Holy Punks in the Fog of War
Reviewed: Black Monk Time by the Monks (Polydor 1966; Repertoire 1994).
In the midst of a mid-life crisis, F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested a connection between his nervous breakdown and his work as a screenwriter, a job that subjected his texts to the whims and profit-mongering of co-writers, producers, directors, and actors, his personality disintegrating with the corruption of his individual talent. As different as The Great Gatsby would have been without the guidance of editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s basic points stand: Hollywood films require collaboration and compromise; work and culture reflect and affect the mind. Some decades later, Joan Didion, too, would suggest popular film lacked artistic coherence, arguing that the few screenplays that ever get produced have chance and marketing to thank much more than merit or vision: when a deal-maker is at the right place at the right time, a film is made; individual writers at desks have very little to do with it. Film then, could be reduced to a simple equation: 1% inspiration, 2% perspiration, and 97% contingency. All this would suggest that popular film—not to mention corporatized popular music—shapes itself at several removes from the populace, its plots gestating in some inhuman cloud of industry interests and practices hovering apart from the tastes, concerns, and narratives of the individual human being living a real life.
Admittedly, I am a crank, especially during the American Entertainment Awards season. After years of disappointment, I have more or less given up hope of feeling anything other than cultural alienation at hearing Justin Timberlake win a Grammy or Paul Haggis an Oscar (though the nomination of Little Miss Sunshine this year gives me pause; the picture, I suspect, is not as bleak as I’d like to think). But the extent to which Hollywood continues to draw audiences indicates how much Hollywood already determines the “tastes and interests” of real, live individuals, begging the question, what is realer than film? Still, the pomp and ceremony of the Oscars leaves me quite cold, resting as it does on the pomp and ceremony already accrued by the Oscars. A tradition of glamour, wealth, and fame provides the medium with its mystique and power, vaulting it beyond any perceptible relationship to me.
But perhaps I should attend to the beam in my own eye before pointing out the motes in others’. Like any cultural form, music reviewing has its habits and rituals, rigidified into shapes outliving their original purpose. The ideal album to review must be new, by the young and beautiful, and just catching a building wave of hype. Instead, for this review, I’m going to rummage through a dust-covered corner of my personal CD library to retrieve one of the strangest and oldest items in its catalogue: “Black Monk Time,” put out in 1964 by the Monks, a little known though cult-adored quintet of GI’s who began playing together while stationed in Germany. They performed tonsured and cassocked like actual monks, but also looped nooses round their necks for neckties as a blunt symbol of society’s constrictions. Forerunning punk by a decade, the Monks were among the first rock bands to experiment with feedback and perhaps began to do so independently of anyone else. Tracks like “I Hate You” and “That’s My Girl” reverberate with the same kind of manic fuzz and roar of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” but with greater control and restraint. Their sound is blunt and rhythmic, all drums and gut-strung banjo, trading melody for beating repetition. They sound like a jury-rigged jalopy careening down the hill of the sixties, belching a fume of feedback and angst back at the madness of the decade. “We don’t like the atomic bomb,” says singer and guitarist Gary Burger on the opening track, “Monk Time”; “Stop it, stop it,” he then shrieks in terror, as if staring straight at a mushroom cloud: “I don’t like it . . . Stop It!” Vietnam and the nuclear age have left grown soldiers wishing for a cloister and throwing tantrums like children.
It is this kind of desperate simplicity that allows the Monks to beat literally a hole through the fog of war in “Complications.” While Burger belts out the slaughter-justifying euphemism of the title over and over again, the rest of the band respond, sneering, “People cry, / People die for you. / People kill, / People will for you,” a powerful condemnation of citizen complicity in distant theaters of war, all the more potent for being snarled by the mouths of actual soldiers to the layered hammered beats of voice, drum, banjo, and guitar. With so many people oblivious to obvious horrors, the Monks take recourse to the crudest form of musical strategy: they pound the song into the listener’s brain. Their insistence, directness, and urgency make them more relevant to the present moment than any rock album released in the last decade.
As insane as the external cultural landscape may be for this band, the interior hardly looks much better. On “I Hate You,” Burger again enters into a dialogue with the band, singing hoarsely, “I hate you with a passion baby,” while they chant the self-defeating afterthought, “But call me!” The song “Oh, How to Do Now,” which begins with the pop signature of a surf-rock drum roll, extends into an increasingly frantic tempo propelled by an off-kilter organ, the lyrics likewise undercutting conventional love song pop sensibilities. Burger’s desire is inarticulate, obsessive, and possessive, as he sings, “I’m going to make you you you you mine today . . . Make you mine long long time today.” The lyrics on Black Monk Time tend to be as repetitive as the beat, signifying psyches troubled from within and without, but also battering down the complacency of convention and demanding justice and sanity in the process. Their aesthetic seems epitomized in “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy,” the lyrics of which—in their stark nonsensical entirety—being, “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Way down to heaven / Yeah!” over and over again. The space opened up by this and other Monks songs disorients, peels away the familiar: what we thought was nonsense is actually the road to heaven, which is actually where we had always thought hell was. The music is ugly, weird, and discomforting, hammering away at the psychological foundations of love, God, and country, and leaving you with nothing but a bare, manic beat. But it is a beat to which you can dance, and one that makes me feel a hell of a lot more aware and alive than I ever felt watching the Grammys.
