Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
The Doldrums
The first time Ariel’s music got any real form of public reception was in 2004 when The Doldrums was released via Animal Collective’s label Paw Tracks. But back when he originally recorded the bulk of the album – fall 1999 through spring 2000 – it was a solipsistic endeavor: music made without much prospect of ears other than its creator’s hearing it.
Ariel did run off some CD-R copies, though, and “sneaked them into record stores, slipping them into the ‘A’ section. I felt like the Lucky Charms leprechaun, running around dropping gifts and not expecting anything to come from it.” According to Discogs, this earliest incarnation of The Doldrums also existed as a tour giveaway, although it’s unclear what kind of tours Ariel was mounting at this embryonic stage of his career.
When The Doldrums got that wider release (or rerelease, if you want to be a stickler) through Paw Tracks, there was a striking unanimity to the critical response: review after review involved variations on the idea of Ariel’s songs coming through a tinny transistor or malfunctioning radio - out of focus, distorted, sporadically disrupted by interference from another station’s signal. The analogy was so widespread you could be forgiven for assuming that this effect was the artist’s intent. In fact it was an accidental byproduct of Ariel’s rudimentary means of production, a home-studio cassette-recorder that tended to produce bleed-through between its 8 tracks, while also chopping off the frequencies at the top and bottom ends of the sound-spectrum. “You take off the top and you take off the bottom, and that’s what you get – a compressed signal like an AM radio,” Ariel told me when I first interviewed him in 2005.
Another common critical response to The Doldrums was nearer the truth: the idea that the record recreated a primal pop scene, the child’s first encounters with the wondrous sounds streaming out of the radio (or in Ariel’s case, the television – the dawn of his pop awareness coincided with the earliest days of MTV). A few years after these baptismal raptures, still a child, Ariel started writing his first pop tunes - scribbling down fully-formed songs in a big notebook from the age of ten. “I lost the book but I still remember lots of the songs, because I remember the lyrics,” he says, explaining that the words trigger deep-embedded memories of “the exact structure of the orchestration.” He adds, “They were all in the mold of the music of the time – there was a Billy Idol one, a Foreigner one! Fully contemporary music, unlike what I would do later.” One of these precocious compositions did actually make it to the recording studio over two decades later - “Can’t Hear My Eyes,” which appeared on 2010’s Before Today. The original, though, sounded more like a hard rock ballad - something by Whitesnake or Great Lion – than the Fleetwood Mac / Gerry Rafferty AOR beauty it became.
Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti was an actual group by 2010. Originally, the band-sound was an illusion artfully concocted by a multi-instrumentalist using multi-tracking, in the tradition of Todd Rundgren, or Ariel’s own hero R. Stevie Moore. Ariel became a virtuoso of editing, using his toe to pause and rewind, and “building up impressive musical lines in tiny increments”. The bedrock of his sound, and the “full band” illusion, was a trompe l’oreille trick in its own right: Ariel’s famous “mouth drums”. Always laid down first as the foundation of every track, these astonishingly realistic and convincing drum patterns were created by Ariel’s subdividing his palate into a virtual kit, with different parts corresponding to the kick and snare and toms and hi-hat, and using his tongue as the drum stick. “I’m probably flexing muscles I was never meant to use,” he quipped when explaining this unique self-invented technique in 2005.
In the beginning, he didn’t imagine “Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti” as a band name along the lines of, say, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. “Ariel Pink wasn’t me, it was meant to be this producer impresario. Like some perverted homeless bum presenting you with The Streets of LA: ‘Welcome to the best graffiti you’ll ever see’.” The “haunted” part of the name happened to chime, though, with the 2000s vogue for hauntology and a spate of artists or labels with the word “ghost” in their name. Ariel had something else in mind: “graffiti gets painted over, but it’s not gone, it’s still there – you just can’t see it. Like a church being planted on top of the Indian burial ground.”
Still, there is something ghostly about the wavery indistinctness of Ariel’s sound on The Doldrums and Worn Copy, a quality that did seem to make him a fellow-traveler with the hauntologists of the mid-2000s. The songs felt like portals through time, revenant reveries of a long-lost radio-rock utopia, a spectral spectrum of slickly produced sounds ranging from late Seventies faves like Blue Öyster Cult and ELO to Eighties rock ‘n ‘soul hitmakers like Hall & Oates.
