The other night I had the time to finally watch Marco Porsio’s 2019 Swans documentary Where Does a Body End. First off: Five stars. Well done. Rock docs follow a certain pattern that this didn’t really deviate from – interview the principals, interview their comrades present and past. In this case the principal is Michael Gira, who founded Swans in 1981 or so and has been the only consistent member across 40-plus years. He was generous with his time and his own assessments of his strengths and faults. I was excited early on that there was a clip of Einsturzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld expressing some praise. Alas, he only gets the camera once more near the end. Other key interviewees included Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth (who toured with Swans at the beginnings of both bands’ histories), and Jarboe. Jarboe drove up to NYC from Atlanta in ‘85 or so having written a fan letter (shared in the doc) to the band after hearing an early recording on college radio. She joined as keyboardist and occasional vocalist appearing first on the 1986 releases Greed, Holy Money, and Time is Money (Bastard). We learn from the doc that she and Gira were partners from that period until Gira disbanded Swans in 1997. (He would reignite Swans in 2010 without Jarboe. An impetus for the film was Gira’s announcement that the newer incarnation of the group would halt after four albums and the accompanying 2017 tour. Last year, a new lineup released an album and are touring – I’ve seen them twice this time out.) Her participation in the documentary is generous and alone worth the price of admission if you’re interested in how bands work.
Thurston Moore’s memories of their bands’ tours together is poignant in the descriptions of just how difficult life on the road was/is for independent acts. In his thoughts on the re-invigorated version of Swans, he admits to a little jealous that Gira’s band was still going, ‘He’s got Swans. I don’t have Sonic Youth.’ (This is a little disingenuous – Moore and SY’s bassist Kim Gordon had been a couple/married for 27 years until Moore fathered a child with their nanny. That put paid to SY.)
One of the most interesting thing about how the film is constructed is the wealth of live footage of the band, both their earlier incarnations and the more recent tours. I was amused of a clip from their 2011 appearance at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in London because I was there. Not that I could have picked myself out in the audience. My favourite clip (which I hope to find online) was Jarboe joining the new lineup in 2016 or so to perform Blood On Yr Hands (a highlight of the ‘95/‘97 tours.)
And of course I can write paragraphs and paragraphs about the interviews and the clips and so forth, but as always, it’s a case of dancing about architecture. Swans have always been about the intensity of the musical experience and their music isn’t for the faint of heart. I think Screen Shot is representative.
Yeah, I know we’re almost through the first month of 2024 and I’m usually more on top of this, but I didn’t read that much last year anyway. So…
Words: Malinda Lo – Last Night at the Telegraph Club (reread for the Leiden expat book club – the other participants didn’t love it as much as I did, but that’s fine too.) Sonia Blanck – Hive (I don’t think this is published yet – I met Sonia on Mastodon and offered to read it. Good and weird SF. Keep your eyes peeled for it.) Jaqueline Harpman – I Who Have Never Known Men (Weird and disturbing SF – the title shouldn’t put you off – this was a proper mindfuck.) Dorothy L. Sayers – Strong Poison M. Katz – Cybernetic Tea Shop C. McMullen – A Space Girl From Earth Rachel Churcher – Angels (I was a sensitivity reader on this *very* cool YA novel. A leap ahead in style and ability for Ms. Churcher. Check it out.) Marek Šindelka – Aberrant (Another book club read – I really enjoyed this bit of weirdness that takes place in and around Prague in 2002. My colleagues in the club didn’t know what to make of the flooding in the city that occupies the last third of the book. I knew from the first dateline that the Prague Flood of 2002 would come up. But I lived in Prague at the time. Everyone else in the club was confused.) Jonathan Scott – The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape Rachel Pollack – Unquenchable Fire (I’d never heard of Pollack, but when she passed away last year, Neil Gaiman penned an appreciation of her work, so I took a dive. Excellent as the recommendation would suggest.) Terry Pratchett – Small Gods (Another one for the book club – still excellent.) S. Jones – Sisters Cavendish (Another preread – this one’s not published yet either, but it’s great.) Ursula K. Le Guin – The Lathe of Heaven (Read for the new book club at my office which still only has two members. Hadn’t read this in 30 years and gracious is it weirdly wonderful. Still.) S.L. Rowland – Cursed Cocktails (Cozy fantasy goodness. Recommended.) Dana Hughes – Rain (A Novella) Kate Castle – Girl Island (Office book club. Female take on Lord of the Flies – very well done.) Sean Carroll – The Biggest Ideas in the Universe Satoshi Yagisawa – Days at the Morisaki Bookshop Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler (first read in college back in ’85 – still weirdly wonderful) Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood (Office book club. I’d read other Murakami, but not this one, his “normal” novel. Enjoyed it a lot.) Delacorta – Diva (I’d bought a DVD of the movie which I hadn’t seen in an age and when I posted about it, a friend said, ‘yeah, you have to read the books too. Lola and Luna are waiting on the bookshelf.) Anne Leckie – Ancillary Justice (recommended by a cousin – wonderful stuff – want to get to the next ones in the series.) Graham Greene – Travels with My Aunt (Amusing and strange in the way that only Greene is.) George Orwell – 1984 (office book club)
