Punk Rock Monday #26 - Some Songs about Death - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Eric's post about how philosophers die hit home for me in part because it was posted a week after the first anniversary of my dear friend and colleague Ian Crystal's death.

When Ian died I had just been helping Mark Ohm translate Tristan Garcia's chapter on death in his Form and Object, and what Garcia writes continues to have an awful resonance for me. Garcia notes that the canonical wisdom of philosophers focuses* on how someone should deal with their own death. Plato, Seneca, Lucretius, Camus, and Heidegger are certainly the top five philosophers to have written about death (Boethius writing in the shadow of his own is certainly close), but in each case the normative lessons tell you first and foremost how to deal with the prospect of your own death.***

At least the kind of music to which I regularly listen (excluding classical and opera here) usually falls down on this same thing. We get all sorts of moving meditations on ones own confrontation with mortality. Here's Ralph Stanley ripping it up.

Note that the narrator is not confronting death for coming to take his mother, wife, child, or beloved friend. The closest you get is his Mother putting a towel over his head. Death is coming for the narrator.

Or consider this classic performance by Iggy Pop. Unlike Elvis, Iggy could still say some pretty profound things when the chemicals in his body would have rendered any other human (and indeed render Elvis) a gibbering fool. Generally, when the singer has to be carried to the microphone, you can't expect a very good performance. But instead we get this gem:

Nowhere near Iggy's greatest song, but still a wonderful bit of musical existentialism, and one of the better songs he did with Bowie in Berlin. Besides the fact that Scott Thurston is on stage with him, part of what makes this performance great is the way the spoken word part gets derailed at the 6:00 minute mark. Right after Iggy has let slip that the whole song has been a meditation on his final destination he says "and here's what I say," at which point the song abruptly ends. It's great stuff, but again the focus is on how we each have to deal with our own death.

Garcia's most radically unsettling claim about death is that any philosophical wisdom that helps you to deal with the prospect of your own death will simultaneously undermine any philosophical wisdom that might help you deal appropriately with other people's death (and vice versa). It's a little bit complicated and I don't want to get into the details, but this is surely an arresting idea. And a lot of music fails for the very reasons articulated by Garcia.

Consider how "I don't mind dying" became a kind of boast in early Blues. The line occurs canonically in Robert Johnson's "Walkin' Blues"

The key lyric is:

Leavin' this morning, I had to go ride the blinds.
I've been mistreated, don't mind dying.
This morning, I had to go ride the blinds,
I've been mistreated, Lord, I don't mind dying.

Muddy Waters' cover of this song secured indifference to one's own death as a reliable trope in post-depression blues. The role of this trope is a little bit unfair to Johnson, because the very next verse in the original version (Waters moves the verse earlier) says that the worried blues is "the worst old feeling I ever had." Despite the hint of bragadaccio, in Johnson's original placement the not minding dying is clearly an aspect of a maddening despair that one can only sing about.

But in punk (and possibly more pronounced in rap) the tough guy aspect of this kind of indifference towards one's own death spreads out into a general indifference as a masculine right of passage. Consider Jim Carroll's "People Who Died."

It's a great song, but as we like to say in this part of the country, there's something "not right" (think Hank Hill, "That boy's just not right") about it. They lyrics are a horror show but the musicians and singer aren't emoting horror, nor do the melody, timbre, or rhythm in any way suggest it. Some people find this tension to make the song more powerful. I think I used to, anymore it just leaves me bewildered. Carroll is just too much like the professional wrestler bragging that if he smells like smoke it's because he's been through fire.

I could here present dozens of songs that illustrate this, but I'd rather return to Garcia's central assertion. It is a message of profound hopelessness, in some ways stereotypically French in that the only consolation to be had is the consolation that there is no consolation to be had. For Garcia death comes close to presenting us with a tragic choice. You can follow the philosophers and appropriately prepare for your own, or you can appropriately grieve the death of others, but not both.

Again, I don't want to discuss his actual argument here, which ties too deeply to his general metaphysical picture for me to be able to do so in a quick post. What's strange to me is that I have found this claim that there is no metaphysical consolation to in the long run to be quite consoling. When someone you love dies too young, people will say all sorts of trite things in an effort to get you past the panic and depression (often out of a good faith, but don't forget that the panicked and depressed are a drag for everyone else to be around in all sorts of ways). But it's much more honest to say that losing someone you loved sucks horribly, and it should suck horribly (it is in general a good idea to acknowledge the dead fish in ones interlocutor's hands).

