Story Archive September 26, 2003 (Page 1 of 1)

Only yesterday I read about the suicide of Ian MacDonald (it's already more than a month ago), a music critic who wrote Revolution in the Head, an encyclopedic book with small essays on every song the Beatles ever released.

In the obituaries it was implied that he killed himself as he had been deeply depressed over the state of the world in the past two or three years. And I immediately thought, what? Why should anybody finish his life for such an almost philosophical reason especially if he is already 54 years old? That must be a false excuse brought forward by the family, the truth must be somewhere else, somewhere in his private life, in his relations to others. I read about him on several websites but only one weblogger (and music critic) had the same idea as me. Ian Penman wrote a wordy stream-of-consciousness entry in his Pill Box where he made clear that MacDonald's problem probably wasn't the current state of the world but his own loneliness stemming from his glorification of the past and incapability to link to today's cultural and musical scene which definitely is not per se less valid than that of his beloved 60s. That's old fart thinking in the most narrow-minded way. MacDonald had locked himself up from the world in his cottage on the English countryside. And there is no way you can survive on this planet as a complete hermit without love.

When I reread MacDonald's entry on Across the Universe I was surprised by the harshness of his verdict. This is one of my favourite Beatles songs, the last song I ever wept to, almost ten years ago (it was more of a catalysator, a love story had just ended). MacDonald calls it a wailing, baby-like evocation-singsong (retranslated from German). I can only feel pity for this erudite critic who knew much more about music than me but whose knowledge apparently hampered his appreciation of beauty.

The long essay on Nick Drake he published just before his death is another indication that there was something wrong with this man. He knew Nick Drake personally and interprets him in a school-book fashion I admire and detest at the same time. In hindsight the article is like his own requiem but the analysis is extremely aloof and there is not one word about himself feeling the same alienation to the world as Drake. What struck me the most was the interpretation of the moon as "the magnetic pull of attachment to materiality" in Nick Drake's lyrics. That seems so plain wrong to me. My favourite Drake song Road from Pink Moon didn't get mentioned of course and the lines I will never forget refute his thesis:

You can say the sun is shining if you really want to I can see the moon and it seems so clear You can take the road that takes you to the stars now I can take the road that'll see me through

I think it is absolutely futile to try to categorize Drake's lyrics as MacDonald did. They are not rational. They are universal.

out in the UK on October, 6th. There is a 4 1/2 (out of 5) star review at Americana UK.

We walk on a bit, and he comments admiringly on another passing girl. "I've developed a technique recently that works rather well, I think." I expect him to start talking about musical techniques, but then he says: "I lean on a parking meter, and every time a beautiful girl walks by, I smile at her. If she smiles back, I invite her up to my flat for a cup of tea. I moved to New York City because there are so many beautiful girls here, more than anywhere else in the world."

"I also did La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt," which was a good performance too. It's a place that I can't remember the exact score, but it stipulates that you play a complex chord cluster and that you try to play it identically and with an even space between it. There were two ways of doing it, since the score is ambiguous: you either play each one identical to the first, where you're trying to always play exactly the same thing, or you try to play each one identical to the one before. I did two performances of that one: I did one like this"--he spreads his arms--"at a piano where it was just as many notes as I could cover, and I did another one with an open piano frame where I just used a big flat piece of wood, CRASH CRASH CRASH. It sounds horrible I know, but if you last ten minutes it gets very interesting. My first performance of it lasted an hour and the second one an hour and a half. It's one of those hallucinatory pieces where your brain starts to habituate so that you cease to hear all the common notes, you just hear the differences from crash to crash, and these become so beautiful. They're just entrancing. The difference can be like trying to cover both the black and white keys at the same time, sometimes you don't get a white down properly or miss a black, and just missing one note out of the fifty or so you're covering is a very noticeable difference, you really can hear that. You start to hear these omissions as melodies, or sometimes your arms creeps up a little bit further or down a little bit further or you hit too hard or your rhythm switches, and of course since I had the sustain pedal down as well it was just a continuous ring and eventually the whole piano was just really resonating and the richness of the sound was just amazing. After a little while you start to hear every type of sound, it's the closest thing in music to a drug experience I've heard. You hear trumpets and bells and people talking clear words, sentences coming out, because the brain starts to--it's like the opposite of sensory deprivation, but it's the same effect. You start to hallucinate, because you telescope in on finer and finer details, like for instance the acoustics of the room become very very obvious to you. You notice that one note always echoes off that wall and another always echoes off that wall. And you can hear interplays like that in space as well, which of course are facts that in a normal performance you wouldn't be aware of, since things are going by so quickly and they don't repeat.