24. Living in the Heart of the Beast

Henry Cow & Slapp Happy: In Praise of Learning (Virgin, 1975);
composed by Tim Hodgkinson

As a privileged muso of the Euro-American sphere (ya heard?), I am well acquainted with a great deal of spectacular Art By Marxists, but also privy to a great slew of terrible Marxist Art - a very different thing. This fifteen-minute song is both things. Henry Cow were a bunch of Cambridge weirdos who melded fascinations with Coltrane, Bulgarian choral music, and sundry else into their own variety of orchestrated rock. Not prog rock like contemporaries who thought it a stroke to juice up Prokofiev or Brahms rather than the class-bound embarrassment it was, but electric music that sounded like what was in their capacious heads. Their heads were also trying to make political sense at the same time, so when Slapp Happy-ite Peter Blegvad’s lyrics did not fit Tim Hodgkinson’s mini-symphony, Hodgkinson wrote this godawful Maoist doggerel himself, which is intoned by the quavery Hanns Eisler specialist, Dagmar Krause. And it is gorgeous. Proletarian? Not so much. Does it kick the shit out of Tarkus? Very much so. This album got its title from Brecht whose amused concision is lacking here, but this music would not still stir in such a dark time if they had gotten that lucky.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).