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Wednesday, August 05, 2009
SILENCE
Lefty Frizzell
1958
Life's Like Poetry
Bear Family : 1992
[Buy It]
SILENCE IS A STRONG REPLY
Murray Head
Say It Ain't So
Island : 1976
[Buy It]
DAY OF SILENCE
Pete Townshend
Happy Birthday
Universal Spiritual League : 1970
[Buy It]
(SILENCE)
Ciccone Youth
The Whitey Album
Enigma : 1988
[Buy It]
Most days I speak to people, like most people. One day this week, I spoke to almost no one. It wasn't planned. I didn't do it to make a point. I got a new computer at the office, and it was a lemon, so I took the day off while they replaced it. I went out for a little while and left my cell phone at home. I had no way to communicate and so I was out of communication, if not exactly uncommunicative.
Usually I speak to one person, at least. I don't mean a generic person. I mean a specific person. There's one friend I check in with every day. I haven't always had a friend like this, but it's been the case more often than not. Every once in a while, this friend will go on vacation, or I will, and we won't speak, and it's disorienting. It's as if the days don't really exist. It's like time is executing a feint. This week, one day, I didn't speak to this person. To be fair, the silence and non-speaking didn't last all day, but they lasted for part of the day, intensely. If making no conversation and making no sound were experiments, my participation in them was at once semi-committed and ultra-compressed. I was out for a walk with no way to communicate with ohters. I listened to music instead.
The songs I heard were, in part, songs about silence. I let the iPod search for them. The first one was Lefty Frizzell's "Silence," from 1958, and it was a disconnect, for the most part, because Frizzell is singing about silence as loneliness, and I wasn't lonely at all, just out for a walk, listening to music, not talking to a friend of mine. Frizzell, too, isnt talking to a friend of his, but this is the cause of his silence rather than an effect of it:I will die in the silence
Where no one hears me when I cry
When the clock ticks
When the wind blow
When the rain falls
Or when it snows
I think of you
Oh yes I think of you
And your face I can see Again, silence here isn't the absence of sound or even of conversation. It's the absence of one specific person, without whom any sound or conversation is meaningless. It's hard to recover that idea in today's world, where there are a million options for connecting with others. I assumed--correctly, as it turned out, though I wouldn't know until later - - that my friend would try to make contact with me during the day, via phone or email. Was the silence my friend was experiencing, where attempted contact went out but nothing came back, different from what I was experiencing, when I felt the fact of attempted contact but could not add to it? I walked and listened.
After I heard some Simon and Garfunkel and some Paul Westerberg, I got to Murray Head, in whose hands silence is another kind of statement- - a proportional response to an injury. The sleeping dog in me won't lie
But when I'm woken you can't deny
When you fall in love right from the very start
You give your love and then they break your heart
When dreams are broken silence is a strong reply Again, here, silence is a romantic substance, and again, the absence he feels is in fact a sign of a more powerful presence. After that song, I wanted to call my friend, just to make it clear that the fact that I wasn't replying didn't mean I was Not Replying. It's easy to mistakenly feel this in today's world, where the million options for connecting with others makes silence echo even louder.
Murray Head's song sounds a little like something Pete Townshend would have written away from the Who, for himself, in the early seventies. Townshend did in fact write something similar, "Day of Silence," though it wasn't for himself--it was from an album called Happy Birthday, which he recorded with a group of friends in 1970 as a tribute to Meher Baba. From this communal environment, Townshend managed to extract a song about solitude and mindful silence:When you're feeling low
Try a day of silence
Take things very slow
Listen to the wireless
Never speak a sound
Sit up on the hedgerow
Watch the world go round
Peace will let your mind go I wasn't feeling particularly low, and I couldn't find a hedgerow, but otherwise, I followed Townshend's prescription to the letter. In his song, in my day, silence wasn't about intake but rather output. It was the decision to produce no noise. That was the song I decided to mention to my friend when I returned to the land of communication: in fact, the one I decided to mention to all the friends I gave the silent treatment to, accidentally or purposefully, mindfully or matter-of-factly.
My iPod moved on from the Townshend song to others: Van Morrison's "Hymns to the Silence," Pavement's "Silence Kit." All of them, no matter what their philosophy, contained a central irony, the one Townshend was talking about when he recommended listening to the wireless: they are noise about silence, as conflicted at their root as, say, an essay about noncommunication. For actual silence, marked and measured, I went and found a song that I was surprised my iPod couldn't find on its own, Sonic Youth at its most experimental, recording as Ciccone Youth. The Ciccone Youth album is a riot of experiments and shattered expectations--the fact that it was released on Enigma almost seems redundant--and so it only makes sense that one of those experiments finds the noisiest of noise-rock bands monumentalizing the non-noisiest state imaginable. "(Silence)" is shorter than John Cage's "4'33",", which renders it both less committed and more compressed. Below I have reprinted the lyrics in full.Labels: ben, rock and roll, silence
posted by Ben
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