The Kinks’ Music 1 – Kinks
The Kinks’ first album, titled simply Kinks, is a mish-mash of different styles, only some of them effective. While Ray and Dave Davies had been playing together for many years, and had been working with bass player Pete Quaife for some time, the final line-up of the band, with drummer Mick Avory, had only settled down after the release of the band’s debut single, a lacklustre cover of Long Tall Sally, in February 1964. Avory was so new to the band that he doesn’t even appear on much of the album, being replaced by session player Bobbie Graham.
The band’s early singles set the pattern for this album. Long Tall Sally was a semi-competent cover of an American R&B classic, You Still Want Me, the band’s second single, was decent Merseybeat-by-numbers, and You Really Got Me, their third, was one of the greatest singles of all time, a crunchy garage-rock track with one of the best riffs ever committed to record.
And the album is as much of a mixed bag as the singles. Like many British bands in 1964 and 65, the Kinks were attempting to sound like the American blues music of a previous generation. The problem is that like many of those bands, the Kinks were not particularly strong either vocally or instrumentally, and simply couldn’t carry the weight of this material. When Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley sing “I’m A Man”, the implicit meaning is “so don’t call me ‘boy’”. When white teenagers from the Home Counties sing the same material, it comes out sounding more like “I’m a grown man, now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room!”
The best of the British R&B-oriented bands, like the Animals or the Zombies or the Spencer Davis Group, got away with this by having astonishingly good vocalists – and all of these bands soon moved away from the R&B sound. The Kinks, too, would make this move very soon, but in 1964 there was little to impress on their first album.
And while they don’t add very much to the sound, it should probably be mentioned that among the session players who played on this album are Jimmy Page (who added acoustic rhythm guitar on a couple of tracks but did not play any leads, despite some reports to the contrary) and Jon Lord.
The Album
Beautiful Delilah
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The album opener is a perfect example of where most British blues bands of the time were going wrong. A cover version of one of Chuck Berry’s more minor works, this misses everything that makes Berry’s original worth listening to – the wit in Berry’s vocals, and his distinctive guitar work.
It does have a punk energy, especially in Dave Davies’ incoherent vocals, but even so it sounds forced. This is garage band music in a bad way – it’s the work of teenagers who aren’t very good yet, and who love R&B music without knowing what it is they love about it.
So Mystifying
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a much better attempt at the same kind of thing. It appears to have been written off the Rolling Stones’ version of It’s All Over Now, but has a more country-blues flavour, reminiscent both of early Chuck Berry tracks like Maybelline and of Carl Perkins rockabilly. The lead guitar part, in particular, has some unusual choices that point the way forward to the band’s later experimentation with country music on albums like Muswell Hillbillies.
The song, and the track, are still not especially good, but even on a by-the-numbers blues track like this Ray Davies is starting to develop a distinctive voice which suits the band far better than the cover versions they do.
Just Can’t Go To Sleep
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A simple exercise in a girl-group style, this is the kind of thing that bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans were having hits with at the time, and is a very competent piece in the style, but completely unmemorable except for the key change down a tone for the middle section, which is an unusually-long twelve bars. The hook line sounds like an early attempt at the hook for Stop Your Sobbing.
Long Tall Shorty
Writers: Don Covay and Herbert C Abramson
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
This song was originally recorded by Tommy Tucker earlier in 1964 as a follow-up to his hit single Hi-Heeled Sneakers, and has almost exactly the same melody as that track. Probably the best of the R&B covers on this album, this has some very creditable harmonica playing from Ray Davies – nothing technically challenging, but with far more feeling than much of the music elsewhere on the album. It’s still fundamentally pointless though, especially in comparison with Tucker’s much more interesting original.
I Took My Baby Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Easily the catchiest and most commercial sounding of the tracks so far, this is a simple three-chord formula pop song of a kind that almost every band did dozens of during the sixties (probably its closest relation is I’m A Fool by Dino, Desi and Billy from a couple of years later, but every Merseybeat band had a few songs like this). The arrangement is more inventive than normal for this kind of song, though, with all instruments except the drums dropping out for the “I wo-o-o-o-on’t” line, and some quite complicated drum fills.
This was the B-side to the band’s first single, Long Tall Sally, and should really have been the A-side, being both a better performance and more in tune with the music that was having success in early 1964.
