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John Lennon – Imagine

19 Monday Oct 2020

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“Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom
and the people will be a hundred times happier.
Throw away morality and justice
and people will do the right thing.
Throw away industry and profit
and there will be no thieves.”

– From Chapter 19 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu

In a recent survey conducted on behalf of the book series, Little People, Big Dreams, it was found that 15% of children aged six to 16 had never heard of John Lennon and a third of them did not know why he was famous. Imagine, the most well-known of his solo offerings, is one of the reasons why Lennon was famous not just as a member of The Beatles.

Imagine by John Lennon is not, as the title would suggest, a song about imagination. It is concerned with reality without the imposition of human preconceptions. The means of achieving peace it advocates is not idealistic dreaming, but rather the unlearning of several ideas that have been invented by humankind, and which have become so entrenched in society that it is difficult to imagine a world without them.

“Imagine there’s no heaven…”

This is a strange line to open a song about a desired world peace. Surely heaven is a positive idea, or, at least, not detrimental to society? Lennon, however, is not singing about a utopia. He is proposing a world that no longer needs heaven because life is enough. As Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

The first verse continues:

“It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky.”

Heaven and hell are the concepts in the song most demonstrably the imagined creation of humankind. The existence of these posthumous destinations for the soul can be neither confirmed or denied because nobody can experience death and return. Lennon is arguing that without the expectation of reward or punishment in the afterlife, people would instead focus on the importance of the journey and living in the moment because life, which it is much harder to argue against the existence of, is all that matters: “Imagine all the people living for today”.

He expands on this theme in the second verse with the line “and [imagine] no religion too”. Like heaven and hell, religion is also the invention of the human mind. (If you are religious, at least admit that the religions you do not follow are such). Religion can have both good and bad consequences. It follows the line ‘Nothing to kill or die for’, so the emphasis is on the negative effects, such as religious fighting, but since he is imagining ‘Above us, only sky’, it is not only these but also the positive repercussions, such as being a good person to get a ticket to paradise, that he imagines not existing.

The second verse begins with the line “Imagine there’s no countries.” Countries are also the invention of humankind. The world is just the world and it is only people that have divided it up into separate entities like a spherical blue-green cake. The world we live in has countries only because of a consensus that they exist, and even then, the boundaries are unstable. Look at Russia reclaiming Crimea in 2014, the fighting between Armenians and Azeris over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, and the revelation that President Trump enquired about purchasing Greenland from Denmark in 2019. Sometimes there is no consensus: Kosovo, Israel and Taiwan are all unrecognised by some states.

If this is hard to accept because the idea of countries is so ingrained in how people view the world, a passage in Book III, Chapter VII of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, when the world population is reduced to less than 100 people journeying from France to Switzerland, might help explain it:

“We first had bidden adieu to the state of things which having existed many thousand years, seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic, and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. […] To preserve these we had quitted England–England, no more; for without her children, what name could that barren island claim?”

Without people, there are no countries. Of course, Lennon is not imagining a world without people but with “all the people living life in peace”. What he dreams of is a world not without humans, but without the delineated borders of countries created by humankind.

The line “Nothing to kill or die for” follows this after “It isn’t hard to do”. Take, for example, the current Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: The two belligerents are fighting over control of the enclave to say “that region is in my country”. If there were no countries and borders imposed on the world by humans, such fighting would never take place and there would be nothing to kill or die for.

The final verse begins with the line “Imagine no possessions”. Possessions do not exist without the human belief in ownership. There are things, and who owns them is, like the borders of countries, a matter of popular consensus and legal definition created by governments, rather than unmitigated truth. The line reminds me of a verse in the Billy Bragg song, “The World Turned Upside Down”:

“The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain.”

Lennon is asking the listener to imagine a world without the concept of ownership. As the quotation from the Tao Te Ching at the beginning of this piece says: “Throw away industry and profit/and there will be no thieves.”

There is a concept in Taoism called ‘Pu’, most commonly translated as the ‘uncarved block’ but which is perhaps better translated as ‘unworked wood’ or ‘unhewn log’. It refers to natural simplicity without any unnecessary complication or human interference. (It has other connotations, but this is the most relevant to Imagine.) What Lennon is actually asking the listener to do is to return to this state of being, before humans imagined these notions; the afterlife, religion, borders, countries, the concept of ownership, and possessions; to perform a miracle and uncarve the block of life by undoing the layers and layers of concepts humankind has constructed and sewn into the fabric of our perception.

