Profane Listening: Teaching Roddy Doyle's The Commitments

In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” John Donne famously cautions his beloved to keep composed and quiet – like a dying “virtuous” man – as they part from one another:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

'Twere profanation of our joys

To tell the laity our love.

Rarefied, sinecured, privileged and private, their bond differentiates itself, at least as far as the poem’s speaker is concerned, from “[d]ull sublunary lovers’ love.” Refurbishing clichés of neo-Platonic idealism, Donne labours to distinguish their joys from vulgar heterosexual desire – his opening conceit enacts, literally, a mortification of the flesh – by linking love parasitically to a form of spiritually-ascendant class mobility. That elitism, moreover, is tied directly to a contradiction built into the poetic speech act: he’s telling her not to tell, creating an exclusive circle of two – speaker and listener – as his poem’s contingent public domain. Or maybe even a circle of one, himself, since the poem’s success depends wholly on whether his audience, the beloved interlocutor hailed by his lines, is even willing to listen, and to be correspondent to his desire, to do as he tells her to. There is a doubled model of listening articulated through the poem that seems to me to hinge on what its reader, its audience, is inclined to do with its profanity, its repurposing of the sacred for its own persuasive ends. Donne’s inflated coinage “profanation” casts our inner ears back, I think, to the word’s Latin etymology: the verb profanere (to desecrate, to violate, to make unclean) suggests being outside or before (pro-) a temple (fānum), which at least implicitly prods its listeners to consider the ersatz sacredness of this or any poetic text: how metaphysical, how hermetic, how divorced from this world, can such words ever be? The hyphenated compound nouns (“tear-floods” and “sigh-tempests”), while presented under prohibition, also make audible in their clashed, clumped consonants (rfl, dsn, stsm) the very – and very human, embodied – noise that Donne wants to suppress. The poem tends to profane itself, I mean.

         I am teaching The Commitments by Roddy Doyle  this week, and part of the reason I have started off with this excursus through Donne is that the novel is one of the most profane and noisy texts I have encountered. Reading excerpts and examples aloud in class, in public, activated some shame in me that’s most likely connected both to my own well-spoken intellectualism – despite common sense and academic privilege, it still felt a bit wrong and even a bit dangerous to utter all those “fucks” and “shites” and racist epithets in front of students – and to a hackneyed moralism circulating around how we listen to popular music, which is arguably the governing trope of the book as well as the focus of my course (and I’m thinking of how iTunes, for example, labels its downloaded songs, based on assessments of the lyrics, as either “clean” or “explicit”). The Commitments, at its heart, is an explicit, expletive text.

         It’s hard to gauge student reactions sometimes, but this class on the literature of popular song has tended so far to be a bit quiet, and who knows exactly why. Faced with reading Doyle’s novel, however, I can imagine they might feel a little shouted down, and a little affronted. In the book, as the band is cobbled together and starting to rehearse, they’re presented as Jimmy Rabbitte’s students. The book opens with Outspan and Derek asking for Jimmy’s musical advice, a moment that leads directly to the formation of The Commitments:

                  —We’ll ask Jimmy, said Outspan.  —Jimmy’ll know.

                  Jimmy Rabbitte knew his music. He knew his stuff.

Jimmy is the discursive centre for this particular configuration of Barrytown, this orchestration of their disenfranchised urban space, their north Dublin, and the vocabulary, the knowledge, in which he trades and which constitutes his cultural capital, is pop music. Jimmy, it’s worth noting, doesn’t play an instrument (well, none of them do, at first, except maybe for Joey The Lips Fagan), and he never performs on stage with the band; his music consists of talk, and his way of organizing the band involves giving lectures, correcting and managing what they “know” about and what they can learn through African-American soul music: “They loved Jimmy’s lectures,” the narrator tells us, although it’s not always clear that Jimmy has any more privileged access to Black music than anyone else. Even Joey The Lips’s stories of playing with Otis Redding, James Brown and just about any other “name” in R & B canon seem like a mix of fiction and wishful thinking; he claims to get a call to play with Joe Tex, but after he leaves Jimmy remembers that Joe Tex had died in 1982. When Joey The Lips confesses that “The biggest regret of my life is that I wasn’t born black,” the insurmountable disconnect, around race, between the given and the made, between provenance and aspirational self-fashioning comes crashing to the fore. The learning project in which Jimmy has the band engaged is doomed by its inherent dislocations, by its insurmountable, racially marked otherness. If “soul is community,” as Jimmy and Joey both contend, the success of their common project, the outcome of their commitment to any “real” provocation to social or cultural transformation through what Jimmy keeps calling “sex and politics,” remains inexorably out of reach.

