Cavalier

“Speak until the dust settles in the same specific place.” – James Vincent McMorrow

James Vincent McMorrow has a voice that will break your heart. A strange falsetto that will linger in that lofty, unknown register for longer than you’d like. His debut album, Early in the Morning, was a favorite of mine in 2011. It is an album very much rooted in the folk tradition: anthemic choruses, confessional lyrics, and of course that voice. And yet, there is a quality to his music that provides various layers of listening and reveals manifold influences. We Don’t Eat and Down the Burning Ropes find extra strength with the addition of the chorus, and they also use the ostinato note that is most common in Jazz and R&B. Could you not just as easily lay an electronic beat under these songs to compliment the repetitive rhythms and notes?

With this in mind, I was delighted to hear Cavalier from McMorrow’s forthcoming album, Post Tropical (out on Vagrant Records, January 2014). The sobering sentiment of his music remains the same, but the banjo and acoustic guitar have been shelved for electronic layering and smooth soul sounds. Is that also brass I hear triumphing along with his falsetto at the end of the song? Comparisons to James Blake, D’Angelo, and perhaps even Jamie Woon are sure to arise. I can't help but hear even earlier sounds as well - sounds similar to those I grew up with. Synthesized, beat-driven, often sentimental ‘soft rock’ from the late 70’s and early 80’s. If his cover of Higher Love was any indication, I might be inclined to listen to McMorrow’s track along with the likes of early Steve Winwood or Phil Collins. And I’m certain I wasn’t the first to notice the album art for Post Tropical and it’s resemblance to Christopher Cross’ 1979 album. Flamingos unite.
In anticipation of the full Post Tropical album, I like to listen to Cavalier as inherently attributed to earlier music forms, deepened by modern soul and R&B influences, but driven further forward by rapt attention to what's come before. An understanding of (and perhaps even a tribute to) this landscape has allowed him to put notes to a boarder picture, and create a singular sound for himself.

Let’s talk about the video which is cavalier in and of itself. I heard the song before I played the video and though I didn’t expect a naked McMorrow singing soulfully from a dark empty room, I’m not certain I was expecting such a soulful song to elicit such a tragic, story-driven scene. The video is directed by Aoife McArdle, a Northern Ireland native and director/writer. She attributes most of her visual inspiration to writing and this attention to narrative is apparent in her work. The story opens at the proper beginning - the middle - with a feverish attempt at forgetting. Settings are born from the most lonesome of night spaces – a strip club, bars, bathroom, laundry mat, convenience store, and a nearly vacant bus. As if this insalubrious nighttime were a burial ground for a love story. But similar to that tale they always told us about the cream in the milk, so too will the sadness of memory rise to the top. I remember my first love.

 

It’s clear that McMorrow should not be pegged as a folk artist. There’s a genre-blending here that leaves me rapt for what other sounds might emerge from his new record. But if one thing is woven throughout his repertoire, it’s a sense of sweet lamentation, the loss of an idea or some fond love -and all I hear throughout is a beautiful, Irish Caoineadh song. I remember my first love.

"Every Love Story is a Ghost Story"

"Every Love Story is a Ghost Story." 

- David Foster Wallace

This is not a ghost story. It is a figure, hazy like an apparition before me, moving with meaning and speaking in voices familiar. As real and warm as flesh, and yet somehow unanchored to anything at this present hour. Faceless, at least in recollection, but I take more assurance in sound than shapes. Why is it that ghost stories are always told in hushed voices, in dimly lit spaces? A feeling of intimacy so notional that fear is inspired before visions make themselves known. Perhaps it's not the presence of something foreign, but the absence of something certain that breeds fear. Upon taking past moments to mind, I find them so slippery and ephemeral that they are a vision more feared than any real or retold haunting. This is not a ghost story, it's just a memory.

