Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20th Century Underground Music, David Keenan (White Rabbit)
This is a strange conglomeration or anthology of previously published pieces about David Keenan’s musical faves. It isn’t, by any means, a ‘Guide to Late 20th Century Underground Music’ as it proclaims; nor, I suspect, is Keenan actually a time-traveller, although in the sense of musical archaeology and the re-presentation of writing from 20 years ago, I guess there is an element of time slip.
It’s a funny old collection, mostly concentrated on the noisier end of post-punk (Pere Ubu, Public Image Limited, Sonic Youth), free jazz and improvisation (Derek Bailey, David Ware, Sun Ra) and folk (Shirley Collins, John Martyn), with occasional diversions into Kosmiche Music and Noise. Eclectic isn’t the word, but there’s also a sense of the book being mostly exactly what you expect from the man who wrote the definitive book on Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93. (England’s Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Occult Underground, since you ask. Highly recommended.)
So this is a book of outsider music that everyone knows about. Nick Cave, Chrome, Faust, Sonic Youth, Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart are of course all here. William Basinski’s wonderful The Disintegration Loops, too, which garnered critical attention because of the convergence of the physical decay of recording tape, looping and the destruction of the Twin Towers, not to mention some smart marketing by Basinski and his record company. More surprising, perhaps, is the inclusion of The Pastels (what universe were they experimental in?) and the appalling Jandek, purveyor of lo-fi crap to the masses. But these appear to be part of Keenan’s obsession with outsider folk or ‘American Primitive’ music or ‘The New Weird America’.
Although Keenan namechecks some of the music journalist greats in his ‘Introduction’ – Lester Bangs, Paul Morley, Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches and Biba Kopf – there is little here to match the writings of those informed and intriguing writers. Mostly there’s a sense of someone arriving late to the party, especially when examples of The Wire magazine’s ‘Primers’ are included. These are a kind of idiot’s guide to a specific genre but are mostly a chance for the writers to show off their research skills, perverse taste and just how hip and obscure they can be. It’s Googling through a filter of opinion and contempt.
Okay, you can’t do a filter about a band who have just begun, but was anyone still listening to Sonic Youth in 2002, twenty years after their first album? Does Keenan’s 2009 Primer about Kosmiche Music tell us anything that Julian Cope’s 1995 Krautrock Sampler (and his online blog encyclopedia) doesn’t? No. Neither does his list of Noise music, where Keenan is disappointingly obvious, despite the labyrinthine obscurities of the genre available online, on CD reissue or at the time on hand-duplicated cassettes. Better is his ‘Reality Is for People Who Can’t Handle Science Fiction: Gallic Futurism in the French Underground 1969-85′, which once past the obvious (Magma, Richard Pinhas and the Italian MEV) gives a potted history with a few new names of musicians and albums to track down. (Which I did.) This piece, however, is too brief and summative, even with its obligatory mentions of Norman Spinrad and J.G. Ballard.
The Wire also have a feature called Invisible Jukebox, which used to be a place where those being interviewed were played music to provoke a discussion about genres, historical precedents and musical (im)possibilities. Since then it has become a way to either prove one-upmanship (‘Really, you haven’t ever heard of them?’) or to frame the subject’s history: what they played on, who they played with, etc. So Keenan gets to play Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine a bunch of guitar stuff he doesn’t know and similarly to Eugene Chadbourne. The latter, at least, knows or has at least heard of some of the tracks, and brings a sense of humour and intelligence to the operation.
I think that it is the po-faced nature of the book that most gets me down. There is none of the linguistic exuberance and opinion of Lester Bangs or the knowing intellectual playfulness of Paul Morley here. When Keenan wants to create a new label or genre, Hypnagogic Pop, he is deadly serious about it, trying gamely to gather up artists who
have enriched and expanded upon the variety of sources experimental
music can draw on while performing a form of psychic self-surgery through
rituals of recuperation. A profound form of musical reflection that generates
creative gold from long-abandoneed cultural detritus, Hypnagogig pop is
true modern magic, a music that dreams of the future by dreaming of the
past. All you have to do is believe.
Do you believe? No, neither do I. This is as far as Keenan gets to time travel, although he does make a doomed honeymoon pilgrimage to seek out Lawrence Ferlinghetti, purveyor and author of Beat poetry. Instead we get a mention of (or perhaps a confession about listening to?) the Grateful Dead and rhapsodic banalities about finding Ferlinghetti ‘in all the oceans of the world’. Then get a final chapter that is the nearest Keenan gets to a free-form manifesto or stream-of-consciousness methodology, where Keenan perhaps excuses his work by repeating the age-old bollocks that music exists ‘outside the realm of language’, in ‘a zone that has not yet been rationalized by language’.
Considering Keenan has just spent 500+ pages trying to prove the opposite it’s a strange way to end the book. But then it’s a strange book, one that mostly fails to make me listen to the stuff I don’t already listen to, tells me little I don’t already know about some of my favourite musicians and bands, and seems like exactly what it is, a chaotic gathering up of disparate pieces with little except the fact they are all by the same author to hold it together.
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Rupert Loydell
- the title is a quote from The Who’s ‘5:15’, a song from Quadrophenia.
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