I’m A Lover Not A Fighter
Writer: Jay Miller
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A cover of a Cajun blues song by evil racist scumbag J.D. Miller, this features some very nice guitar picking from Dave Davies, but is unfortunately spoiled by his lead vocal, which has all the subtlety of a rutting rhinoceros.
You Really Got Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
It’s almost impossible to describe how much this track stands out from the dross around it. On paper, this should be more of the same – a simple two-note riff, played in three different keys, and a lyric with a 35-word vocabulary (significantly simpler than the average Doctor Seuss book). In fact the lyric originally only had thirty-four words in it, but Davies was persuaded to change some of the ‘yeah’s to ‘girl’, to avoid any possible implication of homosexuality.
The sound of this, though, is extraordinary. Forty-eight years later, this still packs a punch unlike anything else in the charts at that time. At a time when record companies were turning down tracks on the grounds that the guitar was distorted, this is recorded with a guitar put through a speaker cone that had been slashed with a knife. Everything about this track is designed to evoke adolescent sexual tension in the extreme – the riff, the repetitive single-note piano parts, Dave Davies’ long “yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” backing vocals, Ray Davies’ screaming, lustful vocals on the high notes. And nothing like Dave Davies’ finger-twisting guitar solo had ever been recorded before.
Angry, frustrated, raunchy, this is the precise moment when rock – as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll – was invented.
Cadillac
Writer: Bo Diddley
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And we’re immediately back into the realms of R & B covers, although Bo Diddley’s thuggish simplicity is more suited to the band at this stage of their development than many of the other covers have been, and this isn’t too bad at all.
Bald Headed Woman
Writer: Shel Talmy
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
One of two covers of tracks by the folk singer Odetta, included on the album so that producer Shel Talmy could claim a ‘trad. arr.’ writing credit. The band do as competent a job as could be expected for a song so firmly out of their normal stylistic range (it sounds more like a work chant than anything else), but this is pointless.
Revenge
Writer: Ray Davies and Larry Page
Lead Vocalist: Instrumental
As is this, a by-the-numbers harmonica-led instrumental presumably included so that Larry Page, one of the band’s managers, could get some songwriting money too. It’s actually quite an advanced-sounding track – it could easily be a backing track from Love’s first album, two years later, but it sounds like a backing track for which someone’s forgotten to bother to record a vocal, rather than a proper instrumental.
Too Much Monkey Business
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another missing-the-point Chuck Berry cover, again of a song which depends almost entirely on Berry’s delivery for its effect, this one is even less successful than Beautiful Delilah because of the frankly incomprehensible decision to double track the lead vocal. For a wordy song such as this, so dependent on diction, this is fatal. Dave Davies’ guitar solo is quite nice though.
I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain
Writer: Odetta Felious
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The second of the Odetta covers, though on this one Odetta has regained her songwriting credit as the song isn’t actually traditional. The backing track is quite pleasant, in an acoustic hootenany kind of way, but then Dave Davies does his usual tuneless punk hollering over the top. He got much better as a vocalist.
Stop Your Sobbing
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is the second really good track on the album, and one of Ray Davies’ very best early songs. A simple Merseybeat track, this has a gorgeous melody and one of the catchiest hooks Davies ever came up with (“better stop sobbing now”).
It’s also more emotionally ambiguous than the rest of his early songs, paving the way for the more interesting work he’d be doing later on. The protagonist wants to help his girlfriend get over whatever is causing her to cry, but he’s also implicitly threatening to leave her if she doesn’t. There’s a weird unresolved tension here between the sympathetic and the extraordinarily callous, that makes this the most emotionally realistic song on the entire album.
This track is also the first to feature Rasa Didzpetris on backing vocals. Didzpetris was soon to become Ray Davies’ first wife, and as Rasa Davies her vocal lines became an essential part of many of the Kinks’ most memorable records.
While this was never released as a single, The Pretenders released a version in 1979 that was a minor hit.
Got Love If You Want It
Writer: James H Moore
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And we end with another cover version of a blues standard. This one is better than the album standard, because Ray Davies plays with his vocals here in a way he hasn’t on the rest of the album, and wins over on sheer strangeness. There’s some ferociously good drumming on this track too.
Bonus Tracks
I Believed You
Writer: Ray and Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An early demo recording, before the band had settled on the name The Kinks, this was recorded under the name The Bo Weevils. A much more sophisticated song and performance than most of what we can hear on the actual album, this could easily have been a hit for a band like The Zombies. It suggests that many of the problems with the first album can be laid at the door not of the band themselves, but of producer Shel Talmy, with whom the band didn’t get on, and who notably didn’t produce You Really Got Me, although he was credited with it.
