Artificial Intelligence: an attempt to be Leonard Cohen? Maybe, maybe not. (You have to ignore quite a few things, like the outward violence and half the songs.) It's as close as Cale comes, anyway, with songs like Vigilante Lover - radically different, yet sympathetic in some fundamental ways. Maybe it's shallow to connect the paganized Judaic symbolism of Cohen with the paganized Christian symbolism of Cale. Could be.
Maybe it's not very insightful to point out the preoccupation with crossing the line between love and war they shared for some of these years, rendering lovers' quarrels as humint battles and affairs of the heart as border disputes. It's certainly superficial to equate them or connect them simply on the basis of falling for 80s digital noises. But I'm not equating Cale to Pete Townshend or Roger Waters, am I.
ANYONE COULD HAVE CRACKED THAT CODE.
It's just a feeling I get. Do I really have to point out that Cale covered a number of Cohen songs? Won't you just give me the benefit of the doubt here? I listen to all this music. Let me make an argument with my heart and my ears. Just this once.
The incantatory nature of the lyric here, the heart ripped open Cale pins on his sleeve, that's what makes this song. Autoabortive references to the Rosy Christians (he must have known better) certainly aren't. It's a supine song, the anger of a bum fallen into the gutter. It's as powerless a song as The Sleeper, but the illusion of calm has been thrown away. All he can do is scream:
Ladies and gents, in honor of the Academy Awards, please welcome back our friends, analysts, discussants, Jean Shackle and Reginald Ibert...
Shackle: To be a pretty new face in the heart of showbiz. It's the subject of so many songs and books and films and fantasies, and frankly it's not very interesting anymore. It doesn't matter whether it ends in tragedy or in triumph, it's simply worn out.
Ibert: You might say the same about wild west pictures. It's all in the execution, my friend, and John Cale got it right with "Black Rose." It's not a classic picture, I suppose, but it's a beauty: a lyrical little noir.
Shackle: It's graceful, I'll give it that. But graceful assembly can't redeem a collection of clichés. Look at this!
Standing on the corner, just baying at the moon Just another little Miss Too-Much Far-Too-Soon
Ibert: My mother once told me that cliché is in the eye of the beholder. Sure, any single element isn't notable, but it's a beautiful arc it follows, and it leaves you with a feeling - which is more than many films do.
Shackle: Well, the main feeling it leaves me with is disappointment. He seems to run out of ideas towards the end, and ends with a straightforward lifting of material from his much finer "Verses."
Ibert: Jean, this came out fifteen years earlier than that.
Shackle: Hum. Still, as the noted film soundtrack composer T.E.Yorke might say, THUMBS DOWN.
It's Día de los Muertos. Why not enjoy a sugar skull with this post? A note about Robert J. Widlar.
Besides many other distinctions, Bob Widlar was the father of the operational amplifier, an arrangement of transistors and biasing circuits that easily slotted into more complicated circuits, becoming a core building block of the technological revolution of the late 20th century. He did not invent it, but he set the standard for integrated circuit op-amps and designed some of the best and most versatile that have been created. After making Fairchild Semiconductor the leader in the IC market, he started the linear IC division at National Semiconductor.
This is where, over the course of four years, he established a reputation as an excitable boy. He brought a ewe in to mow the lawn. To stop people from raising their voice to him, he created and secretly installed in his office a device called the Hassler, which would echo any noise in the vocal frequency range at a higher frequency, on the edge of the ear's range; as the volume increased, the frequency offset dropped proportionally, making the echo more noticeable, and giving the effect of a ringing in the ears. He smashed nonfunctional components into a fine powder to ensure they had zero chance of causing him trouble in the future.
And then, after that four years was up, he got in his car and drove down to Mexico, to Puerto Vallarta, leaving no forwarding address. He took a single-room adobe apartment, where he could concentrate on his alcohol and write technical papers on electrical circuits without so much as an electric lightbulb around. National Semiconductor sent a mission down to track him and reacquire him. Eventually he signed on as a contractor, but kept his Mexican residence. He died at fifty-three during a demanding jog. He wasn't identified for several days.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled fragment.
I think of Bob Widlar when I hear this song. I don't only think of him - I think of the Katharine Anne Porter novel Ship of Fools, as well, and of Ambrose Bierce, charging down into Mexico despite his age to join Pancho Villa's army, disappearing from the face of the earth.
To be honest, I think of myself. Even though I'm not an alcoholic, nor a gringo in Mexico, nor hanging out among troops and criminals. I don't think it's self-dramatization; there's something about the song that reaches out and pulls you into it. It's an epiphanic moment, a passing instant of understanding crystallized into a song. Despite the very particular scenario, it's a song with a weird universal resonance.
That's a big claim, but consider this: "Dying on the Vine" is a fairly obscure song in Cale's catalog, its definitive version a live take, the studio album entirely forgotten. And yet I have heard from several other people who call it their favorite Cale song. It is my favorite Cale song. It is not his best song, it is not his most characteristic song, but it is the song that most reaches into my chest and clamps down on my heart.
Two albums feature this song: Artificial Intelligence as an inebriated slow-motion dance, a life observed from the bottom of the bottle; Fragments of a Rainy Season as a flood of illumination. The video above comes very close to a perfect hybrid of the two. Of all the versions, the Fragments version (mp3 here) is the most essential; it's the most accessible path into the song. (It's worth noting that the version included on the Close Watch compilation is indeed the Fragments version.) I was very disappointed by the studio version on first listen, but I've come to understand and appreciate it.