I am fascinated by how we are intrinsically drawn to themes and motifs of language, whether conscious or unconscious. It's no surprise that the supernatural is a theme that prevails in current and popular art forms in many ways; it seems you can't have a modern love story without a blood-hungry vampire, or a survival guide that doesn't involve running from a zombie. Cover your veins and watch your back, these are creatures that deal with the most fearsome subjects - love and mortality. But what about the quieter, more evasive presences? Taking a recent delve into my musical repitoire, I found myself to be haunted by ghosts at every turn. Song titles, albums, subtle references, reoccurring themes. What is the source of this unsettling?

This got me thinking about ghosts as a modern artistic and literary motif. In literature ghosts appear in Greek tragedy and with abundance in Shakespeare, haunting the pages of Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard III. In Macbeth, Banquo moves through crowded rooms, but is visible only to the eyes of Macbeth himself. In Hamlet, the ghost of the King appears early on the scene and changes the mental and physical course of the landscape that lies ahead; it is he who convinces Hamlet to seek revenge on King Claudius. Many of our modern stories are built on the shoulders of these tales. Then the Victorian era begot the quintessential ghost story, a blend of folklore and twisted psychology meant to inspire fear and terror. The emergence of Spiritualism and Freudian psychoanalysis led to deeper, darker provocations of the human mind and the supernatural was not only a topic of parlor conversations but prominent in literature and the arts.

Many decades later, the post-modern era shows a strong return to this Victorian gothic sensibility; ghosts haunt every turn. But before writing this off as simply neo-gothic, we should consider this haunting as a vital part of post-modern thought, and a fragment of our current zeitgeist. The ghost that I've encountered in modern music and text provides a single and profound psychological haunting. These are not ghosts that change the shape of plot lines, cause death, or induce terror. They reveal an unexpected presence, but it's more of the mind and less of the body - a dissonance between time and space, a confusion of memory. A dusty visitation from the past, a longing for something other than the present moment, an elegy to a lover long forgotten.

Each story is so wrought with longing, I couldn't help but think of the phrase attributed to David Foster Wallace, "every love story is a ghost story." In an article written by Wallace's biographer, D.T. Max questions the evolution of the phrase itself, perhaps not even originally ascribed by Wallace. The conclusion itself seems ghostlike: "hard to trace pathways" reveal little - maybe he penned it, maybe he didn't. I was also particularly struck by Max's mention of Weltschmerz. In a generation so defined by familiarity with media, a continual influx of information, and the domination of digital technologies, it's strange to come across the presence of something so dim and nebulous as the ghost. Perhaps in a word so hyper-defined, longing is all that's left. The resurgence of the ghost motif reminds us that the physical world is incapable of transcending that of the mind, or more deeply - the emotional subconscious. Even in our current environment, the most terrifying and transfixing of topics are not those that we can conjure, but those that we can't. Memory, dust, love, longing, and some unspoken whisper that reminds us that what we're touching will never rival what we're longing for. This is not a ghost story, it's just a memory.

For your listening pleasure I've complied a Spotify playlist with some haunting tunes that I will continue to add to, please feel free to make suggestions as well: Ghosts.  And yes it does include The Tony Rich Project. You're welcome. I've also included some of my favorite tracks below. Listen and be haunted.

Typhoon, Ghost Train

"You only move when I give chase, when I catch you, you dissipate."

Lord Huron, Ghost on the Shore

"Die if I must let my bones turn to dust

I'm the lord of the lake and I don't want to leave

All who sail off the coast ever more

Will remember the tale of the ghost on the shore."

Sanders Bohlke, Ghost Boy

"With our TV and radio friends, 

we colored our names in with permanent black pens, 

in momentary sentiments."

Black Rebel Motocycle Club, Some Kind of Ghost

"Oh oh oh sweet lord come home, 

Don't feel some kind of ghost."

NW: Community, Language & Visitation

The Penguin Press, 2012

In the fourth novel from Zadie Smith, a new prose style and ambitious narrative complexity emerges. NW is a novel primarily about language and the way that language defines us as people in the context of the modern world and the cities and communities that have raised us.