         They can’t help but profane their lofty goals. The alteration they want to bring about by singing about “real” love is framed, as in the Donne poem, by the negation of overwrought, mundane clichés and by the evocation of a transcendent ideal – an African-American idiom that inherently resists the idioms of both saccharine top-of-the-pops and Irish folk: “—All tha’ mushy shite abou’ love an’ fields an’ meetin’ mots in supermarkets an’ McDonalds is gone, ou’ the fuckin’ window. It’s dishonest, said Jimmy.” But performing covers of James Brown or Wilson Pickett hardly seems any more honest, any closer to the lived realities of Barrytown: “— It’s not the other people’s songs so much, said Jimmy. —It’s which ones yis do.” Connection and commitment means finding material that somehow speaks to their experience, and for Jimmy, that speaking means a felt connection at the level of a pre-articulate viscerality, something he hears, for instance, in the rough “growl” of Declan Cuffe’s voice. Jimmy links this fleshy throatiness both to James Brown’s thoroughly sweaty, embodied performance – the grain of his voice, an association mired in sexual stereotypes around black masculinity – and, compellingly, to the band’s obvious inability to get beyond imperfect mimicry of that style; their cultural “politics,” inured in an experience of pervasive alienation, seems best represented by their failure to represent themselves musically in any idiom. Everything is imperfectly borrowed, mistaken, and troubled. In Jimmy’s bedroom, listening to the record of James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” the complexities and complicities of musical and racial appropriation emerge in a mix of sacrilege and idolatry, in a prose that both mimes what it hears and disrupts any easy mimesis:

         —Funk off, said Deco.

Outspan hit him.

Jimmy let the needle down and sat on the back of his legs between the speakers.

—I’m ready to get up and do my thang, said James Brown.

A chorus of men from the same part of the world as James went:  —YEAH.

—I want to, James continued,  —to get into it, you know. (—YEAH, said the lads in the studio with him.)  —Like a, like a sex machine, man (—YEAH YEAH, GO AHEAD.)  —movin’, doin’ it, you know. (—YEAH.)  —CAN I COUNT IT ALL? (—YEAH YEAH YEAH, went the lads.)  —One Two Three Four.

Jimmy positions himself dead-centre, as if to co-opt the sonic space of the recording, to claim it and manage it. The French-Joycean punctuation of dialogue with em-dashes tends to blur the distinctions between voices, to create a polyphonic overlay, a palimpsest. The identification of Jimmy with James manifests itself not only spatially but also in the collision of idioms from different “parts of the world”: James Brown’s sidemen aren’t Irish “lads” in any sense of the word, and when James Brown says “you know,” the point-of-view implicitly shared with Jimmy, the fella in the novel who, more than any other, presents himself as in the know, is both shared and dismantled; it’s worth noting how the transcription of the words in interrupted by editorializing and by typographical juxtapositions,  but also how the original record itself involves call-and-response banter that cuts across and disrupts closure. That disruption is also audible in the textures of the transcribed words:  “— GER RUP AH——“ they hear James Brown intone, abrading his words in a manner not too far removed from Donne’s noisy consonants. 

         If this record, though, is about affirming rough and vital cultural energies (YEAH YEAH YEAH), if it’s about the “politics,” of movin’ and doin’, Jimmy’s listening remains caught in a dynamic of negation and difference: “—No, listen, said Jimmy.” Making black music more “Dubliny” – by substituting, for example, the names of the stops on the DART line, moving North toward Barrytown, for the improvised train stops up the Eastern seaboard of the United States, tracing a kind of second-hand root for post-Civil War reconstruction, in James Brown’s improvised words for “Night Train” – enables what Jimmy wants to call “Dublin Soul” to be born, but those words also offer a fragile and finally untenable amalgam, as the band breaks up before it’s able to make even its first single on “Eejit Records,” and as Joey The Lips comes to realize that “Maybe soul isn’t right for Ireland. So I’m not right.” Their music, in its wrongness, is inherently profane, monstrous. But it also attains, in passing, in rehearsal, a kind of nascent greatness:

By now, The Commitments had about a quarter of an hour’s worth of songs that they could struggle through without making too many mistakes. They could sound dreadful sometimes but not many of them knew this. They were happy.