It's interesting to think about the choices behind Cale's different approaches to the song: play up the Spanish motif or not? play up the emotion or hide it? emphasize the choruses or the verses? what spin do you put on the narrator? and how much of him is you? I've gone through six solo guitar arrangements of this song myself, and tweaking each of these parameters has a substantial effect on the nature of the song. But the song stands up to everything! There are few songs I've encountered that can stand up to as much resculpting as this one does, and yet it always seems to retain its soul.
I'm not a reliable guide to the lyrics of this song; my interpretation is completely personal and extremely idiosyncratic. Just part of the magic of the song is the sentence fragment in the chorus: "I was living my life like a Hollywood..." A Hollywood what, he doesn't say, but it evokes so many Nathanael West-type possibilities.
Larry "Ratso" Sloman (publishing industry itinerant worker and author) was Cale's writing buddy (and presumably partner in crime) during the period that produced Artificial Intelligence (as well as an album's worth of tracks that came out hereandthere). It's hard to identify a specific change in the resulting lyrics, but the overall feeling is different: the old intensity is channeled into poppier digressions, verses are more coherent and polished, and the weird stuff is more predictable than before. The topics the songs cover, in general, are a little more normal and digestible.
Which has a bad side, I suppose, but also a good one. The Sleeper is a fascinating ditty that seemingly tries to use the human intelligence idea of a sleeper agent to explore a (of course) sordid, disastrous failed romance. It doesn't really succeed, as the connection between the two ideas still eludes me, but it's evocative and thought-provoking anyway.
It's about lovers and enemies who can't stay separate. The narrator goes so far as to compare himself to Jesus and the amour to Satan and implies, by a delightfully subtle use of the subjunctive mood, that despite his hateful rant they, uh, fell to conjugating. Word choice is good, with evocative and paradoxical phrases ("I was the moth stuck on your pin") and twisted syntax that works anyway ("it isn't me that's what's wrong with you"). The solid vocal delivery helps the lyrics work - Cale sounds a bit detached, but not overly, and certainly not bland.
The vocal melody itself is remarkably gentle - not what you'd expect for the lyrics. The inescapably 80s backing track doesn't hurt it too badly. For some reason the electric piano here doesn't sound as insipid as it would ten years later - probably because it's not the central instrument of the track. The percussion (is it live or is it Memorex?) sounds like a typewriter, an interesting effect. The electric guitar and bass play repetitive riffs, seemingly within the same chord for the duration of the song.
It's a good little noir song. Like the album, it's not essential, but like the album it's a rewarding listen.
John Cale has an interest in China. Not an obsession or preoccupation or anything sordid like that, but an interest. And in the interest of providing some thematic contour to this project, I'm going to explore it for a while.
For those who don't follow Asian politics, the title of this song refers to the completion of the lease the British had signed on the New Territories of Hong Kong back in 1898. In the late 1970s, the People's Republic of China became rather adamant that the British never had sovereignty anywhere in Hong Kong and that, upon completion of the lease, the British administration had better pack up and go home. But despite the evocative and utterly tasteless title, I don't really know how to connect "Chinese Takeaway (Hong Kong 1997)", from 1985's Artificial Intelligence, with that thematic thread.
This isn't a song, and whatever political intentions it has are rather, um, obfuscated. What this is is a drum machine track with some impromptu goofing around on the synthesizer. Cale:
quotes what sounds like a Bach chorale that I can't place
plays some gently swaying chords with spaghetti-western whistling (Morricone?!)
quotes from the Air in Bach's Third Orchestral Suite (aka Air on the G String)
plays a child-like melody and punctuates it with a sinister laugh
goes out with a few minor screams atop a scary version of Für Elise.
Between most of these piano bits there appears a gently rocking (as in a cradle, not as in Sabotage) arpeggiated chord that sounds rather Caribbean, played on a synthesized harpsichord or somesuch.
The piece sounds sinister, taken as a whole, but it doesn't sound cohesive. It doesn't sound like a piece of music, it sounds like screwing around in the studio. Which is fine - that's what Beatles Anthology-type or Dylan Bootleg Series-type projects are for. This didn't really have any business being a main track on an album. This is probably the most obvious case in which Cale's tendency towards in-studio composition, improvisation, and few-takes recording really backfired.
It's a shame Cale didn't write a real song about this subject. But hey, we'll always have "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Best to start this with a low-content song. Satellite Walk, the final track of 1985's underrated Artificial Intelligence, is a nonsense ditty about nuclear apocalypse. The meaningful lyrics are fairly transparent ("I took my Tomahawk for a satellite walk"). It's not hard to see it as a dig at upper-middle-class self-absorption under the shadow of the Bomb, but your guess is as good as mine. The chorus/coda ("Wake up/Get up/Let's dance") is an injection of "romance" of some sort or another into a sociopolitical song, ala Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan," Neil Young's "Around the World," and the Who's "Eminence Front." I'd love to know where this idea came from, though I wouldn't be surprised if it was Cohen.
Musically, the song is hookier than average for Cale. Verse lyrics are more or less a spoken-word chant. The chorus is sung with a woman - it's pure hook, with no real melody to speak of either. It's a very tense, rhythmic, jerky song. Metallic, repetitive, stacatto guitar gives the song a very unsettling feel - the best thing about it. The synthesizer line is rather silly. It's very of its time, though, as are the uninteresting bass line and drum machine pattern.
It sounds like a digital recording. While it's far from the worst I've heard of its era, it's still unpleasantly limited.
Artificial Intelligence: an attempt to be Leonard Cohen? Maybe, maybe not. (You have to ignore quite a few things, like the outward violence and half the songs.) It's as close as Cale comes, anyway, with songs like Vigilante Lover - radically different, yet sympathetic in some fundamental ways. Maybe it's shallow to connect the paganized Judaic symbolism of Cohen with the paganized Christian symbolism of Cale. Could be.
