For our second 2020MG guest issue, we’re excited to share a post from our friend, Mark Iosifescu. Enjoy!
Mark Iosifescu is a writer, editor, and musician from New York City. His newsletter “Failures of the Avant-Garde” is mostly about the historical counterculture and its interactions with art, literature, and music.
Guest Post: Mark Iosifescu
In kicking around ideas for this contribution to 2020 Music Group, I’ll freely admit that I got stuck for a while trying to make something sufficiently thoughtful out of a small handful of musical hobbyhorses, topics I’ve brought up in conversation enough times with enough friends that they constitute set-it-and-forget it routines. I’m talking, of course, about a) the idea that the Star-Spangled Banner is a much better track when performed at a regular, ironclad tempo without slowing for the chorus or applying any melismatic runs or show-tune allargandos; and b) the unrelated phenomenon in “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement” when Joey Ramone for some reason calls the room in question the “base,” in turn bringing to mind other songs whose singers just stop saying a certain word halfway through (like, for instance, “Pseud Mag. Ed.,” or when Lil B says “I want your bih”). Great, high-minded ideas, I know, and someone should probably write about them before too long—but meantime, we can definitely do better.
In truth, this assignment is notably daunting because, although I spend a huge proportion of my time thinking about music in one form or another, my present condition of new parenthood has my listening habits in a singular kind of disarray. It’s not that I haven’t been listening to music lately; on the contrary, it’s actually more of a go-to just now than it’s been in a minute. But the listening I’m doing feels weighty, self-conscious, and conceptually overdetermined, on levels that are either super utilitarian (comprising thoughts like Hiroshi Yoshimura must be good for newborn brain development) or humiliatingly hipsto-pedagogical (pointing to the guy on my laptop screen and whispering That’s Flavor Flav). And it’s all lost on my kid anyway, who is much too young and, as far as media preferences goes, only cares about looking at and sometimes chewing on crinkly paper.
Meanwhile, I have been managing, thankfully, to get out of my way long enough to find comparatively less affected art experiences—mostly in books and film, mostly circling my perennial research obsessions: countercultural history and aesthetic engagements with political revolution. The other week, I caught a screening of Zabriskie Point, Antonioni’s fantastic and deeply phony 1970 simulacron of American hippie revolt. Besides some rich real-world ties to the era’s interwoven antiestablishment factions (via its leads Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, SF dropouts who would go on to join Mel Lyman’s Boston commune, the ballyhooed “East Coast Manson Family”), the movie also features a soundtrack by Pink Floyd, plus some Jerry Garcia (he rips a truly whatever solo over a truly great sex scene) and Fahey’s “Dance of Death.” Not the worst selection of the kind of contemporary guitar music meant to signify, for the era’s well-heeled arthouse filmgoer, a combination of incorrigibly cool sonic radicalism (as in the opening credits’ sampled human heartbeat) and reassuring rootsy authenticity (as in the black blues and country tunes that underlie the entire enterprise). But Zabriskie Point is, for me, most notable for a story that my father, who grew up in communist Romania, tells of a classroom screening of the film during his time at the University of Bucharest. Apparently, a state socialist group programmed the movie (something seldom if ever done for non-Soviet/eastern bloc films) out of deference to its purportedly anticapitalist subject matter—the decadent West coming in for its just desserts, that kind of thing. The way my dad tells it, the screening was a madhouse: students overfilled the seats, crowded aisles and entranceways, even jammed onto wall fixtures and windowsills, straining and jockeying to get a look at the screen. Were they engaged with the film’s political critique, or at least cheering on its righteous countervailing violence? No way, man; they were transfixed by the style, by the signifiers, by the production’s imprimatur of coolness, and no question, by the enticingly rebellious rock’n’roll music on offer.
A counterpoint that feels worth bringing up (mostly because it’s another movie I managed to get out to see recently) is 1971’s Goya or the Hard Way to Enlightenment, an East German historical pageant on the life of the painter directed by Konrad Wolf and starring Donatas Banionis (aka the dude in the mesh shirt from Solaris). In contrast to Zabriskie Point’s high style and loose critical framework, Goya is a product of state socialism with no shortage of government-sanctioned antifascist bonafides: it’s based on a Feuchtwangler novel and directed by a member of a German Communist Party family dynasty whose father fought for Spain’s International Brigades and whose brother was literally a Stasi spymaster. Unsurprisingly—though not uncomplicatedly—Goya also tows the line for a regime-friendly doctrine of socialist realism, a dimension that heavily involves its use of music. In the film, Goya is depicted as an unrepentant careerist and a decadent toadie for the Spanish imperial court until the night he encounters a traditional folksinger named Maria Rosario Gomez performing an old ballad in a tavern. When he later sees Gomez arrested and put on trial by the Inquisition, her second, boldly subversive performance of what she calls “a song of our mothers” is the catalyst for his political conversion, transforming him from a lapdog of monarchism into an apostle of justice for his nation’s immiserated peasantry (an identity crystallized in his eventual creation of “The Disasters of War” and the “Black Paintings”). The film, in other words, locates a kind of transcendent ideological value in traditional folk music, even as the artist it lionizes used his transcendent encounter to move toward forms which were, in their way, increasingly nontraditional. It’s a conceptual acrobatic that feels typical of great works from the eastern bloc, produced by artists who knew how to stash their modernist tendencies behind the bounds of various state-approved ideological safezones, often ones based in history, and even more often in the inarguably humble, proud-peasant-coded folk idiom. Which, now that I think about it, is not that different from Antonioni’s use of the Fahey recording or whatever; it’s just that, being done under a regime with more or less explicit rules about which art is acceptable and which isn’t, Wolf’s version’s got decidedly higher stakes.
A final entanglement between film music and historical leftist doctrine I’ve been thinking about, and probably the best one, is Chris Marker’s Chat écoutant la musique or Cat Listening to Music. Marker is, of course, thee sick cinematic chronicler of complexity and contradiction among the revolutionary movements of his era, and a noted proselytizer for the feline of the species (take his A Grin Without a Cat, which does more simple explanatory good with collaged archival footage than any sweatily high-concept Adam Curtis sermon while *also* managing to include the all-timer truth “A cat is never on the side of power”). Marker also had a whole schtick going with his own pet cat Guillaume-en-Égypte, whom he featured and credited in lots of work and eventually made into a Second Life avatar, though not before directing the short film in question in 1988. Chat écoutant la musique spends threeish minutes observing Guillaume as he snoozes happily atop Marker’s DX7, which is itself pretty lovingly framed. Meanwhile, in the background, a CD of solo piano excursions by Federico Mompou plays, the cat’s ears twitch periodically amid the Satieian daintiness, and things stay thoroughly cozy. A vision of simple aesthetic rapture, as delivered neither by a brash stylist like Antonioni nor by an ambivalent functionary like Wolf, but by a real-world observer of real-world revolution—and, as often, its willful underminings, paradoxes, failures, and rollbacks—who’s content just now to let the musical moment be. If a political actor as faultlessly virtuous as Guillaume-en-Égypte can enjoy some tunes without getting tangled up in overwrought ideological symbolism, stale culture/counterculture alignments, or regular-ass self-conscious over-explaining, then probably I can too, someday. But not today!!