Audio: George Johnson – Miss Leavitt’s Stars Carl Sagan – The Demon Haunted World Richard Osman – The Thursday Murder Club Bruce Dickinson – What Does This Button Do? (Interesting memoir from the lead singer of Iron Maiden who has done very cool things, but has abridged much that makes an actual life interesting. Not nearly as good as Rob Halford’s Confess.) Jung Chang – Wild Swans (When a niece was recovering from a concussion, my sister read this aloud to her. Sis had recommended it in the 90s, but I never took the dive. This history of China from the period before the Communist victory through the Cultural Revolution is riveting stuff.) Elliot Page – Pageboy (Memoir by excellent trans actor – very nicely done.) K. Tempest Bradford – Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion Homer – The Odyssey (Emily Watson translation, read wonderfully by Claire Danes. Alas Danes does not read her translation of The Illiad, but that’s on my list too. Trevor Horne – Adventures in Modern Recording (Memoir of many great albums from the guy who sang Video Killed the Radio Star and produced Welcome to the Pleasuredome. Among so many other things.) Kai Bird and Martin K. Sherwin – American Prometheus (The Pulitzer-winning bio of Robert J. Oppenheimer on which the movie Oppenheimer was based. If you thought that Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss was a bastard in the movie, dang. Strauss was so much worse in real life.)
I tell a story about my sister having two tickets for Talking Heads at the Pantages in Hollywood in December of 1983. She was already in college and her boyfriend begged off the show she’d bought tickets for. She asked me if I wanted to go. Of course I did, but those gigs were a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and the hard fast rule for me was no gigs on school nights. Our parents were out of town, and there was no way they’d find out. But I went to Hollywood with my sister and watched her sell the tickets around the corner from the show. How many of you have regrets that have lasted for four decades?
Eight or nine months later, that series of gigs was immortalized on film as Stop Making Sense. I went to see it in the theatre three or four times in its initial run (once with friends who were flying on LSD – I didn’t partake of that either) and I’ve seen it at least three or four more times in the intervening decades. And I’ve listened to the album hundreds of times. I’ve had it on tape, CD, and download.
So ever since that teaser of David Byrne picking up his big suit from the dry cleaner came out, I’ve been keen to see it again on the big screen. And I finally did this week with my friend Cheryl (who hadn’t seen it since that initial run). From that beautiful moment when Byrne walks out on a bare stage with an acoustic guitar and a boom box and says “I have a tape I want to play for you” and we hear the backing of Psycho Killer, we know we’re in for something special.
With each of the next several songs, another band member comes on: Tina Weymouth to play bass on Heaven, Chris Franz to play drums (the drum riser rolled out by crew all in black) on Thank You For Sending Me An Angel, and then guitarist/keyboardist Jerry Harrison on Found A Job. Two backup singers, Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt, percussionist Steve Scales, and guitarist Alex Weir join the action for Slippery People. Finally keyboardist Bernie Worrell joins on Burning Down the House.
On seeing it in 1984, everything was very new to me in terms of how rock and roll was put on film. The first surprise, having been far more familiar with the music than the visuals, is that there are two capable singers on stage for the song Heaven, but Tina Weymouth doesn’t have a mic. Lynn Mabry sings harmony from offstage. (Later in the film, Byrne leaves the stage to Weymouth and Franz, aka Tom Tom Club, to perform their hit Genius of Love, on which Weymouth sings lead. It’s not as though she couldn’t have harmonized on Heaven, as she was already on stage.)
As the film moves forward, there’s wonder in how long the cameras linger on Byrne, and occasionally on the other musicians. There’s none of the jump-cut editing that so annoys me on Strictly Come Dancing (and, to be honest, most movies these days), which is nice. On the other hand, there are nine really capable musicians on stage for most of the performance and the joy of a good performance film is being able to see them interact in the context of their art. The most egregious example of the hyper-focus on Byrne is the song Once In a Lifetime. The camera doesn’t move for five of the song’s 5 1/2 minutes, and when it does, we see Holt and Mabry out of focus doing interesting dance moves that Demme didn’t think we’d be interested in, somehow. (Then there’s this Siskel and Ebert review in which all they talk about is Byrne.)
