“I’ve tried so hard to keep myself from falling back to my bad old ways.”
After two band changes and many setbacks, I’m finally going to see one of the Libertines in person – Carl Barat. (I was always a Barat fan; adjust your opinion of my character accordingly.) As such, I’m trying to recapture how I felt about the group in 2006. It’s not easy. Drama is a necessity for art, but it eventually kills all life on earth. This is mostly Doherty’s fault, it’s true, not Barat’s; if I’ve read one story about Doherty spraying someone with blood, I’ve read them all, and I’m not even English.
Let’s start by remembering that they were tragic, which is hard, and very nearly a stated goal. They got handed the tragic entertainment story, thwarted cleverness – the specific kind where someone is playing, brilliantly, with the idea of Crazy Fame when it obligingly reaches up and swallows them into its damp leather gullet. This is a one-way process with no room for nostalgia. When someone’s both dancing with and joking about Crazy Fame, it is exciting and a bit retro and dangerous; when they’re done -when it gets them- the story instantly becomes sad and boring, and suddenly it always has been.
And the Libertines were messing with all sorts of other dangerous things – the aforementioned high tragedy, and an outmoded but surprisingly compliant outlaw romance, and the kind of nationalist nostalgia which you can embrace only so long as everyone has a completely unspoken agreement to look at it apolitically. All of these things really come down to playing with nostalgia, and yet also taking it immensely seriously – a gorgeous disconnect that drove everything they did.
“The Good Old Days” is my favorite of their songs (please excuse misuse of a random fan’s personal video; there’s no other studio recording on YouTube):
The song is a nostalgic vision (Queen Boadicea’s spirit living on in her descendents; vague ideals of “love and music,” the Albion sailing on with “twelve rude boys on the oars”) but every other line is a denial – some false ideal which the narrator wants to make a note of excluding from his official portrait, whether it’s childhood or punk. (“It’s not about tenements and needles,” runs the bridge, “and all the evils in their eyes and the backs of their minds/daisy chains and schoolyard games and lists of things we said we’d do tomorrow”).
“The Good Old Days” is clear-headed, and knows that vanished things are not automatically good. Nonetheless, it longs for them with every faculty it has, and its elegant frustrations coincide with the various impossibilities of this situation – most of all, the lack of a human ability to realize nostalgic dreams in the present. This is, obviously, a foot-stampingly paradoxical desire, but that’s why they’re a rock band and not a doctor of philosophy.
Hence, I guess, my unhappy claim that you can’t be nostalgic for them. You can’t appreciate a group whose whole aesthetic was founded on a complicated love/hate relationship with nostalgia if you can’t have a complicated nostalgic feeling about them, and what with four years of tabloid coverage of the ex-group’s baser moments, that’s impossible. To feel nostalgic, you’d have to feel even remotely that this music belongs to you, or has really gone away, and tabloid celebrities don’t really belong to anyone nor do they ever go away.
I do feel a bit bouncier now that I’ve said this, though. Drama, just like radioactivity, presumably dissipates eventually, and even at the start of the post I was excited enough to see Barat live – all the Libertines (even the other two) are mobile emergency charisma and intelligence units. It was nice to remember how intelligently “The Good Old Days” reacts to and rewrites “The Queen is Dead” (which in turn I always thought was partly a thoughtful response to the Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”). I’m over this band. I’m a thousand kinds of over them, but there’s some residue remaining, obviously.
I wonder how Barat will come off in a small venue, in an opening slot; can “The Saga” (as, at one point, the Libertines actually called a song) even fit in there? I hope not.
Johnny Marr sings “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want”
I don’t think I understand Johnny Marr’s accent anymore. He’s not trying to sound American, but he seems to have lost several of his vowels in an offscreen accident and replaced them with Isaac Brock’s spares.
Anyway, this is exciting contrast for the nerdy. Morrissey’s made some changes over the years, but Marr does a massive edit – turning the famous mandolin outro into a bridge, losing the repetition/no repetition tension which originally supported the two verses, and shifting the chords until they comment on the original more than reproduce it. They’ve both tweaked the song to their modern needs, and in the process, they’ve diverged completely from what they wrote together.
Marr is the only guitarist I know who plays in English. He uses chords like words; the progressions are like elegant, well-written sentences spoken in a strong voice. I could even edge out further, and say that the core sense in his Smiths songs is an ecstatic admonishment (the one he uses for Modest Mouse is more of an abstract anxious tentative joy) – though that’s no universal, and obviously I wouldn’t go so far as to say you can turn this stuff directly into words or even that directly into named emotion. I’m not trying to claim him for the word-people so much as say that, somehow, he’s one instrumentalist word-people think we understand.
Maybe it has something to do with his synesthesia – I read an interview with Marr once where he explains (without using the word) that he has a mental cross-wiring that gives him a sort of internal Windows Media visualizer. He “sees” sounds. The Smiths look like “a circular stained-glass window;” Bob Dylan’s voice is “definitely an organic sandy wood color.” It’s a trait we share (along with Vladimir Nabokov, and -thank you, Wikipedia- Patrick Stump…) – so I know what he means, though to me Dylan sounds more of a lager brown. Anyway, perhaps this blurring of the senses relates to the verbal or visual qualities that make his playing so legible to people who, like me, aren’t native speakers of non-vocal music.
