Insights that stood the test of time
There’s a big old cardboard box that’s lived in the darkness of a dozen wardrobes. (How’s that for an intro rich in potent psychoanalytic symbolism?) It originally housed a Commodore-64 personal computer, which means I’ve been moving this box from house to house, wardrobe to wardrobe, since Athens in 1985. It’s a long long time since it contained a C-64 though. Over the years it has become the repository for my old dream-diaries, letters I’ve received (and a few I never sent), personal journals filled with strange scribblings, cards, photos and assorted frozen memories. So, despite outward appearances, this is not an innocuous cardboard box. Far from it. This is something to be approached with extreme caution.
This time round I only lost half a Saturday. It helps if you open the cache with a specific target… in this case something that had survived the great journal purge of the mid-90s by virtue of being written in an old school jotter… a painfully earnest essay written after reading The Communist Manifesto for the first time. I was sixteen and just becoming aware of politics. Someone (MM) had thrust a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book into my hand around then, and I’d also somehow picked up the entirely erroneous view that being a Marxist was inherently edgy and sexy. Apparently it entailed sitting in Parisian cafĂ©s with women who looked like Audrey Hepburn.
I had it confused with existentialism.
So I’d been calling myself a communist and a marxist (and sometimes a Maoist) for a few months when it occurred to me that it’d be a good idea to read something on the subject. Besides, the expected deluge of Audrey Hepburns had never materialised, so I had plenty of free time. I read The Communist Manifesto having found the Little Red Book completely mystifying. And overnight I became a libertarian capitalist and remained that way for several years. Without a doubt The Communist Manifesto is the worst advertisement for social justice ever written.
The essay I wrote in response is called “The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto”. As a stylistic conceit, each paragraph opens with “The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto is…” It gets tired and tiresome very quickly indeed and makes me cringe a little, though in my defence I was sixteen! I’ve seen the same approach used by professional journalists; what’s their excuse?
That was the line I was looking for. It’s the first thing I ever wrote on the subject of sustainability. Admittedly, it was another twelve years before I returned to the subject. Still, it’s as valid a sentiment now as it was then.
Impossible to ignore however, on the jotter page immediately prior to The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto I had written a single phrase. The three words fill the page and are written in carefully constructed letters with intricate cross-hatching. They state, bluntly, “Bowie is God”.
And yes, that too is still as valid a sentiment now as it was then. So in honour of the purity of my 16-year old self’s insight, here’s an artist-specific version of that old “First Line” quiz. Identify the following Bowie songs from their first line…
- I’ve come on a few years from my Hollywood highs
- (Hello love) (Goodbye love) / Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low… oh… oh
- I’m stomping along on this big Philip Johnson
- Tragic youth was looking young and sexy
- When all the world was very young, and mountain magic heavy hung
- As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party
- Oh. Ooooooooooh yeah. Ahhhhhhh!
- Let me put my arms around your head…
- Aaaaahoh. Aaaaaaaaahohhhh. Do do do do do. Do do do do dooooooooo…
- Nothing remains. We could run when the rain slows.
- Stinky weather / fat shaky hand / Dopey morning doc / Grumpy gnomes
- And so the story goes they wore the clothes, they said the things to make it seem improbable
- Day after day, they send my friends away
- Cold fire, you’ve got everything but cold fire
- Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oh! Weaving down a by-road, singing the song
7 and 9 are hard…
November 18th, 2007 | 8:21am
by Phil
Actually I’ve got 9, although I think the real first line would have been better.
OK: 3, 4, 7, 10 and 11 are the ones I haven’t got. I don’t know whether to be embarrassed or annoyed not to have got them all.
November 18th, 2007 | 11:19am
by Phil
I don’t know whether to be embarrassed or annoyed not to have got them all.
Embarrassed and annoyed, Phil. And annoyed.
🙂
As it happens, I think 7 is quite easy, though admittedly it would be far easier if there was a way to phoenetically translate the sound of a signature guitar riff into text.
3, 4, 10 and 11 are all post-1980s Bowie which could be your difficulty. I know lots of folks (perhaps you’re one?) who disembarked from the Bowie-bus during the savage 80s. Who could blame them? But while I’m not saying he ever made another Low or another Man Who Sold The World, in my view he actually came far closer than most people give him credit for. In fact, if I had to list my top 10 Bowie albums, at least three of them would be post-1990. (1.Outside, Heathen and Earthling can all hold their heads high in the company of his 70s output, and 1.Outside would probably make the top 5).
Incidentally, is it possible that No. 14 is the best opening line to any song ever? Yes, it has plenty of competition, but it’s up there.
UPDATE: I’d forgotten just how good 1.Outside is. Particularly very loud… definitely an album “To Be Played At Maximum Volume”.
November 18th, 2007 | 2:05pm
by Jim Bliss
Oh, that signature guitar riff…
Yes, Tonight was and remains my last Bowie purchase – seeing that that only had three or four good tracks on it, I didn’t want to take a chance on NLMD, and it was nine years from that to 1. Outside.