I’m A Hog For You Baby
Writer: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another Bo Weevils demo, this one is a fairly poor-quality recording of a Coasters cover, but it still shows the band as far more assured than on the Kinks album, with some very good lead guitar and with the band members doing a variety of silly voices in the style of the original. Where most of the R&B covers on the album show an utter lack of comprehension, this one is a sympathetic cover of what is, ultimately, a fluffy piece of nothing.
I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A demo from January 1964, in very rough quality, this is a decent enough pop-rocker that would have made a perfectly acceptable album track had it been taken any further.
Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy (demo)
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a demo, recorded toward the end of 1964, for what would become the band’s sixth single. I’ll deal with the song more when I look at the Kinda Kinks album, but what I can say is that this demo shows every element of the finished record was conceived very early on – the arrangement barely changed at all, although the performance on the finished track is much tighter.
Long Tall Sally
Writer: Richard Penniman, Robert Blackwell and Enotis Johnson
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
For the band’s first single, they were persuaded to record Long Tall Sally, a Little Richard song that they’d never performed before, on the grounds that the Beatles were performing the song live (this was before the Beatles released their own studio version of the song).
On paper, an R&B song about a transsexual prostitute should have been perfect for the Kinks, but there’s no evidence they’d actually figured out what the lyrics were. While Paul McCartney got round the problem of not being able to understand Little Richard’s screeched vocals by gabbling, Ray Davies seems to have just made up some new lyrics for himself.
The song’s taken at too slow a pace – in fact the band are playing the riff from a different, slower, Little Richard song, Lucille, and for all their singing “we’re having some fun tonight” it sounds like they’re protesting too much. It’s not a bad track, as such, but nor is it a very good one, and it’s easy to see why this was a flop, only reaching number 42 despite a TV appearance on Ready, Steady, Go.
You Still Want Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The band’s second single, this was even less commercially successful than Long Tall Sally, but it’s harder to see why in retrospect. This would have been a great pop hit in 1963, the year of Gerry And The Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Searchers. Unfortunately for the band, it was released in 1964, at a time when a harder, bluesier style was starting to come into fashion, and sounded like they were trying to jump on the bandwagon just after it had pulled away.
With five decades’ hindsight, though, this was a massive improvement on their first single, and shows that they were headed in the right direction. While this didn’t chart, the lowest chart ranking any of their next thirteen singles would have would be number eleven.
You Do Something To Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to You Still Want Me, this uptempo pop track is equal parts Merseybeat (in the verses) and Buddy Holly (in the middle eight), with some quite gorgeous Everly Brothers style harmonies from the Davies brothers, in a style they never really returned to. This is easily as good as, say, any of the hits the Hollies had around this time, and is in much the same style. Quite why this and its A-side were left off the album is hard to say.
It’s Alright
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side of You Really Got Me is a standard Brit-blues riff-based track, possibly showing a little of the influence of Mose Allison, either directly or through contemporary bands like Manfred Mann. There’s no real song there – it sounds like something that evolved out of a jam session – but the performance and arrangement, with a prominent drum part and short spot of dead air when the entire band briefly drop out, are inventive enough that the track remains listenable.
All Day And All Of The Night
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The follow-up to You Really Got Me was very much a repeat of that single’s winning formula. Instead of a two-note riff, this time we have a three-note riff (F, G and B flat ). And whereas You Really Got Me goes up by a tone, then by another tone, this track goes up by a third, and then up by a tone into the chorus.
Otherwise, this sticks as closely as possible to the You Really Got Me template, and amazingly manages to capture lighting in a bottle twice. The band would very soon move on to more complex songs, but like their previous single this is one of the great pop-rock tracks of all time.
I Gotta Move
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to All Day And All Of The Night is again very similar to the previous B-side, a simple riffy blues track. By this point, the Kinks had become quite good at this kind of track, but there’s little of interest here other than the faint backing vocals, setting up a drone – a sound which would become of more interest to the band in the next year.
Louie Louie
Writer: Richard Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Apparently Ray Davies wrote You Really Got Me while trying to work out the three-chord riff to Louie Louie, which had been a hit for the Kingsmen in the US the previous year, so it was natural that the Kinks would record their own version, which became the opening track of their Kinksize Session EP. This version is now the best-known version in the UK, and is notable for the band getting the chords wrong (they play I-IV-V rather than I-IV-v). This recording in turn seems to have been the inspiration for the Troggs’ hit version of Wild Thing in 1966 – a record produced by the Kinks’ manager Larry Page.
