Frozen Warnings: Bleak Music

"The blues isn't about feeling better; it's about making other people feel worse." 'Bleeding Gums' Murphy

I was in the local indie club last night, showing my disapproval of the dreadful music being played in the usual hipster fashion – frowning, arms folded, standing stock still at the side of the dance floor – when I was approached on two separate occasions by girls I had never met before enticing me to “smile, you’re in a club!” or some similar sentiment. Standard miserable-gittishness aside, it struck me that much ‘happy’ music leaves me completely cold. There is a certain level of gauche jauntiness that just makes me want to kick the speakers in – one of many things I have against Britpop, but that’s another story. Some of pop music’s most engaging music has been made by those driven to explore the darkest depths of their own psyche, often at a huge personal cost. Suicide chic is crass, stupid and unhelpful, but it often becomes hard to disentangle the artist’s own personal decline from these records. With emo becoming a sterilised, stylised short-hand for misery that is justly ridiculed, it’s worth mentioning that it is possible to express sadness, misery and regret in pop music without descending into effete whining and meaningless cliché. Indeed, the basis of modern popular music was the blues, which was very much a raw expression of pain and misery. Blues music, and indeed much music made by those who have lead troubled and painful lives and use it as artistic fuel, remains incredibly popular today. It is worth asking, what is the appeal of such horrendously bleak music? Why does suicide and personal tragedy shift units? Of the people who made these records, some lived to tell the tale, whilst others did not, but all paid a price for digging this deep into the well of human suffering. Sit back, preferably in a cold, damp, dimly lit room, hide all the knives and abandon all hope: here are some of popular music’s bleakest moments.

Billie Holiday – “Gloomy Sunday”

Any study of bleakness in popular music necessarily starts with Gloomy Sunday, the infamous Hungarian Suicide Song, because, present at the birth of popular music as we now know it, it was an early indicator in the ability of pop music to express grief and sorrow extremely powerfully but also an early indicator of the commercial potential of misery and suicide chic. Written by Hungarian Rezso Seress, the song was popularised by the English-version cover by Billie Holiday, but its notoriety preceded it – allegedly the song caused a spate of suicides, its lyrics and tune so miserable that it inspired numerous young lovers who heard the song to throw themselves off buildings immediately on hearing it. Realising that this would only add to the ghoulish appeal of a song that features line as bleak as “Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all / My heart and I have decided to end it all’, the rumours were spread and Billie Holliday’s version, albeit with a third verse that softens the blow, became a hit. Certainly, the song’s austere chords combined with Holiday’s stunning voice and morbid lyrics of love cut short by death created a piece of music so terminally tragic that you can only too easily imagine soundtracking the desperate suicide of star-crossed lovers. The song has been covered by numerous artists with an unhealthy obsession with death, and the suicides of Seress and Billie MacKenzie – the Associates frontman who also covered the song – have only helped to increase the bizarre legend of the song.

Public Image Limited – “Theme” / Metal Box / Flowers of Romance

John Lydon was a volatile and troubled character from an early age, so it’s not surprising that the grotesque media carnival of the Sex Pistols only brought his feelings of alienation, paranoia and self disgust to the fore. Aligning himself with two fantastic musicians who were able of creating a worthy soundtrack to his inner turmoil but who were unfortunately equally damaged in their own special ways, he formed Public Image Limited. “Theme”, from their self-titled first album, is played in mental hospitals to show patients that they are not alone in what they are feeling. All atonal guitar noise, throbbing bass and primal screaming, it’s utterly harrowing. Lydon howls “AAND I WISH I COOULD DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAH!” for 9 punishing minutes, forcing you to share in his world of self-hatred and paranoia. If the first album lost the plot after that, then Metal Box certainly doesn’t. “Death Disco” is Lydon’s pained farewell to his dying mother, and that’s probably the album’s emotional high point. “I could be wrong / It could be hate”spits “Memories”, whilst “Chant” almost chokes on its own misanthropic mantra before dissolving into the undead muzak of “Radio 4”. Levene’s scaping guitar and coruscating synthesizers scream blue murder in the hollow caverns of Jah Wobble’s subsonic bass playing. The follow up, Flowers of Romance, was bleaker still – all clattering tribal drums and harsh synthesiser squawks over Lydon’s atonal ranting, the zenith – or nadir, depending on how you look at it – of his raging hatred expressed on “Track 8”’s repulsion: ‘A bulbous heap / Batting her eyelids.. Erupting in fat”. From this harrowing pit of hatred there was clearly nowhere to go, so Lydon stopped making proper music, reclaimed his Rotten pseudonym and started making really crappy pop music. It’s funny how things turn out.

