Doherty und Barat

I don’t know what it is about Carl Barat. He was one of the sleeker live performers I’ve seen -very nice, very cool, very famous- not that that detracted from the joy of seeing him, but I’ve never seen a more together person. But when it comes to photographs, he’s a lurking cynical hairball, these subtle observant expressions – it’s as if the normal poles are reversed with him: spontaneity in the face of permanent recording, and total professionalism in person. I stress that I’m talking about an unusual aspect of his art, rather than judging him as a man. It’s “Carl Barat, you know how and when to channel yourself,” not “Carl Barat, you are a fuzzy little fake.”

Anyway, this photo of Barat and Doherty at (how did you guess?) the latest NME awards captures something about how they always look together – this complicated, resigned exchanged glance (of course they’ll exchange a glance when the cameras are there) which is both public and genuinely intimate. You know you’re being played to, but the plot of the play is “fuck this for a situation where we feel we have to play to people;” the glance is an invitation to pretend you’re part of their frustration with the observing mob, rather than part of the observing mob. Under the circumstances, that’s very generous.

I was enjoying some Fall Out Boy Trail today, marveling at FOB’s world-takeover ability to simultaneously disgust and please -they make product placement a punk pose; they released a deliberately unwinnable parody 16-bit game where you can heal your party with Vitamin Water and somehow it’s cheeky- but I prefer the weary striptease of the Libertines’ 4-years-and-counting breakup, if we’re going to pit PR-as-art against PR-as-art, and we are.

“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.