The Magnetic Fields - "69 Love Songs"
DISC 1
It starts, when it starts, with Stephen Merritt's voice falling down these stairs:
Don't fall in love with me yet
- he's (meaning 'is', meaning 'has') a story to tell, a laugh, a joke, a song, a smoke. Emerging from the fog (haze dense cloud) of its own projection, Merritt's voice - well deep (wells are deep, try falling down one) - rolls out all the eventual revelations, elevations and elations [author checks dictionary: -ations isn't a suffix! just convenient]. His larynx is both a cloak and a dagger, simultaneously hiding and seeking, continuously understanding this cache of lover's letters, grafting the music onto the map I'm drawing you and off the map he's drawn himself. My map your map, because I live in your (my) (his) (her) (its) world, so you're all implicated. But don't worry, I'll do all the work unscrambling all your mess (into more-or-less mess, mind).
His voice is the perfect limit situation to build truth / meaning / both / neither / whatever around - that is, if you're willing to believe me that a voice really is, really can be, really was for the few months recording "69 Love Songs" a limit situation: the beginning / the end of the whole process: the hold or initiative or drive or stay of a voice: the knot securing a kite to a tree. And with the kite rippling (because even hypothetical kites are cliched), rifled through with the winds of takuto or the last breaths of its tree, the music created is beautiful: the whistle and skirl (it's bagpipes that skirl, but), skarp (nothing really skarps) and plash (it's rain that plashes, in puddles, but) of the wind off nylon but I'm interested in the shape of the kite, the type of knot etc. here, here where "form is sedimented content" (Mark Sinker) [horrendously curtailed by lack of context, Frank Kogan chokes (up?) on his own words: "a form or content (same dif)"].
Wishing I hadn't (had not, spelled 'h, a, d') used 'choke' in that last sentence 'cos it's perfect for what I want to say now: too much too much too many parentheses [I'm not sure you understand yourself - ed.].
100 things you should have done in bed: smoked, danced, jumped, cuddled, coddled, sex, cried, curled into nothing, Scrabble (played) urgh eh *splat* bugger what now, where how?... but you never had the chance to try them, never got the gall to try them, then you lost the person to try with, and the people to try for, your reasons to cry for. No-one has 69 spare songs (lying around! in their psyche!) to distil the (- on! -) oft-inaccessible substrate (- off! -) of real-actual life (some day, some day, somewhere, it exists). Which is a crass - I?m a crass person - way of saying ALL the WORLD is here - 69 Love Songs, like the world, but MORE SO! System: the neo-classicism of the songs, the formality of the whole affair, Tom Lehrer, the name-drops, the tangents, the melodies, structures or the methodical laying out of emotion, that one emotion cast in stark relief by being rubbed up against all the others.
Alt-S gives ?. Alt-M lets you review ยต-Ziq. There is a shortcut key for ellipsis: press 'dot' three times: '...' Alt-Q giv
[Conceptual joke, maybe one day I'll write it funny.]
"-... something completely wrong". It's so easy to believe all the world is here, to say it, but where are the holophotal lenses, new parliaments, fireflies, harunobu, cardboard, strontium, Chartres, call-centre workers, colloids, microhouse, planetists, Guy Fawkes, tormentil, Scots, mons pubi, pirouettes, The Underworld, turnips, Gaelic, manginas, Electric Brae, vandals, sandals, public toilets, pound notes, TV-Video combos, haar, totem poles, shards, fragments, curfews, the AA, the KKK, CFCs and colostomy bags, billiard balls and smashed crabs, single breaths and flooded quarries, frozen puddles, fake ID, Arts Councils, sick man's sweat, concrete, cheap ways of upping a word count, and, and, and. Where are they? If "ALL the WORLD is here", where is it? ("-... the tip of my tongue"). It isn't, isn't there, isn't here, isn't anywhere, isn't near.
So. this isn't an example of the 20th century American (??) / modernist encyclopedic panominon ("-... there are no terra incognitae") (Gravity's Rainbow, Ulysses, Underworld, The Corrections) that I wanted you to believe it was, a minute ago. The effect there (in those) (books) (panominons) is to render a world: complete, ambitious survey - the 'form' (draw your own margins, these are mine): arcana, felicities, rhythms, flights of fancy (words beginning with 'f': fly fancy free, fucker), references, found objects, litany of characters / situations / specificity, historical anecdotes: a whole world: almost (how almost?) a science of the world. Where Merritt's world has a center (love, keep returning to, love), theirs are diffuse and comprehensive. The effect is confusion and small wonder and big wonder and glee and worry and, again the sentence thins out in a trail of 'ands'. All this marvel at their own enterprise. But, whereas, however Merritt's album is ambivalent about it's own ambition, as is Merritt, his album (purposefully) stopping (prematurely) shy of (the intended)100: "I chose 69 love songs because of its sexual connotations and its typographical possibilities" (which Sinker pegs as 'hericletan dialectics' [me, either] and other people have as 'jokes'). Again, the detachment ("-...that?s beside the point, right beside it").
[Insert anecdote or story or fiction or (thesaurus' suggestion) or even tale about own detachment finished by question 'do you SEE?']
"Form is sedimented content." Stephen Merritt - a man whose voice has emigrated 'him' (whoever that is) from himself? - has a columnal voice: deep and broad: a neo-classical brogue that offers Cole Porter 20 Marlboro - 40, even - which he then proceeds to eat. (Flitting through the digital channels, feeling like the whole world has been arrayed in this certain way just to piss me off, feeling, oh finally! feeling again, though feeling like a teenager, coming to rest on the music channels and my little brother, Paul, 7, says, "Aww, don't watch songs, songs is rubbish".) It's almost (??) as if (!!) the songs are readymades, plucked off the shelf and signed by Merritt's voice: performances of covers: instant Standards ("-... the type of film that becomes a classic"): the deeper form of irony, perhaps, i.e. it's almost certainly sincere. The irony of difference: irony in its function as displacement, not as the diffidence of 'knowing', there's no cynical hatred of the songs he sings here but a crafted set of performances, like, as I said, above, before, he's covering his own songs. ("Slamming Door: A real door slammed off-stage gives the best effect", Michael Green, Stage Noises and Effects; "At home he feels like a tourist", Gang of Four, At Home He Feels Like a Tourist; "Songs is rubbish"). "And 'form is sedimented content'?" Obviously, now, here are two forms - 1 the neo-classicism of the songs / the singing / the 'project' & 2 the irony of the performance(s). How do these two dance? Like the last eels alive in the bucket.
DISC 2
It starts, how it starts,...
DISC 3
It starts, if it starts,...
THE BOOKLET
And standing at the end of it all, surveying the great rustling sheet of my map settling onto this world, [I feel compelled to copy my objects], my morale [up & down] twisted again, and lonely again, and worried again, and conscientious again, and stylised again, it's gone long again, and again it must end, ("Put the music in your ears", Trad.), so No-One Ever sings on "No Song Ever":
God, how much
Just, just too much
It?s, all so much
Only, so much filibuster
THE CD CASE
This took me too long to write.