I’ve Got That Feeling
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The second track on Kinksize Session, this seems to be an attempt by Ray Davies to write in the style of the Zombies, who had recently had their first big hit with She’s Not There. Much like that song, this is keyboard based, and based around a jazzy riff centred on an Am chord, though this continues the habit Davies has at this time of making riffs out of single-tone differences, rather than having the more expansive changes of the Zombies song. This is again reminiscent of the riffs to You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, but the choice is probably made because unlike the Zombies’ singer Colin Blunstone, Ray Davies was at this time an incredibly limited vocalist, and keeping within a narrow range was probably necessary.
I Gotta Go Now
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
At 2:53, the third track on Kinksize Session is longer than anything on the band’s first album. Which is odd, because it must have taken much less time than that to write, consisting as it does mostly of two chords and six words. And unlike in the case of You Really Got Me, this doesn’t appear to be a deliberate choice as much as it’s an utter lack of effort. I actually managed to forget this track while listening to it.
Things Are Getting Better
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This track, the last on Kinksize Session is actually a rewrite of Cadillac. Ray Davies forgets the lyric to the last line on the last verse, and what little lyric there is is written in an attempt at American dialect (our protagonist “hasn’t got a dime”). Davies would soon move away from this kind of imitation and find a voice of his own though.
Don’t Ever Let Me Go
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This was apparently an attempt at a follow-up to You Really Got Me, wisely scrapped in favour of All Day And All Of The Night. It features the same riff as You Really Got Me, but married to a more conventional, and thus less interesting, song.
I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An utterly by-the-numbers garage rock track, with absolutely nothing of any interest about it.
Little Queenie
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Recorded during a live BBC session, and introduced by Brian Matthew (who is still to this day a BBC DJ, having been a broadcaster for 64 years), this is yet another attempt at a Chuck Berry cover. This time, they miss out half of the lyrics and don’t seem to really have understood the rest. The liner notes for the Kinks deluxe edition claim Ray Davies is singing this, but if so he sounds very like his brother Dave (although the two could often sound alike).
Overall, Kinks, and the material recorded around that time, is a sloppy mess for the most part, with occasional flashes of brilliance, though sloppiness was the norm for every band other than the Beatles or the Beach Boys at the end of 1964. 1965 would see the Kinks improve dramatically…
9: Mister Miracle
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
(Before I start, a quick apology to any visually impaired people reading this. I posted all this before, with alt tags for the images, including one with a little extra bit about the use of the handkerchief in the minstrel show, but WordPress ate it. I’ve reposted this, but don’t have time to retag the images tonight – I am unwell with what I’m hoping isn’t stomach flu. I will do so as soon as practical. I’ve also not re-italicised titles.)
Before I start this, an admission. I am a white man. Further, I am a white man from England. I say this up front because I am going to be treading on some astonishingly touchy ground regarding race in the USA, and while I consider myself to be a passionate, committed opponent of all forms of racism, I am aware enough of my own privilege to know that it’s entirely possible I will make mistakes here, even though I am making every effort not to. Please feel free to inform me of any problematic aspects of this.
“I found that Hoyle and Narlikar had already worked out Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics in expanding universes, and had then gone on to formulate a time-symmetric new theory of gravity. Hoyle unveiled the theory at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1964. I was at the lecture, and in the question period, I said that the influence of all the matter in a steady state universe would make his masses infinite. Hoyle asked why I said that, and I replied that I had calculated it. Everyone thought I had done it in my head during the lecture, but in fact, I was sharing an office with Narlikar, and had seen a draft of the paper. Hoyle was furious. He was trying to set up his own institute, and threatening to join the brain drain to America if he didn’t get the money. He thought I had been put up to it, to sabotage his plans. However, he got his institute, and later gave me a job, so he didn’t harbor a grudge against me”
Stephen Hawking
Authenticity is a tricky subject, isn’t it?
It used to be so simple. Fats Domino doing Ain’t That A Shame was definitely authentic. Pat Boone doing the same song wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Pat Boone wanted to change the words to “Isn’t that a shame?”