“I felt like I was doing something brand-new with Doldrums that I’d never done before,” says Ariel now, talking about how he left behind the familiar terrain of lo-fi indiepop for “this other kind of music I liked, which nobody else liked – this lugubrious, middle-of-the-road sound of the Eighties. It’s not about bands, it’s about songs – and an artist might make one song in that vein per album. If they make three, then it’s already my favorite album.” The early Cure are at the heart of the style, but there’s also Kate Bush, and The Psychedelic Furs... and a lot of far more uncool (at least in those days) artists that are “totally obsolete and forgotten”.
A record store clerk for much of the period before he became a public figure, Ariel is a scholar of obscure artists with a specialized knowledge and taste for the sold-out and the compromised, for opportunistic hacks jumping on the latest trends, for once-major artists rudderless and on the downward slope. But he’s never done research as prequel to or component of the creative process; he doesn’t map out a mood-board of influences and references for songs or albums. Any resemblances and warped echoes that listeners identify – or that he, inveterate record-geek, later offers up in interviews - emerge organically from his pop unconscious, a region of mushed-together memories, the residues and traces from a childhood where “MTV was my babysitter”.
Half in jest, half in earnest accuracy, Ariel has described his music as “retrolicious” in the past. “I see it as preserving something that has died,” he told me in 2010. “Something that's going extinct. And just saying, 'no!'. I like to make things that I like. And what I like is something that I don't hear.” Today he describes his relationship to the music past in terms of ancestor worship, with a hint of those tribes who honor the dead by consuming them: “I just love my music gods – I’m just eating it all up.” But for all the “style surfing” and the mask-like adoption of vocal personae (like the British-accented Eighties synth-pop voice he sometimes uses), there is an expressive urgency and ecstatic emotionalism that bursts through the surface pastiche.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Doldrums’s three-song sequence “Strange Fires”, “Among Dreams” and “For Kate I Wait”. Perhaps the greatest three-in-a-row of the 21st Century, these pearly beauties tingle and tremble with longing and loneliness. “Strange Fires” has something of the ethereal translucence and jejeune misterioso vibe of The Cure’s “A Forest” – “the bad poetry of a junior high school kid”, as Ariel puts it. Kate Bush, that other formative influence, is all over “Among Dreams”, with its high wuthering vocal. And “For Kate I Wait” is literally a tribute to Bush. I’ve always heard it as the voice of an obsessed fan waiting for Kate’s new single to come on the radio, back in the days when you couldn’t dial up your desires instantly but were at the mercy of playlist programmers. It’s actually more oblique than that, says Ariel: “A creep song. All of my songs are from the point of view of the stalker”. He regards “For Kate I Wait” as “a personal milestone, a big accomplishment in the way I crafted it. It’s got this really inscrutable heart that’s hard to replicate with a band live.” It’s his favorite tune on the album.
Many fans would nod in agreement… then pause, ponder, and suggest that “The Ballad of Bobby Pyn” just might surpass it. Unlike the rest of The Doldrums, which was recorded at the turn of the millennium, “Bobby Pyn” was recorded three years later, in 2003, when Ariel’s life was collapsing. “I was going through a break-up with my wife, and I recorded it in my closet, because I had to get out of the living room – she was taking over everything.” Perhaps the claustrophobia of this sanctuary / impromptu studio – a three foot by five space, crammed with clothes hung on a rack and piled in hampers – is what impelled Ariel to build such a shimmering skyscape. But the lyric undercuts the gauzy serene drift-a-long of the track, Ariel darkly muttering lines like “I just don’t know about love” and “I know everything about hate.”
The name “Bobby Pyn” is an earlier alter ego used by Jan Paul Beahm, better known as Darby Crash, frontman of The Germs. “They’re the most iconic punk band for me,” says Ariel. “LA’s claim to fame when it comes to punk. They invented hardcore, inadvertently, but they’re also the most queer and messed-up band ever. Everyone in that band was a genius. They all had very lasting impact - in my life, and in the world’s life.” Germs drummer Don Bolles would ultimately end up playing in Haunted Graffiti, capping thirty-plus years of “making music and deejaying and dressing like a freak,” in Ariel’s words.
“They all loved Darby, they idolized him,” Ariel continues. “He was such a charismatic person. A cult leader.” Magnetic but troubled, Crash died from a deliberate heroin overdose on December 7 1980, the day before John Lennon’s murder.
