時の洗礼を受けていないものを読むな: My White Whale (Or: Don't read things that have not had the baptism of time)

Many years ago — 2012, I think — I was living in an apartment in Bombay on Veera Desai Road. My room had a tiny balcony, which had been invaded by a family of pigeons that I hated very much. One evening, my two flatmates were watching some music video on repeat in one of the other guys’ room. I was feeling left out so I joined in. It was some slow-motion thing that they — film-school alumni which they were — were drooling over. It was nice, like one of those short films you can’t understand but it keeps you gripped.

The artist was Flying Lotus. The song was called ‘Hunger’. Somewhere around the two-minute mark, the song flipped on its head, ditching its previously established languid indolence. It went into this disconnected and ridiculously beautiful fingerpicked guitar bit. I knew I’d heard it before. I knew it. I KNEW IT. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where in hell I’d heard it. This is the problem with listening to a lot of instrumental music: when you hear something, you don’t have a distinct voice attached to it; there’s no Aadhar no. identifying the artist on first glance. So you have to force your brain to think.

By the second or third viewing, I knew — I. Fucking. Knew. — that this little guitar line on a Flying Lotus song had something to do with Radiohead. A) Because of my obsession with Radiohead, most things eventually circle back to the band. But more importantly, B) I’d read of some link between FlyLo and Radiohead — that Radiohead were fans and had helped him get some media attention, or the other way round. Or something. Just that there was a connection.

It became a tic. This happens often with me, and just about everyone I know. Where you’re out, randomly enjoying or hating the shit out of life, and then suddenly this incomplete fact pops into your head and you have to complete it. So you try Google (previously known as an encyclopedia), you Phone-A-Friend, you throw a fit. Whatever it takes.

This live-screening that I was a part of, which set off my psychosis, took placed late in the night, at like 1 a.m. or something. I left that room irritated, scratching my arms and head. I went back into my room and destroyed my night.

Here’s what I did: I listened to every single Radiohead song there is in existence. In chronological order. Whatever MP3s I didn’t have, I YouTubed (in those pre-Spotify days). Of course, I didn’t listen to each song from start to finish; I skimmed through most of them. But I made sure to cover all the different parts — the intros, the choruses, the verses, the unexpected discursion, the extended bridges and outros. With every passing album, as I neared the completion of their discography as well as the impending sunrise, I got more and more agitated. Mentally of course, but it was also physically uncomfortable. This was the least fun I’d ever had listening to Radiohead, and I’d had some terrible times listening to them in the past.

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Anyway, this went on for what seemed like forever. I thought of giving up in between; I took a short break that could have become an indefinite one had I not been such an idiot. Eventually, I was done with Radiohead. I’d aged 10 years: my joints hurt, my hair — whatever hadn’t fallen out — had turned grey; I was yelling at kids that didn’t exist. It was the worst.

But I soldiered on. This was my white whale. I moved on from Radiohead to band member Jonny Greenwood. I’ve been an obsessive fan of his for donkey’s years as well, and I was at this point still 100% certain that I’d find that damn guitar line. I heard his score to Bodysong, and didn’t find it. I moved on to There Will Be Blood, knowing fully well that there was no bloody way I’d find it on it; that was the last one (this was before Inherent Vice or even The Master had come out). I was losing hope when, out of nowhere, I thought of checking out his obscure score for Norwegian Wood, a 2010 Japanese film adapted from the novel.

I had to hunt through my laptop to find the folder that had the album. Here’s the thing: the song titles for his Norwegian Wood score are all in Japanese which, cool as it is, makes it a nightmare to keep track of songs. So I had to listen to every single song on it from start to finish, waiting patiently, knowing that I’d find it. Or that I’d be found out finally.

By around the middle of the album... boom! There it was. It’s a song called, well, something in Japanese. It's just a two-minute guitar line that goes on for a few bars and, once it’s done its job, it goes away. Never before or since have I felt so triumphant, so relieved. And so sleepy. The sun was out.

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Epilogue: As the story goes, Jonny Greenwood’s score for the latest PTA film, Phantom Thread, is releasing on January 12. They’ve just put out a new song off it, called ‘House Of Woodcock’, and it’s quite something. Also, the name of the white whale song is translated to “Don’t read things that have not had the baptism of time”.

x

How long must I wait, before the thrill is gone?

Is Beck OK? Hearing his new album, Colors, I can’t tell. It’s lively; it keeps bouncing and hitting peaks in unexpected places. Joy and melancholy are in combat with each other incessantly: On the one hand is Beck’s effortless ability to craft infectious pop melodies that — in a rare twist — have a quality of freshness and originality to them. On the other is his flaneur-like gift of seeking out unfamiliar musical spaces, almost to a fault. It falls into place often, none more so than on the album opener, ‘Colors’ (the missing “U” is infuriating). The euphoria of the chorus is checked almost immediately by the agitated key shift it’s in rotation with. There’s lots of these uneasy moments all over that give the seemingly straightforward structures a trademark edge, the getting into of which isn’t the purpose here.

