The Surface of the Moon

Scratched CD (image from wikipedia)

So I wanted to write something about Neil young’s Harvest Moon, a record that I’ve become peculiarly attached to over the past couple of years. I say peculiarly not because the album isn’t generally highly thought of (it is), but because I tend to have a pretty low tolerance for bluesy, folksy Americana with lyrics about Harleys, hound dogs, and prairie grass. So why do I like this LP? I think it’s because, while it initially comes across as ‘timeless’ and ‘effortless’ (or, as a more cynical listener might say, rote and generic) you can, if you listen more closely, hear Young wilfully and not always successfully struggling to divorce himself from the here and now, an effort which invests the record with a weird tension that I find both fascinating and moving. When Young claims he’s just doing what comes naturally (‘Here I am with this old guitar / Doing what I do’) he’s being at once basically truthful and deeply disingenuous, and the graft that’s gone into making everything sound assured, serene and spontaneous imbues what might otherwise have seemed like a pastiche with a King Canute-type pathos.

As wikipedia will tell you, Harvest Moon is generally considered a sequel to 1972’s Harvest, and was recorded in the early ‘90s, in the wake of a bout of tinnitus Young incurred while cementing his status as patron saint of grunge. Heard out of context, however, you’d probably think it dated from around the same time as Harvest - indeed, I’ve had conversations with people who love and have long owned the record but had no idea that it was released in 1992. For one thing, this presumably means they missed out on the superb photo of Young and band in the booklet packaged with the CD version I have (which photo I tragically can’t find online): not only is everyone looking pretty ravaged, but the preponderance of tie dyed tees and denim cut offs locates us squarely in the 1990s. For another, it suggests they haven’t listened too closely to the lyrics: opener Hank to Hendrix, for example, namedrops Madonna (‘From Marilyn to Madonna / I always loved your smile / Now we’re heading for the big divorce / California style’).

The Madge reference highlights the tension that make the album so interesting for me: is la Ciccone being conjured as avatar of all that’s wrong with contemporary culture (as she is in Roger Kimball’s adorably flustered postscript to Tenured Radicals), or is Young positing an equivalence? Does the comparison impose continuity on pop cultural history (yesterday, Marilyn; today Madonna - plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose), or is it meant to describe a trajectory from the authentic to the ersatz? Such moments highlight the contradictions inherent in adopting a reactionary stance* - the problem, for example, of reconciling the desire to believe certain things are natural and essential and will always be with the conviction that right now we’re going to hell in a handbasket - and disrupt the attempt to keep things cosily nostalgic. We become uncomfortably aware that someone probably had to invent Harley Davidsons and guitars at some point; that they used to be - ugh! - new.

Speaking of technology, later in Hank to Hendrix there’s a verse that I can only hear in terms of Young’s notorious antipathy to digital music formats (so inveterate is Young’s hatred of CD and MP3 that he’s begun touting his own file format, ‘Pono’ - named, naturally, for the Hawaiian word for “righteousness”). It goes:

Sometime it's distorted
Not clear to you
Sometimes the beauty of love
Just comes ringin' through.

The same theme’s engaged in more explicit terms in the closing track, Natural Beauty. Here which Young sings about having ‘heard a perfect echo die / into an anonymous wall of digital sound’ before asserting ‘a natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature.’ It’s here that the consonance between what’s happening sonically (the desire to create something hushed, pure and lilting, catalysed by tinnitus and rendered tougher by the quavering reediness of the ageing Young’s vox) and what’s happening lyrically/thematically (the desire to conjure a mythic never-never-America, compromised by Young’s inability to avoid references that locate us in the abject present) are strongest.

Ironically, what the results most remind me of is a hard disk drive - a device that, incidentally, has more in common with a ‘proper’ analogue record player than you might think. Sealed off in a hermetic container in the bowels of the computer, the HDD comprises a series of platters made from highly finished aluminium or silicon, onto which data is written in clusters comparable in size to blood cells and anthrax spores. Read by drive heads that skim micrometres above them on cushions of air, these platters are exquisitely vulnerable to smudges, scratches and faults - and in this respect they resemble Young’s artfully evoked fantasy USA. Listen carefully (as a paranoid audiophile, searching for evidence of digital signal compression, might) and a series of flaws - the catches in Young’s voice, the ‘anachronistic’ references to digital media and MTV - compromise the comforting idea it’s still 1972, tarnishing the illusion.

The effect is strangely reminiscent of Borges’ story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote - an account of a writer who attempts not merely to translate or copy Cervantes’ masterpiece, but to recreate it ‘word for word and line for line.’ For Borges’ narrator, Menard’s 20th century Don Quixote ‘infinitely richer’ than Cervantes’ (identical) 1602 version. This is because what are, in the mouth of a seventeenth century Spaniard, mere rhetorical commonplaces, doxa and formulae, become, coming from ‘a contemporary of William James,’ audacious, ‘astounding’ conceits. Likewise, to release Harvest in 1972 is one thing, but to release Harvest Moon in 1992 is quite another. While I’m aware that championing futile acts of heroism is an activity with dubiously conservative overtones, I find I’m with Borges when it comes to which is more fascinating.




*Young’s, of course, traditionally been way too interested in and conflicted about the technologically and culturally new to be tagged as a straight up luddite (witness Trans)...

Voices Off

So my recourse, in spells of emotional turmoil, is to media occupying two opposed registers: on the one hand, macho or machinic music that denies the possibility of emotion/affect (excepting aggression, obvs); on the other, stately, hyperbolically tragical stuff – chansons, melodrama, Veronika Voss. Basically I’ve been listening to a lot of D Double E and a lot of Cale-era Nico lately. As a consequence I’ve been thinking a lot about how voices affect me.

