Vortex
There’s two majorly important things it turns out I need when my society veers off into the shitty authoritarian dystopic chapter of its long interminable ending – music and nostalgia.
Music’s unsurprising given its transcendental qualities but the nostalgia thing’s new, maybe something to do with sagging into cronehood. Even before 2020 I was reframing the 1970s of my childhood into a Vaseline-lensed golden age of freedom, but as the days here in the 2020s have narrowed down further into an inhuman spreadsheet while everyone pretends it’s not because the digital discord is telling us it’s not, every analogue happening seems startling and alive by comparison.
I’ve started in recent years to get back into listening to an entire album. It’s been difficult to find the inclination despite having the time. Even with all the time in the world, listening to an album felt too time-intensive. I guess the minutes have shrunk, for all of us.
Understanding that I was actually going to have to consciously carve out space to listen to music was partly why I began playing around with digital collages. That and the convenience. No need for clay, or kneading, or paints or pencils, no need to clear away the dustbunnied tops of tables unused for months and years. Digital collages feel flatter, sure, with none of the lovely physicality of analogue playthings, but they are conveniently flatpacked into the laptop, ready at any time of the day or night – usually night – with no need for scissors or glue or paper.
The purist in me feels like digital collaging is cheating. I can construct one right out of my imagination if I choose, if a particular idea comes to me. I can search the endless everything for almost any public domain photo I care to find. That’s a much different beast than the immediacy of a pile of magazines and newspapers, and needing to imaginatively tweak what they offer. It feels a weaker, less imaginative way of creating, in some ways.
But it was a good way for me to get back into creativity after health stuff took me away. Collage created a space I could fill up with music because I wasn’t shoving my brain with words. And so I began filling myself up with album-length visits to Augie March or Mia Dyson.
The album. It’s out of fashion, but it’s how I think of songs. As a collective. I like it like that.
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The album I have by far listened to most over The Great Motherfuckery has been Let It Be by The Beatles. It’s a weird album to have honed in on, I guess. Not their best. But the title song drew me in. It kept calling me, over and over, on days when the terror of the lurching mechanical monster outside the door got me shallow chestbreathing and raging at humanity, which appeared to be slickly and easily allowing itself to be drawn down down down into the maw it appeared to no longer even see, unquestioningly, the flip switched when I wasn’t looking into a big long lick of Daddy wherever his public or private countenance would appear and tell people what to do.
And so Let It Be became a mantra to remind myself that you’re damn well sitting inside this, it’s not going away, you’re not going to escape this. You’re going to sit right in the middle of what feels unbearable, horribly unsafe, a repeat feel of childhood dynamics, and you’re going to keep sitting there until who the fuck knows, maybe forever, maybe we’re in the last analogue days, and so let it be. Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. I used to think when I was a kid that Paul was singing about Jesus’ mum but it was his own, who died when he was 14, appearing for a nocturnal visit after Paul was trying to wrangle shy bits of melody that refused to appear. Then she appeared, and then when he woke so did the melody. So let it be.
That album was released a month after the band’s death and seven months before my birth. As befits the rabid nostalgia I’ve been gorging myself on these last two years, that felt meaningful somehow, a spectrum-wide timefold. My connection to the album has felt very intimate and important, because of that song, which has become like a good friend, and so when I discovered a documentary of the album’s creation was about to be released earlier this year, it felt startling, like my insides had somehow connected to the outside. I mean, what are the chances? I watched the documentary, twice. Hours and hours of these four musicians nursing into being these bits and pieces into songs for the last time. Whatever you think of the band, you have to admire their creativity levels. Milling around were of course Yoko, Linda Eastman, Mal Evans (who I swear is the lovechild of Louis Theroux and the farmer from Shaun the Sheep), and various sundry other producer types wearing extremely fluffy jackets, all swilling around inside a newly set-up room within the band’s Apple offices to record the album. It all felt so … loose. But tight. Playful. But productive. Analogue people. They were so fucking young. Ringo the oldest in the band at 29 and the ever-youngest, the baby George, at 26.
And they sat around inside this room and they riffed, and played, and mucked about, and then proceeded to pump out in the space of 14 days a bunch of songs that still get played today. The seriousness of the play. And the adultness of the men. You can say whatever you like about time being better now and people being better now, but that’s just PR bullshit fed to us by the same people who installed a puppet government of Nazis in Ukraine eight years ago and who now have the most caring amongst us subbing out their three needle emojis for a Free Ukraine emoji. Westerners are fucking stupid. Our idea we’re the pinnacle is the most self-satisfied delusional shit I’ve ever heard in my life. Devo were right, and this doco proves it by comparison. We are dessicating before our own eyes and apparently, there’s nothing we’re going to do about it. Look at these young guys at the end of the 1960s and tell me we haven’t devolved. It’s not our fault, it’s our oppressors’. They’re the ones that splintered the whole into shards over decades and fed it back to us as deodorant and new cars to hide our shame at not knowing who the fuck we are or where the fuck we live.
But maybe still it will all turn out. Maybe the story’s not yet over. Maybe maybe maybe. Let it be.