Pink Floyd – Animals

By 1973, Pink Floyd had misery sussed, making Dark Side of the Moon the party album you could slit your wrists to. Wish You Were Here, despite the generous sentiment of the title track, saw them sinking further into Roger Water’s misanthropy. Animals came out in 1977, and then there was no turning back. The Floyd entered punk’s year zero with what is possibly the bleakest, most angry album released the entire year. The Floyd’s previous albums dealt with Water’s favourite themes – madness, alienation, loss of innocence, the emptiness of the modern world – but Animals sees him lyrically begin to shut himself off from humanity altogether, leading to the warped self-absorbed self-hatred and misanthropy that fills The Wall and extends to The Final Cut. Wish… may have seen Waters lamenting lost youth and longing for the return of his lost friends, but Animals sees him taking swipes at humanity itself. From his position as Rock God, Waters weighs humanity’s collective heart and finds it grossly lacking, caricaturing his fellow man as grotesque beasts with no saving graces. “Dogs” portrays conniving businessmen driven by selfishness and greed, ultimately dying by their own sword – a frighteningly accurate portrayal of Thatcherite industry, whilst “Sheep” portrays the masses as braying idiots brutalised by their leaders and unable to fend for themselves. Throughout the album, Pink Floyd back Waters every inch of the way, with a sharp musical focus they would soon lose for good – David Gilmour in particular is at his best, especially on the sharp soloing and nasty riffing that give “Dogs” its teeth. The Wall and The Final Cut may compete with Animals for bleakness, but they cannot compete in its violently focused musical attack. This is a powerful, nasty and utterly engrossing monument to humanity’s moral failings, pointed out by degenerate squabbling pop stars at the peak of their powers.

Syd Barrett – “Jugband Blues”/ “Vegetable Man” / “Dark Globe”

And what of the Floyd’s errant drug-addled genius? Fewer artists must have suffered more in the comedown after the Summer of Love. Syd’s drug use had left him a worn out shell of a man, and whilst he disappeared into obscurity to live in Cambridge with his mum, his band went on to sell millions of records by writing songs inspired by his descent into madness. If Piper At The Gates Of Dawn captured the highs of the psychedelic experience, his latter day stuff captured the tortuous descent into psychosis latent at the heart of it. “Jugband Blues” is Syd’s harrowing resignation speech, the last song he recorded with the Floyd. Essentially, by this stage, excessive drug use had lead to his mental collapse. “Jugband Blues” is miles away from the psychedelic wonderment of Piper , the dream long since having turned into a nightmare. Opening with ‘It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here /And I’m most obliged to you for making it clear that I’m not here’, the song lurches haphazardly through a number of seemingly unrelated musical sections, giving a fairly accurate picture of Syd’s fractured mind. Barrett’s creative inventiveness now appears to have been turned into destructiveness; whereas before his eccentric arrangements and musical ideas made a song, here they fight to bring the song to its knees before it’s even got off the ground. “Vegetable Man”, never officially released on account of being too disturbing but often bootlegged, is even more frightening. Similarly wayward in structure, the song builds up to violent peaks only to collapse into a pathetic heap. Syd managed to get his act together enough to record the charmingly shambolic The Madcap Laughs. Songs like “Octopus” hint at the psychedelic whimsy of old, but have a very audible undercurrent of damaged darkness, with songs often collapsing mid take, or dangerously hanging together for grim life. “Dark Globe” is perhaps the album’s most harrowing moment, melodically halting and awkward, with Syd’s voice strained and cracking as he hollers, ‘Wont’ you miss me / Wouldn’t you miss me at all?’ Kids, just say no.