Instead, it’s a sincere feeling of concern for Beck. While I’d always known of his existence — checking out the odd song here and there and dismissing it out of a misplaced musical snobbery — I properly discovered Beck’s music earlier this year, at some point in February, with the album Odelay. His ability to shift gears and head off in unpredictable sonic directions was a revelatory experience. The shape-shifting is sneaky, chameleon-like behaviour, no doubt, and he deserves a slap for never giving the listener a moment of familiarity and comfort. (No, I’m being facetious.) But it’s also what made his music exhilarating — no, liberating — for me, both from the point of view of a new listener and as an artist. (Artist? No, I mean artiste.)

Hooked (lined and sinkered), I started to get into his other works. What I found was an almost stubbornness, a resistance to conformity, often for the sake of it. I found an artist who was infinitely restless — a theme I visit often while writing about music — and endlessly seeking new delights in new sounds. The form shifted — from experimental rap-rock to disco to alt-rock to pop to acoustic, folksy ramblings — and the tools at his disposal were replaced and rearranged with every release, but what stayed consistent was his aesthetic impatience, the underlying twitch that guides his art. Across like a shitload of albums, Beck has somehow managed to redefine himself for himself each time.

(What I refer to here isn’t the avant-garde but a hyper-experimentation within sounds that are recognised as somewhat conventional, or at least conventional-adjacent; basically, a mangling of old tropes, both an embrace and a defiant rejection of convention.)

To present day, where Colors has come out. Structurally, this record is more self-contained than a lot of his more radical ventures, in that it prefers to roam around within the wide-enough confines of disco, pop, funk, alt-rock, the occasional rap bits, and what can best be described as Beck-rock. (At times, he even sounds, here, like Daft Punk or Depeche Mode, but much, much, much better.)

But even with these supposed limitations — and without discounting the fact that Colors does boast the odd clunker or two, ‘No Distraction’ chief among those that reach a kind of ska-reggae accessibility usually reserved for much less gifted artists than Beck — it still wanders enough, throwing these bizarre curveballs (like the percussive rapping on ‘I’m So Free’, followed by the chorus blitz, or the push-pull interplay of ‘Wow’) by the dozens.

Which makes me wonder about Beck Hanson the individual behind all the music and the weird dances. Mental health is no laughing matter (well, it is, but laughing matters are very serious matters too; though that’s a discussion best left for an undetermined date in the future). With Beck, the fact that he’s pretty much impossible to read as an artist; he's an enigma, a mystery, a closed book; he's indecipherable — where I understand little to no nothing about his motivations except to just be constantly outrageous in whatever avatar he chooses to adopt — makes me fear for his sanity a little. 

See, what really sets him apart is the versatility in his art. He’s not sticking to any kind of tradition or discipline; he sounds like someone who’s constantly looking for the next buzz, the next kick, the next fix. It’s worked for over two decades, so there’s something to be said for commitment.

But then, what happens when it stops giving him the childlike happiness he quite clearly gets from his art. He’s been getting increasingly defeatist, grumbly, cantankerous, withdrawn, as an artist in the public eye (sort of).

Me being someone who knows a fair bit about existential bitterness, about getting stuck creatively, about banging my head against a wall over and over again with the expectation that the wall will crack, not my own skull, I feel a kind of projected concern for Beck. This is a challenge literally every given artist will face in her life, repeatedly if she’s dedicated to her craft, and I can safely say it’s something that torments Beck too. But he’s somehow found a way to crack that wall so consistently for so long. But what happens when it stops working for him? Is it, as I worry, an ephemeral state? Or does there exist a state of permanent restlessness and reward and failure? Will he short-circuit?

As he sings on ‘Dear Life’ here, “Dear Life, I’m holding / How long must I wait / Before the thrill is gone?” As he sang on ‘Modern Guilt’ off Modern Guilt, “Don’t know what I’ve done but I feel ashamed,” and then later: “Don’t know what I’ve done but I feel afraid.” So I worry, but then the excitement of “what next” is as rewarding for him (I hope) as it is for me. 

we aimed for wrong notes that explode, a quiet muttering amplified heavenward

It’s early days still, so I haven’t yet been able to decide whether Luciferian Towers is Godspeed being hopeful this one time, or if it’s just them laughing — with disgust — at the world falling apart. Either way, the music is invigorating — I feel renewed, almost optimistic, when I take off the earphones, like the smell of fresh laundry. It’s that ephemeral moment of magic that happens when silence collides with absolute noise.