Though they’re unable to hear themselves, to “know” themselves for what they are – even when “[t]hey taped themselves and listened” – they still embrace the rough misprisions and imperfect “Dubliny” slippages and derive a happiness, a profane joy, in the struggle to connect with each other. The agon of music making, the profane and profaning effort to play together, forms a contingent community within that difficult nascence: “There were mistakes, rows, a certain amount of absenteeism but things were going well.” If the point seems to be not to put too much weight on the inevitable failure of their awful, unruly, “racialist” appropriations, neither is it to overlook or sanitize their offenses. Rather, we’re meant to bear witness to the possibility of creative coexistence, of producing a shared, poorly-recorded, mistake-ridden music that manages still, in its noisy and troubling way, to enact a poetry.

Hey, That's Me: Bruce Springsteen and Audience, Part 1

Last week, I started off the current version of an undergraduate course I’m teaching on song lyrics and popular culture with a four-class unit about Bruce Springsteen. I have tried to use his music as an introductory case study in how popular music works, and in what it can do. One of the things we began to think through was the way in which his songs consistently thematize their own reception, representing both textually and musically a set of relationships between singer and audience. Specifically, I tried to read his songs as invitations not only into an erotic reciprocity – to touch and be touched, to feel each other’s presence – but also into a form of shared community: the nascent and loving democracy his “America” promises to be, even if maybe it can never realize that dream. These songs want to communicate, hopefully.

In what’s really the first essay in 31 Songs (2002), Nick Hornby asserts that his all-time favourite song is Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” That song both addresses and enacts, for him, a durable and enduring moment of love, and it describes the living arc of his own long-term fandom:

I can remember listening to this song and loving it in 1975; I can remember listening to this song and loving it almost as much quite recently, a few months ago.

[. . .] So I’ve loved this song for a quarter of a century now, and I’ve heard it more than anything else, with the possible exception of . . . Who am I kidding? There are no other contenders.

This one song manages, whenever he hears it, to speak to him, for him and about him. I have to say, too, that I know exactly the feeling and exactly the identification that Nick Hornby maps out here, exactly what it is that “Thunder Road,” even despite itself sometimes, makes happen for listeners and for fans every time it plays. Hornby describes his experience of the song as a kind of mimesis, in its perennial capacity to “express who you are, perfectly”: who he is, he must mean, although the second person – in which the bulk of the song is written – is significant. The song itself begins – after a brief descriptive intro – with a series of apostrophes, of interpellations that present themselves as urgent invitations, open doors:

The screen door slams. Mary’s dress waves.

Like a vision she dances across the porch

as the radio plays.

Roy Orbison singing for the lonely,

Hey that’s me, and I want you only.

Don’t turn me home again. I just can’t face

myself alone again.

Don’t run back inside, darlin’ – you know

just what I’m here for.

So you’re scared and you’re thinking that

maybe we ain’t that young anymore.

Show a little faith there’s magic in the night.

You ain’t a beauty but yeah you’re alright.

The shift from the distance of romantic spectacle to something like discursive proximity – close enough to make yourself heard – hinges on another inset moment of audibility, and of interpellation: Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” (echoed in the end rhymes) not only mimes the persona’s desire for Mary, but also hails him into existence, into audible range, as both a listening and a speaking-singing subject: “Hey, that’s me . . . .” Hearing Roy Orbison’s song on Mary’s radio gives him voice, and lets him talk, and also offers him a vocabulary and an idiom through which the rest of his own song can play out.

Professing desire beyond what he’s able or willing to say means for him returning to a literacy, to a kind of “talk,” a cultural field that the soundscape of rock’n’roll provides him with: “Now I got this guitar, and I learned how to make it talk.” Springsteen positions himself both as ventriloquizing fan and as nascent legend to produce a kind of proactive audience, a practice of listening that means trying to learn how to attend to others while still managing to talk for yourself, and to talk yourself up. The song offers an extended invitation to a feminized, idealized other; Springsteen, from somewhere within the heteronormative city limits of an imaginary Freehold, New Jersey, asks his own listeners – on this the opening track of Born to Run – to be like Mary and to get in the front seat of his car and pull out of the deadened space of here with him, to win. That idealization is also both fractured and resisted, even as it’s declaimed as an article of faith, by insistent disavowals and negations (“ain’t . . . ain’t . . .”), and by Mary’s coy but very real refusals. If she seems to be framed merely as an object of his desire, existing “only” for him to overcome his loneliness and affirm his masculine agency, his long cascade of pleas and poetic flattery, of goading and passive aggressive come-ons, also tends to undermine itself from the outset; after all, who in their right mind would accept a date from a man who tells you you’re not beautiful, but just alright? Sure, he’s just being honest, I guess, but the conventional hyperbole inherent in love song lyrics, diffused into something plain and mundane, also loses most of its persuasive tug, its “magic.”

