Anti-Climacus

On Returning/ A New Career in a New Town



On the one hand, you have Wire, a band that made one of the definitive punk albums in Pink Flag, who became progressively less interested in guitars and their potential and moved in the direction of abstract electronic music, to the point that the catchiest song on 154 is titled "Map Ref. 41N 93W" (it's somewhere in Iowa, in case you were curious. I'd bet a small pile of money Becky has been there, or at least driven past).

On the other, you have David Bowie, finally off cocaine and interested in making an album that bears the influence of krautrock like Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk, said resulting album (Low) being a series of short pop-ish songs on one side, and a collection of longer 'soundscapes' on the other.

Of course, both albums are excellent. Within my own aesthetic sense, this is a bit of a paradox: albums, generally, are good to the extent that they sound like they could be played on a back porch or in a garage. Hence, for example, Pavement or Wilco. 154 and Low are mechanical and cold or austere (pick your metaphor) to an extreme, the opposite of whatever authenticity might come from an acoustic guitar.

When I wrote about Kanye yea these many months ago, I mentioned something about his use of Auto-Tune, that it was intended to be thematic rather than technological. I think this is also the case in these songs: the novelty of the sound is only important insomuch as it allows each to get across their point and rejects introducing new elements solely for their newness. Put another way, this is approximately the difference between Radiohead's OK Computer, where the theme is alienation, and Kid A, where the theme is 'look at all this cool stuff a sequencer can do!'

The same applies to literature, but in ways that are perhaps unexpected. If Kafka takes some liberty with reality I don't mind; if Borges does the same I feel he's violated something in his agreement with me as the reader.