The record is a “spiritual moment”, perhaps (even though I don’t technically believe in the concept). Last night, I had one of those, at some point during ‘Anthem For No State’. I was briefly transported — the visual is hazy now, but it was some desolate mountain, with power lines all around. I’ve added train tracks into the memory now, but I can’t say for sure if they existed at the time. This lasted for literally a second or two, but it’d been building up.

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I’ve never been someone who tears up while listening to music, a fact I state with neither pride nor shame. Music affects me in countless ways; blubbering just isn’t one of them. I think it’s happened no more than twice in my life. But during ‘Anthem For No State’, in the second part I think, I found myself heavy-eyed.

The welling up wasn’t out of sadness or some profound despair that Godspeed captured in that particular playthrough; it was an involuntary physical reaction to the song. And as soon as I became aware of it, the tear ducts shut down immediately. But it happened.

I often go back to this line by Mark Richardson in his piece about Godspeed a few years ago: “…it's the kind of sound you hear with your body and not just your ears.” I’ve read it many times since, but never before, and it — at the time — basically put into words an emotion I’d long had about Godspeed (and a bunch of other music too).

This is what Godspeed do. There’s of course the dystopia, the mystery, the cheek, the audacity, the defiance. The transcendental orchestrations that paint with sound a picture of the world we live in. The risks they take. Their last two record, especially — both of which came after a nine-year period of silence, before “god’s pee decided to roll again” — had a speculative emotional dissonance to them. Remarkable as they were, and exhilarating in their own right, I was far more comfortable admiring those two releases from a distance — they were aspirational, intimidating. They made me seek them out.

But Godspeed, beyond all those elements, has also been a deeply personal band. Their music —especially when I first discovered it as a kid through their John Peel session — doesn’t so much speak to me as it becomes a part of me. Luciferian Towers has that elusive quality of changing something about me (taking into account that it’s only been a day).

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(Just to clarify, people often talk of music that ‘changes’ them, as do I. This isn’t some grand spectacle, really. It’s not like you wake up one day and start parting your hair on the other side and you start speaking fluent German and all aspects of your personality are suddenly inverted. Instead, it’s a subtle, barely-there shift, where the music affects a specific part inside you, destroying it over repeat plays, and birthing a new thing in its place. The outside world can rarely ever tell, but you just know.)

Of course, I’m leaving open the possibility that I didn’t, in fact, experience any wanky “moment of clarity” situation at all. That maybe I just nodded off while listening to the album — maybe that’s what meditation is: a series of almost-asleep, almost-awake rotations.

A hammer smash to the kidneys

It’s like walking on clouds in those coy hotel-room slippers we all steal. Like floating about mid-air inside an airplane[1], when your ears aren’t exactly blocked, but they’re also not functioning at 100% because of that persistent hum. Where making out what’s being said six rows ahead is almost easier than understanding your neighbour’s words. “Excuse me, can you get the fudge up so I can go to the bathroom?” (I only ever take the aisle seat, so it’s a problem window-sitters probably won’t get.)

For the first three-and-a-bit minutes, nothing really happens. I mean, it’s all pleasantries and sunshine in the sort-of-profound, sort-of-meaningless way only Mogwai can manage. But as a standalone movement, without context or an inkling of what’s to come later, it doesn’t much make sense. You worry this might be Mogwai getting a little too ponderous, a little too laborious, while developing a very specific, very narrow mood.

Hells to the no.

‘Don’t Believe The Fife’ is a crackling reminder of the very reasons I first fell in love with Mogwai: The compassionate, wounded passages that saunter along aimlessly, taking their time to craft a mood-canvas onto which I can reflect my immediate state of wellbeing (or otherwise). The impressionistic guitar lines crawling around like intricate pencil-sketches. And then the inversion: The explosion, the bastardry, the mania, the carefully concealed other end, the ugly insides we all do our best to hide away with make-up, haircuts, and forced smiles.

Over the years, the band seems to have toned down its radical soft-loud theatrics, instead going for steadier, more circumspect arrangements. It’s not really a criticism — they’ve expanded into different worlds in their 20 years of hyper-prolific existence, reaching a special kind of peak (for me) with Les Revenants. Yet ‘Fife’ recalls that early deranged quality which hammers away at your kidneys with no prior warning.

It trudges along, and then, out of nowhere, it bursts like a thunderstorm. The coolest bit? Sure, the element of surprise goes away after the first time (or even before that, if you’re reading this without having heard the song). But the outburst remains elusive; it’s unpredictable after repeat listens, even when you’re waiting for it.