What’s worth noting is that, even if we end up choosing not to go with him somewhere else (and as “Born to Run” puts it, to “get out while we’re young”), or if on the other hand we turn out to be willing to trade in our angelic wings for some very earthbound wheels, what we experience for the five minutes of “Thunder Road” is still a sustained and open invitation, a seemingly one-sided conversation that nonetheless keeps asking us to respond, and that leaves its requests unanswered, those imaginary responses as-yet and always unheard, either from Mary or from us: they’re all potential,  all unfulfilled promise. “The door’s open,” we’re told, “but the ride ain’t free.” And the return, that cost, is a commitment to reciprocity. So when Nick Hornby says the song expresses “who you are, perfectly,” what he must mean, what he can only mean, is actually opposite to perfection or to closure; the song’s conversant subject, the “me” who both listens for and sings to Mary, never coheres, but remains unfinished, a figuration of desire.

         When I was sixteen, I finished my grade eleven economics exam early, and I couldn’t leave the exam room, so I copied out from memory the lyrics to “Thunder Road” on the back of the exam booklet. It was a young fan’s act of mimicry, though I’m not sure what those lyrics might even have meant to me then, if I understood them or identified myself through them the way I might now, or might not. But what I do recognize in retrospect is that re-writing, transcribing, Springsteen’s words by hand was an initial gesture at that reciprocity. In those few free minutes, I started to write myself into a dialogue – a little like fourteen-year-old Terry Blanchard in Kevin Major’s YA novel Dear Bruce Springsteen – a conversation with whoever it was I’d always want to become. “My love, love, love,” he sings later and elsewhere, “will not let you down.” That’s not to say Springsteen’s songs will tell us who we are, but that they will always keep that reciprocal Eros, that mutuality, live and open, that invitation to join him heading down the road.

Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart at Play Chthonics (Audio)

This is an audio capture of a reading last night (Wednesday, 15 January 2014) by Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart at Green College at the University of British Columbia, as part of the Play Chthonics: New Canadian Readings series. There were a few minor tech problems with the recorder, so the beginning minutes of their reading were unfortunately lost; the recording fades in with Christine Stewart reading from a collaborative piece written for the Institute for Domestic Research, which presents their shared poetic methodology (I think it’s called “aleatoric alchemy” at one point in the text) for collective, collaborative research practice. The piece finishes with a declaration of openness – “We do not come to terms. We abound.” – that signals a key shared interest in practices of listening. Christine Stewart suggests at one point that listening might be understood as a way of reading, or of being read, and Catriona Strang’s poems consistently inclined toward loving intensifications of attention, toward keeping things open: “Imagine,” she writes to Proust in Corked (her forthcoming book from Talonbooks), “all my conclusions are tentative.” Christine Stewart read from Virtualis, her collaboration with David Dowker published by BookThug in the spring of 2013. She also read from a text on Paul – joined by another collaborator, Ted Byrne, who happened to be in the audience – and she and Catriona Strang traded poems, reading each other’s work, to conclude the reading itself. On the recording, the reading is followed by an extended conversation with members of the audience about their poetics.

Sincere thanks to Green College, UBC for their ongoing and generous support of this reading series. Copyright for the recordings remains with the artists.

Carly Rae Jepson's "Call Me Maybe": lecture notes and audio

For our second class of English 228B here at the University of British Columbia, I drafted a short lecture on reading – on beginning a close reading – Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe,” a song which I had used as an introductory example in the first class, on pop music and lyrics. The students had been asked to look at the video, and to look at the “parody” done by Carly Rae Jepson with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots. I decided to write out some lecture text – the preferred mode for the class, I’m imagining, will be workshop discussion – in order to give something of a firm anchor point from which to begin thinking about how reading takes place. The class took place on Wednesday, January 8, 2014. An audio capture of the lecture portion of the class (hosted on my SoundCloud page) is attached below. (Just a note – in the audio, I credit Eve Kosofsky Sedwick with the term "heteronormativity" [I am thinking of her introduction to Epistemology of the Closet], but the term seems to have originated with Michael Warner.)