In the midst of a mid-life crisis, F. Scott Fitzgerald once suggested a connection between his nervous breakdown and his work as a screenwriter, a job that subjected his texts to the whims and profit-mongering of co-writers, producers, directors, and actors, his personality disintegrating with the corruption of his individual talent. As different as The Great Gatsby would have been without the guidance of editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s basic points stand: Hollywood films require collaboration and compromise; work and culture reflect and affect the mind. Some decades later, Joan Didion, too, would suggest popular film lacked artistic coherence, arguing that the few screenplays that ever get produced have chance and marketing to thank much more than merit or vision: when a deal-maker is at the right place at the right time, a film is made; individual writers at desks have very little to do with it. Film then, could be reduced to a simple equation: 1% inspiration, 2% perspiration, and 97% contingency. All this would suggest that popular film—not to mention corporatized popular music—shapes itself at several removes from the populace, its plots gestating in some inhuman cloud of industry interests and practices hovering apart from the tastes, concerns, and narratives of the individual human being living a real life.
Admittedly, I am a crank, especially during the American Entertainment Awards season. After years of disappointment, I have more or less given up hope of feeling anything other than cultural alienation at hearing Justin Timberlake win a Grammy or Paul Haggis an Oscar (though the nomination of Little Miss Sunshine this year gives me pause; the picture, I suspect, is not as bleak as I’d like to think). But the extent to which Hollywood continues to draw audiences indicates how much Hollywood already determines the “tastes and interests” of real, live individuals, begging the question, what is realer than film? Still, the pomp and ceremony of the Oscars leaves me quite cold, resting as it does on the pomp and ceremony already accrued by the Oscars. A tradition of glamour, wealth, and fame provides the medium with its mystique and power, vaulting it beyond any perceptible relationship to me.
But perhaps I should attend to the beam in my own eye before pointing out the motes in others’. Like any cultural form, music reviewing has its habits and rituals, rigidified into shapes outliving their original purpose. The ideal album to review must be new, by the young and beautiful, and just catching a building wave of hype. Instead, for this review, I’m going to rummage through a dust-covered corner of my personal CD library to retrieve one of the strangest and oldest items in its catalogue: “Black Monk Time,” put out in 1964 by the Monks, a little known though cult-adored quintet of GI’s who began playing together while stationed in Germany. They performed tonsured and cassocked like actual monks, but also looped nooses round their necks for neckties as a blunt symbol of society’s constrictions. Forerunning punk by a decade, the Monks were among the first rock bands to experiment with feedback and perhaps began to do so independently of anyone else. Tracks like “I Hate You” and “That’s My Girl” reverberate with the same kind of manic fuzz and roar of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray,” but with greater control and restraint. Their sound is blunt and rhythmic, all drums and gut-strung banjo, trading melody for beating repetition. They sound like a jury-rigged jalopy careening down the hill of the sixties, belching a fume of feedback and angst back at the madness of the decade. “We don’t like the atomic bomb,” says singer and guitarist Gary Burger on the opening track, “Monk Time”; “Stop it, stop it,” he then shrieks in terror, as if staring straight at a mushroom cloud: “I don’t like it . . . Stop It!” Vietnam and the nuclear age have left grown soldiers wishing for a cloister and throwing tantrums like children.
It is this kind of desperate simplicity that allows the Monks to beat literally a hole through the fog of war in “Complications.” While Burger belts out the slaughter-justifying euphemism of the title over and over again, the rest of the band respond, sneering, “People cry, / People die for you. / People kill, / People will for you,” a powerful condemnation of citizen complicity in distant theaters of war, all the more potent for being snarled by the mouths of actual soldiers to the layered hammered beats of voice, drum, banjo, and guitar. With so many people oblivious to obvious horrors, the Monks take recourse to the crudest form of musical strategy: they pound the song into the listener’s brain. Their insistence, directness, and urgency make them more relevant to the present moment than any rock album released in the last decade.
As insane as the external cultural landscape may be for this band, the interior hardly looks much better. On “I Hate You,” Burger again enters into a dialogue with the band, singing hoarsely, “I hate you with a passion baby,” while they chant the self-defeating afterthought, “But call me!” The song “Oh, How to Do Now,” which begins with the pop signature of a surf-rock drum roll, extends into an increasingly frantic tempo propelled by an off-kilter organ, the lyrics likewise undercutting conventional love song pop sensibilities. Burger’s desire is inarticulate, obsessive, and possessive, as he sings, “I’m going to make you you you you mine today . . . Make you mine long long time today.” The lyrics on Black Monk Time tend to be as repetitive as the beat, signifying psyches troubled from within and without, but also battering down the complacency of convention and demanding justice and sanity in the process. Their aesthetic seems epitomized in “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy,” the lyrics of which—in their stark nonsensical entirety—being, “Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy / Way down to heaven / Yeah!” over and over again. The space opened up by this and other Monks songs disorients, peels away the familiar: what we thought was nonsense is actually the road to heaven, which is actually where we had always thought hell was. The music is ugly, weird, and discomforting, hammering away at the psychological foundations of love, God, and country, and leaving you with nothing but a bare, manic beat. But it is a beat to which you can dance, and one that makes me feel a hell of a lot more aware and alive than I ever felt watching the Grammys.
posted by R at 11:46 AM
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