entrancing performance. “I hear a sound of an abundance of rain! I hear a sound of victory! The lord says it is done!” She begins to speak in tongues and calls for “angelic reinforcement” from Africa and South America to, I guess, deliver Pennsylvanian electoral college votes. As she’s speaking, she punctuates her downbeats by punching her fist. A man walks back and forth behind her reading a book. He’s wearing shorts. When the camera pans to a wider shot, someone is in front of the stage, doing pushups.
I was not the only person who found the performance musical. There are now ample remixes of the song. Most of them are different kinds of electronic music, though a longhaired guy in a Krusty the Klown sweatshirt played metal guitar underneath White repeating the phrase, “and strike, and strike, and strike, and strike.” Though I don’t in any way endorse the messaging herein, and find her calling for African and Latin American angels to save the election problematic at best, I’m very taken with White’s rant. Coherence is overrated. I prefer something vague delivered in a monotone. Profundity usually follows.
Listening to White, I was reminded of a piece of music by the Canadian ensemble Godspeed You Black Emperor I was very taken with a little more than 20 years ago. The group, essentially an experimental instrumental rock band with strings, made self-serious epics, long pieces with grand swells and the use of pensive bells. Their song “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III” takes this formula and overlays a long recording of a Finnegan on the street ranting, loosely about the injustice of his speeding ticket. “You think you're God because you have a robe and you can put people up the goddamn river for 20 years?” he says. Okay, you think, maybe he’s got a point, even if it’s wrapped up in a bit of conspiracy. Then a minute later Finnegan lists the firearms he owns, and all the air is sucked out of the room. What started as a kooky antigovernment diatribe gets very dark very quick.
Though it may be a bit cloying, the elegiac backing Godspeed You Black Emperor gave his rant feels like the right music. That is, if it should be set to music at all. Though the intention may be to lament the ugliness of Finnegan’s rant, adding melodramatic string crescendos serves to ennoble it. What about Paula White? When you turn off the remix and listen to the pleading in her voice in the original recording, does it seem like she really thinks angels are on their way to America to overturn the election results? It sure sounds like it. That’s easy to mock, but it’s harder to change.
How much the broadcasting of one’s warped beliefs is purposeful deception and how much is lunacy is a big question for modern times. I can begrudgingly sympathize with those taken by the machinery of QAnon and other modern conspiracies, all of which encourage a simple and uncritical take on unfairness, one somehow easier to swallow than the idea that our leaders and their systems have failed us, largely seemingly on purpose.
A number of songs on this week’s mix borrow the aesthetic of plainspoken lunacy, but either obscure the messaging into oblivion or make it harmless. The lower stakes feel nice. The opening track, by the New Age musician Fantuzzi, pleasingly makes no sense. The song’s lyrics, in their entirety: “As we hang out longer and longer, some of us who are moving forward into a consciousness that is calling onto us, we automatically create a blanket of light, a space of grace. The whole world gets a little bit more of it.” Maybe he means you get better with age? There’s a small guitar twang that fades out the song. It’s 23 seconds long, a heavenly little slice of weirdness. Listen, but not too close.
Playlist notes:
Violinist and composer Laura Cannell’s These Feral Lands, Vol. 1 is certainly one of the most striking pieces of music I’ve heard this year. It’s not so far removed from the ideas behind Godspeed You Black Emperor, just drastically toned down and drained of pomp. The album is made up of Cannell’s improvisational playing meshed with Kate Ellis’s cello and a handful of vocalists. Jennifer Lucy Allen’s piece is gorgeous and worth skipping ahead to, but I’ve been overwhelmed by the album’s opening track, “Barsham Light,” featuring Stewart Lee speaking a few paragraphs. He’s at first buried beneath the strings, and Lee is hard to make out. And then he begins singing as well, two tracks of vocals slightly out of time with each other, then catching up with a resonant echo. It appears he is talking about sunshine hitting a church. “And there on the rood beam the crucified Christ will bathe once more in heaven’s golden light.” There’s a pause and then the song’s final line, which he repeats for about a minute. It’s the easiest one in the song to make out. “Have you got a light, boy?” There are a lot of ways to take a question. The most straightforward is a man asking for a light for his cigarette. But let the question roll around as he repeats it with his sweetly droll voice and it begins to feel a familial confrontation about the light inside of you. Do you have one? Or maybe he’s talking to Jesus. I cannot say I took my own advice above, to not listen too hard. The song deserves it. Even if I’ve misunderstood it, playing on repeat all week, it’s given me a light. So, yes, to answer your question Stewart Lee, I do.
In August, Beth Anderson released Namely, an album of 65 brief songs, each an a cappella recitation of a different person’s name. Many are composers, like Steve Reich and Lou Harrison, and Anderson pronounces their names in their musical styles. Sometimes it’s catchy and sometimes it sounds like she is having a stroke. I wasn’t familiar with Anderson before discovering this album, and was delighted to find out more info first through her very rudimentary website. “When I was in high school, I read John Cage's books and fell in love with the ideas and the excitement of the avant garde,” she writes. “My music, as a result, moved over to what has been called post-Cagian, non-academic. That lasted until about 1979 at which point I changed.” The next year, she recorded the decided non-academic “I Can’t Stand It,” a recitation of bugaboos with Wharton Tiers banging away on the drums. It is awesome.
As much as I loved reading about Anderson’s music, though, I found even greater joy reading about her marriage. In 1995, she had a city hall wedding that was lovingly detailed in a New York Times story. She met her husband, Rusty, at a potluck dinner for Mac users the year before. The courtship was fast and intense and, Anderson says, she was all in pretty quickly. "I either wanted to get married or I wanted him to go away because it was breaking my heart that he wasn't marrying me. Finally, he said, ‘So, you wanna?’” She did. “I just think he's the sweetest man on legs.”