“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.
Pete Doherty is decay personified, and thus so to were the Libertines.
You have excellently dissected their aesthetic. They were legend seekers, and brilliant ones, but they were building their own legend on the ruins of punk and post punk British Rock which itself was founded on decay; societal, traditional, economic…. And those bands themselves fell apart in accordance with the strength of the emotion they were constantly expressing. In other words, by the time the Libertines came along, destruction and decay seemed to be as much form as subject.
Reading interviews with Pete Doherty it’s hard to tell how much he chased or tried to escape that fate of form. Could one write about decay without decaying? If so, which came first. Pete was never sure. It seems odd to suggest, but it is true in my mind that Pete’s drug use was an experiment in self destruction for artistic purposes. But he as admitted as much. Maybe he was playing with crazy fame or maybe he felt forced into crazy fame by the very form of his music.
But, yes, the Libertines were notsalgic for nostalgia and one can’t be nostalgic for nostalgia of nostalgia. One can simply identify with not knowing where to put yourself now that the traditions and the nostalgia for them have drained.
Also a brilliant post. (I reblogged your Antony and Cleopatra “review,” you know!)And “Good Old Days” is my favourite too. It’s the one I send when I try to make people understand what all the hype was about, and can never understand when it doesn’t work. But then, perhaps you’ve got to share that murky nostalgic streak.
Thank you very much! I’m sorry that I have neglected our mighty alliance this past week; it’s been the end-of-term. Finally I can think of something else to a degree, so I shall now properly link you and catch up with your blog, which is one of the most exciting new ones I’ve seen in a long time (not just saying this b/c we are friends).