“The Ballad of Bobby Pyn” doubles as both a luminous elegy for a lost soul and an exorcism of Ariel’s own destructive impulses. “That was a trance thing, I really wanted to trance it out,” he recalls. “This almost narcoleptic, spun-out feel. Like some drugged-out zone. I wanted an anthem for my alienation. Me with shades on”.
21 comments:
Oh, perhaps worth mentioning: the reluctance to separate the art from the artist has just led to the phenomenon of Rick Astley performing a set of Smiths songs at Glastonbury, now that Morrissey's persona non grata. That is the sound of irony being played with so much that it's now broken.
Always thought his music was retro-derivative. And I'm strictly talking about his music, not his "politics".
"Retrolicious" was AP's own term - positivizing your negative verdict!
Yes it's a weave of echoes, borrowings, ghosts , pastiche stylizations etc - but it's shot through (for better or worse) with the artist's personality and perspective. Even when he's putting on a stylized voice (like the archly wooden AngloSynthPop vocal mask he sometimes dons), it never sounds anything other than AP.
Not wanting to get into it all again, at all...
but let's say, Morrissey was onstage at Glastonbury singing his own songs.
How would the "separating the art from the artist" work in this scenario?
The artist is right there in front of you. The sound is emanating from his vocal tract.
The audience is all looking in one direction, at the artist. Giving him their attention. Applauding, presumably.
"Death of the author" is tenuous in the case of a disembodied text, given that authors are public figures who exist in the world.
But in this scenario - Morrissey onstage at Glasto - the author of the songs would be directly there a real-time presence.
(And the physical personage of that author inevitably brings with it a reminder of the accumulated knowledge about their acts, values, opinions - their history as a public figure)
To ignore that - to unknow what is known - would require complicated mental mechanisms akin to doublethink in 1984.
But let's take the analogy to the extreme - let's forget about Morrissey and his utterances - let's take an example of a performer who committed sexual abuse of minors or some other clearly reprehensible and repugnant acts, like murder.
You are saying that if R. Kelly, say, was to perform at a festival, the correct viewer response is to listen and enjoy the rendition of tunes from his splendid back catalogue, while determinedly keeping the mind uncontaminated by awareness of his acts?
You seem to be saying that this is both feasible and in fact the aesthetically correct response.
As you know my view is that for almost everybody this is not feasible, as a mental procedure, and the correctness of it is at the very least debatable - something a person could write a whole book interestingly fretting about.
(In fact in the book, the concept of correctness doesn't really come up - it's much more to do with emotions rather than ethics - love of an artist and their work - and then how counter-vailing emotions are stirred by aspects of the artist's life).
In the Morrissey hypothetical, perhaps the immediacy of witnessing the artist live would cause an observer to reconsider the figure as depicted in the media (a ludicrous "Simpsons" straw man) as separate from the figure standing onstage pouring his soul into the microphone. Instead of creating a fretful situation, perhaps direct, unmediated access to the author might compel a re-evaluation? Contact with the author as a way of reconnecting with his or her essence, the author's quiddity serving as an eloquent riposte to an ongoing Twitterverse assault?
Rather than trying to "unknow what is known" the observer might ponder the different kinds of knowledge we have about a pop star. I know of certain utterances ("the Chinese are a subspecies"). I also know the sound of a voice singing "It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind." Those two pieces of knowledge are not the same, are they? Does one have precedence?
(Of course, you had the opportunity to test this hypothesis a year or two ago, right? And it doesn't sound like seeing Morrissey did much to rehabilitate him for you. But maybe that's because most of his recent solo material is crap.)
The proper test might be, say, watching Morrissey perform a 16-song set of Smiths tunes. Then you could listen to him sing "I Know It's Over" and ask yourself: has this individual *really* changed so much since the days of his gentle, kind, outsider-championing persona?
'Course, what we *do* have is Rick Astley performing a 16-song set of Smiths tunes at Glastonbury. Which in my eyes is another facet of the "Fan's Dilemma" to consider, maybe, in that we might ask who we're left with after all the "problematic" artists are scrubbed from the culture. Nothing's more 2023 than Rick Astley playing Smiths songs to an adoring festival crowd while Morrissey sells out concert dates in Peru. It's as if the British public, like a football club manager, had traded Morrissey for Rick Astley. That's where we seem to be. I mean, who wants to fret? And I'm sure that's a good thing, because the public is never wrong.