But then, Chuck Berry is definitely ‘authentic’ too, isn’t he? He pretty much invented his genre. But have a look at Hail! Hail! Rock And Roll, the 1986 documentary about him. There’s a scene where he talks about how he’d admired musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as Domino, but realised that their music was ghettoised. So he changed his vocal style to sound less black, and more like Boone – “Why can’t I do what Pat Boone does and sell records to the white people, too?” [FOOTNOTE: Unfortunately I'm currently unable to check this quote for perfect accuracy, as I can no longer play my old VHS copy of this film. Should anyone be able to provide a corrected version, I will post it to http://andrewhickey.info/errata.]
This appears to have worked. Witness the scene in It by Stephen King (a novel about seven misfits who go off to fight a giant spider that’s really a far more malicious and powerful force than it at first appears), where one character wants to go and watch TV to see if Neil Sedaka is ‘a Negro’, because he’d been fooled into thinking Chuck Berry was white until seeing him on TV. [FOOTNOTE: This, as with much of King's work, is semi-autobiographical. See http://www.stephenking.pl/sk_artykuly_ew_58.html, in which King argues that white people like Bob Seger and Snow Patrol can now sound every bit as good as black people like Chuck Berry.]
Is someone ‘authentic’ when they’re copying an ‘inauthentic’ performer who is in turn copying an ‘authentic’ performer?
I still know a few people who prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles because the former are more ‘authentic’. Is an LSE economics dropout from Kent singing Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters songs more or less authentic than an art school dropout from Liverpool singing Marvelettes and Isley Brothers songs? Discuss.
Chuck Berry is, of course, known for suing artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys, who he considers stole his ideas. Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s pianist, sued him in 2000, claiming to have co-written most of Berry’s hits without credit. The lawsuit was thrown out.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman complains that Baron Bedlam, an imitator made out of plastic, is ripping off his act. Shilo Norman is the third Mister Miracle.
“You’re tokenising me! I’m not a white man, I’m a Scot, OK? My fucking country… my country has been ruled by the fucking English for five hundred years, so don’t tokenise me, okay?!”
Grant Morrison, reply to a fan’s question at a convention panel, 2006
In Final Crisis, Grant Morrison’s 2008 follow-up to Seven Soldiers (and specifically to the Mister Miracle section), Anthro, the first boy ever born and the DC Universe equivalent of Adam, is given the secret of fire by Metron of the New Gods.[ FOOTNOTE: Metron is the Greek for 'measure'. One of the quotes I considered but discarded for one of these section headers was from Antiphon the Sophist - "Time is a thought or a measure [metron], not a substance.” – but I couldn’t find a source for it other than Wikipedia] The scene is somewhat reminiscent of the scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which knowledge is given to hominids by aliens. Unsurprisingly, Jack Kirby, the creator of the New Gods, adapted 2001 in comic form in the mid-70s – both Kubrick’s film and Kirby’s comics dealt with the idea that ultimately, what makes us human comes not from ourselves but from aliens who took the clay that was the crude form of proto-humanity and shaped it into something other and different.
Popularised by Eric von Däniken, a convicted fraudster, the ‘chariots of the Gods’ idea holds that beings from elsewhere arrived and civilised a poor bunch of ape-people who could never have achieved anything by themselves, by turning those ape-people into a poor imitation of themselves. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, this idea is a lot more popular among the nastier sections of the right-wing than among others.
Here, though, Metron is explicitly linked to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has become the modern-day symbol for knowledge and intelligence, even though his own initial reputation was based on having taken secret knowledge from others and making it public. Hawking, who uses a wheelchair because he lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was, when Seven Soldiers was written, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge – the same position Isaac Newton had held centuries earlier. The chair that allows Hawking to move about is paralleled by Metron’s Möbius chair, which allows him to travel throughout time and space.
Much of Hawking’s work over the decades has been to do with black holes, and in particular the black hole information paradox, which we discussed back in the chapter on Zatanna. To refresh your memory very briefly, black holes suck things into themselves. They also radiate particles (Hawking radiation). But those particles should, according to the ‘no-hair theorem’, be totally random. So the information in the objects originally sucked into the black holes is destroyed. And information is supposed to be unable to be destroyed. This would violate all sorts of things, including our old friend the Second Law Of Thermodynamics.
One solution to this, which we’ve touched on earlier, is the holographic universe idea. Another is that the information gets pumped into another universe. Hawking, though, at around the time Seven Soldiers was being published, decided that Hawking radiation is just non-random enough to allow the information to escape back into the universe it came from.
