On January 7, 2017 the Los Angeles Times published a piece about Conor Oberst (aka Bright Eyes) comparing his 2005 Album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning written out of the wreckage of his (and others) failed attempt to have John Kerry elected president to his then current record Ruminations. It compares the first record album that speaks of disappointment, despair—dark thoughts of hope eclipsed by a diminished expectations for nation and world moving forward, to his later Springsteen Nebraska-esque recording, Ruminations. That recording spoke to both the timelessness and the timeliness of the first, as well as the realization that the present may be worse than the past.
Regardless of your political perspective, the years since Ruminations have been anxious times. The questions in pre-inaugural America were: Will congress impede the potential renewal of the United States by our newly minted President Trump? Will President Trump ravage the Constitution for the sake of “America First” priorities, whatever the cost? Does our political system even function well enough to make significant change in either direction? Those first months of Donald Trump’s presidency raised anxiety across all stripes of the US political spectrum and to all corners of the globe.
And so it goes.
But the Oberst essay reminds us that in challenging times, artists have always afforded us with pieces that invite our reflection and consideration, offering a perspective outside of our own—maybe like ours, maybe not—but one that causes us to consider our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and fears, in challenging times.
There have been many references to works of art that resonate with our times. The night that Trump was declared the winner, there were multiple mentions of the film The Candidate where the Robert Redford character, after having been elected, sits on the edge of a bed and asks innocently, “Now what?” Although that and other works of art may reflect the historical context in which we now find ourselves, some art resonates with the Zeitgeist of the time it was created as well as with many eras hence. For example, in response to President Trump’s election, world music aficionado Tom Schnable posted a tribute to jazz music and civil rights as a response to what he then thought, and now understands, are the racial undertones and implications of our current administration.
Now we are now entering a season when we no longer will have a political proxy war in the media, but will have hand to hand combat in what looks to be a season of considering removing our President, however likely that might be. What art might help us reflect on, distract us from, or engage with the world as we now experience it?
Once such piece that I would recommend is a 1982 recording by John Cale entitled Music for a New Society. I first encountered this album upon its release in the Fall of 1982 on college radio. Politically I was still stinging from the first two years of the Regan presidency, and the loss of my naïve hope that John B. Anderson had a chance as a third party candidate against Reagan and Carter in the previous presidential election. A loss that made me resonate with the review of Oberst’s Ruminations. The fall of ’82 was also the season when my father who had harbored a brain tumor for over a decade, was beginning a quick descent to his death. By January of 1983, this album became the soundtrack to the political and existential malaise that had set into my life. It remains a work I return to for both catharsis and perspective.
John Cale (1942- ) is a Welsh musician who was classically trained on viola and piano as a child, but soon became more enamored with American Rock and Roll music in the 1950s. Although encouraged (even awarded) to continue classical pursuits, Cale found a home in avant-garde music of the late 50s/early 60s. It was in this genre that Cale first began composing. In the mid-1960s Cale found himself connected with American songwriter Lou Reed and began a series of collaborations that resulted in their founding the Andy Warhol supported band, The Velvet Underground. Cale played bass, viola, and keyboards for the Velvets; and while Reed was the principle songwriter, Cale was their arranger. After two albums together, Reed dismissed Cale from the band. Cale went on to be a solo artist, and the producer of some of the great artists and albums of the rock era.
By the end of the 1970’s Cale had gone through both personal and professional crises, and was hoping for a sound that would recover the tone of some of his earlier, more popular works, and yet be relevant to the new decade’s sounds and politics. In 1982, in response to the emergence Regan-Thatcher political influence (and his own existential malaise), Cale released one of the most beautifully grotesque recordings in rock music. It is open and spacious, not dense, but its lyrics and tone are brooding and dive deeply into dread with occasional glimmers of hope between the cracks. The instrumentation is often unexpected and at times results in an aural ambush. Interestingly this once hard to find recording has just been significantly revised, remixed, and re-released with a second disk containing the original recording.
Though the record contains some fairly straight ahead rock offerings, such as the guitar crunch of “Changes Made,” most of the songs lean heavily on sparse arrangements augmenting misanthropic lyrics, such as “Damn Life,” or the unfiltered pain of “If You Were Still Around” whose lyrics include “If you were still around, I’d tear unto your fear; Leave it hanging off you in long streamers.” And Cale’s delivery of these lyrics betrays the unsettled melancholia of this recording, ambivalently teetering between sorrow and anger, moving on and being tethered to the past.
For me the song that best illustrates the uniqueness of Cale’s album is the song “(I Keep a) Close Watch,” which was the single from Music for a New Society. Originally recorded for his 1975 album Helen of Troy, this composition was envisioned as a vehicle for Frank Sinatra, though it never became that. It is a heartfelt ballad, with a good bit of 1970’s orchestration, which shifted it away from sounding like Ian Hunter’s ballad of the same time, “Ships,” and more toward the the hit version of Hunter’s song by Barry Manilow. Hear for yourself by listening to the studio version and then a version with Cale simply accompanying himself on the piano. Though in both instances it is a beautiful torch song, the sparseness of the live version adds a richer emotional texture to the question—and the sting—of lost love.
When Cale revisited this song for Music for a New Society, he kept the ethos of that live version and added instrumentation and production that both underscores the tone of the song and plays counterpoint to it, inviting us to see the song more metaphorically. After all, the bagpipes and drums which bring the song to its end are at once funeral and military, speaking of both personal loss and global angst. In fact that closing instrumental segment was a separate track (“Mama’s Song”) and included a recording of Cale’s mother singing the Scottish folksong “Beside the Sea.” His mother’s voice was removed when it was appended to “Close Watch.” Cale’s mother had become ill at that time, giving voice to not only lost love, but losing one’s mother.
The new remix of “Close Watch”, though maybe more up to date, again draws a smaller circumference around those lyrics’ sphere of influence. While still personal and relational, it lacks the broader appeal and a sense of society beyond the immediate.
This song as originally imagined on Music for a New Society gives one a sample of the timbre of the larger work and how it invites multiple listens, intense introspection, and repeated reflections—resources we might need to negotiate the days ahead, even as we continue to digest the days behind.
This is but one of many pieces of art that is available for our consideration as a point of perspective for considering the ever–surprising turns and twists our world provides us. I wonder what pieces of art you might suggest? Please post your offerings in response to this piece. I hope that this is the first of many pieces of art you might find helpful as resources for our shape-shifting society and world; elements of veritas in a post-truth world.
I will follow this up shortly with a review of a recent musical response to the Tree of Life shooting, one year later. I hope more suggestions are offered between now and then.
With audacious hope,
