Punk as Literature: Toward a Hermeneutics of Anglophone Punk Songs Gerfried Ambrosch Over the last forty years, the Anglophone punk culture has produced a plethora of poetic texts - with varying degrees of elaborateness - in the form of song lyrics. Most punk lyrics assume the typical superficies of a poem and should, therefore, be categorized as poetry, albeit with some qualification. In the performative realm, the lyrics are part of a larger whole and stand in a reciprocal relationship not only with their musical environment (intermediality) but also with the culture that begot them and within which they take full effect. Relying on subversive-transgressive tactics, this culture - punk culture - has cultivated what we might call an ‗aesthetic of dissent.‘ ‗Inarticulate‘ vocal styles are part of this aesthetic - or as one participant put it when interviewed by this author, ―[P]unk fashion is about looking unemployable, punk politics are about refusing to play the game, and even punk vocalization is about incomprehensibility, is about becoming wild‖ (Brian D. 2011). These factors must be taken into consideration when attempting to establish a hermeneutics of punk songs, a project to which this article is intended to be a contribution. Relevant to the present subject, questions of performance and performativity are given special attention. As a practical example, the article closes with an in-depth song analysis. 1. Introduction ―We‘re the flowers in the dustbin / We‘re the poison in the human machine,‖ the Sex Pistols sang in 1977. Their crudely poetic sentiment, along with the idealistic belief that ―a social fact could be addressed by a broken chord‖ (Marcus 2011: 76) sparked the early punk movement. For over four decades, punk has survived as a multifaceted cultural reality wherein lyrical expression, in the form of song lyrics, has taken on a central role as a means of artistic self-expression and discourse formation. As performed literature, punk lyrics stand in a reciprocal relationship with specific visual and musical signifiers and between the conflicting priorities of internal and external performance due to their intermedia nature. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 42 (2017) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Gerfried Ambrosch 102 The following pages are part of an effort to develop a hermeneutics of Anglophone punk songs 1 , focusing on the song lyrics written and performed by British and American punk artists, while taking into account questions of performance and intermediality. As the community‘s epistemological basis, punk lyrics, which are an ideal means by which to trace the developments and explain the conflicts and schisms shaping the punk culture, are best understood when put in a broader literary and cultural context, both in terms of artistic precedents and hegemonic culture, the latter serving as a collective ‗constitutive other,‘ one to which many punk songwriters have made explicit lyrical reference 2 . Parallels can be drawn to poetic traditions such as modernism and romanticism. Eliot‘s bleak depiction and profound critique of modern life in The Waste Land, for instance, is echoed in countless punk songs 3 and in the collage-like punk aesthetic itself. Inspired by dada and radical groups such as the Situationist International, Early Punks used many of the revolutionary tactics employed by members of early avant-garde art movements: unusual fashions, the blurring of boundaries between art and everyday life, juxtapositions of seemingly disparate objects and behaviors, intentional provocation of the audience […]. (O‘Hara 1996: 34) As for Romantic influences, let us, by way of example, take a brief look at a song by the band AFI entitled ―No Poetic Device‖, which contains romantic elements - and, ironically, a number of poetic devices: I‘ve been dreaming. I was lucid. I was dreaming blood was seeping from my pores. Who‘d believe that it was all my own decision? Cracked faces and medicated smiles. Set fire to my home before I turned and walked back in. For every needle open my chest and insert ten pins. I just anticipate what awaits when I awake…break…I die in my daydreams. The gardens have all been overgrown. I pushed my hands through the thorns just to crush the final rose. A deadly secret only I suffer to know, I can‘t eradicate what awaits when I awake...break. I die in my daydreams. (AFI 1999) 1 For the purpose of this article, hermeneutics shall be defined as the science of interpretation and critical text analysis. The British philosopher Roger Scruton defines it simply as ―the art of interpretation‖ (Scruton 2015: 42). Punk has been given a great deal of academic attention, but never have the lyrics, as performed literature, been the main focus of this attention. 2 E.g., ―Coffee Black‖ by As Friends Rust (excerpt): ―Every step that you take forward is a generation back for us […]. We are the ugly. We are the gay. Impoverished, effeminate, and overweight. Take your consumer culture back from us‖ (2001). 3 E.g., ―What the Thunder Said‖ by Catharsis (1996) and Trial‘s ―Reflections‖ (1999). The latter opens with the lines, ―the wreckage of humanity has been strewn across the land / and now the hour of desperation is at hand‖ (Trial 2009). Punk as Literature 103 Conveying a similar sense of nightmarish mystery as some of the works associated with dark romanticism, especially those of Edgar Allen Poe, the lyrics‘ melancholy, dream-like description of the speaker‘s highly subjective, inward-looking experience is also reminiscent of Wordsworth‘s ―I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud‖, Keats‘s ―On a Dream‖, and Coleridge‘s ―Kubla Khan‖. In this connection, Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s influence on punk should not go unmentioned. One of the most blatant examples is Strike Anywhere‘s 2003 song ―Blaze‖, which borrows, almost verbatim, an entire stanza from Shelley‘s The Masque of Anarchy (cf. Shelley 2012: 512, lines 368-72), thereby establishing an acutely potent connection not only between the two texts (intertextuality) but also between Shelley‘s worldview and their own 4 : We! Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake these chains to earth like dew. You are many, they are few! […] (lines 1-4, transcribed by this author) 2. Musical poetry: performance and performativity Given that they are inextricably interwoven with their musical environment, following the rhythm of the music rather than a poetic meter, are song lyrics in general, and punk lyrics in particular, to be considered poetry? It is one of the goals of this article to demonstrate that they are, albeit with some qualifications. In their written form, most song lyrics assume the typical superficies of a poem - they are composed in verse and utilize language in ways that are noticeably different from everyday usages - and employ tried and trusted poetic devices. Moreover, they ―deal in human values, meanings and purposes‖, as Terry Eagleton puts it (Eagleton 2007: 29). In poetic texts, these moral concerns are performed rather than stated. There is a substantial difference between nonvocalized poetry and song lyrics, however: [W]hile the voice in poetry is generally perceived as an internalized one encoded in the medium of writing, the voice of lyrics is by definition external. Lyrics, this is to say, cannot be perceived outside of the context of their vocal (and musical) actualisation - i.e. their performance. (Eckstein 2010: 10, original emphasis) 4 See Shelley‘s essays ―The Necessity of Atheism‖ and ―Vindication of Natural Diet‖. Anarchism, atheism, and vegetarianism are widely subscribed to in the left-leaning punk community. Gerfried Ambrosch 104 I would argue, however, that the immanent voice of poetry is still present in song lyrics. It doesn‘t simply evaporate once the vocalization commences, nor does the fact that the music is the lyrics‘ sole raison d'être mean that they don‘t also exist as poetry. There are, to be sure, song lyrics that do not work outside of Eckstein‘s aforementioned context, but many do, especially in punk, where vocalists are encouraged to sing in ways that effectively eliminate lyrical understanding, forcing the listener to sit down and study the lyrics as literature. This point of disagreement notwithstanding, it certainly makes sense to distinguish, as Eckstein does, between two levels of performance: internal and external. With regard to song lyrics, we might describe them as different layers of performance. In this connection, Klaus W. Hempfer‘s distinction between ―structural performativity‖ - the inherent ‗stagedness‘ of poetic texts - and performance in the sense of artistic presentation (Aufführung) is useful; the former ―does not imply‖ the latter (Hempfer 2014: 65, my translation). However, in songs, these two spheres become intertwined, augmenting, or interfering with, one another. As externally performed literature, song lyrics both ‗perform themselves‘ and are performed. In Eckstein‘s words, they ―are always doubly encoded, as both verbal and musical referents‖ (Eckstein 2010: 67). I use the words ‗performance‘ and ‗performativity‘ in a rather narrow sense, leaving aside their meanings in other contexts 5 . The definition most relevant to the present discussion is this: a performance is an artistic presentation before an audience. In a ―performance situation‖ (Hempfer 2014: 61, my translation), the audience plays a significant role: […] the performance artist depends on an audience which can interpret her work through its own experience of performance, its own understanding of seduction and pose, gesture and body language; an audience which understands, however ―instinctively‖ (without theorizing), the constant dialogue of inner and outer projected by the body in movement. For performance art to work it needs an audience of performers; it depends on the performance of the everyday. (Frith 2002: 205-06, original emphasis) Frith is not wrong, but he seems to conflate two different conceptions: performance proper (artistic presentation) and what he calls ―the performance of the everyday‖, be it in Chomsky‘s sense as linguistic performance or in the sense of ‗performative identity‘. As Hempfer points out, it is important to make this distinction (cf. Hempfer 2014: 61f.). It is one of the defining characteristics of performance in the artistic sense that it contrasts with the everyday. Poetry is a good example. In songs and poems, linguistic signifiers are valued not only for their semantic but also 5 E.g., Austin‘s performative utterances, Chomsky‘s notion of performance as the surface structure of language, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and Judith Butler‘s theory of gender performativity. Punk as Literature 105 - and especially - for their aesthetic merits. In fact, it is often the case that ―the signifier predominates over the signified‖ (Eagleton 2009: 41), establishing itself self-referentially. This is fundamentally different from the way language is used in everyday situations (encoding and transferring information). Lyrics are highly self-contained, ―semantically saturated‖ (Eagleton 2009: 56) pieces of aesthetic writing. Though punk lyrics, especially those penned by explicitly political artists, often serve as vehicles for concrete messages, they, too, show signs of implicit self-referentiality and aesthetic detachment - they are, as scripted verbal performances, poetry. Their vocal actualization is best described as an additional, external layer of performance, one that stands in a reciprocal relationship with the text itself. Through the intimate route of the vocalist‘s body, these different layers become connected. A song‘s lyrical speaker can be overt or covert, tangible or elusive. The vocalist - the material ‗speaker‘ -, on the other hand, is always a person of flesh and blood - to an extent. Within the aesthetic construction of the band, the singer, too, becomes, in some sense, ‗fictionalized‘, i.e., part of the creation. However, behind the vocal performance, there is a real human being. Even if the lyrics explicitly state that the first-person speaker is a character and the vocalist, being bound by the lyrics, repeats this assertion, as is the case in the Dead Kennedys song ―California Über Alles‖ (1979, hereafter ―California‖), this fact does not change. In a sense, the vocalist becomes an actor playing a role. When Jello Biafra sings, ―I‘m Governor Jerry Brown / My aura smiles and never frowns‖ (Dead Kennedys 1980) he plays the part of Jerry Brown (in addition to his ‗role‘ as the group‘s singer) 6 . As a kind of externally performed dramatic monolog, the song ―encourages the reader to question the speaker‘s authority or intention‖ (Williams 2013: 83). The Mancunian singer Morrissey once said that singing before an audience is ―really a bit like starting and finishing a play; it‘s like stepping out and doing Hamlet or Macbeth; there‘s a lot of mental preparation‖ (Flintoff & Kelehar 2002). However, despite there being elements of dramatic art to the stage performance of the vocalist, singing is not quite like acting. The singer ―is precisely not an actor impersonating a character‖ - with the exception of special cases such as ―California‖ - and ―his speaking, therefore, not a priori fictional‖ (Hempfer 2014: 63, my translation) 7 . A film is, arguably, a more self-contained piece of performative art than a popular music record or concert in which the singer‘s biography directly informs the performance. And given the participatory nature of live con- 6 To further complicate the speaking situation, the singer uses a telling alias consisting of the sugary gelatin dessert Jell-O, an epitome of America‘s consumer society, and the name of a secessionist state in Nigeria beset with war and famine. 