I am not in favor of Rick Astley performing Smiths songs, or being a stand-in for Morrissey.
Nor, for the most part, am I in favor of the boycotting of problematic artists. Let them face their public.
I was unpicking this idea that artists can be separated from their work, and vice versa. It's particularly unlikely to be achievable - particularly inappropriate - given how Morrissey's songs come so totally from his personality and his particular / peculiar history. There is no separability.
The fan's dilemma is that the songs that we love (well up to a certain cut-off point in my case!), and the statements, that we find objectionable, stem from the same personality.
Apologies, Simon, I didn't mean to imply you were commenting on Astley. I was making a general comment, perhaps sparked by Stylo's first remark above. I found the spectacle of his performance very, very interesting.
Otherwise, in my comment I was trying to speak directly to your musings about separating artists from their work. It is precisely my point that there *is* an inherent separability between "the artist and his particular/peculiar history" simply because one source of our knowledge (the art) is much more direct and illuminating than things like comments in the press, especially in our era of the online echo chamber. I don't think it's true to say that what we know "stems from the same personality" when what we know comes from such different sources.
Now, how much separability there is varies from artist to artist. In R. Kelly's case, yeah, I'd say we know quite enough. His villainy's a matter of public record. In other cases, like Morrissey's, there are some complicating factors to consider in what we know about the artist. And my point was, in the hypothetical case of watching Morrissey onstage, being in full witness of his actual presence/performance, a person might find that that authorial presence outweighs the rest.
In short, I question how much we really know about the "real" people behind the art. Art is a definitive statement. Whatever else we know about the artist is-- well, imperfect and less reliable, to say the least. And that is one way of navigating the tricky dilemma of separating art from artist.
As someone who was never keen on Morrissey in the first place, I do find the pearl-clutching about his drunken uncle politics a bit odd. Especially as they were visible right from the very beginning (people chose to overlook).
It's not really the case that he flipped a switch and suddenly became shockingly right wing - which is the pretense of his critics - he just started saying the quiet bit out loud at the same time his artistic powers started to decline. If he was still at the height of his artistic powers would the condemnation be so strong? I have my doubts.
There's a lot of hedging going on in these kind of value judgements, and when everyone feels safe to come to a conclusion it's presented as a kind of moral fait accomplis (Artist X is bad!) when in reality there's a lot of low calculation going on (Is his fan base declining? Are his records getting worse? Can we get away with condemning him now?).
Phil, I think your comment is spot on in most respects. Where I would (respectfully) differ is in your apparent certainty that the truth of Morrissey's politics has always been visible.
I would argue that what has always been visible, but never really examined, are contradictions between his public statements in the press and what was conveyed by the music as a whole. This comes out in Simon's wonderful interview with Morrissey from 1988, for instance, when Morrissey (with a song wishing Thatcher's beheading on his latest LP) moaned about paying taxes. Simon tried to call him on this (his anger at Thatcher presumably for things like cutting public services, yet anger at paying for public services) and didn't get anywhere, but it's one of the few times a journalist challenged one of his statements. But had he gone further, I don't think he would have exposed Morrissey as a secret Tory, but rather a badly under-educated pop star who lacked a proper understanding of politics and society; on the subject of politics, at any rate, an idiot.
I say this not to defend Morrissey. I know the subject is tedious. He was a tedious subject long before the racism stuff, for the very reason you cite: the music had gotten dull.
However, I would point out (again, respectfully) that your post illustrates what I was talking about above, in my previous comment. You're speaking with a certainty about Morrissey's politics-- about the man, not the art-- which I find questionable. Avoiding a dumb internet argument, let me just pose a question: although I agree it's true that many critics kept mum about the "drunken uncle politics" because The Smiths were making great music, isn't it also true that a remarkable number of actual left-wingers loved The Smiths? Was there really a collective blindness, or did people respond to something in Morrissey's music that was, if not explicitly leftist, very much in sympathy with left wing views?
Lest I be accused of pathetic mental gymnastics, I'll cite Mark Fisher's brilliant essay about Joy Division in "Ghosts of My Life". It contains the keenest insight into the band I've ever read, by any critic, when he talks about the necessity of getting past the "art" and "life" binary to reach the more complicated truth about the group. "If the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must also be the truth of Laddism".
