Meditations on Goth Benedictions

Call the curtain! Raise the roof! Spirits on tonight!

Boy, I'm glad I didn't own a record store in the 80s, because when Bauhaus went on tour, David J Haskins said in his memoir Who Killed Mister Moonlight?: Bauhaus, Black Magick, and Benediction that he'd shoplift at lots of the records stores they went into. There's some compelling stuff in the book about his time in Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. I enjoyed his occult adventures and a tasteful amount of juice about band members (a Bauhaus reunion almost ended in tears over an argument about pants. Yes, pants.).

Reading about his days in Bauhaus appealed to the fourteen year old goth in me wearing a Bela Lugosi's Dead t-shirt. I liked learning about how things like reggae dub influenced them (which I never really noticed but listening back now I can totally hear it) and how certain songs came to be. My co-workers at the bookstore were subjected to an eight-hour Bauhaus/L&R jag every day for weeks after I finished this book as I reaquainted myself with all the music he writes about, but listening to it with a different ear and certainly a different mindset.

I liked hearing about his black magick adventures with everyone's favorite occulty magician Alan Moore, and weird shit about phases he went through. He got obsessed with animal skulls, and he'd have visions about where to find a buried animal skull, and then he'd go digging where his dreams told him to go and then he'd actually find one. NOT CREEPY OR ANYTHING. That kind of stuff always pulls me in.

Also, I enjoyed the fact that he actually addressed the whole thing about the required goth uniform being the color black, in a nice "It makes sense because I lived through it"-art-school kind of a way that I can appreciate:

"Black was of course the only way to go: the colour of night and death, and always the distinguishing mark of those who wished to stand outside the norm, from existentialists to beatniks to goths. It is the flag of morbidity under which the anarchic troops of apolitical revolt rally before storming the barricades of convention. The nineteenth-century decadents believed that it required a highly refined sensibility to truly appreciate and savour the delights of sensual sadness and the beautiful phosphorescence of decay. The goths would no doubt agree. In their disdain for the vulgar and their celebration of all that is wan, delicate, and slowly dying, they were and still are the true descendants of those poets of exquisite unease." 

If only I had this quote on a card to hand to my parents when I was fourteen to explain my wardrobe choices. Hilariously, my wiseass husband told me he once went to a Bauhaus reunion show with his friend, both of them dressed in Hawaiian flower shirts just to be ridiculous. He said that some guy standing next to them said, "Funny! I thought of doing the same thing but decided not to." They had a good laugh with whoever this guy was and said, "What? Are the goths gonna beat us up? Hahahaha."

In no way related to the quote above, and in fact, on quite a different topic altogether in the book, David J writes a really excellent description of why a lot of popular music in the 80s was so high in treble, namely, because of all the cocaine everybody was consuming. This following quote is perfect in talking about 80s dance music but it also serves as a good description of the experience of doing coke:

When I hear a lot of popular music from the 80s now, 2 things often strike me:

1. How super high the treble is.
2. How fucking long top 40 songs were. They're upwards of 5, or 6 or 7 or 8 minutes long, and half of that is the outro. Is Everyone Wants to Rule the World a 27,000 minute song? And how much of it is that long boring ass fade-out that no one cares about? Oh you care about it?  Well fuck you, you're boring, you were born in a barn.

Anyway, David J. talking about 80s music reads like some distant cousin of the Patrick Bateman American Psycho monologue about Huey Lewis. I find this ticklingly humorous in a meta-kind of a way, since the music of Huey Lewis has always seemed extra treble-y to me, with so little bass emphasized in the mix that it was like the music had no soul. (In this case I'm thinking of bass as being equated with soul in various meanings of the word: soul as in the music genre of soul but also soul as in that which we associate with the vivacity of life.) Huey Lewis and the News are a sort of appropriated "soul without any soul" band in the vein of Hall and Oates, or as Ian Svenonius writes in a more articulate way in Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock'n'Roll Group regarding Huey Lewis and the News, he says that they are "a succinct manifestation of the breezy middle-class post-collegiate jock archetype of the 1980s." You know, like, all conformed white person high treble/low bass music with no soul.

I know, I know, I'm not covering new territory when I say the music of Huey Lewis is boring; I'm coming off like a "Fuck you jocks, punk rock! Goth! Down with THE MAN!" and I sound like I'm still fourteen. I'm not so unaware that the immature ridiculousness of doing that hasn't dawned on me, but I can't say I really care.

The irony of the whole thing is that actually, I'm not really big on music where the bass is high in the mix. Honestly, I tend to hear stuff better when the treble is a little higher, and when the bass is too high it sounds like someone taking a dump, which is why I think that the term "bass drop" that's popular right now is extra hilarious, and makes me giggle. Probably I imagine most people would agree with me that it's just a matter of equaling out all the sounds in the mix in a way where one of them isn't favored over the other. Or when I say "most people" I mean "people who have exactly my sensibilities and interest in music and very specific set of qualifications for enjoyment."