7 Hempfer‘s observation refers to medieval courtly love songs (Minnesang). Gerfried Ambrosch 106 certs, especially in the punk context, the experience of attending such an event obviously is, for similar reasons, different from watching a play. There is, nonetheless, an important difference between the person who sings and the semi-fictional persona of the singer as the latter‘s identity is inextricably tied to the performative realm. The situation is further complicated by the fact that in punk the singer is usually also the author of the lyrics. We find varying degrees of aesthetic detachment between the lyricist and the lyrical speaker. At one end of the spectrum, we have songs like ―California‖, where the speaker is explicitly fictional (a character), and at the other, songs in which the speaker clearly is the lyricist‘s mouthpiece, fictionalized only by the aesthetic context in which we encounter him. Sometimes speakers explicitly reveal themselves to be the author. In extreme cases, they even break the ‗fourth wall‘ and directly address the audience as a form of apostrophe. Two worlds collide. ―Less Talk, More Rock‖, a song by a band tellingly named Propagandhi, is an excellent example of this practice: ―We wrote this song because it‘s fucking boring to keep spelling out the words that you keep ignoring‖ (Propagandhi 1996). This lyric makes explicit the ―performative fiction [Performativitätsfiktion] of poetic texts‖ (Hempfer 2014: 67, my translation) by introducing a meta-lyrical element into the song. This leads to a paradoxical situation: The speaker cannot truthfully say that he wrote the lyrics, because, being intrinsic to the text, he is, technically, still ‗producing‘ them 8 . 3. The reciprocal relationship between the music and the lyrics in punk songs In songs, the lyrics and the music are inextricably intertwined and stand in a reciprocal relationship to one another. This is especially true for punk songs. In most punk communities, the lyrics have a prominent status as a means of conveying messages and sharing ideas. At the same time, the method by which the lyrics are conveyed within their musical environment is intrinsic to their meaning. The lyrics‘ immanent poetic voice and its external actualization may occupy different performative spheres, but they do not exist independently of one another. They are connected through the music, which is the reason they exist in the first place. The merging of music and lyrics affects the meaning of both. Trevor Thomas, drummer for London‘s Active Slaughter, explains: If you just look at the lyric sheet […], it can be said however you want to say it, but once you put music to it, it has a very distinct way of being said. I guess I would argue that the message is the most important thing, but the de- 8 Hempfer offers similar observations in connection with William IX. von Aquitanien‘s ―Farai un vers de dreyt nien‖ (66). Punk as Literature 107 livery of that message is very important as well, because if I just stood up and read out those lyrics, as great as they might be, they would lose a certain something. If they‘re delivered in a package that‘s angry and subversive, if you like, that adds to the message. (Thomas 2011) Like Thomas, most of the people interviewed for my research believe that the music and the lyrics are equally important. ―To me you can‘t have one without the other,‖ says Jello Biafra (Biafra 2012). And for Propagandhi‘s Chris Hannah ―it‘s kind of an equal give-and-take with both.‖ What implications does this have? ―When we‘re trying to put a song together,‖ the Canadian musician explains, ―it feels like there‘s equal emphasis on trying to make the music as interesting as we want it to be and still trying to get the lyrics to say what we really want them to say‖ (Hannah 2011). This trade-off is part of what we might call the ‗economy of songs.‘ It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice parts of the lyrics to make them fit within the musical parameters, and sometimes, it is the lyrics‘ ‗musicality‘ that suffers to the benefit of the message. Mark W. Booth, author of The Experience of Songs, describes this relationship as ―a continual interplay‖ (qtd. in Eckstein 2010: 78). However, there is also a ―danger that the music, when it is combined with words, may in some way ‗destroy‘ the words,‖ notes Walter Bernhart. ―This implies that music, in a multimedia situation, as far as its effect on an audience is concerned, possibly overrules, displaces, absorbs the words and what they have to say‖ (Bernhart 2015: 265). Bernhart goes on to argue that Texts of an argumentative character […] are unlikely to benefit from accompanying music in their adequate reception. Texts with a purpose, such as, e.g., a political message, are easily ‗destroyed‘ by music, which will distract the audience‘s attention from the indispensible [sic] referential meaning of the text. By contrast, a text which mainly establishes a mood or gives expression to emotions […] will far more readily benefit from musical accompaniment - on the condition that the music choose to take up that mood or emotion and ‗duplicate‘ it, as it were. (Bernhart 2015: 269) Expressing a similar notion, Greg Bennick, singer for the Seattle band Trial, describes punk rock as ―music that is played passionately as an expression of truth, and the lyrics augment that passion and specify that truth‖ (Bennick 2011). As for Bernhart‘s assertion that political lyrics are more ―easily ‗destroyed‘‖ than lyrics that mainly express emotion, I would posit that radical political messages, as we often find them in punk songs, benefit from the emotional charge provided by the music as it enhances their impact. Music, by itself, is unable to convey concrete semantic content (which is not to say that it has no meaning), and language may not always be the best tool to express emotions. ―At the end of the day,‖ explains Dan Yemin, ―language - you know we‘re talking about personal experience, Gerfried Ambrosch 108 we‘re talking about interior life - is a