“In active (feedforward and/or feedback) regulation, each disturbance D will have to be compensated by an appropriate counteraction from the regulator R. If R would react in the same way to two different disturbances, then the result would be two different values for the essential variables, and thus imperfect regulation. This means that if we wish to completely block the effect of D, the regulator must be able to produce at least as many counteractions as there are disturbances in D. Therefore, the variety of R must be at least as great as the variety of D.”
Principia Cybernetica – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/reqvar.html
It’s generally regarded that American popular song began with Stephen Foster. Foster, who died aged 37 the year before the American Civil War ended, wrote songs for blackface minstrel shows. These shows, which remained popular in the UK into the 1980s but thankfully died out in the US some decades earlier, involved light-skinned performers ‘blacking up’ as black people, and singing and dancing in a parody of what they imagined the black manner to be. Interestingly, many of the performers in these shows, who would now be regarded as white, were Jewish, Italian or Irish – ethnicities and nationalities that were regarded as inferior at the time.
Foster’s songs, and the other songs of the type, were advertised as being authentic examples of ‘African’ or ‘Ethiopian’ music (as well as some much more offensive terms). But they were in fact far more in the style of Irish ballads and European parlour song, and owed little or nothing in their composition to the actual songs of the enslaved black people of the period. However, they were intended for playing on the banjo, an instrument adapted from one used by slaves to perform their own music, and to be sung in ‘negro’ voices.
In fact, many of the earliest professional black entertainers in the USA performed in minstrel shows, wearing black makeup and performing in the same style as the white performers. These shows were apparently hugely popular with black audiences, who were glad to see any black performers on stage at all, even if they were reduced to playing caricatures of white people playing caricatures of black people.
The cult of ‘authenticity’ in popular music comes from much the same place, and is largely the responsibility of people like John and Alan Lomax. The Lomaxes and their ilk were well-meaning in their attempts to record a culture that was already dying, but their wish to ‘preserve’ music meant that if a black performer had a song that didn’t, to them, sound black enough it must have been contamination from white music. Likewise white folk singers were discouraged from singing blues numbers.
The person worst served by this kind of thing was probably Robert Johnson, known among his peers as a sophisticated musician in a multitude of styles, but who only ever got to record in the blues style for which he’s now known [FOOTNOTE: Johnson was recorded by commercial producers, rather than the Lomaxes, who I'm using as the most prominent example of a general trend of thinking.] Johnson, of course, died young, and to add insult to injury it became widely believed that he had sold his soul to Satan in return for musical facility – it being, of course, impossible that a young black man could have become a virtuoso guitarist through a combination of natural ability and practice.
Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter did somewhat better. While the Lomaxes insisted on recording only his blues music, rather than his impassioned political songs or gorgeous ballads, and only gave him the money he earned in small amounts, supposedly to stop him spending it all on drink (until he threatened to sue them), he later managed to record pieces like Goodnight, Irene which are among his most enduring works.
But we see, time and again, the theme of the black artist being defined by what the white people think the black people should be doing, stretching from Lead Belly all the way back to the ex-slaves copying their ex-masters’ on-stage aping of them.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman is an escapologist. He puts on chains and escapes from them for his audience.
“LEAD BELLY Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel”
Headline in Life magazine, 1937
The second law of thermodynamics is what both gives us our freedom and eventually dooms us. It states that as time goes on, entropy (disorder) must increase. This is quite possibly the most fundamental law in the universe, and it’s what gives us the arrow of time at all – we can define time, simply, as the increase in entropy.
But the second law is also mathematically equivalent to Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety, which states (in lay terms) that it’s impossible to control a system unless you have as many options open as there are ways the system can do things you don’t want. The more complex a system – the more disordered a system – the more options you have to have to control it. So all attempts at control are, ultimately, futile. Dark Side can find as many ways to hem Mister MIracle in as he likes, but the escape artist will always find a way out. The controller has to be lucky every time – the controlled only has to be lucky once.
Black holes are the ultimate expression of the law of gravity. Gravity pulls everything towards the centre, and get something massive enough, and this force will pull all the mass toward the centre to such an extent that even light is pulled toward it. Once you’ve crossed the ‘event horizon’ – the point at which the attraction of the singularity becomes great enough – you can’t get out.
In most black holes, movement towards the singularity (the centre of a black hole, not the geek rapture) is the same thing as the increase in entropy – this is why you can never escape. But there’s a special type of black hole – the extremal black hole (and really, what other kind could a superhero ever deign to try to escape from but an extremal one?) – where that may not be true. These are the smallest possible black holes that can exist (which also means that they’d be the perfect type to be artificially created, like the one Mister Miracle escapes from).
