One of the most remarkable things about the late Tony Judt’s genuinely remarkable history of modern Europe, Postwar, is how pig ignorant he was about punk rock. That Judt would posit European critical theory and the Sex Pistols on the same page as if they were opposites (see page 480) against the readily documentable contrary certainly caught my attention. Does it matter? No, but sometimes yes. Why? Because of certain isolated but definitive acts of aesthetic generosity that epitomized punk without typifying it. Maybe foremost among these is “Eisiger Wind” (German for “Icy Wind”), a single by an
all female group of mostly-painters from Zürich who released a string of sublime records on which varying personnel sang or howled in alternating and equally incomprehensible English and German, hilarious and scary in equal measure, against primitive (or primitivist) guitar-bass-drums. Sometimes whistling. I have not a clue as to what this song is about. All I know is that the three musicians on this record play and sing what sound like three completely different yet still intimately related songs at the same time, at full force, resolving as one into a chorus that goes: “LA-LA-la-la, LA-la, La-LA-la-LA-la-LA-la, LA-la-la-la-LA-LA-la, La-la-la-LA!”Note: For Advent, 25 secular essays about 25 songs, one per day from Dec. 1 through Dec. 25. Each essay is exactly 200 words long.
No comments:
Post a Comment