November 18th, 2007 | 2:45pm
by Phil
1. Cracked Actor
2. Starman
5. The Supermen
6. Diamond Dogs
7. Ziggy Stardust
8. Drive In Saturday
12. The Bewley Brothers
13. All The Madmen
14. The Prettiest Star
15. Beauty & The Beast
Funny that, despite liking several of the later Bowie albums, i draw the same post-80s blanks. I suspect it’s to do with the way I got to know the earlier stuff. It used to be common for me to sit down with an album and the lyric sheet and listen to the music while reading the lyrics. I’d often do that for the first few weeks of having a good album, whereas i can’t remember doing it recently. Not all the way through, and repeatedly, anyways. A new Cowboy Junkies tends to get that treatment.
November 21st, 2007 | 4:20pm
by merrick
If Bowie is God (as I wrote 20 years ago), then the 80s were his “God Made Man” period, Phil. Flaws and all. He never lost the knack for writing a good tune though, and (almost) all of the singles during the 80s were great… Let’s Dance, Loving The Alien, Absolute Beginners, China Girl, Blue Jean… great songs all.
Unfortunately he clearly stopped giving a shit about the quality of his albums. Lots of cocaine and too much adulation will do that to an artist. Merrick will put in an impassioned defence of the first Tin Machine album, but in my opinion Bowie didn’t really create anything truly great again until he sat down to work with Eno on 1.Outside.
—
I’m the same, Merrick. It’s a while since I’ve sat down with a new album and followed the lyrics all the way through. If my memory serves me right, Stina Nordenstam’s The World Is Saved is probably the last one (and it’s almost three years since I bought that). But there are still a small handful of artists who I’ll do that with… David Byrne, Stina Nordenstam, Matt Johnson… none of whom are exactly putting out a huge amount of material though.
The songs you missed (almost identical to Phil’s list) are:
3. Thru’ These Architects Eyes (1.Outside)
4. Reality (Reality)
9. Sound and Vision (Low) — OK, that wasn’t entirely fair
10. Sunday (Heathen)
11. Little Wonder (Earthling)
All excellent songs by the way, though Reality is not an essential album by any means.
November 21st, 2007 | 6:53pm
by Jim Bliss
Ah… I didn’t really get 9 – which is ironic, as it was my single favourite piece of recorded music for a couple of years. I thought it was the mumbled introduction to “Letter to Hermione” (whose real first line is one of the greats).
Isn’t it “…to make it seem unbelievable”? (The whale of a lie like they hope it was…)
Off-topically, I think I stumbled on the source of the blog’s title this evening. I was quite surprised, it doesn’t at all have the rural-idyll overtones I’d assumed.
A terrible signalToo weak to even recognise
‘Too weak‘ – something genuinely nightmarish about that.
November 21st, 2007 | 11:10pm
by Phil
No I definitely hear “improbable” when I listen to that line. Later in the song though, “unbelievable” is used (the gloriously weird and evocative):
Letter to Hermione is one of the ultimate “3am whiskey and cigarettes staring at a phone that never rings” songs. It’s got some absolutely savage lines.
And yes, you’ve unearthed the “The Quiet Road” reference. “A gentle collapsing / of every surface / We travel on…”
As I mentioned above, David Byrne is one of the very few contemporary artists whose lyrics really interest me. I’m aware he himself actually dismissed the lyric-writing process in the past (“lyrics are just a way of tricking an audience into listening to your music”), but — and here I run the risk of getting all Jungian on yo’ ass — I believe that the creation of art involves giving expression to the unconscious. Certain artists in my view, appear capable of giving expression to the Collective, as well as to the personal, unconscious. And I think Byrne is one artist who does that (whether he’s aware of it or not) to a far greater degree than most poets or songwriters.
“Early Encounters with The Anima: A Jungian Topography of the Adolescent Male Music Geek”… now that’s a thesis title to make any supervisors blood run cold.
November 21st, 2007 | 11:49pm
by Jim Bliss
About 12 years ago I was in the death throes of an affair. Among many features, I’d given her several tapes that I knew she’d never listened to. as a twisted parting shot I did her a tape of all the tracks that had got me through the rough time was she was failing to not leave me for the acid jazz trumpeter twat. Letter To Hermione was, of course, on there.
At the lighter end of the Bowie spectrum, I’ve just posted the Bowie and Bing duet, limited 12 inch version that included the spoken preamble to the track. Surely the only artist to collaborate with Bing Crosby and Nine Inch Nails.
November 23rd, 2007 | 7:55pm
by merrick
Merrick – thanks for the pointer to that blog, which I’ve promptly forgotten in the hope of avoiding really excessive time-sinkage.
I’ve got the 12″ of “Kiss”; dunno if it’s any different from the version you posted, but I could supply mpegs if you were interested. Still to locate anything by Sam Therapy or King Dice.
November 25th, 2007 | 10:39pm
by Phil
Still to locate anything by Sam Therapy or King Dice.
Took me a while to get the reference. And I’d probably still be no wiser if the song hadn’t been shuffled at me by my mp3 player on the bus home from college this evening.
November 27th, 2007 | 7:41pm
by Jim Bliss