very imprecise tool to describe those things‖ (Yemin 2011). The American psychologist and punk singer has addressed this problem with the lyric, ―We don‘t know what we are, but we‘re sure of what we‘re not. / I know that language will fail us, but it‘s all we‘ve got‖ (Paint It Black, ―New Folk Song‖). Somewhat ironically, this meta-linguistic statement is made in a multimedia context in which language is precisely not ―all we‘ve got‖. In songs, words and music form a unified whole that is, in some sense, bigger than the sum of its parts. Many, though not all, song lyrics sound awkward when removed from their musical context, and lyrics written without any musical inspiration often lack the musicality necessary to merge into song. ―There is music which tries to enter into a dialogue with the words and concerns itself in one way or another with the meaning of the text […],‖ explains Bernhart, ―and it is this form which is less likely to be ‗destructive‘ than music which […] appears more or less independent from the text and mainly serves as a background‖ (Bernhart 2015: 269) - and vice versa! Song lyrics must be ‗songly‘; they must be able to enter into a meaningful dialog with the music, not just in terms of their message, but also in terms of their intrinsic ‗musicality‘. Bernhart speaks of varying degrees of ―word/ music harmony‖ (Bernhart 2015: 272). ―When I‘m writing a song,‖ explains Greg Bennick, I can‘t write lyrics unless the music is passionate and engaging. I‘ll just sit for years sometimes, just listening to it over and over and over again, if I‘m gripped by the music. […] When the music and the lyrics come together, something incredible happens. […] it‘s almost as if the music supports the lyrics, when lyrics are written in a way that‘s cognizant of that passion behind the music itself. […] The way that I write is: I listen for a moment in a song, and then I write around that moment. (Bennick 2011) Recommending an approach similar to that outlined by Bennick, P.G. Woodhouse once said, ―If I write a lyric without having to fit it to a tune, I always make it too much like a set of light verse, much too regular in meter. I think you get the best results by giving the composer his head and having the lyricist follow him‖ (qtd. in Frith 2002: 179). In other words, the music has a tremendous effect on the lyrical composition, but this effect need not be ‗destructive‘. The relationship between the music and the lyrics, especially in punk songs, where the medium is part of the message, is usually a symbiotic one. 4. The meaning of punk vocalization By accentuating phonetic properties, the vocalist can manipulate the lyrics in such a way as to highlight important textual elements, thereby eclipsing others. Such emphases may elicit a vocal rhyming pattern, in- Punk as Literature 109 discernible in its written form, which, in further consequence, creates intra-textual connections that may alter the meaning of the scripted lyrics. However, vocalization does more than just manipulate the lyrics. It is, in and of itself, meaningful. This is especially true with regard to what Greil Marcus refers to as the ―punk voice‖, which […] called attention to its own artificiality for more than one reason: as a rejection of mainstream pop humanism in favor of resentment and dread; as a reflection of the fear of not being understood. But the voice was unnatural most of all out of its fear of losing the chance to speak—a chance every good punk singer understood, that was not only certain to vanish, but might not even be deserved. (Marcus 2011: 76) Out of this sentiment developed an aesthetic tradition based on the punk vocalist‘s role as an instigator, adding something to the lyrics that cannot be achieved by writing: a powerful emotional charge, a physicality that impacts the listener on the gut-level. ―I recognized at an early age,‖ writes Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin, ―that a group could consist of superb musicians but what really brought a song to life was the delivery of the vocalist‖ (Graffin and Olson 2010: 104). Punk songs are meant to be performed with utmost passion, which is why many punk singers, seeking an outlet, exhaust themselves almost to the point of self-destruction when they perform. Iggy Pop is a good example. The proto-punk icon and Stooges frontman is known for his highly physical performance style. ―There is just something in a certain kind of music that suggests the way the song should be performed,‖ he says (―Iggy Pop‖ 2004). ―Iggy does not so much sing as relieve himself,‖ explains Morrissey. ―All of the body is thrown into the vocal delivery‖ (Morrissey 2013: 113). This approach adds a tremendous amount of emotional content to the lyrics. ―Penetration‖ by the Stooges is a good example. ―On paper,‖ explains Catharsis singer Brian D., the phrase ―‗penetrate me‘‖ may be ―a little bit risqué, but Iggy Pop hissing and moaning and yowling and whispering ‗penetrate me‘ over and over on that last Stooges record is an obscene and intense experience that you can‘t just do by writing‖ (Brian D. 2011). Punk singers‘ vocals are expected to genuinely reflect their deepest feelings, even if this entails a loss of articulacy. In fact, incomprehensibility itself has meaning in punk. Extreme vocalization, be it screaming or shouting, is a part of punk‘s aesthetic of dissent, a transgression of culturally accepted norms of expression. Brian D. elaborates: As a context in which people are encouraged to become - by the aesthetic points of reference that everyone has in common in this society - inhuman, to sound like animals, to sound like different from what everyone is familiar with right up to the point of permanently injuring themselves [...] punk is a really fundamental refusal of the way that human beings are constructed in Gerfried Ambrosch 110 this society: punk fashion is about looking unemployable, punk politics are about refusing to play the game, and even punk vocalization is about incomprehensibility, is about becoming wild, and that creates a situation in which the lyrics are not important in the way that they are in conventional acoustic guitar folk music. (Brian D. 2011) Hurled at us with incredible speed and distortion, the individual words no longer convey linguistic content. This does not imply, however, that lexical signification is irrelevant, but that the vocals mainly impact the listener ―on a visceral level, at the level of the gut, the deep emotional level,‖ as Dan Yemin puts it (Yemin 2011), especially when unmediated lyrical understanding is made impossible by the singer‘s oral ‗inarticulacy.