Michel Chion differentiates three modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. Causal listening is the level at which we class sounds as (coming from) machines, larynxes, birds, middle-aged Latina females, grime MCs etc. (our hypotheses can be wrong, of course). Taking D Double, the level on which I ‘get’ “think you’re a big boy cos you’ve got a beard/ bullets’ll make your face look weird” is semantic, but the line works musically because of his bizarre torsion of the vowels – perceptible at the level of reduced listening. D Double E gets away with his signature line being ‘it’s me’ because no one else says me like him; he seems to have total control over the production of the sorts of sounds you’d usually associate with vexed inarticulacy. Of course, the three aren’t really separable; what I’ve deduced or supposed about a voice will inflect my interpretation of what it says. I can find this girl’s ‘R’ sounds* fascinating as the residue of a Notts accent’s all-but-totally successful erasure (with that erasure’s attendant class connotations) but also gorgeous all on their dull, frictive own. Nico’s arcane, obstructively mispronounced lyrics kind of don’t matter because they’re the occasion for her to make sounds, though their gamey magniloquence also adds something to the experience.**

Barthes’ term for the irrefutable je ne sais quoi certain singers/vocal artefacts possess is ‘grain’ (which, given my general preference for trebly and sobbing voices over husky and raspy ones, I’ve never much liked as a descriptor). Naomi Schor suggests that we can find the co-ordinates for a Barthesian aesthetics in those aspects of each medium which seem, for Barthes, to represent its irreducible – and irrecuperable – essence: the ‘punctum’ in photography, the obtuse in film, the haiku-esque mode of textual statement that ‘instead of insisting ‘we are the real’... merely announces ‘so’’ (Schor 89). ‘Grain’ – which Schor doesn’t, incidentally, mention - would seem to be the sonic equivalent.

But are these qualities always contingent and/or irrecuperable? Barthes says yes: escaping/exceeding intention and meaning, they can’t be synthesised or produced (Joss Stone signifies without possessing the granular quality proper to proper soul?). Nevertheless, once they’ve happened they command our attention – which is a very valuable commodity. In an essay I recently read (which has transformed my experience of looking at go-see polaroids – something that, as a consequence of my guilty fascination with the fashion industry, is something I actually do a fair bit of), Elizabeth Wissinger talks about fashion models’ role as amplifiers or transducers of affect.

Challenging the traditional supposition that fashion photography is about embodying culturally valorized archetypes, she suggests that the best models/images may be precisely those that mobilise confusion and irresolution, creating expressions/conjunctions that are ‘unexpected... unassimilable... beyond the borders of conventional interpretation.’ A pre-expressive attitude – a face that could be about to resolve into an expression of joy, or ire or sulkiness but is, right now, suggestively illegible – is what the fashion shoot aims to produce/record/transmit.

As such, looking totally punk, or all-American – or, for that matter, looking ‘womanly’/‘sexy’ - isn’t necessarily as lucrative, as durably recuperable, as being able to negotiate the space between definable attitudes and aesthetics (I’ve written elsewhere about how, when Chantal Joffe gets it right, her paintings suggest the proximity of sexily compelling poses/expressions to poses/expressions symptomatic of boredom, panic or foetal alcohol syndrome). The same’s arguably true of voices; while studies suggest that different accents and dialects connote different qualities, signifying for the majority of us as posh, kind, stupid, trustworthy or whatever, voices that are mongrel, or grating, unpredictable or texturally compelling have a capacity to levy attention more to do with reduced listening than with our cultural biases.

Chion uses another term – ‘MSIs’ or ‘materializing sound indices’, ‘qualities of sound that direct our attention to the physical nature of its source’ – that suggests something both about the character of sounds that move us, and the reason they do (weirdly I’m thinking here of the tiny breathless hitch with which the beardy-sounding voice of hhWickes inaugurates his pronunciation of that brand name, also of how abnormally high in the mix Elly Jackson’s vocals tend to be, and how well this serves her raw novitiate schtick); you kind of hear these sounds with your musculature and pallette as much as your brain, they act on you physically, on account of their reference back to their production. Maybe, at points where I’m not really keen on where cognition and memory tend to be taking me, its the capacity of these voices to override the semantic that’s so appealing. Certainly I’m going to give Undeniable – feat. an uncharacteristically sweet-natured D Double vocal – another spin.

*(‘uvular rhotics’, I think they’re called – interestingly Keita Takahashi just called his new company uvula because he was struck by the contrast between the (to him, meaningless) English word’s sound, and its ‘disgusting’ Japanese significance)

**Here we’re up already against the gendered sound/meaning opposition whereby women are identified with formless babble, men with syntactic sense – an opposition psychoanalytic feminism has read as a male attempt to disavow the phase when the bouncing baby boy was dependent on the instructive maternal voice. Music has repeatedly been seen as ‘dangerous’ because it subordinates the signifying function of the voice to emotive/aesthetic imperatives. Dudes finding foreign chicks’ botches cute and the quasi-toddlerish extended sibilants currently voguish among hipster girls suggest this same libidinally invested preference for female speech to be infantile/ornamental/purely sonorous – a charge the paragraph this note’s appended to could be convicted of pretty easily too.

***It also suggests the phenomenon’s similarity to the operation of MSG, which (I’m told) activates so many disparate tastebuds simultaneously that the body asks for another helping in the hope of getting a better handle on what’s going on.