Joy Division – Closer

In reality, too much has probably been said already about Closer, and more will continue to be said. Ian Curtis is perhaps the ultimate Dead Pop Star – he had talent, keen intelligence and genuine wasted potential to go along with the obligatory good looks and ready-made legend (Closer was released after Ian Curtis committed suicide). However, the reason Joy Division, and especially Closer, continue to draw such attention is down to the power of their music and the way it seems to fit perfectly with our image of Curtis’ troubled mental state. Listening to Closer, it is easy to see why. Curtis’ doomed poetics had evolved from Unknown Pleasure’s dark angst to something much more disturbing, in the same way that Joy Division’s music had grown more sophisticated and darkly textured. The opening side, with “Atrocity Exhibition” appropriately setting the scene for grim voyeurism, is harsh and unforgiving stuff, but it’s really with the second side that things get scary. The music slows down to a spectral crawl, and Curtis sounds as if he has stopped struggling and surrendered to the darkness that swallowed him. In “The Eternal”, Curtis even has a premonition of his own funeral. But perhaps it is “Isolation” on the first side that really gets to the heart of the record. The song features the infamous “I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through / I’m ashamed of the person I am” couplet, but in the final verse, Curtis is given his first glimpse of what lies beyond: “But if you could just see the beauty / These things I could never describe… This is my one broken prize”. These lines some up both the harsh cold beauty of Joy Division’s vision, but also give a chilling picture of a man poised upon the abyss, drawn fatally down towards the darkness.

Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible

There are many reasons to hate the Manics, one of the most obvious being for the sickening ‘Cult of Richey’ that to this day surrounds the band – the way Richey Edwards’ self-absorption, self-harm and ultimate self-destruction has been turned into a heroic act by some of the band’s most devoted followers is a sad post-script to their career. I come to The Holy Bible not wanting to add to the ridiculous legend in any way, but it is nonetheless their most musically exciting and engaging album by a long way. Lyrically, the pretensions of the Manics’ patchy earlier albums – all confused rhetoric and misread Nietzsche - are chewed up, shredded up and spat out, amidst flotsam and jetsam from Richey’s disintegrating mind. For the first time the band managed to wrest their confused lyrical threads into something at once very personal and engaging, if utterly harrowing. But, crucially, the music is right behind the lyrics – the band’s former hammy punk-metal tempered with a harsh, Spartan post-punk derived sound. Thus Richey’s anorexia tale ‘4st7’ is given extra nastiness via its scratchy guitars and odd time-signature changes, giving way to a chillingly serene coda. ‘Yes’ examines prostitution of the soul with real bile, whilst ‘She Is Suffering’ has a crawling evil ambience clearly designed to echo Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’. The Holy Bible lends itself to legend so easily because whilst Richey was disintegrating is the only time MSP managed to sound completely sincere – if still typically confused. They had become slave to their ‘cultural alienation, boredom and despair’ rhetoric, and had unwittingly sent themselves down a path to destruction. This happened to fortuitously coincide with the band throwing off their musical shackles and embracing their tortured muse head on. The Manics finally burned with the passion and conviction they had always wanted to, but at a high human price. Never again would they achieve such heights of passion or musical excellence, and their subsequent career has seen them almost afraid to approach those attributes which gives them to this day one of the most passionate – and obnoxious – fan bases around.

Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses

It’s a sad truism in popular music that, if you want to be a mad tortured artist, it helps if you a) are male and b) kill yourself at an early age. Kristen Hersh of Throwing Muses conformed to neither of these simple rules, and, as a result, is not a rock ‘n’ roll martyr like Richey Edwards or *spits* Kurt Cobain. Hersh had a troubled upbringing and suffers from manic depression. Few artists in the history of popular music have approached her courage and intensity – her art is highly personal and cathartic. Yet because being a mad woman in pop music is for some reason less ‘cool’ or marketable then being a mad man, her music remains neglected outside a narrow cult following. Also, it has often lead to her not-insignificant talent all too often being patronised as the outpourings of a lunatic in a way that has never happened to, say, Richey Edwards. Hersh has been described as a female Morrissey, which is a horrendous insult to Hersh – she is no effete whiner, but an artist who confronts her difficulties through her music. Throwing Muses first album is unbearably intense. Opener ‘Call Me’ opens with driving, knotty guitar lines and Hersh howling like a banshee ‘Something’s gone/ Something’s oveeeeeeeeeerrraaaaa…’ before sinking into a deceptively mellow coda – ‘Here I am / What a looser / Waiting for the years to go by’. Songs violently switch mood, from melancholy to vitriolic and back again, the surreal lyrics eloquently expressing Hersh’s angst – listening to the record is like being lost in someone’s very disturbing inner space. ‘America (She Can’t Say No)’ rails against a nation’s lack of values, but most of the pain here is internal. The music is as engaging and unique as the lyrics – swirling, baroque guitars give way to deranged rockabilly worthy of a female menopausal Fall, back to acoustic folk. Most disturbing of all is ‘Delicate Cutters’, a tale of finding catharsis through self-harm. Miles away from emo posturing, the song is just Hersh’s acoustic guitar and icy voice, hard and grim – she means every word of it. Like ‘Closer’, the record is possessed of an eerie beauty and a chilling serenity. The fact that Hersh did not take the easy way out and to this day makes intense and extremely personal records makes it all the more impressive.

Felt - Me And A Monkey On The Moon

Me And A Monkey On The Moon was Lawrence’s tenth album with Felt, and although his music had always been melancholy and he had often expressed a feeling of isolation from people in general – see ‘All The People I Like Are Those That Are Dead’ – it was only with this, Felt’s final album, that he dropped the beautiful oblique poetry of his lyrics to make an intensely personal album. MAAMOTM is, lyrically, brutally honest, from the break up tales of ‘I Can’t Make Love To You Anymore’ and ‘Never Let You Go’, to the tales of Lawrence’s troubled childhood, full of loneliness, despair and worse. But the odd thing about Monkey is how open, joyous and liberated the music sounds – this was Felt at their most musically approachable. ‘Budgie Jacket’ hides its disturbing subject matter behind mumbled vocals and a shimmering guitar solo, whilst ‘I Can’t Make Love’ even includes slide guitars. ‘New Day Dawning’ is at the heart of the album. Lawrence essentially writes himself out of the story – ‘I’ve chickened out of things in the past, but now I know / When death calls I’ll be ready to go’. He is a man whose dreams of pop stardom came to nothing, and now he’s lost absolutely everything and just ‘wants to blend right into the walls of the world / And not be seen’. But then the song’s sunny chorus proclaims ‘It’s a new day dawning, Oh good morning to you’, before crashing into a coda that sounds not unlike Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’, complete with a elegiac guitar solo. Felt had never been so openly rock, nor expressed such open goodwill to the rest of humanity. Ultimately, Monkey is Lawrence’s good-bye note, but, instead of trying to drag down the listener with him, Lawrence realises that he has to make this journey on his own. The album takes on an oddly prescient quality in light of what happened next: Lawrence resurfaced with Denim, only to sink into his current twilight existence as a homeless registered mental patient. Many have tried marrying downbeat lyrics with upbeat music, but Monkey is unique in the contrast between the goodwill bestowed upon the listener and the utter despair awaiting its writer. It’s not that there isn’t hope on this album, it’s just that there’s none whatsoever for its creator.