The story is one of visitations and intersections, showing those who are at home within the constructed world and those who are just guests within the story - as framed by power, and ultimately by language. The narrative follows two main female protagonists, Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake (formerly Keisha Blake), childhood friends drawn together by a powerful incident when they were young. Woven within the stories of Leah and Natalie are also Felix and Nathan - the male presence, written primarily as visitors within a world over which they have not been able to garner control.

Set in NW London, where Smith set White Teeth and also where she hails from, the four main characters were raised in the same housing estate. A sense of community is established -whether real or fashioned by events and shared environments -and this community is what binds the stories together. While they are together, they are equally disparate in their own realities and Smith uses different language motifs to make the distinctions of each character more clear.

NW was very quickly compared to the work of Virginia Woolf, particularly Mrs. Dalloway, for the use of stream of consciousness prose. But while it's inherently inspired by it's Modernist predecessors, it's also filled with the language of the present climate - google maps directions, text messages, IM conversations, stage directions, concrete poems, patios, conversations overheard while waiting, pop culture references - an onslaught of hyper-modern language motifs. Perhaps even more resounding in the comparison to Woolf is the woman's struggle to make a place for herself in the modern world, and the use of time to measure this conflict. I couldn't help but hear Big Ben striking "first a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable" (Woolf), throughout my read of the novel and it's many references to time. In fact, Smith goes so far as to hold women as the cadence, the timepiece:

"If it was not quite possible to feel happy for him it was because the arrangement was timeless - it did not come bound by the constrictions of time - and this was the consequence of a crucial detail: no women were included with the schema. Women come bearing time."

Even in the telling, Smith clearly understands this is the most complex of her works, and uses her own language throughout the novel to engage with the reader. She pulls through the narrative, as if to separate herself from the story, and address you: "reader, keep up!" Characters are often referred to by their full name, as if this use might serve as a formal separation between author, protagonist, and reader. We may share a community within the novel, but we are not the same.

And, keep up you must. For as much emphasis is placed on language, it's perhaps the implications between the language that play the most important role in the story. Conclusions must be drawn between what is told and what is felt, a motif that the late Modernists mastered, but perhaps becomes most relevant now in the age of technology. At the same time that one is or seeks to be the "the sole author" of their story, it becomes clear that that, "nothing survives in the telling."

Smith crafts very careful communities - both in Willesden, in relationships between protagonists, and in the pages of the novel itself - and then is careful to show that these communities have been authored. The illusion is broken, both for Leah and Natalie, Felix and Nathan; but alas, for the reader as well.
"People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence."

Perhaps my only complaint with the novel was the progression towards the novel's ending and it's ultimate conclusion. It seemed that something this carefully wrought by language ran out of time and came to a desperate end within the last 50 pages. Communities are established and destroyed, and thus in the ultimate act for control, the narrative is changed drastically not by language, which has been our guide, but by force. However, being a masterful artist, I can't help but wonder if this was Smith's intention after all. For as quickly as communities were created in the text (by socio-economic conditions, geography, incidents in youth, birth and death), they can just as easily be destroyed. A dramatic play for control -a search for authorship -is made by each of the characters within the novel, and at the end of the novel it seems their story has not been fully drawn. Control is lost. The characters are merely ghosts; failing to understand their progression towards, and ultimately away from their own conclusions about themselves.

Smith still reigns master at writing histories for characters of race, socio-economic struggle, and especially of women trying to build a place for themselves within the roles society has demanded. As a fan of Woolf, I was especially drawn in by the prose, and felt the language was a successful, resounding attempt for Smith. Though, let's be careful not to place this story on the shelf with other Modernists as a few reviewers have suggested, because in its essence and conclusion it's inherently a story of our current Zeitgeist. Ultimately, we are all just visitors in the communities that have been constructed for us, or even unknowingly created by our own hands.

For more wonderful writing by Zadie Smith, check out her article on Jay Z, The House that Hova Built.

© 2012 Eamonn McCabe