Soon I turn 40 years old, and it feels that I’ve spent decades taking giant steps in the wrong direction.
One of the few certainties I have is that I must walk towards Scott Walker. I’m navigating by starlight, and his records collectively are one of my few fixed points in the night sky.
This is the first piece I’ll write on artists who are influencing me.
The vanishing trick
Search for a few images of Scott Walker, the songwriter. There he is in the 1960s, a handsome young pop star, and in every photo he has the expression of a man lost in a supermarket. There he is in a few promo shots in the early 1980s, with an airy perm, older, still confused. And then you’ll see some 1990s/2000s shots where he appears less lost but more reticent than ever, parked behind sunglasses and a cap - a well-preserved older man who doesn’t care if he gets mistaken for just another Boomer at the barbecue restaurant.
He disappeared for long stretches of time.
I don’t think this was misdirection or reverse psychology. I believe he simply didn’t see any point in presenting a particular persona, knowing that an audience will inevitably fantasise one anyway as they absorb an artist’s work.
He made the right decision. He removed any questions about his own character or motivations from the picture as completely as possible. All we can say for certain about why he made his later albums, post-pop-stardom, is… that he wanted to make them. He thought there was some value to the work and that there could be an audience for it. It’s one thing not to crave validation, but he blew past that and made it impossible for his audience to express their feelings for him – no live shows, no fan interaction, very few interviews. I believe this was deliberate mental hygiene for someone who wanted to remove any possibility of performing what is now called ‘fan service’. (Inevitably, it makes him even more appealing to someone like me – but thankfully he had no way of receiving our adulation, he’d pulled the antennas off the radio.)
The conventional pop song presents as an expression of the singer’s lust, or loneliness, etc. Our natural tendency to identify the singer with their song is encouraged by the subjects, by the passionate performance of singers, and by the primacy of the singer’s personality in pop culture.
This is dandy. The pop song is the art form that will define the 20th century. (The 21st, I’m not so sure.) It has taken over the world in a million different guises, it has been the most breathlessly innovative and culturally powerful medium of the last century. And the convention of the pop song is that we either know or pretend that the singer is singing about themselves.
Scott’s vanishing trick is that he pulls himself out of the song. He can disappear because he doesn’t consider himself relevant to what’s going on. (There is always a paradox operating, because he does sing these songs, and his voice is so distinctive and human and present. He’s there and not-there.) Scott’s subjects are not emotional states, they are histories.
I say these songs are snow-globes, capturing a world behind glass. Clara narrates the traumatic end of Mussolini: his mistress watching the tyrant fall asleep in his bedroom tiled with esoteric symbols, then the lovers seen as hanging corpses, desecrated by passers-by; then they are alive again, in a song that flip-flops between life and death and in that oscillation captures the panic of the doomed, a panic like that (as the song suggests) of a bird trapped in an attic. Scott is not present. He is narrating. He is watching these awful scenes unfold and reporting back to us, in the future, from the 20th century, where he lived.
This is why Scott is irreplaceable to me. In a way that no other pop singer has, he cared about history. He remembered things: the character of the light in a Dutch hotel room in 1963, Pasolini’s murder on a beach, the violence of the black-and-white Donald Duck. He knew that we forget far more than we remember, and that the past is still there, waiting for us to join it, that we are outnumbered and inconsequential next to the ghosts. He wouldn’t stop picking at the scabs of his century, the fascism and Stalinism and ethnic warfare, because he knew that it’s all still there. I mean that in two senses: the metaphysical point that the past is just as real as the present, in the same way as the interior of a house is real even when you go outside and can’t see inside it anymore, and also in the pessimistic sense that any lessons we learn are forgotten, that we need little excuse to re-enact the precise nightmares of our grandparents.
Blindfolded in the cinema
Scott was a serious movie buff. The Seventh Seal, from Scott 4, is a straightforward retelling of that movie in song form. It obviously made an impact. It isn’t a stretch to read his songs as screenplays, scripts for cryptic art films. His late albums in particular have the pacing and foley of films. Blindfolded in the cinema might be an apt description of what it is to hear these albums for the first time. Something is happening, you can guess by sound, something upsetting. Knives sharpened. Strings to put you on edge. And then you hear that baritone from off-screen, face obscured by a black velvet curtain, drip-feeding narration, enough to speculate with but not enough to be reassured. It’s confusing as hell, and to carry on listening requires the same kind of dedication as sticking around to finish a difficult film. There isn’t time to understand. One sitting isn’t long enough to piece together any structure or narrative. There are lulls and flurries of activity that defy any obvious musical rhythm. There is nowhere to hang your hat. You are in the cinema, lights off, drenched in cold sweat and having a panic attack.
