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Friday, August 10, 2007
BRAVE & STRONG
Sly and the Family Stone
There's a Riot Goin' On
Epic : 1971
[Buy it]
I'M NOT AFRAID TO DIE
Gillian Welch
Hell Among the Yearlings
Acony : 1998
[Buy it]
NOT AFRAID
Bizzy Bone
Alpha and Omega
Bungalo : 2004
[Buy it]
JEANNIE'S AFRAID OF THE DARK
Robbie Fulks
13 Hillbilly Giants
Bloodshot : 2001
[Buy it]
IS IT SCARY
Michael Jackson
Blood On The Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix
Sony : 1997
[Buy it]
THE FEAR
Pulp
This Is Hardcore
Island : 1998
[Buy it]
I was reading an article by Ron Paul recently, and that's the first time I have ever started a sentence like that. It wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. I might even do it again. I was reading an article by Ron Paul recently, and he was outlining his thoughts about fear:
While fear itself is not always the product of irrationality, once experienced it tends to lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity. When people are fearful they tend to be willing to irrationally surrender their rights. As the end of these rather dense and prolix sentences--no political speechwriter would ever sign off on them, and that's part of their charm--he reveals the heart of his argument, which has to do with the way that fear can be used as a tool of political repression. Ron Paul's completely right about that, of course, and that's the first time I have ever started a sentence like that either. But if Ron Paul wasn't running for office, he'd be making a broader point, and a highly contentious one that that. Does fear lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity, or does it lead to reason? Is fear irrational or is it the most rational aspect of humanity? I flipped a coin to find out. It landed on its edge.
Pop music is full of fear. Fear of Flying, Fear of a Black Planet, even Fear of Music. Songs that say they're about bravery, like Sly and the Family Stone's "Brave & Strong," are also about the absence of bravery:
Frightened faces to the wall
Can't you hear your mama call?
The brave and strong survive The big fear, of course, is the fear of death. This last week, it seemed to be everywhere. My wife has been planning her father's 85th birthday party, hoping that the Uninvited Guest doesn't show. A friend in her twenties was taken to the hospital, unexpectedly, for something that turned out to be nothing but had her family worried, briefly, that it might be everything. Another friend in her thirties told me, matter-of-factly, that she has been thinking of dying often. Or rather, she was thinking about dying once, often.
In all of these cases, I tried to kill off this fear of death. I told my wife that her father will be fine. I mean, who dies in their eighties? I sent cheery messages to my twentysomething friend. I told my thirtysomething friend that she can think of dying all she wants, so long as she's not afraid of it. "I'm not afraid of dying," I said, full of bluff. She said nothing. Her silence suggested that maybe claiming that you weren't afraid of death was in fact proof that you were afraid of death. It also suggested that the largest issues work by contraries. Silence just won't shut up sometimes. There are songs that also have something to say about this issue. In "I'm Not Afraid to Die," Gillian Welch finds solace in the inevitable:
Forget my sins upon the wind
My hobo soul will rise Bizzy Bone's "Not Afraid" takes a more nihilistic route to the same destination. So, two versions, one peaceful, one meaningless. What is there to fear? According to my thirtysomething friend, her fear involves being alone on her deathbed, with no company, no family, no solace. Oh, and caring about it, and not having any confidence that she'd go on to something better. That's bad.
It's strange that fear of death makes people feel so alone, because it's something shared by almost everyone. If you think thirty is young, what about "Jeannie's Afraid of the Dark," which Dolly Parton wrote and sang with Porter Wagoner on the 1968 duet album Just the Two Of Us. (The version here is a fairly faithful Robbie Fulks cover, though remaining fairly faithful involves preserving the almost unbearable five-hankie weepiness of the thing.) Jeannie's a little girl, afraid of the dark, and every night she runs to her parents' room so that she doesn't have to sleep alone. One day, her parents take her to the cemetery, and she makes a morbid (not to mention unhygienic) request -- that when she die she not be buried, because she won't be able to deal with the dark. Parents with kids this nervous should probably keep them away from the Paul Tillich books:
The first assertion about the nature of anxiety is this: anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing. The same statement, in a shorter form, would read: anxiety is the existential awareness of nonbeing...It is not the realization of universal transitoriness, not even the experience of the death of others, but the impression of these events on the always latent awareness of our own having to die that produces anxiety. So how to deal with these anxieties? Well, one way, weirdly, is to feel fear -- fear, that is, of other things, things that don't involve annihilation. In fact, other fears are life-affirming, because they require being. So be afraid of snakes. Be afraid of clowns. Be afraid of ghosts. (That's why fear of the dark has a special status, I think -- it's easy to forget that you exist.)
The other night I did a reading at a bookstore in the city. Afterwards, at a bar, I was talking to another writer whose husband is a film scholar who specializes in horror movies. I was asking what counts as the minimum requirement for a horror movie, as opposed to a scary movie. Does someone have to die? Does more than half of the audience have to scream? Does the film have to be aware of the entertainment value of its own capacity for producing fear? "There are books written about that," she said. I went on, asking her if werewolf movies were all about masturbation and vampire movies all about sex (there are books written about that, too, as it turns out), but the basic question was the one that stuck. What makes something a horror movie rather than a scary movie?
I brought the question with me back to music. What's scary? Fantomas? Scott Walker? Nico? Is bleakness scary? Is Ice Cube scary? Is rage scary? Is truth scary? And if many of those artists have recorded scary songs, what's a horror song? I found two, I think: Michael Jackson's "Is It Scary," which is an unholier-than-Thriller piece of meta-horror in which he keeps testing your threshold for experiencing terror as entertainment, and Pulp's "The Fear," which does more or less the same thing, stacking misgivings like bricks in English bond. The effects in both songs are so outsized, so preposterous, that they shouldn't work at all, and yet both of them work scarily well at delivering their message. Existence may be terrible and scary, but it's life. it goes and goes again. And it has death beat by a mile:
Oh baby,
Here comes the fear again.
The end is near again.
A monkey's built a house on your back.
You can't get anyone to come in the sack
And here comes another panic attack
Oh here we go again. Labels: ben, country, rock, soul
posted by Ben
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