The real interesting stuff in Who Killed Mister Moonlight? isn't David J talking about treble and bass. Somehow that got me on a real tangent. What I'd really wanted to talk about was the real News-of-the-Weird-section-of-the-alternative-weekly-newspaper vibe to the book, but somehow it wasn't what I ended up meditating on. I mean, how much can you say about enjoying someone else's spiritual experiences, other than "that's really cool dude"? Well, I guess maybe I'll go dress in black and dig up animal skulls. Then I'll go relax with some absinthe and find some artists with which to play exquisite corpse.

Karaoke and Serial Murder

I finished reading Ryu Murakami's Popular Hits of the Showa Era. It was published in the mid 90s, like around 1994, but now it is finally being released with an English translation in the states. So it's about these two groups seeking revenge on each other. One is a group of young men who get together to hang out and experience existential angst and start laughing for no reason, and then also sometimes they do karaoke together. One night one of the young men murders a woman who is kind of like a Japanese version of an "old maid" -- not really old, but unmarried and in her 30s, too young to be a "cougar" but too old to be considered appetizing in a traditional lame businessman-looking-for-a-wife, although sometimes they can be divorced and have joint custody of a kid. Bla bla bla. So the woman has this group of friends that avenge her death, and then the 2 groups become these waring factions. All of this sounds to me like "Meh. BUT, here's the part that pulled me in, and that is there's this whole karaoke connection. So both factions are really in to karaoke. Unfortunately, although I have done karaoke in Japan, I didn't know any of the songs they were really talking about. But I think the title of the book is taken from the Showa songs that the women do in the book -- showa being a genre of music that's kind of like a Japanese equivalent to what Americans think of as "oldies" (for the sake of simplicity). So of course, I had to read it. Any time I find any sort of reference to karaoke somewhere, my karaoke radar immediately goes off, and I have to go suss it out. In fact, I am really obnoxious about it. The only way I can explain my karaoke fetish is such that my husband's mom was wasting away in a private room in a nursing home and they made an announcement that they were doing karaoke in the main TV room and my husband had to virtually hold me down to stay in the room. There are 3 things that are like crack to me: pugs, Britney Spears and karaoke. If you had a pug wearing a pink wig and a shirt that says "I heart karaoke" my world would pretty much explode.

Anyway, I noticed that they have a movie that was made of the book. It is called Karaoke Terror, and there seems to be a general consensus that it blows. But I moved it to the top of my Netflix queue anyway. That will fit in just fine with the serial killer movie/documentary phase I'm going through right now. Well, to be more accurate, I was going through a true crime/serial killer reading phase a few years ago when I put it all in my queue, but since the queue is so long it took that long to get here. The other night I watched American Psycho and by and large it was pretty preposterous, like so over the top. I mean, I know it was supposed to be, but even that sort of tongue in cheek-ness was over the top. I enjoyed the monologues he did while he was preparing the grisly murders he would do (which reminded me very much of Dexter, which I have seen a few seasons of and read the first book -- although I want the whole show just to be Dexter's sister). Anyway, Christian Bale's character would talk about the critical aspects of the later work of Huey Lewis, or the merits of Whitney Houston's version of "Greatest Love of All," or even something equally ridiculous about Phil Collins. Those were like little nuggets of hilarity (or something) to me, that I think would be awesome to memorize. I could take or leave the rest of the movie or any of the grisly murder stuff, but those little nuggets of monologueyness about top 40, those were the parts I liked. If they could just distill it down to those moments, that would have been enough for me. For example, I will paste in some of the more preposterous things I enjoyed that Christian Bale's character said (I don't know if his character says them in the Brett Easton Ellis book since I never read it but I have to imagine they probably are there):

*"But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist," I almost want to sample that. like if I was into making sound art collages or something."
*"When Sports came out in '83, I think they [Huey Lewis and the News] really came into their own, commercially and artistically."
*"It's hard to choose a favorite among so many great tracks, but "The Greatest Love of All" is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation, dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it's not too late to better ourselves."

I like the idea of doing "The Greatest Love of All" at karaoke and saying that at the beginning of the performance because I'm sure it would sound ridiculous -- and I'm sure it was supposed to sound ludicrous in the movie. Also! Sidenote: in the DVD extras there was discussion about how the movie studio originally wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play the serial killer character! And it was right after Titanic came out! And Gloria Steinem told him not to do it. Interesting!

ANYWAY, so the Showa Era book -- perhaps I will check in about my thoughts after I see the movie. And then, if I am so inclined, I may go check out the movie they made based on another book by the same author, Audition. I think that might actually already be in my Netflix queue. In a strange twist of fate, I received Deepak Chopra: Seven Spiritual Laws (staring Olivia Newton John -- I swear to you now -- and there was part where she was supposed to be sort of illuminated from behind and it reminded me of her in Xanadu, where her and her fellow muse sisters are magically illuminated from a mural and then born into being in real life, all by the power of ELO magic) -- anyway, I received that DVD at the same time as some documentary about the cultural look at the archetype of the devil and how it manifests in different cultures. I guess I have a lot of interests or something. Also coming this week: Bollyrobics: Dance Workout. So you know, like I said, lots of interests.

Maybe the world needs more fiction books about karaoke. Are there any? I know there are stories about being getting lynched for doing "My Way." But I'm talking fiction. Which is funny, that the "My Way" thing is real and that it's happened in multiple countries! That is insanity.