There are other places in Stop Making Sense where we get wider camera angles and see the interplay of the performers, most notably in the gorgeous Naive Melody.
In ‘83, Talking Heads were touring their fifth album, the damn near flawless Speaking In Tongues, which provides six of the film’s 16 tracks. The sound on all of the songs (especially from the third song onward) is fuller and deeper than on the studio albums (and even the versions found on earlier live compilation The Name of this Band Is Talking Heads. When you can see the other members of the band, you can tell they’re firing on all cylinders, having performed as quartet for several years before expanding in ‘80 and ‘81 to a much larger touring act.
Even in ‘83 there was animosity between Byrne and the other Talking Heads, and they continued for three more very interesting albums (Little Creatures, True Stories, and Naked), but they never toured again. While the music on Stop Making Sense is obviously a collaboration of brilliant and capable musicians, one can only wish that the band and film makers had seen fit to share more of that collaboration with the audience.
A friend I’ll call G recently wrote an impassioned post about the experience of growing up female, that this is a unique thing that trans women somehow dilute. Her post included also argued that the sheer average size of biological males argues against their right to occupy biological female space. They are incapable of knowing the fears and joys of being female, from the perspective of being biologically female from birth in the world.
As cisgender humans, G and I are incapable of occupying the spaces of other genders. Our experiences don’t allow for that – nature or nurture – but we can empathise with others’ experiences. I can start to imagine the fears of women making their way through public spaces where they’re catcalled – fears that as a cis-presenting male, I don’t live with. I can imagine those fears and be with those who have them in their space without, for example, denigrating their lived experience. Stating it this way is, I admit freely, very harsh to my friend’s position – possibly harsher than it needs to be. With that empathy I can try to a better human, advocate, partner, and friend.
I also didn’t grow up suffering any kind of gender dysphoria, but I can empathise with those who experience it now – who spend every moment with the feeling that the space they occupy, the space assigned to them, the roles society puts them in are wrong – and argue to make their existences easier and more aligned with who they are. I don’t need to live their experience to trust their lived experience. I was reading today about Brianna Titone, a trans woman in the Colorado legislature. Her childhood dream was to work for the FBI and she remained closeted until she aged out of admission to the Bureau at the age of 37. I can barely imagine the pain that cost her.
From my perspective, it matters what those initial experiences imprint on a person, but those experiences are both internal and external and shouldn’t be legislated back into the closet.
Paraphrasing from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: We can’t know the inner experiences of other people, but we can know our own hearts and by this know the hearts of others. Not what their desires and needs and fears are, but the nature of desire and need and fear. (Hobbes presents this idea in the introduction to the Leviathan. The syntax is very old-school, but it’s four paragraphs worth reading.)
This is possibly the key to the argument. G knows the nature of her fears and needs and desires as she grew into womanhood – or does if she examines her own heart, just as I know mine. We can use that self knowledge to examine the fears and needs of those who grow in a body that doesn’t feel right. Or with desires that don’t align with what the so-called majority posits are the only legitimate paths for desire.
How do we make things equitable in the public square in the face of state after state legislating against trans existence? It’s truly fascistic, in my view, and sets the stage for a full rewrite of the sexual freedoms Americans have had since Griswold. Women are already suffering as a result of restrictions on procedures and medicines that are associated with abortion even if the mother’s ability to further bear children should she survive complications of a pregnancy gone awry. It’s a demonic state of affairs. A few years ago there was a case in Dublin where a woman’s pregnancy went septic – she was denied abortion and died as a result. In response, Ireland legalised abortion and at the time was seen as a latecomer to abortion rights in general. Since then, the US has gone backwards with alarming speed.
What does all of this have to do with trans rights? Good question. Affirming that a person has the right to determine where and how they are most comfortable in their body is one place – bodily autonomy is another. Gender affirming care is a phrase, like ‘woke’ and ‘political correctness’ that has been twisted out of all recognition. G has also argued that drag in general mocks femininity rather than embraces and exalts it. Was Barry Humphries, or Ian McKellen for that matter, mocking women? Do panto dames mock women by their very existence?
G has shared a point about drag being men in ‘woman-face’ and she’s not the only one of my friends to do so. What makes drag different than minstrel shows – Al Jolson singing Mammy in black face? The sidestepping of discrimination and thereby making fun of an underclass group is partially at the heart of each one. But drag has always seemed to me more celebratory of those things that make women different than men.