Imagine, therefore, is not about imagination. It is about a reality unencumbered by the intervention of human preconceptions. The children who do not know who John Lennon is, whose minds are yet to be ‘carved’ by the preconceptions of their ancestors, are perhaps the ideal form of this concept, the people who could grow up to make Lennon’s dream a reality. Can you imagine that?

Jeffrey Lewis – Keep It Chill! (In The East Vill)

03 Monday Aug 2020

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“No, my prophecy will come bright, charging full at the eastern rays of the sun!”

 – spoken by Cassandra in Agamemnon by Aeschylus, as translated by George Theodoridis

On 24 March 2020, the singer Jeffrey Lewis posted a video of the song “Keep It Chill! (In The East Vill)” to his YouTube channel. It was a solo piece on acoustic guitar written in response to the COVID-19 outbreak reaching New York and the subsequent shutdown. Just over three months later, many of the worries and fears he enumerated in the lyrics have become eerily prescient.

In the third verse, Lewis predicted that rats are ‘gonna run out of things to eat’ because there’s ‘no one in the street’ and ‘it won’t take long ‘till they’re a billion strong.’ There were more sightings of rats after the implementation of the lockdown in both New Orleans and New York, and the reopening of outdoor restaurants and other eateries in the Big Apple has brought a surge in visible rat activity.

The verse continues with the lines ‘They’re sure the food they’re missing’s/now stored in out kitchens,/so look out, here they come!’. In the UK, a report by Aviva found that there had been a 42% increase in rat infestations for JG Pest Control between January to March 2020 (Q1) and April to June 2020 (Q2), a 120% increase in rodent-related callouts between Q2 2019 and Q2 2020, and that residential rodent cases for the first half of 2020 was equivalent to 90% of cases in the whole of 2019.

Lewis finishes the prediction with the lines ‘So each virus life we save/is gonna die in a mighty rat tidal wave’, which has not happened yet, thank goodness, and may never happen. Recently, however, the first case of tick-borne babesiosis was diagnosed in England. Babesiosis is a disease ticks acquire after they have fed off infected cattle, rodents or deer and then pass onto humans with bites. At present, there is no evidence to suggest this case was because of rodents, but the aforementioned increased human proximity to rats will likely lead to the spread of other diseases.

In the second verse, Lewis forecast that ‘the teeming hordes that can’t take no more is gonna loot the stores and then they’re coming for us’. Following the police killing of the African American George Floyd on 25 May 2020, there was widespread civil unrest that included, but was not limited to, looting, although the vast majority of it was peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. The section is concluded with the line ‘there’s blood that’s gonna spill’, and (graphic content warning) blood did spill, but from police brutality rather than rival looters.

In the fourth verse, Lewis refers to President Donald Trump as the ‘orange clown who runs DC’ and provides a list of actions he expects the leader to take. This begins with the President seeing ‘there’s perfect cause to declare martial laws’. Although he has not, in fact, declared martial law in response to the civil unrest, he has taken it upon himself to use a military general for a photo opportunity, threatened to deploy the National Guard, and sent federal agents in unmarked vehicles to detain protestors. So, while martial law itself has not been invoked, everything but martial law has been.

Later in the verse, Lewis sings that ‘all his Klu Klux kranks/patrol the streets with tanks/saying “Behave and you’ll be spared!”’. The use of ‘Klu Klux kranks’ to make reference to the Klan carries with it the connotations of racism the police have been accused of, and their anonymity, hiding under the hood, also anticipates the anonymity used by the officers in unmarked vehicles.

Lewis follows the ‘perfect cause to declare martial laws’ with ‘and pause elections indefinitely’. On 30 July 2020, the President tweeted: ‘Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???’, saying it will be the most ‘inaccurate and fraudulent’ election in history because of ‘universal mail-in voting’. Although later in the verse, Lewis opines that ‘you can’t send mail out’, the coronavirus outbreak means that a lot of people will be choosing to post their ballots. In Nevada, for example, lawmakers are looking to provide every registered voter with a mail-in ballot, much to Trump’s chagrin. The President has dangled this proposition of a rescheduled poll, and although the constitution clearly states that only congress has the power to authorise it, it would not be surprising if he attempted to carry out such a threat.