I am not blind or deaf to Morrissey's "problematic" statements. I interpret them through the broadest possible lens, though, which (for me) makes him-- well, less of a bastard, let's say. I suggest a similar approach when thinking about other "fallen" artists, as a way of mitigating, if not passing beyond, any monstrous dilemmas.
Hi Nick,
I was never really a Smiths fan, so my recollection is necessarily impressionistic, but I remember the "all Reggae is vile" comment occurred fairly early on, and indicated the general direction of travel. But my point really is not to condemn Morrissey from a Leftist point of view (I'm relatively apolitical nowadays), just to state that there is a lot of calculation/positioning going on in how certain figures are condemned and not others. For example I remember how Paul Weller stating his intention to vote Tory in 1979 was endlessly used against him, while Ian Curtis being a card-carrying Tory went unmentioned, and Mark E. Smith voting Tory in 1983 was swept under the carpet. A lot of MES's later opinions were also overlooked even though they were not too far distant from Morrissey's - but who was going to take HIM on in a slanging match?
I don't think Morrissey is a monster at all, just a bit of a twat. He certainly pales against genuine monsters like Oscar Wilde (a paedophile who predated street urchins), William S. Burroughs (a paedophile who killed his wife) or Michel Foucault (a paedophile who deliberately infected multiple partners with AIDS). I think the bizarre blacklisting campaign against him is just another instance of the paranoia of contemporary left-progressivism as it quivers in fear of rising populism. Morrissey Derangement Syndrome as a micro-version of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Phil, the list of sub-monstrous twats is long and distinguished, yes. I would offer the people you listed as additional instances of how a more total view of an artist helps with the "fan's dilemma" under review here. To make a very, very general statement, as I'm not an expert on all 50,000 Fall fans: it is my impression that despite MES's political views, the majority of his fans (those who'd actually consider themselves political, that is) lean left or center-left. So I would guess that while MES's political views should be taken into account, in the bigger picture his fans might perceive...well, God knows what sense anyone can really make of glorious mess that is The Fall, but it's probably a more nuanced view which mitigates whatever verbal grenades Smith might have thrown in the presence of a journalist.
When we consider these things more broadly, the dilemmas don't magically go away, but in many instances you can arrive at a place of acceptance which is reasonable and not in any way a cheap rationalization or "1984"-is doublethink.
And as I said before when we "consider these things", we should also consider what exactly we know and don't know. We know the art. And we might have other primary sources of information about the artist, like a good biography or a memoir. But what about the stuff that comes to us through the media? How much do we really know about any given offender?
I have no intention of pursuing this topic (not wishing to sound like an online nutcase) but suffice to say, if you've paid attention to Morrissey for the last 37 years since "reggae is vile", as I have-- masochistically, absurdly, irrationally-- you'd know that (a) Morrissey has subsequently given many indications he likes reggae (a little) and other forms of black music and (b) often makes vicious, hyperbolic statements for which he never apologizes or bothers to retract but does, later on, reverse or at least soften.
Of course, you don't care. You're not a fan. Why the hell would you tally up all his utterances? And that's totally fine!
But this is the kind of knowledge a *fan* having a crisis of conscience might take into consideration. It involves seeing everything, weaving it all together, and paying closer attention to the sources of what we actually know and don't know about the person's "offenses". Not so much attempting to unknow whatever it is we know, but to ask-- as the start of a real inquiry, rather than a lame deflection-- "well, what exactly do I really know?"
Nick,
I think you should write to Morrissey and encourage him to perform a few Rick Astley songs.
It would be by far the best PR move he could make right now.
Needs more sizzle. I think it would have to be more along the lines of, "One Night Only! Morrissey performs the hits of Rick Astley-- STREAM IT LIVE as he descends to the S.S. Titanic inside a submarine constructed of carbon fiber!"
I read the original Monsters essay when Simon referenced it on the main blog. It goes on a bit but the early parts explore some interesting stuff: 1. the author's experience of others telling her how she should respond to a work of art and 2. how Woody Allen's acts especially aggravate her because she related so strongly to him.
For some fan-artist relationships, it's not just some artist doing bad stuff, it's someone who you think is part of you. Which obviously explains why some Morrissey fans have felt such a keen betrayal. If this person who I saw myself in is clueless and racist then what does that say about me? I'm not sure any of Mark E Smith's fans identified with him in quite the same way.