I loved the footage in the doco from the street, when The Beatles famously took to the rooftop of Apple to play an impromptu concert for the Saville Row goers below. Everyone’s clothes fit better. I mean, it’s Saville Row, but still, people got tailored up more back then. Quality over quantity. One good outfit over 73 fast fashion polyester tops from Boohoo. Some of the people on the street were horrified at the interruption to their productivity, this lascivious behaviour of scruffy lads who’d gone from being all nice boys to being drugged up layabouts bringing demonic eastern influences to the young scruffs of England. Most were pleased though. As I personally believe you really should attempt to be whenever the biggest band in your land starts up playing for fun on the roof to fuck things around a bit, like Mary taking the lamb to school. I’ve Got A Feeling, One After 909 and one of my favourites, the nonsensical Dig A Pony, were all used on the album from that rooftop performance, the last they ever did, before the band died but before John died.
I’m doing that old person thing of comparing the comfortable, unchanging ago to now and finding now wanting, aren’t I. Except now now is :)
Favourite John and Yoko tale: John went to an exhibition of Yoko’s. He was vaguely unfazed until he came upon an installation which comprised a ladder leading up to a platform. On the platform were two items – a magnifying glass and a tiny piece of paper. When you held the magnifying glass to the paper it said one single word: “Yes.” Apparently that’s when John fell in love with Yoko and no, I’m not going to go and double-check that for accuracy because I like it like that and I want it to be so.
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I’m sitting here trying to work out how to end this essay. There is a giant ball of grief hanging heavy inside the centre of my chest today. It’s impossible to know if it’s current grief or if it’s old grief that now feels safe enough to come to expression now my body knows I’m listening and have great wonderful powers of transmutation. It’s very tiring, processing your stuff. My earbuds are stuck firmly inside my ears and a YouTube video of calming running water, binaural beats, isochronic tones and subliminal messages, created by someone I don’t know and have never met, is playing right inside my head. The music is encased inside my own head.
I don’t mean to demean earbuds. Being able to listen to music without disturbing other people is lovely. But I listen to music on earphones, by myself, far too much. Probably about the same amount of time as the combined infection fatality rate for a virus that shut down the world – somewhere around the 99.97% mark, depending on which data you look at and when. Anything is too much when you do it all the time. But headphones are convenient. Listening to headphones can get you a better sound, for much cheaper, than you’d get listening to ineffective speakers inside a room with shitty acoustics.
It’s been an hour of listening to this music now and, yes, the grief ball has subsided. Maybe the subliminal messages from people I don’t know who made the track but who are probably linked to the CIA, are working. They very kindly provided a list of the messages they are telling me but which I cannot myself hear. They include but are not limited to:
In this moment right now, I am free
I feel so comfortable and relaxed
All my tension is melting away
I feel good about myself
I am so peaceful and calm
I am always calm
I am safe
I am free
I am in total control of my life
I feel so content
I can relax whenever I need to
I feel incredible
I am a good person who deserves to be happy
I am so happy and relaxed
I feel so peaceful and rested
in this moment right now I am totally safe
I feel safe and protected
I am safe and protected
I focus my attention on happy thoughts
Happy thoughts are floating through my mind
Calm thoughts are floating through my mind
Happy, calming thoughts
Each day I become even more relaxed and happy
I feel amazing
At this moment everything else can wait
In this moment right now, I feel amazing
In this moment right now, I am content
And now, suddenly, I am.
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People play music 25-50% louder on earbuds than on speakers because there aren’t the harmonics of the room to position you and tune you into how loud you’re listening. In a room, with up and down and left and right, the music bounces around the space, the bass thumps through the floor, the drums through your chest, Andy Summers’ guitar on Driven to Tears jangling like an invisible ocean through the air, into your eardrum, causing it and the bones next to it to vibrate. The bones move the sound into the cochlea, your ear’s snail shaped tube that’s full of liquid. How trippy. Andy’s guitar is now making liquid waves, which get picked up by a bunch of hair clumps who are moved by the waves and who convert them to electrical signals and chemical releases that get sent to the brain.
My cousin Andrea and I used to Sit Down And Listen To An Album as a regular event. The only technology at hand was the stereo with the tall speakers that the cat liked to come and sit right in front of if a song had a thumping bassline. The album hopefully had good cover art to gaze at and lyrics on an inside sleeve to learn like the best sort of homework. We just sat there and … I dunno, listened, and felt, and felt encased. Surrounded by sound. Those were the safest and happiest times of my childhood and if we were listening to an album at a random time – say, 1.59pm on a Tuesday – that could only mean one thing, and that one thing was six weeks of almost absolute creative freedom of the summer school holidays. The music swirling, your mind drifting around, thoughts weaving into and out of your head as the music wove its way through the air from the two speakers to your two ears. Not music on the inside but music on the outside, fitting itself to the sonics of a room. It really was a kind of meditation, a shared dreamy giving over to another kind of empty/full space for an hour or so.
The best times were the times when, listening for the second or third time to an album I wanted to love, I knew I was falling for it, as it began parsing itself out beyond that one song I’d sprung to like iron filings to a magnet. Now the beginnings of each song separating itself from the whole, slowly revealing its identity. We would talk during the playing of an album – it wasn’t like some puritanical over-reverential thing though in some ways it did feel reverential. Just your everyday kind of reverential, a human fitted to a safe outside, surrounded by sound. At least, I like to think that’s how it felt, listening to Zenyatta Mondatta and Voules Vouz, encased in Andrea’s house on Mountain Highway, all those decades ago, in the late 1970s.