‘ The vocal delivery itself is potent enough to emotionally affect both the sender and the receiver. We might call this the ‗transformative power‘ of punk vocalization. Screaming and shouting, being unrestrained and uncivilized modes of expression, liberate the vocalist from society‘s aesthetic norms. Moreover, there is a sense of vulnerability, honesty, and loss of control attached to these forms of vocal delivery. ―Certain physical experiences,‖ writes Simon Frith, ―particularly extreme feelings, are given vocal sounds beyond our conscious control—the sounds of pain, lust, ecstasy, fear, what one might call inarticulate articulacy: […] we hear them as if they‘ve escaped from a body that the mind—language—can no longer control‖ (Frith 2002: 192). The emotional content of punk vocals is not ―limited to the emotion of hostility‖ (Yemin 2011). Ian MacKaye agrees. The legendary hardcore punk frontman, famous for his bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, believes that, in the performative context, passion is often mistaken for aggression: ―People often say to me, ‗God, you seemed so enraged in Minor Threat,‘ but I didn‘t feel enraged. I was joyful. I was passionate. I meant it‖ (MacKaye 2011). But how can screaming and shouting be an expression of anything other than rage, distress, or hostility? Yemin: Compassion and empathy are liabilities to succeeding in mainstream American culture, in mainstream capitalist culture. That‘s why I think aggressive, oppositional music is the best tool to express compassion and empathy, because it‘s not the language of our culture. The things I‘m yelling about are generally not values that are reinforced in our culture. I think the anger in this context makes sense and the louder we scream the more maybe we‘re defining ourselves as something that attempts to go against the grain. (Yemin 2011) Extreme vocalization is only one possible pathway, however. Some punk singers went in the opposite direction, trying to sing with the greatest clarity. Greg Graffin, for instance, ―found that delving into areas of philosophical inquiry and intellectual challenge greatly enhanced the conceptual quality of my songwriting. I wanted my newly discovered concepts Punk as Literature 111 and words to be audible, so I took great pains to be more eloquent and articulate when I sang‖ (Graffin and Olson 2010: 190). Singers who utilize more articulate vocal styles also manipulate the lyrics, albeit in subtler ways. Morrissey‘s highly suggestive vocals, especially his trademark camp falsetto, are a case in point. Gavin Hopps characterizes the post-punk singer‘s vocal delivery as ―carnivalesque‖, by which he means his ―bold stretching out of words, far beyond their customary length or shape, and conversely, his squashing of words or complicated syntax into the conventional spaces of popular music‖ 9 . The former Smiths frontman toys with linguistic signifiers ―without commitment to meaning [thereby] destabiliz[ing] not only the song‘s meaning […] but also meaningfulness as such‖ (Hopps 2012: 25). 5. Toward a hermeneutics of punk songs: Analysis of “Arsonist’s Prayer” Having outlined the peculiarities of punk lyrics as a form of externally performed poetry in a specific socio-cultural and aesthetic context 10 , I wish to conclude this article, as a practical demonstration of what I mean by ‗a hermeneutics of punk songs‘, with an interpretative analysis of the song ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ (2001) by Catharsis, a mainstay of the American anarcho-hardcore scene for over two decades. ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ is an excellent example of heavy punk music, elaborate poetry, and radical politics coming together in one song. It draws not only on several different traditions from within punk but also on outside influences. Due to the use of religiously connoted language, the lyrics, metaphorical as they are, possess a serious, almost solemn quality, permeating the composition as a whole with a sense of drama. The listener is taken on a journey down valleys of despair and up summits of unbridled idealism. The lyrics brim with pathos while also painting a bleak picture of the ―world as it is‖ (line 10), a world the speaker wishes to 9 See the Smiths‘ ―This Charming Man‖ (1983): ―Why pamper life‘s complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat? ‖ (Smiths 1995). Here, Morrissey makes use of both techniques, squashing and stretching. Singing the word ‗seat,‘ he moves between several different notes (melisma): see-ee-e-eat. 10 In the interest of brevity, I choose not to discuss the relationship between text and paratext, a term coined by Gérard Genette, and the social and didactic functions of punk lyrics. Suffice it to say, paratext, typically provided by LP sleeves and CD booklets, plays a fundamental role in the reception of punk songs as a framing device (images, liner notes). As far as the functions of punk lyrics are concerned, it makes sense to broadly differentiate between social, didactic, and cultural functions. In punk, the lyrics play a central role in individual as well as communal identity formation processes (social function), are morally instructive (didactic function), and establish, maintain, and perpetuate codes of lyrical practice (cultural function). Gerfried Ambrosch 112 destroy. The singer‘s ‗destructive‘ vocal style - he, too, seems intent on ―raz[ing] it all‖ (line 55), sparing nothing, not even the lyrics themselves - is a metonymy of this sentiment. Matching the lyrics‘ radicalism, the tuneless vocals are raging and spat out with utmost aggression. The instrumental music, on the other hand, is heavy but tuneful. Dark minor chords and somber melodies dominate the song. Recall Bernhart‘s notion of ―word/ music harmony‖ mentioned in chapter 3. ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ is an epic ten minutes long, which is quite extraordinary given that most punk songs fall short of the three-minute mark. The lyrics consist of no less than 62 lines, hardly any of them end-stopped (enjambment). Some sentences are spread out over entire verse paragraphs and have relatively complex, in some cases hypotactic syntaxes. Structurally, the song does not seem to follow any particular formula. There is no identifiable verse or chorus; the individual lines and verse paragraphs are highly irregular in length. In place of a classic versechorus structure, the song creates its own narrative of conflict and resolution as it dynamically alternates between different levels of intensity, between thundering, heavy sections and more delicate, quieter passages. 