Recognizing that a particular artist you used to like now makes you feel bad is OK. But it's also OK not to feel bad. The intense online mediation and discussion around culture implies that you should have thoughts and feelings about an artist. And it's OK not to. I do find the constant need to file artists as "problematic" or "sound" akin to the Daily Mail's 00s project label everything as "causes cancer" or " "cures cancer".
R Kelly is a terrible person - but I never really loved his music so that has little impact. Phil Spector was a bad guy - and yet I'll still probably end up listening to Spector-produced tracks at some point.
Personally I'd prefer a Morrissey-Rick Astley cage match - with no sound.
In part this is probably because I spent some of the weekend reading about moral subjectivism vs moral objectivism.
Nick - Harking back to something you wrote earlier, the separability of the art and the artist does not vary from artist to artist. They are always 100% separable, and it is always extremely simple to do so. The singer is not the song. The author is not the novel. I'd even say that's basic common sense.
I don't think the issue is whether an artist's iniquities pollute their work (because they can't), but rather objections to supporting economically, say, a child molester or an overt racist, or even just someone with differing political views. And everyone has exceptions to their outrages (most of this blog's readers would have surely uncoupled the music of Davie Bowie and Iggy Pop from their affairs with underage girls, yes?). The only way to be consistent is to commit to the death of the author and realise that the art is in no way contaminated by the artist's sin. Thus, you can boycott whomever you want without any discombobulating sense of contradicting yourself.
Let's face it, the only reason there are ANY 20th Century authors still on the library shelves is because the critics have quietly decided that it's OK to fuck kids as long as the kids are Moroccan.
Stylo, up to a point I'm basically in agreement. Nabokov is among my favorite novelists, "Lolita" easily among my top five favorite novels. Trust me, I've had plenty of time to think about, rehearse, and deploy the argument for splitting art from artist.
Such an approach is absolutely necessary in judging a work of art. I also love Nabokov's literary criticism, which (while exalting the artist) strictly forbids considerations of the artist's biography.
It's a starting point, though. I'm for using different interpretive tools. I cannot imagine appreciating a work of art without knowing as much as I can about who made it, under what conditions, etc. Sometimes those bits of data matter, sometimes not, but I prefer knowing.
Maybe you can "commit" to not seeing those elements, or dismissing them as extraneous. I can't. (From a psychological perspective I'm skeptical of "commitments" anyway.) And indeed what I'm suggesting is that by going further, allowing for some, if not full, permeability between artists and their work, we can not only deepen our appreciation for the art but move beyond the "complicity crisis" which seems to have hit pop culture.
The reason I believe different artists require different approaches is simply that some artists trade on the illusion of total self-disclosure while others do not; some forms of art trade on that illusion, others do not. Nabokov was influenced by Symbolism so all of his work is informed by a heavy preoccupation with form, and moreover he published and didn't perform, so it's easy to read the novels as if Nabokov did not exist, or existed only as an absent God/Creator (as he would have it).
On the other hand, some pop stars, like Morrissey, create a persona entirely based around the total vomiting out of the self onstage, which requires another kind of interpretation. It's a performance, yes, but his effectiveness depends on whether or not you buy into his "sincerity". From this point of view, I'm interested in the question of his alleged racism, not because I'm clutching my pearls, but because I want to know what it means for the total interpretation of his work. How can any of his songs about empathy and kindness hold true if, secretly, he's also heartless and cruel toward certain kinds of people? But precisely because I've allowed myself to explore this question to the fullest, instead of "committing" to a division, I've reached my own conclusions which are not, I hope, of an Orwellian nature.
It's not a formula. People need to think, allow for complexity, embrace contradictions. In my view that's the only way to stop the culture from hurtling back to the childish, imbecilic, yet very dangerous moral climate of the 1950s.
I thought Nabokov hated symbolism, considering it reminiscent of psychoanalysis, which he absolutely despised? Partly why one of his lectures on Kafka focuses on determining into which exact kind of beetle Gregor Samsa has metamorphosed.
I don't deny that an author's biography might direct the reader towards particular avenues when considering their work. But to rely on such biography as the crux to one's argument about the work is utterly fallacious. It's as if one were unaware of the existence of the human imagination. And noting autobiographical parts in a work of fiction is really just assembling trivia.