In considering the arguments against trans people, I’ve wondered if autism in a similar category as gender dysphoria? In both cases, societal and medical changes developments should make it more possible to live comfortably and successfully in the world than was possible ten, twenty, thirty years ago. I can hear a case that these are totally different – one is something that you can show in a medical diagnosis and is historically identified. And the other? Very much the same.
The main problem I have with my friends expressing anti-trans or anti-drag sentiment is that trans folks and queer people in general are in the legislative crosshairs in the US and elsewhere. And the last couple of years have seen a massive uptick in these things.
There are eight trans legislators in US statehouses. None in the US Congress. The silencing and outlawing a class of queer people is happening in at least half of the states with very few voices able to stand up on the other side. And when they do stand up, they’re often silenced. The case of Representative Zooey Zephyr in Montana comes to mind. She was ousted from her duly elected seat for speaking against an anti-trans bill and is still unable to return. The bill passed and was signed by the state’s republican governor.
I read the papers everyday and above the virtual fold, always, is something about the targets on the backs of gender non-conforming people. There’s the bill in Texas trying to legislate that people working for government dress to match the gender they were assigned at birth. (This is nothing new in Texas – I had a housemate 20 years ago who fought her previous employer, the Houston office of the Internal Revenue Service for the right to wear trousers to work. If I recall correctly, she had to take them to court.)
And the BBC reports that the Proud Boys (yes, the source of five seditious conspiracy convictions this week) are now targeting drag shows.
I’m not sure of the answers and I think my lack of certainty is me being played into a more fascistic position. I’m not active in drag (though I once dated the first drag queen to run for president, Joan Jett Blakk), and I’ve never watched Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Are a bunch of queer men dressing up and making their faces exaggerations of femininity problematic in ways that I as a queer-adjacent male can’t comprehend? Are we really that different, men and women (and all human points between and beyond), that we can’t bridge this divide without othering and criminalising a valued (or any) segment of the population, without devaluing any of us? It’s the devaluing of humans for something that’s inherent (heck, even if it’s for something as harmless as drag, that’s chosen) that gets me first, whereas othering people at all takes a piece of my heart and incinerates it while I still breathe.
Of course the music industry wants streaming prices to rise. They’re in the business of maximizing shareholder value by hook or by crook. Raising streaming prices, of course, doesn’t mean they’ll pay the artists any more, but the coffers of those at the top will be enriched. More.
The BBC article has an interesting table of the top ten earning artists worldwide last year, with the assumption that these are the artists who make up the bulk of that 26 billion in the headline. Four are from Southeast Asia, four from North America (including Taylor Swift at the top of that list), and two from the UK. The table doesn’t include their earnings.
Who the artists are and where they’re from aren’t very useful metrics for understanding the position or state of the music industry as a whole.
To get closer, sure I want to know what those artists earned, but the music industry is massive. What the artists earned might be peanuts compared to what the labels earned on the backs of their work. Also, the music industry is comprised not just of artists and labels, but of touring and ticketing organizations (dominated by LiveNation and Ticketmaster), distributors, agents, and all the people and infrastructure around secondary markets such as television and film.
Once upon a time, there were about a dozen major labels. When I was in high school, the shop I worked in sold almost entirely 45s. (When, you ask? I worked at American Pie on Venice Blvd from 1983-1985. I don’t know when it eventually closed.) The business model included a storefront, but was mostly dedicated to wholesaling. The records were organized by label and then by record number. It was MCA, Polgygram, WEA (Warner / Elektra / Atlantic), CBS (which was Columbia and Epic, later subsumed by Sony), Capitol/EMI, A&M/RCA and a small scad of independents. We dealt entirely in reissues of the oldies and the current top 40. Even those six conglomerates have shrunk to a smaller number. The thing is, at the time, they were all doing well as separate entities.
Fast forward 20 years for an anecdote about the times they’d fallen on. In 2005, EMI (and whatever agglomeration it then belonged to) pinned all of its financials on one release. One. The release in question was Coldplay’s X&Y. Great pop album. It did really well, but EMI, once home of the Beatles, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, and Pink Floyd, sold its recorded music division to Universal Music Group. UMG, by my own finger in the wind estimate, accounts for about 40% of the recorded music business. A list of UMG’s labels is here.
(A side note regarding EMI’s accounting: In 1985, coming off the massive success of Hounds of Love and The Whole Story, someone at EMI dropped the ball and forgot to renew Kate Bush’s contract. Her next albums came out on Columbia.)