Another thing Lewis expects Trump to do is ‘call the banks’ and say ‘let’s all join ranks/unless their money might get shared’. The $2.2 trillion stimulus package passed in the senate on 25 March 2020 included a provision of $500bn for businesses in what was criticised as a ‘corporate slush fund’, as well as $400bn in loans for small businesses to be made available through banks and credit unions, which resulted in ‘larger companies with connections to major national or regional banks’ getting ‘priority treatment’. It did, however, include sending cheques to individuals, so Lewis’s fear that ‘you won’t get no bailout’ proved to be unfounded, but not far off, given the unprecedented increase in unemployment and the lapsing of rent protections paving the way for mass evictions.

Lewis also worries that “if the internet’s not a memory yet/it’ll get surveilled outright at will’. On 29 May 2020, President Trump signed an executive order targeting Twitter after it fact-checked one of his tweets. A lawsuit against it has been brought by the Center for Democracy and Technology, claiming the order could ‘discourage other platforms from exercising their free speech rights’. Add Trump’s intention to ban TikTok from the US to the mix, and the internet is not just being surveilled, but the wild west of the world wide web is becoming increasingly regulated.

Despite all of this, Lewis ends the song on a happy note, claiming there is a chance humanity will take ‘total warning about global warming’, that the shutdown will ‘slow greenhouse gases’ and ‘makes things greener and the whole world cleaner’. He also says there could be a ‘full-on call for healthcare for all/and better safety nets rolled out’. The hope is that these calls are answered and, unlike Cassandra, the warnings are heeded, because Lewis’s future-telling hit-rate of ill omens in one song is frighteningly high, so there is grounds for optimism that his harbingers of happier times will be too.

Emmy The Great – Dandelions/Liminal

27 Monday Jul 2020

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“Funny, although [Malaya] was going through civil war, in lots of ways it was more straightforward than Hong Kong. You’d know where you were most of the time. Not really like that here, is it?”

“No, it’s all about layers here,” I said.

“Layers. That’s a good word for it. Layers.

 – John Lanchester, Fragrant Harbour

Emmy the Great’s Dandelions/Liminal, the first single released from her upcoming album, April, is about the final stages of a relationship when you know the end is coming but some of the embers of that first flame still glow. It also examines the dichotomy between societal expectations on the one hand, the natural world and intuition on the other, and the blurred edges between them.

The forward slash in the title gives the song three potential names: it can be either Dandelions, Liminal or Dandelions/Liminal. Dandelions is a concrete noun, while liminal, which can mean either a transitional or initial stage of a process or occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold, is an abstract adjective. This is a reversal of the expected grammar: an adjective is usually put before a noun to describe it. It also means the title itself has a certain liminality to it, unable to settle on either word or both.

Emmy The Great was born in Hong Kong, a fact mentioned in both the press release for the single and an interview on Sunday Morning Live that aired on 19 July 2020. Having also lived in the UK and New York, Emmy occupies a liminal space where she is able to sing in both English and Cantonese. I first heard her sing in Cantonese when a friend of mine, Laura, and I went to see her at the Village Underground, and Laura identified one song as a version of Faye Wong’s cover of Dreams by The Cranberries featured in Wong Kar Wai’s 1994 film, Chungking Express.

Hong Kong, which was a British colony until 1997, is a liminal space, sitting, historically, if not geographically, on the threshold of East and West. As a special administrative region of China under its ‘One Country, Two Systems’ policy scheduled to last until 2047, it is in the process of changing jurisdiction. At present, with the controversy over its National Security Law, democracy protests, and threats by the Chinese Government to stop recognising the British National (Overseas) passport, it is also a battleground between Western, especially English-speaking democracy and control by the mainland.

The artwork released alongside the single is a diptych of historic photos of Hong Kong, taken from the vantage point of Hong Kong Island and overlooking Kowloon across Victoria Harbour, a natural division within the territory of Hong Kong itself. The photos overlap, so that the leftmost edge of the first photo comprises the rightmost edge of the second photo. This is the same structure as the title, with the word/photo you expect to be on the left appearing on the right. There is also a picture of what I assume is a dandelion on the left-hand photo, although it is hard to tell, and a clash of the natural world and urban settlements in both, but more distinctly in the right-hand picture.