Big Star - Third/Sister Lovers

Big Star’s third album is so far removed from the glorious power pop of their first two releases that at times it’s hard to believe that this is the work of the same band. Deemed to be too uncommercial for release, and shelved for years due to bickering between guitarist/vocalist Alex Chilton and the producer and record company, Third hit the shelves in 1978, years after Big Star had dissolved to unsurprisingly pitiful sales. Whereas it’s hard to see why Big Star’s first two records failed to sell in hindsight, Third did not sell for obvious reasons, being muddy, perverse and just plain nasty from the offset. Opener ‘Kizza Me’ starts off like the power pop perfection of before, albeit harsher and more ragged, before collapsing at the bridge as Chilton whispers ‘I want to white out’ over cavernous piano and a single jarring chord. The song hops gamely into the chorus, but the damage is done: Chilton has let the mask slip, and his half-hearted grin over the chorus isn’t fooling anyone. This tension runs through the record, alternately making for great music and bloody messes. It becomes abundantly clear that Chilton’s head wasn’t in a great place, as drunken covers and shambolic sketches of songs jostle for space alongside more fruitful offerings. Ultimately, this is the sound of a man wrestling with his muse, only to give up the struggle and run away. At places it feels like Alex Chilton just doesn’t care anymore – upon being told that ‘Downs’ had potential to be a hit, he subjected it to gross sabotage, spitefully hiding the melody under drunkenly dissonant piano, poor arrangement and what sounds like chairs falling over, until the song is reduced to a mangled shell of its former self. Unfortunately this doesn’t do his art any favours. However, occasionally this wilful perversity pays off, as on the fantastic surreal mess that is ‘Kangaroo’. ‘Holocaust’, the album’s most infamous song and its most engaging moment, is one of the most miserable songs ever recorded – over cycling minor chords on an echoing piano, Chilton sings ‘You’re eyes are almost dead / Can’t get out of bed…’. Essentially a grim self portrait and fair indicator of what he was going through at the time, Chilton laments that ‘Everybody goes / Leaving those that fall behind’ before looking at himself and proclaiming, ‘You’re a wasted face… you’re a holocaust’. Bleak doesn’t cover it. Images of loss and confusion are scattered throughout the record’s more together moments, with Chilton pleading ‘I hate it here / Get me out of here’ on ‘Blue Moon’, whilst on ‘Big Black Car’ he sounds as if he’s barely there, merely a ghostly presence behind the music. Fuelled by feelings of bitterness and anger, Alex Chilton’s muse had lead him down a twisted and tortuous path, and Chilton decided he wanted no more of it – Third is the final record that he made that even comes close to reflecting his talent as a songwriter. Few people have come so close to looking greatness in the face, only to throw it all away for nothing.

This Heat - Deceit

This Heat were a product of desperate times: mass unemployment, the Cold War, the rise of Thatcherism… you’ve heard it all before when people talk about the late 70s so I’ll not reel out all the old clichés. But rather then driving them to play three chords and shout rather silly slogans, This Heat were inspired to create a new, radical musical language, built on invention and with a rare, often frightening intensity. Their first album contained its fair share of bleakness, from the portrayal of watery death in ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ to the political turmoil reflected in ‘The Fall Of Saigon’, but ‘Deceit’, released at the height of the Cold War, was even bleaker and more intense. Recorded under the threat of nuclear fallout, the record is infused with paranoia and doubt. Opening with ‘Sleep’, both an incantation to start the album’s dream-like sequence of ideas and a call to awake from apathy and blind acceptance, ‘Deceit’ allows no compromise. ‘S.P.Q.R.’ harks back to the days of the Empire, declaring ‘We are all Romans / We live to regret it’, whilst ‘Makeshift Swahili’ is about lack of communication and the breakdown of understanding, on both a personal and global level. ‘Independence’ rereads the American Declaration of Independence in order to hold up the hypocrisies of the Thatcher/Reagan junta. However, the record is not simply finger pointing – This Heat’s questioning intelligence lies beyond soapbox sloganeering, whilst the band are as ready to admit to their guilt as anyone else’s. The music provides the perfect counterpoint for the lyrics, ranging from knotty tension, shrapnel and violence to periods of odd beauty and calm within the storm. The band’s musical invention was years ahead of its time, especially in its use of tape loops – different recordings are spliced together and overlaid across one another to give a harsh and alien ambience, and pieces of music are spliced in from earlier songs to add to the sense of dream-like continuity. The record is not without a human heart – in places, the group’s vocals combine over pastoral arrangements to give an almost folky feel. But then songs are wracked, torn, collapse and turn about on themselves, adding to the feeling of chaos and confusion. The overall effect is both alluring and terrifying, especially on ‘Hi Baku Shyo’, a field recording from a dead, post-nuclear world. ‘Deceit’ is a beautiful and haunting lament for the downfall of humanity, and, with global warming and volatile international relations rising constantly, all leading to a sense that perhaps we are about to reap as we have sown, this record sounds more and more powerful and pertinent with each listen.