Does this sound fun? Surprisingly, it is.
After the tenth, perhaps, or twentieth or hundredth play through, the sky lightens a little. Shapes can be discerned; look, it’s Tintin! And Rosa Luxembourg! Running together through that Baltic fog, through the haunted forest! Who are those two: mummies? No, it’s a pair of frozen revolutionaries, hand-in-hand, murmuring their last loving words. This is a confusing film, but no one can tell me it’s meaningless. And oh my, each time I watch it again more is revealed; new characters, locations, even jokes. It’s all in there, packed with the density of a black hole.
I might offer an objection here: how much work is Scott actually doing? If I stare at a wall until I hallucinate, is it me or the wall doing the creative heavy lifting? Is Scott just painting walls for us to stare at until we see something?
I think that suggestion is a small but important part of the truth. An artist who leaves so many holes in his stories isn’t doing so accidentally. This is an artistic technique being pushed to its limits. Scott gives us these vivid flashes (and the vivid is important, nothing is ever nondescript) and leaves us to fill in the blanks. I’ve read enough to recognise that this is the one simple trick perfected by the Modernists, the Eliot/Pound bunch. (It may seem insubordinate to reduce such influential characters to a single technique, but at least I’m paying them the respect of understanding what they did – which they were very good at.) Read The Wasteland for the archetypal example. It’s a series of vivid monologues that range through time and space with no narrative or obvious connection except unhappy vibes, in a mixed register from trivial dissatisfaction to profound spiritual angst. It should not be an enjoyable or meaningful read, but it is. Our minds cannot help but create associations where there are none. Those conspiracy-minded jellies nestled in our skulls experience a thrilling emotion of revelation from this challenging and involuntary work of fabrication that we are carrying out. It is an extraordinary thrill that is unknown – whose existence is not even suspected – by those who avoid reading such work, or those who read it and miss the point entirely.
Courage and faith
There is no rule for the correct dose of obscurity in a song, any more than there is a rule for the best amount of black on a canvas. Scott errs on the side of more, because he’d rather make us wait for understanding than condescend to us or deprive us of revelation. This is the decision of a songwriter who doesn’t wish to condescend to his audience, and I appreciate it very much. Scott treats us as adults. And by opting out of all publicity, by not promising or promoting anything, he has defused our right to complain if we struggle with the work or decide that there’s simply nothing there. His songs are just there, like paintings in a gallery, to be ignored or examined as you wish.
[This isn’t to say his work is beyond criticism – he put out some mediocre stuff, even ignoring his regrettable 1970s output. The point is that the current mode of cultural criticism is irrelevant to Scott, because that mode assumes that all art is a cry for attention and judges whether the work (or even worse, the artist as a public personality) is worthy of it. Our modern critics do not ask Does this work offer riches?; they ask, Is this artist worthy? If the artist can efface their public personality, the second question becomes impossible to answer and the work will be left alone by mediocre critics.]
Scott gives me courage and he gives me faith. He believed in a serious audience. He believed that people would listen to his difficult and frightening songs, and shake their heads in confusion, and then listen again and again until they found something beautiful, and that this is a meaningful way for a human to spend their time. That’s faith in humanity. He didn’t need defences against being accused of pretension because he believed in a serious audience. He had faith that those who criticise pretension are irrelevant because they don’t believe in seriousness, that the discussion is as pointless as arguing the merits of swimming pools with someone who never learnt to swim and who judges pools by their snack menu or decor.
Space. Time. I still rush compared to Scott. I don’t have as much courage. I don’t have as much faith in my audience. (Sometimes, it’s just that I’m not trying to do the same thing. I do still like pop songs.)
I’ll finish by including an embed to one of my own songs in which the debt to Scott is particularly obvious. This song is from An Imposter, and it’s called Pigeons. It doesn’t have Scott’s daring, but his fingerprints are all over it. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it an homage.