The very first line of the song, ‘Oh it was terrible the trembling/back when the leaves were turning brown’, introduces this idea of liminality. The first clause is backed by tremolo strings, reflecting the trembling in the lyrics as they slide back and forth across the notes, while the second recalls the process of autumn, one of the subjects Emmy has said the album was about in a pinned Tweet.

But there is also the overlap between societal expectation and natural intuition, as demonstrated in the first verse after the first chorus. It opens with the desire to have a leisurely riverside stroll, but undercuts it with the question, ‘Isn’t that what people do?’, transforming it into a romantic ideal the couple is attempting to imitate without the underlying affection required to rekindle those spontaneous early days.

The next line, ‘You say we’ve lost touch with Mother Nature’ follows perfectly on from this, because the natural experience has been subordinated to societal expectation. By the time the final line, ‘And I say, I need to call my mother too’, comes around, we’re back completely to societal convention, away from intuition and without a mention of the natural world, as Emmy needs to use technology to fulfil what is expected of her.

An earlier couplet, ‘Let us dance a little more/they’re playing music in the store’, also deals with the way these two ideas interact, as the primal need to dance is changed once you realise that they are in a store, where that urge is not expected to be satisfied.

In fact, the other person in the song, her lover, acts as a sort of proselytizer for natural world. The three times they communicate are a note to say they are leaving town, saying that they have lost touch with Mother Nature, and that their official line is that heartache is healthy for the body. The last of these is followed by Emmy singing ‘If pain is healthy for the body, baby, you too could have a body like mine’, referring to a real advertising slogan used for several products, most notably for bodybuilding. The ‘official line’ becomes blurred because, depending on whether or not heartache is healthy for the body, the following line could be a validation of their outlook or a sarcastic joke.

This verse also introduces backing vocals singing ‘da da da da da da da’, which, aside from being much more interesting to hear than to read, is the first syllable of dandelions, the other half of the title, repeated as if literally scattering all over the place. Various other text painting techniques are used throughout to evoke this scattering.

The first time Emmy sings ‘scatter all over the place’, the first four syllables are quavers or half-notes, taking up a period of half a beat, and the fifth note, the second syllable of ‘over’ lasts for a dotted crotchet, or one and a half notes. The ‘the’ lasts for one quaver or half note and ‘place’ lands on the first beat of the next 4/4 bar.

The drum pattern also changes during the singing of this phrase, with the snare drum now landing on the first beat, the second half of the second beat and the fourth beat. All that has really happened is that one beat has been dropped and another moved half a beat, but the effect is that the backing seems stretched out, reflecting the scattering, which is further emphasised when combined with the rhythmic pattern of the lyrics.

The second time Emmy sings ‘Scatter all over the place’, the pattern changes. The six notes of ‘scatter all over the’ are stretched equally over the four beats in a set of crotchet triplets. The effect of this is that the words themselves seem to scatter over the beat. The fact that it is a different pattern of notes singing ‘scatter all over the place’ to the previous one calls further attention to the randomness of the scattering dandelions.

This scattering is also reflected in the final passage, where Emmy sings ‘Don’t give me anything except your time’ and a chorus of voices sings ‘scatter all over’. The chorus then echoes ‘your time’ and Emmy takes up ‘scatter all over the place’, so that the words themselves switch places to echo the scattering of dandelions.

The song combines this series of liminal motifs; the bittersweet twilight of a relationship, the inevitable passage of time, the natural changing of the seasons, intuition versus societal norms; into a song that slides effortlessly between conflicts. A breakup song without a breakup is difficult to categorise, to the point where it has a choice of titles, but that’s the point. It’s about the porousness of boundaries, the liminal spaces between layers. That’s a good word for it. Layers.

Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America – The 1975

15 Monday Jun 2020

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“Of footprints left behind Him, in the earthly path He trod,
And how the lowest may find Him, who straitly walk with God,”

From “The Object of a Life” by G. J. Whyte Melville

In The 1975’s Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America, lead vocalist, Matty Healy, and guest artist, Phoebe Bridgers, take on the personas of people who are concealing their same-sex attraction because it conflicts with their Christian beliefs.

The theme is set out in the opening two verses, where Matty’s character says ‘I’m in love’ twice because he is in love with both Jesus Christ and a boy he knows. In trying to reconcile these supposedly incompatible feelings, he concludes in the opening line of the chorus that ‘fortunately, [he] believes’.

This establishes the idea that he is ‘lucky’ to believe in God. Finding it fortunate to believe in God when it creates a guilt about his same-sex attraction suggests that other people are unlucky and unfortunate not to believe, because they will not have the guidance of God to cope with their feelings.