Nico - The Marble Index / Desertshore

A recent issue of The Wire music magazine (www.thewire.co.uk) pointed out that you could draw a history of the latter half of the 20th century with Nico in the centre – from Nazi Germany to washed-out junkie via Warhol and the Velvets. The Marble Index and Desertshore stand in the middle of all of this as the definitive artistic achievements of Ms Christa Pafgen and one of the most extraordinary works to emerge from that period of history. These two records have lost none of their power, and sound just as harsh, alien and singular as they did on their release in 1969 and 1970. Both albums are song cycles with Nico’s legendary Teutonic voice standing at the centre, in all its tragic, doomed glory, accompanied by harmonium and John Cale’s oblique and inventive arrangements. Both records straddle the popular/classical music divide uniquely successfully, being both highly respected and influential in both but belonging to neither. Nico’s surreal poetry reflects her withdrawal from the human race and the world of human feeling, echoed in the powerful bleakness of the music. This is music at its most red-raw and visceral, suffused with a deep, aching hurt, the only escape from which is the numbness of narcotic oblivion. They are set in a metaphysical land of deserts and oceans – vast, empty and uninviting, swept by harsh winds and violent storms, older then humanity itself. The song’s modal scales and images of weather and storms appeal to the most primal of our instincts, but the sheer oddness of the arrangements and the subversion of the natural images from the comforting to the openly hostile turn them into an inverted nightmare. Nico follows her muse unflinchingly, sparing neither herself nor the listener :‘Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)’, with its themes of an empire corrupted at the heart, thematically harks back to Nico’s childhood under Nazi Germany and her father’s death in the gas chambers, even if they are unmentioned in the song’s oblique poetry. However, The Marble Index and Desertshore’s musical achievements put it far from the cheap holiday in other people’s misery that some of the other albums on the list might be guilty of, and, in dealing with these themes, Nico takes on the pain and angst of the whole of the late 20th century. There is a sharp, brutal honesty to these records, but it is delivered in beautifully concise poetry. The Marble Index and Desertshore are easily the most bleak albums ever recorded, but they are also two of my favourites. This is not (only) down to bloody-minded perversity, but to the unique power, guaranteed emotional impact and sheer beauty of these records. Harsh and unforgiving as they may be, both albums are almost unbearably beautiful and moving. From the cycling chimes of ‘Evening Of Light’ to the dark incantations of ‘All That Is My Own’, these records have a crystalline purity and sharp, fragile beauty that is quite unlike anything I have ever heard. Indeed, it is about time that Nico is recognised as a hugely talented artist rather then a doomed junkie. The first time I heard them, these records moved me beyond anything I’d heard before, and they continue to haunt me still.

Post Script

“This is a song for the sunshine / Dedicated to the sunshine” This Heat, “Health and Efficiency”

This list is by no means conclusive – for start, there’s no Nick Drake or Cabaret Voltaire, Leonard Cohen or Neil Young, Neutral Milk Hotel or Nick Cave. Maybe I’ll write about those later if I feel like it. However, after this article in praise of (and in thrall to) the bleakest side of popular music, I’d like to point out that today I have been listening to You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever by Orange Juice, a bright ray of sunshine of an album that always makes me feel happy, and which is also one of my favourites. I don’t know if it’s healthy or not to immerse yourself in miserable music all the time, but I would guess not. Certainly, popular music’s fascination with the morbid and the miserable is a subject that probably deserves a book all to itself, and I have no idea what this says about the people who listen to such music, if anything at all. It’s probably worth pointing out that as long as there has been music, there has been miserable music. There is a Requiem for every Ode To Joy, a murder ballad for every declaration of love. Human emotions are rarely as simple or as clear cut as just ‘happy’ or ‘sad’, and listening to ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ music does not mean that you are either, even if music does often have the power to affect our emotions. I have enjoyed The Marble Index many times whilst being happy, and conversely have listened to You Can’t Hide… whilst feeling utterly miserable. For most of us, the range of emotions is al part of life’s rich tapestry (or insert other favourite cliché here), but I still think there is something fascinating about the extremes, even if you wouldn’t really want to live there. Incidentally, this could lead on to the whole ‘Do you have to suffer for your art?’ debate, as I do believe it’s linked, but I’m not going to go into that today. Today, the sun is out, and I feel positive and inclined to settle for joyous escapism rather then the bleakness of the human condition. But I’m glad these records are here for when I feel differently.