The physicist Sean Carrol has shown [FOOTNOTE: for a value of 'shown' that means 'done some mathematics about objects that have never been shown to exist in nature, in a situation that would be unlikely to occur even if they do exist'] that if these are charged in a particular way, there are actually two event horizons. There’s an outer one, which is inescapable – once you’re inside it, increase in entropy becomes equivalent to movement toward the centre, so it’s impossible to get out of.
But then inside this, there’s a second event horizon. Inside this, time works normally again. Anything in it can move towards the singularity, or just hang around in the inner event horizon forever. Were you to find yourself in this inner event horizon, and somehow managed not to die instantly from the extraordinary gravitational forces, you would find you had room to move. You could never get out into the outer event horizon, but you’d have wiggle room.
And the singularity of this type of black hole, should it exist, would be something of a type unique in this universe – it would have zero entropy, according to Carrol. What Carrol suggests this means is that the entropy of anything entering the singularity would escape into another dimension, which he calls Whoville.
“Taking the extremal limit of a non-extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole (by externally varying the mass or charge), the region between the inner and outer event horizons experiences an interesting fate — while this region is absent in the extremal case, it does not disappear in the extremal limit but rather approaches a patch of $AdS_2\times S^2$. In other words, the approach to extremality is not continuous, as the non-extremal Reissner-Nordström solution splits into two spacetimes at extremality: an extremal black hole and a disconnected $AdS$ space. We suggest that the unusual nature of this limit may help in understanding the entropy of extremal black holes.”
Extremal limits and black hole entropy, Sean M. Carroll, Matthew C. Johnson, Lisa Randall
So we’ve seen that a notion of authenticity is ultimately an oppressive one. Coming originally from the best of motives – to try to preserve the unique music of an oppressed racial group, and later to protect black musicians from having their music sanitised and popularised by more ‘acceptable’ white musicians – it’s ended up trapping musicians in artistic ghettos.
The songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart actually went so far as to name his band The Negro Problem, partly in reference to An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a 1945 study into racial prejudice, but mostly because that’s how he’s regarded. Nearly 80 years after Lead Belly’s heyday, it has now become so accepted that black people make ‘black music’ that the idea of a black man playing a guitar or singing melodies, rather than using a turntable and rapping, is anathema to the music industry. In albums like Post-Minstrel Syndrome, and in his musical Passing Strange, Stew has created some of the best songs in any genre for the last thirty years.
When ‘authenticity’ means a songwriter like Stew is punished for trying to escape from a musical ghetto, is it another tool of oppression? Is it worth letting a troop of plastic clones come along, one after another, and make sanitised copies of ‘authentic’ art, if that’s the price of setting people free? Can we get rid of Pat Boone, the minstrel show and Vanilla Ice without getting rid of Fats Domino, Lead Belly and the Wu Tang Clan? And should we even want to?
Chinese guys can jump real high and Germans cook soul food
white boys rap and hippies nap up their dreads to look rude
jazz is now suburban, it’s Marsalis-ly clean
and now we’ve got Viagra everyone’s a sex machine
so black men ski
Some kids I’ll describe as friends say I am race-obsessed
the luxury of your opinion shows you that you are blessed
I have poems about sunsets, flowers and the rain
I’ve read them to policemen, but it was all in vainStew – Black Men Ski
“Barker and Taylor do that, too, but after describing the marketing manoeuvres that made country and the blues racially “pure” categories (and left much of folk a politically impotent exercise in earnestness), they shy away from the legacy of that divide: rock purists and anti-hip-hop crusades on the one hand, and, on the other, pop music that entertains but rarely provokes, and never threatens any real danger but suicide, packaged and sold as a gesture of romantic authenticity. By the time they get to punk, a genre defined by politics, they’re so committed to avoiding the authenticity trap that they celebrate punk’s overlooked showmanship, failing to recognise that their embrace of inauthenticity as the essence of popular music is itself a trap.
But, as they write of the Monkees’ utterly contrived “I’m a Believer”, so what? It’s still a great song. And Faking It is a great collection of true stories about “fake” music. It’s the essay as Möbius strip; a literary illusion that ultimately makes less of an argument than it seems to, and yet tells us more about what’s true, what’s not, and why that doesn’t always matter, than a more straightforward confrontation with the secrets and lies of pop music ever could.”