The key is that it is the reader, the listener who does all the interpretation. The author and the singer can't fix in any way how others interpret their work. Even if they plonk the entirety of their teenage years into their work, there's no reason why the audience should care. For instance, someone may very well relish Morrissey's songs for their deft wordplay and how they oft convey a deep sense of melancholy. No need to ponder his views on English nationalism whatsoever.
Stylo, I'm with you-- I don't think biography should be the *crux* of any interpretation. It's one avenue into the artist's body of work, and shouldn't be discounted. That's all.
Also, I think Simon's original point is that you don't get to choose whether or not you include biography in your interpretation. We can talk about what interpretation ought to be. We can have our principles. But what if certain nasty little facts crash the party, as they are wont to do in an age when people live in states of total media saturation? I'm aware you think it's possible to slam the door on those persistent little beasties but my mind, at any rate, doesn't work that way.
As I said, different artists demand different treatments. Morrissey's songs rely on an emotional resonance that Sammy Hagar's, say, do not. I'm not referring to words alone, I mean the total presentation. Each also tells us how to listen to their work, and Morrissey has always insisted that the best pop is emotionally genuine, in some way shape or form. Empathy and kindness are central to his art, not only to the words but that "deep sense of melancholy".
I submit to you that it simply isn't possible to take any of his work seriously if one believed the emotional notes he hits aren't, on some level, genuine (however complicated the definition of that word may be in his or any pop star's case). And they *might* not be genuine if, say, he despised whole groups of people for their skin color. Don't you think?
Everyone can answer that question in their own way. I have. It's far preferable to dive deeper into the artist and his work to discover the truth-- including examining what we think we know as fact-- rather than lose ourselves in a fog of guilt.
Oh, and by Symbolism I meant the writers whose work prioritized form (actually the Russian Symbolists, for Nabokov, Blok in particular). Nabokov hated Freud the way Morrissey hates...meat.
Nick - I think we are disagreeing more than you surmise. One sentence I chose to delete from my last post was an assertion that alluding to biographical details in criticism is specious reasoning. Take a writer having gone through a divorce subsequently writing a novel about a divorce. Did the writer's divorce inform the novel? Maybe. But divorce is a rather common human affair, and also crops up in the novels of the steadfastedly married and the eternally alone. In other words, the writer's divorce is just trivia. Why not take it to its absurd conclusion? "The passage where the main character suffers a slightly painful defaecation mirrors a similar bowel movement the author experienced whilst visiting the Rhineland."
I don't you (and Simon, in an earlier discussion) insist that it's so difficult to compartmentalise the art and the artist? The only person forcing you to consider the two together is you. You're choosing to view the artwork through such a wonky prism. Likewise, it's you that's deciding that Morrissey's performances are "genuine" and "sincere" due to the supposed inclusion of autobiographical nuggets. Not least, you hint yourself that they might not have been as "genuine" as you hoped.
(While I'm here, does anyone find it a bit odd that the NME slammed Morrissey for dancing with a Union Jack, given that a few years later all the Britpop groups came with Union Jack guitars?)
Finally, how can you hope to find the "truth" of an artwork, when at most all you can do is generate an interpretation? And what on earth do you have to feel guilty about? You didn't make a racist comment, did you?
Nick, I don't see death of the author, separating the art and the artist and what have you as limiting. On the contrary, I see it as a great liberation. It allows the reader and the audience to form their own conclusions, to take the artwork away from the artist and mold whole new interpretations.
And you may not be able to forget the details of an artist's past, but you definitely can determine how you react to it. You're not simply a steaming, whirling id. You have the capacity for reason. You learn to control your temper, you learn trigonometry, and you learn that an artist's sins needn't trouble you. Or are you literally unable to have any control over your reactions? You are not three years old.
To illustrate, I read a scathing review of Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma in the last Private Eye (I haven't read the book, but I think it's safe to assume I would disagree heartily with it). The review quotes a passage, saying that two facts, that Chinatown is one of the greatest films of all and that Roman Polanski anally raped a thirteen-year-old, are irreconcilable. That is nonsense. Not only are they reconcilable, THEY ACTUALLY HAPPENED. The clue was in the word "fact". If you find that difficult to square, then the problem lies with you, not reality.
The problem I have with biographical interpretation is simply that it's invalid. An artist cannot determine how their art is interpreted, and the audience is free to interpret. For an audience to put a biographical straightjacket on an artwork is, of course, unjustified and constricting. That madness is not for me. I'm the Native American smashing through the window and escaping the loony bin.
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