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Monday, October 30, 2006
TEMPTATION
Tom Waits
Frank's Wild Years
Island : 1987
[Buy It]
CROSS BONES STYLE
Cat Power
Moon Pix
Matador : 1998
[Buy It]
It's Halloween time, so I've unearthed my eeriest music. Hark, is that the howling of the damned?
IN THE PINES
Lead Belly
Folkways : 1948
Available on: Smithsonian Folkways
[Buy It]
GHETTO
Graham Central Station
Graham Central Station
Warner : 1973
[Buy It]
Lead Belly's here, not just because his intro reminds me of the theme song to the "The Addams Family." (Check it out here, see what you think.) This song evokes primal terrors: the dark forest, loss, abandonment, and sudden, terrible death. My husband was a hard-working man
Killed a mile and a half from here
(What happened to him?)
His head was found in a driver wheel
And his body ever never be found Cities have their own primal terrors. Think of Kafka's Prague. Or the ghettos closer to home.
In the spare time I don't have, I'm writing a ghetto fairy tale about post-riot Washington DC, chock full of dark visitations and relatives dying in back rooms. It's very much a horror story.
MARCH TO THE WITCH'S CASTLE
COSMIC SLOP
Funkadelic
Cosmic Slop
Westbound : 1973
[Buy It]
Later funk is truly terrifying, the perfect soundtrack for horror. Working on this over the summer, I listened to Cosmic Slop so intensively I nearly induced a psychotic break. Much like what happened to Sly Stone, who degenerated into incomprehensible rambles and repetitive loops as the junkie brain took over.
In the 70s, they opened a methadone clinic* two blocks from my grandma's house. She'd pass through lines of junkies on her way to church. The clinic was a block away from the heroin lot. I'd be sitting by the window, waiting for my father to come home, and suddenly, hundreds of people would come out of the alleys, silent and quick, like in "The Birds." Also waiting. Oh, come child
Come, rescue me
Cause you have seen some unbelievable things Most members of my family claim to see spirits; I have one sister who was subjected to private audiences with the devil in her bedroom late at night. My younger sister and I have both had dreams of infinitely evil creatures who perched on our beds to suck the life out of us. We would wake up gasping for breath. At these times, one wonders, what is real? And the devil sang... Bernie Worrell says of "Cosmic Slop," which he co-wrote: "The melody is like a spiritual hymn. If you take away the words and just hum it, it sounds like down on the plantation. I get chills still when I hear it."
He's right. The voices haunt you for a long time after.
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*Wikipedia on methadone:
Methadone has traditionally been provided to the addiction population in a highly regulated methadone clinic, generally associated with an outpatient department of a hospital. Clinics such as these stem from programs set up during the Nixon administration to combat heroin use, first in Washington, D.C., then nationwide.Labels: holidays, megan
posted by Megan
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