Jeff Sharlett, Keeping It Unreal, New Statesman 16 April 2007
Lead Belly is buried in Shiloh Baptist Church, Mooringsport, Louisiana. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Comic issues Mister Miracle #1-4
Artists Pasqual Ferry, Billy Patton, Freddie Williams II(pencils), Pasqual Ferry, Michael Bair, Freddie Williams II (inks), Dave McCaig (colours)
Other credits Pat Brosseau, Nick J Napolitano, Phil Balsman, Travis Lanham (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Most of his DC work after this has followed on from it – 52, Final Crisis and The Return Of Bruce Wayne are all sequels to this.
Look Out For Freedom, responsibility and entropy
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The end
This Week’s Spotify Playlist – Jake Thackray, Sparks, Bob Lind, Wild Man Fischer
For those of you who are uninterested in my increasingly recondite ramblings on comics, continuity, canon, quantum physics and Doctor Who, here’s some music…
Incidentally, I lose track of what I have and haven’t included in these, but I hope there’s always enough new stuff to keep people interested…
Come To The Sunshine by Harper’s Bizarre is one of Van Dyke Parks’ early songwriting/production works, and a little soft-pop classic.
Soulful Dress by Sugar Pie Desanto is a Chess R&B track from the early 60s, about dressing up before going out.
Vox Wah Wah Ad by The Electric Prunes is just what it says it is – the Electric Prunes demonstrating the proper use of the wah-wah pedal.
It’s A Hard Business by Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney is… wait a second… let me say that again… by Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney. Yes, that Wild Man Fischer and that Rosemary Clooney. The homeless schizophrenic outsider musician and the jazz singer who starred in White Christmas and was George Clooney’s aunt. What will I find on Spotify next – Perry Como Sings Jandek?
Mrs Toad’s Cookies by Klaatu is from the last album by the Canadian band, who were most famous for writing Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft and for many people thinking they were the Beatles in disguise. I can *sort of* see the Beatles similarity here – especially McCartney – but to be honest it sounds like a collaboration between Jeff Lynne and Mike Batt. Which is no bad thing…
Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney?!
Ahem… Lighten Up, Morrissey by Sparks is a message I think we can all agree with…
Wagons West by The National Pep is another one by my own band, but again I do actually think it’s a good song. I wrote the music, my friend Tilt wrote the words. Tilt sings and plays drums, I play all the other instruments and Laura Denison also sings.
The Father, The Son And The Friendly Ghost by The Native Shrubs Of The Santa Monica Mountains is a soft-pop/bluegrass song about Casper The Friendly Ghost, Abraham Lincoln and Trotsky, a Beach Boys-esque waltz-time middle eight (with a tiny hint of Zappa in the changes in the end) contrasting with a common-time banjo-plucking verse.
Living In Sin by Janet Klein is another of her naughty covers of songs from the early part of the last century.
Wild Man Fischer and Rosemary Clooney?
Eleanor by Bob Lind is a great little track from someone who’s mostly only known for the one song Elusive Butterfly. This one’s very, very Lee Hazelwood.
Havana Moon by Chuck Berry is one of the earliest knock-offs of Louie Louie, performed solo by Berry on guitar and vocals.
Misty Roses by Colin Blunstone is one I’m sure I’ve included in a playlist before, but it’s also absolutely gorgeous. A Tim Hardin cover, with a fantastic string arrangement, this is one of those tracks that everyone should own.
Don’t Fear The Reaper by The Beautiful South is a cover version of the Blue Oyster Cult song. I used to live round the corner from Paul Heaton, and he used to go to our local pub on quiz nights, but after my sisters started coming and blatantly gawping at him he stopped going (unsure if it was coincidence…)
On Again! On Again! by Jake Thackray has the greatest opening line of any song – “I love a good bum on a woman, it makes my day/To me it is palpable proof of God’s existence a posteriori“. Anyone who can make bilingual puns in Latin while doing Carry On style humour is all right with me. This song got Thackray pegged as a misogynist by many, who couldn’t see that it was just possibly tongue in cheek (lines like “Please understand that I love and admire the frailer sex/and I honour them every bit as much as the next/misogynist” were probably not meant to be taken entirely seriously…)
And Go Back by Crabby Appleton is a great glammed-up powerpop track, produced I think by Curt Boettcher (it certainly sounds like his work – it sounds like his songwriting as well, actually)
WILD MAN FISCHER AND ROSEMARY CLOONEY?!
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