|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME | ABOUT | BIOS | EMAIL |
|
 |
| |
Monday, February 18, 2008
DECIBELS AND LITTLE PILLS
American Music Club
The Golden Age
Merge : 2008
[Buy It]
A MAN NEEDS A WOMAN OR A MAN TO BE A MAN
Bill Callahan
Woke on a Whaleheart
Drag City : 2007
[Buy It]
TENNESSEE
Silver Jews
Bright Flight
Drag City : 2001
[Buy It]
The recent publication of a collection of Franz Kafka's aphorisms got me thinking about what, precisely, an aphorism is. Some of Kafka's resemble parables or short stories, but to me, a true aphorism is brief (preferably one sentence), wittily constructed (in the Oscar Wilde-ish, advising-against-any-endeavor-requiring-new-clothes sense), and has meaning in excess of its vocbulary (this is where it crosses over with the riddle).
An aphorism is distinct from a truism: the latter tends to be goopy, with exactly one discernible point; the former is more starchy, evoking an array of senses and meanings. Some of my favorite lyricists are handy with aphorisms, although truisms can be satisfying when handled with care. American Music Club's Mark Eitzel is a whiz with them. But his lyrics are animated by an emotional directness and transparency, and comprise a congnitive experience much less complex than the aphoristic one.
The aphorism hangs as much on deft wording as inner truth; there is something shifty and furtive about it; its composition is a bit like that of a joke, where even its speaker can only intuit, not fully describe, its entire payload. Bill Callahan, formerly known as Smog, is one of the finest aphorists working in music today, although he frequently blurs the line between aphorism and truism (and red herring: "Spend a night with an owl and you'll see more blood than sleep," he told me in an interview last year, which I still can't make heads or tails of in context).
Callhan tends to pepper oblique narratives with aphorisms that bolster them up philosophically, which reveals another quality of the aphorism: it is a general statement; it elaborates one system of thought so compactly and completely that it seems to elaborate everything. "There is no love where there is no obstacle," from "Say Valley Maker," is a truism. "God is a word, and the argument ends there," is more aphoristic, the sort of sweepingly obliterative aphorism we might associate with Wittgenstein: "The world is all that is the case."
But I think my favorite Callhan aphorism is from his latest album, Woke on a Whaleheart, on the song "A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man." The aphorism, obviously, is right there in the title. If the proposition were simply, "A man needs a woman to be a man," it would be a truism, and a rather silly one at that. But Callhan's rendering opens up the statement into broader realms of ambiguity, asserting a superficially simple truth while conjuring up a whole array of questions about the traditional definition of manhood.
David Berman of Silver Jews is terrific at this too (Drag City is a very aphoristic label), in his poetry ("All water is classic water") and in his music. I'm thinking specifically of this inspired turn from "Tennessee": "Punk rock died when the first kid said/ Punk's not dead." We could talk about how this statement gets at at truth about how systems become moribund when they become overly defined, but aphorisms are for marinating upon, not exegesis, and I fear that in a post about these little time-released capsules of ideation, I've already said far too much.Labels: aphorisms, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