My perspective is (as is usual) different than that of the BBC. The larger metrics I’d like to have at my disposal are those associated with the independent music sector. While I enjoy a lot of pop, I was amused by the fact that I could hum exactly one song by one artist on that list up top. (To get Shape of You by Ed Sheeran out of my head, a friend sent me a link to BTS’s Butter which is a straight-up banger, no doubt about it.) As noted, I don’t listen to a lot of pop, but the artists I do spend a lot of time on have carved out their own interesting niches.
The folks I discuss here are ones I’ve long been fans of – Bandcamp and other such platforms support thousands and thousands of artists, many of whom are more or less successful on their own terms as well.
Michael Gira finances the recording of Swans albums by releasing limited edition CDs of demos and live material. The fan base snaps them up and the band goes into the studio every few years. Gira owns his own label, Young God Records and has been known to manage his own distribution by hand (though they inked a distribution deal with Mute for their last album, 2019’s leaving meaning which I think is still in effect for the upcoming release, The Beggar).
Laura Kidd, whose first several albums came out under the moniker She Makes War, and now records as Penfriend. Her most recent release, One In A Thousand came out under the name Obey Robots with Rat from Ned’s Atomic Dustbin), runs her own label, My Big Sister Recordings. She does all her own marketing and promotion and her last two albums have debuted in high positions on the UK’s independent music charts. She’s been doing things her way for almost 15 years without major label support. Check out the Obey Robots track Elephant.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor is another band who run their own label (Constellation Recordings). I’m well aware that music that falls under the rubric of post-rock aren’t going to be raking in the big bucks. Even as a fan, I was unaware of their last album, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!, until about a month after its April, 2021 release. They’ve been recording on and off since 1997’s F♯ A♯ ∞ (there was a break between 2002 and 2012 since which time they’ve released four insanely good albums) entirely on their own terms. When they tour, they sell out decent-sized venues without a lot of promotion. Given the chance to get their music to an even wider audience, the band holds to its principles. They allowed Danny Boyle to use a track in his film 28 Days Later but wouldn’t allow its inclusion on the soundtrack. My guess about this is that they stick to a singular artistic vision. Their albums, much like their concerts, are best experienced as full pieces, but there’s probably more to it. GY!BE are also one of those bands that allows taping of their shows and there’s an extensive list of concerts posted at archive.org. Here’s Job’s Lament from a gig last year in Minneapolis.
Unwoman, who creates cello-based music which is ostensibly pop, reaches her fans through Patreon and judicious use of social media. I’m not sure how I would have found her had she not been part of group I belonged to who met regularly at a pub on Haight street back in the 90s. She releases independently, using Bandcamp as a distribution tool (as do most of the artists I mention here). One way she keeps her fans engaged is by polling them to choose which covers she’ll record. The music itself tends to emotionally bare electronic/goth sounds (which is really reductive, I know), but she’s an experienced enough musician to have fun with songs like Everything Is Awesome.
SUNN O))) is another one of those acts who make difficult music for the benefit of an ever-expanding audience. Two guys who drive their sound with feedback-heavy riffs, performing in hooded robes behind waves of fog to keep their appearance hidden. Like the other artists I talk about here, they’ve been in this game for a long time. Evolving from acts such as Burning Witch, Goatsnake and Engine Kid (by way of Thorr’s Hammer), they created Southern Lord Records to release their own material and since 1998 of cultivated quite a roster. (Around 70 acts call or have called Southern Lord home.) Interestingly, Southern Lord’s distribution is handled by UMG. SUNN O))) also post audience recordings of their shows to Bandcamp. As was said about the Grateful Dead back in the day, the albums are fine, but the best way to experience them is live. That said, the in-studio set they recorded for the BBC, Metta, Benevolence, isn’t a bad intro.
To bring the thing full circle, the acts I mention here have been actively engaging the music industry for anywhere from 15 to over 40 years. (Swans evolved out of the same early 80s No Wave scene that gave the world Sonic Youth.) Many learned the hard way or took the hard way to satisfy the drive to create unapologetic music. Taylor Swift, according to Wikipedia, wanted to be making pop from a very young age and with the help of parents who were in a position to do so, she worked within the industry to develop her skills and create music that would sell. And sell it she has, by the truckload.
I know I’m not Swift’s target audience, but I recall my boss at American Pie telling me that the ability to write pop music that sells is a skill. I believe we were talking about Van (“The Hustle”) McCoy who had just passed away, but the same holds true of many such artists, Swift among them. She took her early successes and has continued to build on them. While she’s not my cup of tea, I can’t help but appreciate that. There are, however, massive communities of creators of hundreds of different musical styles who I’d like to see accounted for in these discussions.
Joe Jots 