The protagonist of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity, Rob Fleming, defines his self-awareness in terms of his record collection, an accumulation of popular music he inhabits and that gives him a second-hand voice: "Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music." Following on our initial reading of Carly Rae Jepson’s song “Call Me Maybe” at our first class, I want to suggest some of the ways we can begin to address what I called the “cultural work” of popular music, how (in more contemporary terms) the playlists of favourite songs – a version of what Rob Fleming and his record-store colleagues call their “top five“ lists – both produce and define their listeners as subjects, and speak to the welter of value systems – taste, morals, desires – through which we circulate.

         For this course, I’m suggesting that we concentrate on the poetics of song lyrics, on the kinds of texts that popular music articulates but also on the cultural contexts in which those words operate. One of the things to notice in the passage from Nick Hornby’s novel – which we’re not reading in this course, and which I’m unlikely to mention again – is its utopianism: text and context intersect to form an ideal “whole world,” a world that appears to promise comfort and escape but that also presents a qualitatively better, richer position from which to view our contemporary world critically. (This is, as a matter of fact, one of the ways in which the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch understood the transformative political impetus of utopian, as offering what he calls “the principle of hope,” as an instance of the “not yet.” ) In class last day, we arrived at a what seemed like an essential conflict in our assessments of “Call Me Maybe” – both the lyrics and the video – that suggests that the song might either encourage conformity to an illusory middle-class heteronormativity (the romantic idealism that manifests itself in clichés that come from other pop songs and romance novels – “I trade my soul for a wish”) or that it might be a critically-minded parody of those dangerously mindless delusions, that it does in fact see the boy-girl, romantic-rescue scenario it thematizes as “crazy” and disempowering (some of you noted, for example, how the song appears to invert the terms of agency, so that the stereotypically passive ingénue becomes the one who is actively seeking an erotic encounter, thus undermining heteronormative gender hierarchies – an inversion marked in the video, although not in the song itself, by the singer’s disappointment when it’s revealed that the object of her desire, of her gaze, is gay). We might appear to have reached a bit of a stalemate: which reading of the song is right, or at least to be preferred? Is the utopianism of the song’s vestigial “romance” narrative self-reflexively critical or does it merely reproduce coercive mass-culture escapism?

         I want to look at the lyrics to try to work our way through this dilemma, and to think about how popular song interpellates us as listening subjects. By “interpellate,” I mean what Louis Althusser describes as “hailing,” when the apparatus of the state or of “ideology” calls out to us. Althusser’s famous example is a policeman’s “Hey, you!” but I want us to think for a moment about how this song calls us, maybe. The trope in the title is the phone call, after the persona behind the lyrics has given her number to a prospective lover. That number is, if you think about it, a marker of personal identity, like her name. To be called at your number is to be recognized, to be desired back, and, as the title indicates, to be hailed as a “me,” as somebody who’s seen, whose gaze (“I looked to you,” “I wasn’t looking for this”) is returned, who gets noticed, seen herself. Not to be noticed, in this schema, is to be nobody. 

         The song remains, however, in a kind of state of abeyance around this possibility. We don’t know if her call or her gaze is answered, if she does get interpellated by her prospective “baby.” The title (which is also the tag line of the chorus) indicates this uncertainty in its clipped and tenuous syntax – it doesn’t feel like a proper sentence – but it can also be read as the persona naming herself: her name, what she’s called, is Maybe. Her sense of self consists in the dilemma we’re contingently trying to resolve here. She’s an aggregate of her own desires, uncertain of the terms in which those desires can articulate themselves. Her sense of the rightness of her object of desire, the “foresight” she seems to have, attempts to firm itself up in the circular repetition of the chorus and the bridge – “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad” – but in the temporal paradox that she voices here, that sureness and that feeling of (his) presence are effects of desire, of want, of absence, of “missing,” which in turn suggests that her maybe-ness is the only space she has, a fractured assemblage of clichés and skewed grammar that is as catchy as it is troubling.