Review Summary: Straw gods..
With each passing year, our collective ideology becomes more convoluted and hollowed at once. On the one hand, you’ve got a perpetually rising tide of radical decency that is now bordering on one of the most aggressive censorship campaigns in the arts since the Nixon era. Decency, behind which sits a faceless, raceless, genderless, non-sectarian being, which in itself is a masterpiece of closet conservatism. On the other hand, sociopolitical paranoia has reached such drastic levels of anxiety, that the neo-liberal agenda of painting it as an archaic beast seems more an inane cosmetic policy than anything else.
It makes sense then that the only thing that can get our collective attention anymore is something violent or militant. Reality TV and general tendency towards addiction fetishes have now bled over into areas to which they are particularly detrimental; politics, economics, social stigmatism, artistic expression etc. If radical artists in the 70’s were thrashing against steadfast mainline dullness, today’s crop do it because it’s just about the only way they can float to the top of the sewer, be it through personality, public persona or the art itself. This is where we find so-called ‘polarizing’ acts, Kanye West, Swans and the like.
Of course Kanye West and Swans walk the fringe for entirely different reasons, at least at surface value. It’s hard to imagine now how much of a modest producer prodigy West used to be in the music world before his first albums started to properly take off. His first album cover showed a dejected masked man, an obverse of his identity-fuelled persona of today, and that album’s topics skirted token rap braggadocio in favour of addressing the black diaspora in the Free World, the gender divide etc. It was a dizzyingly fast reach from that to the sort of man who would probably head-butt a baby at a christening because the little pink cunt is taking up all the attention in the room. You can always make the argument of course that Kanye West didn’t do this to himself, we did it to him. You tell someone they’re a genius long enough, eventually even the most ascetic man will start imploding egotistically. But that’s a cheap half-claim at best. Can’t make a scumbag do something a scumbag couldn’t have done in the first place.
Comparatively, Michael Gira’s persona is mired in more intrinsic integrity. They’re easier tropes to walk at any point. Misanthropic, atonal, abstract, brutalized; all these facets linger on solitude. You can cultivate them privately and unleash them gradually. It’s been incredibly strange to watch Swans become aesthetic bastions of what ‘experimental’ music, ‘noise’ music, ‘anti’-music is. Even stranger has been witnessing them suddenly become critical darlings for doing it, and subsequently a sort of cultural juggernaut. Which they are. Sure, they aren’t selling out Carnegie Hall once a year, or promoting on the late night talk show circuit. Their music doesn’t pop up on HBO shows, and they don’t get priority seating at award shows. But they do conduct sold-out tours of mid-sized theatres across the country and the world. They manage the fickle middle line between indie elitists and metal snobs (Both Pitchfork and this site adore them). But Gira is not the same as West in even his polarizing nascence. If West became a megalomaniacal terror in parallel progression to his fame, Gira was likely at that level of psychoneurotic self-love when he was cutting low budget LP’s in New York in the 70’s, pissing and moaning all the way how that city was too dirty and drug-addled, a man with his head shoved up his own ass smack-dab in the middle of one of the most fruitful and exciting art revivals in our history. This isn’t to say that West was a modest little boy before we turned him into a monster. But creating dissonance carries a lot more built-in artistic value than plunderphonics. Gira’s fame stands as the end terminus of a man who screamed so hard and so long that he was brilliant, that the world finally believed him, just as he stopped believing it himself. And now there’s no stopping him.
I’ve listened to Swans for fifteen years. And I remember the kind of golden moment they used to lend me. A feeling of utter nihil. It made all art seem limitless. But that was fifteen years ago. I haven’t stopped trying to soak them back in. But when I listen to them today, I feel as absurd of myself as I do of grown men who still think Catcher in the Rye or On the Road are formative classic works of literature. There are things that are made for you to absorb when you’re an empty kid looking to find meaning. Tabula Rasa art. It works best when applied to teenagers, and teenage boys in particular. And what comes across a lot more obviously in real life conversations about Swans than it does on the Internet, is just how many people are forcing themselves into liking, nay, loving them. I understand that feeling. We build straw gods for no other reason than hollowness and solitude. It took me close to twenty years before I realized that it wasn’t against the law to dislike Ulysses. Swans were a decidedly shorter journey.
I did try again though, somewhat recently… it didn’t go well.
There’s something to be said about watching Swans perform at an open-air venue in broad daylight. Light and heat just pummeling down, illuminating the group of old grizzled men gathered on stage. It’s like seeing a curtain flap that made a whistling noise through the night that scared you as a kid in the lucidity of morning. It wasn’t terrifying or unfathomable. It was sad and hungover and smelled like piss. Unsettling, yes, but not the way monolithic art can be unsettling. Unsettling the way an old bum is when he pinches a nostril and blows a wad of snot onto your shoes at a bus-stop. Watching those men spasm and twitch in front of a field of strangers, men stubbornly dressed in black semi-casual clothes, as ridiculous-looking as any simulacra would be. It dispelled a lot of things.
I like Swans. I do. But not like you, baby. Never like you.