1 The horror—that we may not live We may not live To see the walls fall from between us Between us and the world for which these songs cry out 5 That the desire—which still lives—to contest, a mark of shame upon certain foreheads, Will remain an offering unto the dead: illegible, irrelevant And we will be shaped into priestly statues in poses of defiance before our own masters To softly, safely sing the praises of a disarmed war, a lukewarm love So lest we fall out of lust for life, let us risk all we have to risk 10 For only a fool—only a fool—would cling to this world as it is If I could strike one blow to spite their force, though I might bear one hundred more, I would wear the welts like rubies, and the shackles for a crown And if I had one hundred hearts I would throw them all before their bullets Before I‘d sell a single one to wield their power 15 So lest we fall out of love with life, let us give all we have to give For only a fool would cling to this world: Autumn—the leaves fell Then the trees Became fences and factories Punk as Literature 113 20 Now winter is coming Let‘s put the heat on …but no fire or ice, their absences suffice The nights now will be long and cold, with a silence like you‘ve never known And you‘ll shake in it, cry out at it, but it will wrap you in its spider‘s thread 25 Perhaps you‘ll stare into that blankness until it peers back into you And both of you see nothing - and it will wrap you in its spider‘s thread: That blessed are the wombs that are barren Blessed are the branches that bear no fruit Blessed are the rivers run dry 30 For we have come to the end of the world To die So die—die and become—perish, let go and be done With all the tangled threads that keep you tied to husks of false hopes, fossilized If these years still wait for those who will be more merciless than history 35 To burn the chaff and make an end, to make the fields fertile once again Then break—break the skin, Open—open, and reach in And draw the nerves out taut to play a song upon those tight strings Such as this world has never heard 40 Let it be dirge, hymn, or dance, vomit or tears, absolving snowfall or acid rain Summer that sets fire to the harvest, or ice age that, thawing, blossoms crimson pain Pleasure or death, splendor or rust, flash flood or drought that turns jungles to crust Those tender caresses for which the skin aches Or tear gas to breathe and plate glass to break 45 The uproar of riot, the hush of nightfall, or sirens announcing the doom of us all The triumph of failures who fought at all costs, or despair of derelict dreamers who lost Silence and space—hungers to be—momentary eternities The furrows of ash left by passion and wrath The faithless fixed stars over our wandering paths 50 As the moon moves the sea we could move these mountains As comets drop to earth, so might empires end As old suns explode rather than fall to dust Let us steal fire and pay with our lives if we must For if all this world is God‘s, and man a mere plaything of laws and things 55 Then why not raze it all, and in destroying at least set sail on borrowed wing? Anything other than what we have known Strike the match, take a breath now—the hour has come To dance the resistance, teach tied tongues to sing: This is the end of the calendar, the Last Loosening! Gerfried Ambrosch 114 60 Around and inside you, the violence you fear—for or against it, it‘s already here It forged the cord that bound you to the ground—it built these walls LET‘S BURN THEM DOWN (Catharsis 2001) ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ presents itself as part of a canon (―these songs‖, line 4). It calls on the listener to join a revolutionary struggle. Leading by example, the speaker completely commits himself to the destruction of the repressive apparatus that is the capitalist state. For this cause, he is prepared to be martyred. Again, this is reflected in the singer‘s unrestrained, potentially voice-damaging vocal delivery. Though this makes lyrical understanding impossible, we understand the singer, whose ‗dehumanized‘ vocals ‗embody‘ the speaker‘s struggle (cf. chapter 4). As the title intimates, the song‘s central metaphor is fire. On the one hand, it symbolizes passion, freedom, and insurrection; on other hand, it is an agent of repression. This deliberate metaphorical inconsistency is best captured in the song‘s final two lines: ―It forged the cord that bound you to the ground — it built these walls / LET‘S BURN THEM DOWN.‖ 11 The lyrics moreover allude to Greek mythology, specifically to the story of Prometheus, who, as legend has it, gifted mankind with fire stolen from the gods (lines 52-53). Intertextuality generally plays an important role in ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ (cf. chapter 1. Introduction). ―Many of the lyrics for that song,‖ the author explains, ―were inspired by a poem by [Mexican surrealist] Octavio Paz, who was writing about the Marquis de Sade‖ (Brian D. 2011). This poem was ―the newspaper, if you will, that I was cutting the words out of to rearrange in the Tzaraist tradition.‖ 12 The poem in question, ―The Prisoner‖ (1947), is a powerful text that deals with destruction, suffering, freedom, desire, excess, sex, and joy. One of the song‘s most blatant borrowings is the oxymoronic line ―Silence and space - hungers to be - momentary eternities‖ (line 47). The corresponding passages in ―The Prisoner‖ are: ―Man is inhabited by silence and space. / […] / forms, images, bubbles, hungers to be, / momentary eternities‖ (Paz 1998: 5, 6). And the phrase ―summer that sets fire to the harvest‖ (line 41) is lifted verbatim from Paz‘s poem (Paz 1998: 6). Celestial bodies feature prominently in both texts. ―As comets drop to earth, so might empires end‖ (Catharsis); ―Comet with a ponderous phosphorescent tail: reasons-obsessions‖ (Paz 1998: 5). In ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ suns ―explode rather than fall to dust‖ (line 52). In other words, they don‘t just fade away; they go out with a bang - as should we, the meta- 11 Strictly speaking, the noun replaced by the pronoun ‗it‘ is ‗violence,‘ not ‗fire,‘ but the verb ‗forge‘ clearly belongs to the same semantic field as ‗fire.