visual art side of things, I am going to be creating some larger works for a gallery show, and produce an art book. I am looking forward to being the artist guest of honor at the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in Toronto. It seems like something new is always popping up, and so I have to say I am looking forward to the unknown!
IN TERROR SITS THE BLACK-HAIRED BRIDE, by Michael Skeet
A TOUR OF WEIRD MUSIC
Weird is both emotion and sensation. It’s the realization—the more abrupt the better—that your understanding of the world is completely wrong, and the unsettling sensation of your guts trying to coil themselves around your spinal column when that realization hits you.
We are familiar with the weird in fiction but we also dine at a vast buffet of other weird media. If one looks at fiction and film as platters of weirdness, allow me to suggest that weird music is the equivalent of tapas or dim sum: small bites of something that get inside, twist you around, and are gone again before you’ve had a chance to fully digest their meanings.
Because of the bite-size nature of popular music—and because a steady diet of weird music loses its effectiveness in a way that doesn’t apply so much to other media—music has different “weirdness requirements” than those of literature or film. In the case of fiction, at least, we tend to know going in whether or not something is weird, and the pleasure comes from the way the author satisfies our expectations—including the ones we didn’t know we had. In the case of music, though, the less we expect it, the more effectively weird a song is.
A song that makes its case from the opening words and doesn’t vary its lyrical tone at all can’t really be called weird, because the element of surprise is missing. The same is true of splatter films; both examples are about as subtle as a thrown paving-stone. Likewise the weirdness that comes from societal unfamiliarity can’t really count either. Japanese gagaku music from the eleventh century certainly sounds weird to Western ears, but that’s only because of different musical DNA. And some forms of musical weirdness fade over time, as they are absorbed into the cultural mainstream. The tonal experiments of Igor Stravinsky or even Richard Strauss were considered horrifyingly odd by listeners at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, as was the explosion of sixteenth and thirty-second notes introduced into jazz by Charlie Parker in the late 1940s. But to listeners today all three musicians are perfectly within the realm of the normal.
This tendency of musical advances to be absorbed into mainstream culture is also a good reason to leave purely instrumental music outside our consideration.
Enough exclusion. What makes for good weird listening? Well, contemporary pop is full of gems that sneak up on you and give you a swift jolt. Pleasant melodies can hide strange and unexpected lyrics. I had been listening to Fleet Foxes’ eponymous album for the better part of a year before a friend suggested I listen a bit more carefully to the lyrics of “White Winter Hymnal.” I did so, and now Brueghel-Bosch mashup images leap into my mind every time I hear the song, and not just because of that album’s cover art. More to the point, the imagery still shocks despite my ongoing familiarity with the song. (Their new album, Helplessness Blues, sounds rather less like Gregorian chant on acid but still contains some pleasant blows to one’s equilibrium: check out “Battery Kinzie” and the compounded weirdness of “The Shrine/An Argument”. And “White Winter Hymnal” isn’t the only song on the earlier album worthy of consideration: give a listen to “Your Protector”.)
Randy Newman, one of the greatest American songwriters of the past fifty years, penned a disturbingly weird song with “Sail Away.” It seems all sunny in its bucolic praise of America, but the sunshine disappears like a psychotic’s smile once you realize to whom those cheerful lyrics are being sung.
The equally bucolic “Rainmaker,” by Harry Nilsson, packs a lovely dark-fantasy punch in its final verse and coda. The frothy effervescent melody of his “Daybreak” hides that its narrator is a vampire who—we learn in the last lines—will only be saved by an unlikely total eclipse.
Then we have Tom Waits: Even in his earlier works you practically have to make an effort to avoid the weird. By now, with his voice a mechanical wasteland of whisky and cigarettes and his tastes in instrumentation spinning somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt. (Think it’s weird hearing a didgeridoo in the Celtic folk of Coyote Run? Wait until you’ve heard the pump organs and marimbas that Waits adopted as far back as the eighties), Waits’ very existence constitutes a sub-genre of the weird.
There is no shortage of Waits songs that meet our criteria, so you could pretty much pick an album and let loose. I’ll draw your attention to three, however. “Poor Edward” (from the theatrical production Alice proclaims its weirdness right from the first verse and just keeps getting weirder as it progresses. “Swordfishtrombone” (from the album of the same name) spins a demented tale of a veteran who may or may not be a victim of something supernatural (or who may just be flat-out mad and no buts about it); this song reminds me, in some ways, of Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy,” and a more cheerily psychopathic couple of minutes you’re unlikely to ever experience; the kick in the final verse is definitely weird. (Another fine weird Waits tune is “’Tain’t No Sin,” from the theatrical presentation The Black Rider, but Waits didn’t write this one; it’s by Walter Donaldson, who also wrote “Makin’ Whoopee” if you can believe it.)
My favourite weird Waits song from the huge number I’ve heard—and I’ve heard scarcely a tenth of the man’s work; he’s been writing songs for more than forty years—is “Potter’s Field” (from Foreign Affairs), a long, half-sung film noir from the dark side with poetry that dazzled me when I first heard it back in my radio days thirty years ago, It continues to amaze me today whenever it pops up on my iPod. Waits seems to specialize in this sort of underbelly darkness (hear also “$29.00” from Blue Valentine) but for my money “Potter’s Field” is one of the best things in that long career.
Kate Bush is another songwriter who has embraced the weird side from the very beginning of her career. “Experiment IV” (The Whole Story), with its careful descent into Frankensteinian madness, or “Get Out of My House” (The Dreaming), inspired by Kubrick’s film of The Shining, are the obvious choices here. But listen to “Wuthering Heights” (The Kick Inside) while ignoring the title; the otherworldliness of Cathy’s need to be let in is definitely high on the weird-meter, especially when the lyrics are matched with Bush’s vampire-on-helium voice.
“Wuthering Heights” brings the whole sub-genre of Mad Love songs to mind, a cavalcade of the strange that goes back to the “dead teenager” songs of the early sixties and probably beyond. I can’t think of a more bizarre manifestation of love than the bubblegum invitation to cannibalism that is the sprightly jangle of “Hungarian Love Song” by The Jazz Butcher :
I’ll be your breakfast
I’ll be your dinner
You won’t get hungry
You won’t get thinner
Don’t take offense now
Don’t think me rude
But if you need me
I’ll be your food
A completely different sort of creepiness is engendered by Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession,” or “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. In both cases the dangerous strangeness of the lyrics is compounded by the inexplicable fact that so many people seem to think that these are songs suitable to play to a loved one. A love song from a stalker is not the sort of thing to play to your new spouse at the wedding, people.
Although some may feel “I’m