The line, ‘Searching for planes in the sea’, is likely a reference to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which went missing and was never found, even after a thorough search of the oceans it was most likely to be in. The reference means he is searching for something elusive and almost impossible to find, a solution to his dilemma, an answer from God. The quest is ‘ironic’ because planes do not belong in the sea, but also because the searching itself may be for something that is not there to find.

In the third line of the chorus, the characters sing that ‘soil just needs water and a seed to be’, or to exist as a living thing, which in this context also represents the water of life, the Holy Spirit that is needed to nourish the seed of a soul. But, the characters ask, if they turn into a tree, can they be the leaves? What they want to know is whether they can change, whether this part of them they feel but do not want to admit to the outside world, will pass like the leaves that fall away. If they receive the holy spirit, will they be able to alter who they inherently are, what they want to become?

The line in the second verse, ‘for I am just a footprint in the snow’ is a reference to a poem of disputed authorship called ‘Footprints in the Sand’. In the poem, a believer looks back on his life, represented by the titular footprints, in the company of God. For most of his life he sees two sets of footprints in the sand because God walked beside him. When he was at his most desperate and in need of help, however, he sees only one set of footprints. He questions whether at these times God had abandoned him, but God replies that ‘it was then that I carried you’.

In the song, the lyric follows the line ‘I’m in love but I’m feeling low’. The narrator is also at his most desperate and in need of help, but he is only one footprint. There is a greater ambiguity here, for the song exists in a world where God does not explain himself: The single footprint could be because God has abandoned him, or because God carried him, or because there is no God. The fleeting nature of life is further emphasised by the sands of time being replaced by the more ephemeral snow.

Another deviation from the poem’s analogy is that in the song the footprint does not belong to him but IS him. In the poem, the footprints represent the stages of the believer’s life. In the song, Matty’s character is saying is that he is just a stage in his life that will pass; not at a stage, A stage.

An ancient Greek philosopher called Heraclitus is famous for saying that you can never step in the same river twice. This is true because the water you are stepping into is constantly changing. It follows that people, composed of the same star-stuff as everything else, are also constantly changing. Matty’s character realises this, and although there is hope in the possibility of change, he also realises the insignificance of his being, which results in him feeling low about his love.

Phoebe Bridgers’ verse is also about sublimating her same-sex desire. She is ‘nice’ when her beloved, Claire, ‘comes round to call’ but will ‘masturbate the second she’s not there’, which adds a second so-called sin. The word ‘nice’ was also used in the first verse, where Matty sang that Jesus is ‘so nice’. The repetition suggests that when Claire comes around, the Phoebe Bridgers character is acting in a godly way, which she immediately stops doing when Claire leaves.

Although it is not mentioned in the lyrics, the year 2005 is part of the title because it was a pivotal year for gay rights. In the UK, the home of The 1975, it was the year that civil partnerships between same-sex couples were introduced, while California, the birthplace of Phoebe Bridgers, became the first US state to legalise gay marriage. It was therefore not just a confusing time for the characters in the song, but also for the statute books. In the UK, partnerships between same-sex couples were legally recognised, but marriages, the domain of the church, were not. Part of the US had accepted gay marriage, but other parts still held out. It also might explain the second part of the title, “God Bless America”, because a part of America had accepted gay marriage while the UK still had yet to do so.

The sound of the instruments being set up at the start of the song create the illusion of immediacy, as if the characters are desperate to articulate their current dilemma. The acoustic guitar also lends the tune a confessional tone. There are muted trumpets in the background, partly representing the trumpets of God and the angels, but because they are muted, also capturing the inability of the two characters to fully express their feelings.

When you think of a duet, especially by singers of opposing genders, you tend to think of love songs: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe”, Dolly Parton and the late Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” and Elton John and Kiki Dee’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”, the latter of which features one of the most famous gay musicians in history, but is still about a heterosexual relationship. In this instance, there are two people of opposite genders singing about their longing for someone of the same gender, subverting the expectations of such a duet.

In short, The 1975’s “Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America” is a duet between people who are not lovers but share the same internal struggle, a confessional about concealing your own nature and a song of praise caveated by several reservations. It is a mess of contradictions, but by embracing these, it articulates a difficult struggle and becomes a beautiful representation of the truth.