‘ We can infer that fire symbolizes violence. That which was created by fire/ violence can be destroyed by such. 12 Brian D. refers to dada artist Tristan Tzara. Punk as Literature 115 phor seems to imply. Like a supernova, we should aspire to die in a moment of splendor (line 42). This requires that we also live splendidly. ―The bodies, facing each other like wild stars, / are made of the same stuff as the suns. / […] / Dream is explosive. Explode. Be a sun again,‖ as Paz phrases it (1998: 4, 6). What are we to make of these obvious intertextual parallels? After all, ―The Prisoner‖ and ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ deal with different kinds of subject matter. Paz‘s poem alludes to Sade‘s theories about sexual excess and the infliction and endurance of pain as a form of pleasure, while the Catharsis lyrics constitute an allegory for the anarchist struggle against the capitalist system. At the end of the day, however, both texts advocate a life of pleasure without restraint, whatever the cost: ―Death or pleasure‖ (Paz 1998: 6); ―Pleasure or death‖ (Catharsis, line 42). In the latter case, this passionate attitude is not just written into the text (internal performance); it is performed by the band (external performance), especially by the vocalist, who uses his own body as an instrument, screaming his heart out (cf. chapter 2). Tristan Tzara is not the only lyrical connection to dada in the lyrics. Toward the end of the song, there is a reference to Walter Serner, specifically his 1920 book, Last Loosening (line 59). The original German title, Letzte Lockerung: Manifest Dada, was accompanied by the subtitle: Ein Handbrevier für Hochstapler und solche, die es werden wollen. In the same way that Serner‘s subtitle elicits the allure of becoming a con man, arson is portrayed as an act of courage in ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖. Given the lyrics radicalism, it comes as no surprise that we also find a Nietzsche reference in them, reflecting one of the philosopher‘s best-known aphorisms from Beyond Good and Evil (line 25) 13 . Before we go deeper into the text, let‘s take a brief look at the paratext. The record cover presents a moody painting of a violinist wearing a gas mask, while the typeface mimics a painter‘s signature. The nightmarish cover image functions as a visual reference for the music (intermediality). It frames our expectations as to what the music is going to sound like. Presuming aesthetic consistency, we‘d be very surprised if ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ was an upbeat tune in a major key. The lyric sheet is adorned with the image of a bonfire in the silhouette of a rearing horse (white on black). The drawing symbolizes the song‘s main themes: passion, freedom, and insurrection. Next to the horse, we find the lyrics, the recording credits, and an additional text which states: Not to suggest that the young woman who burns down a posh resort acts more nobly than the one who spends her years in libraries—but nor is she any less noble, so long as she acts to nurture what is beautiful within herself and find 13 The original quotation is: ―Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein‖ (Nietzsche 1999: 98). Gerfried Ambrosch 116 common cause with others. We‘re not in the least afraid of ruins, nor of making them, living, as we do, in them—as they do within us. Until we have cleared these away—as the woman who burns down the resort does—so the seeds in the soil beneath can germinate again, uproar can be our only music. (Catharsis 2001, excerpt) The text speaks of the consecration of radical measures, informing us that ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ is essentially an ode to extremism. The phrase ―uproar can be our only music‖ is a Keats reference 14 . The note tells us not to be afraid to leave ruins as we revolt against the status quo; after all, we already live in ruins ―as they do within us‖, meaning that we have internalized the ruinous structures of repression that sustain the capitalist order. The same sentiment is expressed toward the end of the song (line 60), reminiscent of a passage from George Orwell‘s Down and Out in Paris and London, in which he criticizes the intelligentsia‘s irrational fear of an underclass uprising: ―The mob is in fact loose now, and - in the shape of rich men - is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as ‗smart‘ hotels‖ (Orwell 1989: 128). Orwell‘s ―‗smart‘ hotels‖ are replaced by ―a posh resort‖ in Catharsis‘s additional text. As the song opens, a melancholy piano overture cautiously tiptoes over distant chanting and cheering. It lasts just over a minute. The voices in the background sound exuberant and assertive: the sound of a demonstration, ―recorded April 21, 2001 in Quebec City, Canada [...] during the people‘s resistance to the ‗Free‘ Trade Area of the Americas summit‖ (Catharsis 2001: liner notes). The lyrics make explicit reference to this context (lines 44-45). The moment the piano intro ends, the heaviness of the guitars and drums begins. This part is played in half-time. It picks up speed as the drums break into d-beat, a classic punk rhythm. The song remains instrumental until the drums briefly cut out while the heavily distorted guitars keep playing. In this fog of noise, the vocalist roars: ―The horror— that we may not live / We may not live,‖ thus making a dramatic entrance. When the drums resume, he continues with the rest of the first verse paragraph. Lyrically, this section is remarkable on several levels. For one, it is reminiscent of the opening lines of the Keats sonnet ―When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be‖: ―When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain‖ (Keats 1996: 1016). Both passages evoke the same kind of fear or horror, i.e., the idea that we may die before we are finished or before our efforts come to fruition. Furthermore, the first verse paragraph has a strangely staggered syntax. Each line starts by repeating the tail end of the previous one (anadiplosis), 14 In a letter to his brothers, Keats wrote, ―[T]here is nothing stable in the world; uproar‘s your only music‖ (Keats 2014). Punk as Literature 117 which makes for a striking effect. The individual lines become peculiarly interwoven as each line modifies the meaning of its immediate predecessor as well as the sentence as a whole. The em dash after ―The horror‖ signifies a pause for reflection 15 . The horror continues in the second verse paragraph. There are two telling parentheses in this passage. The first one, ―which still lives‖, emphasizes the connection between desire and the affirmation of life. To be alive is to have the capacity to act on one‘s desires, even though doing so may leave a scarlet letter ―upon certain foreheads‖, i.e., win the scorn of society. Of what use would ―the desire … to contest‖ be to the dead? It would indeed be ―illegible‖ and ―irrelevant‖. The second parenthesis simply repeats the phrase ―only a fool‖ for emphasis (epizeuxis). Who