That’s partly because of how firmly the first section gets established. It’s partly because there’s a bit of a false alarm when the drums kick in at first, because you feel like you sort of ‘know’ this Mogwai; you ‘know’ where they’re heading with this. It’s also because of a really cool songwriting trick, where they pile on the additions with little regard for form. The brain is used to listening to things at least twice, or in multiple of four, before something new happens. Here, though, the tremolo'ed/delayed guitar bit enters, playing just once. Then the drums kick in, playing just once.

No need to overstate the point, but that’s when the eruption happens, with like the fattest guitar sound I’ve heard in years. It’s hundreds of guitars being smashed in anger. Welcome back, Mogwai.

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[1] This might not be a universal emotion, since I’ve been connecting Mogwai with airplanes for a while now, ever since one defining experience.

Some day you will find me/Caught beneath the landslide/In a champagne supernova in the sky

In the second half of 2009, from what I remember, I wasn’t excessively happy or sad. Let’s call it a rung or two above ho-hum, which isn’t all that terrible a place to be in. So when I look back fondly at the time, it has nothing to do with anything except that I was eight years younger then than I am now. At the time, I used to own a shitty Acer Macbook, and I was in between earphones. The iPod ones I had had stopped working, and I was yet to buy these really cool Sennheiser earphones I used to own — they were going out of production soon so shops were getting rid of existing stock at 1000 instead of the listed 4000 (sorry, “999” instead of “3999”). The only way I had of listening to music was through the crackling speakers of my Macbook.

One particular (late, late) evening (or early, early morning), in the middle of a depressingly drawn-out YouTube spiral, I discovered what is now called ‘Man Of War’ by Radiohead. It was a live recording, and the guitar bit at the beginning of the song was really pretty and exactly what I’d been looking for at that particular time. The song finished and I didn’t know what to make of it, except that I’d been sucked in. It takes its time to properly settle in, as all the different elements start to ‘show themselves’ only later. Instinctively, all I could tell was something meaningful was going on. Plus I was little freaked — it’s one of those songs that attacks you from the precise point where your peripheral vision ends.

Thom Yorke, to me, seemed to be singing the moody words almost reluctantly, slowly easing into the big melodies that linger in the air once it finishes. It reminded me of my food conservatism, where I’ll resist trying out something new to the point of extreme annoyance, before I finally taste it and then my stomach explodes after overeating. The guitars, though, were the real draw. The three guitars appear to be playing roughly the same thing, bouncing off of each other and taking minor deviations to add fullness to the atmosphere. It’s only on further scrutiny that you realise that there comes a point where they’re only superficially holding hands, before departing in their own distinct directions, which is when the song detonates. It’s thrilling.

Anyway, so I may have become slightly obsessed with the song. The live version was literally on loop for the next three days — every waking minute was spent fighting the YouTube autoplay feature (if it existed back then; I don’t remember). Side by side, I was trying to suck all joy from the song in spite of my audiophobe setup. For a week after, it still remained sort of on loop, after which it dropped in and out of my consciousness every few years. The name, though, was a problem.

The obsession didn’t come immediately. Before that was the process of finding the song a second time. First time was accidental, and when I tried searching for it again, I couldn’t find it. All I remembered was the “man of war” lyric. But the song was tagged as ‘Big Boots’ everywhere, which I hadn’t known at the time, because I never pay attention to song names. So I went through a rigorous process of listening to hundreds of B-sides and live versions of unreleased Radiohead songs before I finally found it. Which is why I was hesitant to ever call it ‘Man Of War’ — I was scarred from all the digital and emotional labour, not to mention the association with the metal band Manowar.

The problem, then, became a postmodern one. Radiohead had another unreleased song, known in fan circles, as ‘Big Ideas’, with “I don’t got any” in parenthesis. Of course I kept confusing the two. I didn’t exactly love ‘Big Ideas’— a song that had become ‘Nude’ by then I think — so I convinced myself that I had imagined the initial thrill I felt on listening ‘Big Boots’. In my head, ‘Big Boots’ didn’t exist anymore, which was very upsetting. Until I finally discovered it, an unfettered release.

A lot of fans had been waiting for a studio version of ‘True Love Waits’, which finally came out last year. My ‘True Love Waits’, though, had always been ‘Big Boots’. Now that it’s finally here, the only things I recognise from the live version (even though it’s exactly the same) are the easy melodies and the sideways attack. Even the attack has been amplified in the production.

But for the most part, even though I share a big long history with ‘Big Boots’, and the (over)familiarity is part of why I’ve already become re-obsessed with the song, it still functions, simultaneously, as a whole new entity. How exciting is that? Yes, I think it’d have slotted right in to the narrative of OK Computer effortlessly, and its presence may have elevated OKC even further. But then, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to discover, all over again, this 25-year-old song in 2017.