I should here note one counterexample to Garcia's claim, not because one counterexample has anything to do with a claim about the tendency of Western thought (see notes below), but because there is wisdom to be found in the counterexample. Many of the ideas in Douglas Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop were motivated by a reflection on the death of his wife (see the David Brooks article here). Hofstadter claims that our selves literally overlap with those we love and who love us, and perhaps if true, this does something to deconstruct Garcia's antinomy. I don't know. The thing is, even if part of your beloved is continuing with you, part of you then died with them. I don't know how this interacts with Garcia's claim about the wisdom tradition.

In any case it would be appropriate to end with some in the punk canon that seems to get something right about our response to the death of those we love. Consider the much covered (usually very badly by Baby Boomer bands), "Fixin' to Die" by Bukka White:

This is a wonderful and important send up of the "I don't mind dying" trope. Like the narrator of "Walkin' Blues" White's narrator doesn't mind dying, but he does hate to leave his children crying, and in the final verse considers his children's mother crying by the fireside. It's pretty horrifying, but the message is clear all this bragadaccio and claims of peace before your own death is bullshit, because you are going to leave people who love you. If Camus had listened to this song, The Myth of Sisyphus would maybe be quite a different book.

Or consider The Dead Kennedys "Dead End" which pretty well expressed the despair, panic, and sometimes hopelessness of someone grieving.

The Dead Kennedys could so effortlessly pull something like this off because they had no investment whatseover in being cool. The lead singer would do mime on stage if he thought the song called for it.

Possibly the ur-song of grief in the tradition of singing about grief is Blind Willie Johnson's "Motherless Children." I discussed this one in punkrockmonday #25, link below. I'd also like to close with Mance Lipscomb's "Ella Speed," but his version is not on youtube right now, so I'll use Doc Watson's "Ohmie Wise" instead.

These murder ballads in Appalachian music and Blues, when done well, also get right something about the horrific aspect of reality to which grief bears witness. Insofar as we are seeking a kind of explanation that consoles, I'm not really sure what philosophy can or should add beyond this kind of thing.

[Notes:

*Garcia does not deny that some philosophers have written eloquently on grief. Please feel free to share, but not in the "what about X?" spirit of counterexample that pervades way too much analytical philosophy.** In particular, I am not concerned merely if some philosopher somewhere said something about grief. The issue concerns wisdom that might be of use to the grief striken. Garcia's claim might thus be understood in this way. Anyone taxed with putting together a "wisdom tradition" (that is understanding that also consoloes) set of classic philosophy texts would include a lot of very helpful and insightful material about how to deal with ones own death, and at least if canonical sources were used, nothing insightful or very helpful about grief.

**In a paper recently rejected (recent barely disguised venting of spleen here) me and my co-writer had made several claims about tendencies (one of them concerned Blues, Appalachian, and punk bands being more likely to have songs from the perspective of evil protagonists than classic rock), and both reviewer and editor thought that presenting two counterexamples (in this case, baby boomer bands who plagiarized blues songs badly) was devastating. So now in the next version we have to make obeisance to fans of classic rock by putting in a footnote mentioning one cover by the Grateful Dead as well as the Rolling Stones so the next uncharitable reviewer won't be able to make the same obvious mistake. John Lydon and Greil Marcus are sneering at all of us.

This is a very old trick for pedants to pull and should be outlawed in polite philosophical company. Note that Kingsley Amis' dissertation was rejected over the same falacious reasoning. It is absolutely clear that he is talking about the standard way that poets circulate their work to friends while rewriting. But his outside reviewer, Lord David Cecil, asked only one question during the defense, "Always?" Even though he should not have had to, Amis patiently explained the quantificational scope of his claims, but it was to no avail. Cecil, who Amis had earlier had to remove as his director because of his gross dilatoriness, prevented him from passing. Scholars have actually found Cecil's marginal notes to the thesis, and it just contains the one word "Always?"

The lesson is that any time you discuss a tendency in a submitted paper make sure to put in a footnote giving cases where the tendency doesn't hold. This will prevent the Lord Cecils among us from applying the trope.

I realize that there is something unseemly about using meditations on the death of a friend to score points on a poor anonymous reviewer who likes the Grateful Dead far too much. All I can say is that if Ian is still with us in any respect, he finds me doing so hilarious and would, if he could, have a great time taking the piss out of me for having written this part.

***Camus is the horrifying apex of this kind of thinking. The fact that offing yourself in the prime of life will almost certainly cause others grief as well as take away your ability to make the world a less miserable place just doesn't register as a reason for him not to do it. All that matters is how the prospect of suicide impacts ones own confrontation with absurdity. I love Camus, but no thanks.]

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23 November 2013