in their right mind would embrace a status quo that ―shape[s individuals] into priestly statues in poses of defiance‖ in order to ―softly, safely sing the praises of a disarmed war, a lukewarm love‖ 16 ? The meaning of these oxymorons is that modern life is pacified, dull, and meaningless as it is devoid of extremes (see also line 22: ―but no fire or ice, their absences suffice‖). The speaker concludes that it is better to perish fighting the system than to idly live in it. When we examine the inner structure of the third verse paragraph, we find that it contains two conditional clauses with more or less identical syntaxes. This parallelism lends a pleasing structuredness to the passage. On a different level, however, the same two sentences are chiastic as singular and plural are reversed. The verbatim repetition of the hyperbole ―one hundred‖ foregrounds the underlying chiasmus. The paragraph‘s final two lines are almost identical to their counterparts in the previous verse paragraph. The function of this macro-parallelism is to further enhance the song‘s lyrical structuredness. If there is anything in ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ that resembles a chorus, this is it. However, the subtle differences between the two passages are almost more significant than their similarities (not that listeners unfamiliar with the lyrics would be able to discern such ‗nuances‘): So lest we fall out of lust for life, let us risk all we have to risk For only a fool—only a fool—would cling to this world as it is So lest we fall out of love with life, let us give all we have to give For only a fool would cling to this world 15 We are reminded of Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness: ―He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - ‗The horror! The horror! ‘‖ (Conrad 1994: 100). Another possible reference is Shakespeare‘s Macbeth. In Act II, Scene iii, Macduff exclaims, ―O horror, horror, horror! ‖ (Shakespeare 2008: 134). 16 See also Revelation 3: 16 (KJV): ―So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.‖ Gerfried Ambrosch 118 The speaker no longer deems it necessary to insert the parenthesis ―only a fool‖ when he repeats the last line. What‘s more, by substituting ―love‖ for ―lust‖, the text calls attention to the fact that these words are semantically related but not synonymous while still keeping the alliteration alive. Similarly, we learn that to risk everything, even one‘s life, is to give something to humanity. The colon at the end of this verse paragraph prepares us for a caesura - clearly discernible in the lyrics and reflected by the music - and promises an explanation as to what the speaker means by ―this world‖. The vocal delivery changes. Rather than full-throated screaming, the singer utilizes more restrained forms of vocalization: lines 22-26 are whispered; then, following the crescendoing music, he switches to diabolic hissing, dramatically ‗embodying‘ the lyrics‘ unsettling message (recall the different performative roles of actors and singers discussed in chapter 2). The fire-ice dichotomy alluded to in this verse paragraph draws on an old topos. (We find it in texts such as Edmund Spenser‘s ―My Love Is Like to Ice‖ and, more recently, Robert Frost‘s ―Fire and Ice‖.) The abundant use of the / b/ sound in this passage (as in ―blessed‖, ―barren‖, ―branches‖, ―bear‖) is conspicuous. These ‗warm‘, voiced consonants contrast starkly with the ‗cold‘ sibilants they are juxtaposed with (both categories are represented in the word ‗blessed‘). The conflict between fire and ice appears to be echoed phonetically. Another intriguing feature of this passage is that it bears a striking resemblance to the ―Hail Mary‖: ―blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.‖ Catharsis utilize the same ―blessed are‖ anaphora, but in their inverted version the wombs (and trees) are infertile. This is strongly reminiscent of Luke 23: 29: ―For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck‖ (KJV). ―[I]t will wrap you in its spider‘s thread‖ is likely a reference to The Waste Land, lines 407-08: ―Which is not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider‖ 17 (Eliot 50), once again demonstrating the song‘s elaborate web of intertextuality, which may, in itself, be a nod to Eliot, who used a wide variety of external references and voices in his epic masterpiece. ―Arsonist‘s Prayer‖ is a powerful piece of poetry and an intense musical experience, echoing the famous lines out of Goethe‘s Faust: ―Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, / Der täglich sie erobern muss‖ (Goethe 1996: 348, lines 11575-76). Despite its intricately poetic nature, however, it only does what many punk songs have done: it fuses vigorous music with subversive content and compelling poetry. I have demonstrated that punk, as a particular sphere of cultural production, has spawned a distinct literary art form - punk lyrics - informed by an aesthetic framework 17 The first line seems to convey a similar sense of horror as the song‘s opening lines. Punk as Literature 119 of reference that pertains to the community‘s basic ideological structure. Though most general observations about song lyrics apply, punk lyrics constitute a special case in terms of their epistemological significance for the community and because of the way they are performed. Distinguishing between internal and external performance, I have shown that seemingly inarticulate vocalization is, in many cases, encouraged as a means to enhance the physical impact of the musical-lyrical package that is the song. In other words, the deliberate ‗destruction‘ of the written lyrics is an intrinsic part of the performance and constitutive of its meaning (and therefore highly relevant to the hermeneutical approach outlined in the previous pages). This affects both the music-text relationship and the experience of the listeners who are denied linguistic access unless they engage with the lyrics as literature. References AFI (1999). ―No Poetic Device‖. Black Sails in the Sunset. Huntington Beach: Nitro. As Friends Rust (2001). ―Coffee Black‖. Eleven Songs. Wallingford: GOLF. Bennick, Greg (2011, March 1). Personal Interview. Bernhart, Walter (2015). ―The ‗Destructiveness of Music‘: Functional Intermedia Disharmony in Popular Songs‖. In: Werner Wolf (Ed.). Essays on Literature and Music (1985-2013) by Walter Bernhart. Leiden/ Boston: Brill. 265-72. Brill Online Books and Journals. [online] http: / / booksandjournals.brillonline.com/ content/ books/ b9789004302747s021 [Accessed Jan. 31 2017]. 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