I’ll start with an “accidental (quasi-) Limerick”—
The Westerbergian
Sublime
Can be summed up in
the line
“I suppose your guess
is more or less
Probably as bad as
mine.”
There’s a Confidence-By-Default
in that line from “Nevermind” (from Pleased To Meet Me). It’s basically the
opposite of the “First Thought, Best Thought” dictum so beloved of the Beat
Generation. You could even call it The VIA NEGATIVA. Starting from the basic
“life sucks,” or “life is shit,” premise, there’s the realization that two
negatives might make a third, worse, negative—but they could, maybe just maybe,
become a positive. This Westerbergian
Sublime (an anti-essentialist essentialism or essentialist anti-essentialism)
is evident in so many of the classic mid-80s Replacements songs, but it’s also
there even on their 1981 debut, Sorry Mom,
I Forgot To Take Out The Trash. Like much punk, Paul puts himself into
relationship with a voice of authority, but often the authority is a woman and
is respected more than the mere male authorities---“Sorry, Ma” isn’t just a
joke.
Take “Customer,”
for instance. I’m shy. I’m terribly
shy, but since I have to be “nothing but a customer” anyway, I certainly don’t
want to be “Lost In The Supermarket.” (The Replacements hated when critics
would compare them to The Clash, preferring, say, The Faces and Small Faces),
and this cashier is kinda kute, I can at least be theatrical about my inability
to make a genuine first move in a pick-up bar (especially, as long as got this
sonic force of a rocking band that needs a vocal/verbal image face to
complement Bob Stinson’s Lead-guitar face).
This studio recording provides a replacement to video culture (years before they finally broke down
and created the seminal ‘nose thumbing,’ yet poignant, “Bastards Of Young”
video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl9KQ1Mub6Q)
by creating its own very theatrical verbal/musical “moving picture”
How about cigarettes?
CHORD CHORD CHORD
I'll take sugarless
CHORD CHORD CHORD
You sell Wombats? I’m a
Customer…..
The call and response between vocal and guitar-lead band
could paint a picture of the singer on a rampage back and forth through the store
to get these items, but that interpretation is a stretch (though no more than
95% of music videos). It’s probably more accurate to see the beloved cashier rushing around trying to find the Sugarless,
The Cigarettes, and The Wombats. He’s not just asking her (though “What’s On Sale?” is delivered with a sexy-coy
come-on wink), he’s ordering her
around, making her grab all these different items (which he may not even buy!),
pushing the envelope of the Customer role so he can feel, uh, Empowered! (I
wonder if she ends up calling him “Chief” or “Boss,” well, save that for the
answer song).
Nonetheless, in terms of sexual
politics, in much of Westerberg, male is gendered consumer and female is
gendered producer—which for many women, especially in the 80s, was very
refreshing. Most men, even in the underground scene, were still clinging to
macho-breadwinner postures without any substance to back them up; here was a
male could admit women’s productive power (like a cross between feminism and
the blues that understands the woman as “replacement” for G-d—or, more
accurately, G-d as replacement for woman).
Still, it’s certainly not a very efficient way to seduce or shop
(although the song is very efficient,
a nugget, a gem). If there are people behind him in line, they must be getting
pissed off (unless they’re too busy moshing). And this is where the hope that
the strictly non-verbal aspects of the music can somehow compensate for the
social transgression implied in the words, like Jonathan Richman taking his
band to the Government Center to “make the secretaries feel better when they
put the stamps on the letters” (what I call the Westerbergian Sublime is also
very evident on The Modern Lovers’
first album, especially the “confidence-by-default” in the quasi-revenge
fantasy of “I’m Straight).”
In “Customer,”
Westerberg has it both ways: shy and cocky. It’s a scene more than a story, and
there are lots of scene-songs on the first two (“melodic hardcore”) Replacement
disks. “Goddamn Job,” is a scene. Or
two frames in a short graphic novel with the phrases “I need a goddamn job” and
“I need a goddamn girl” in word balloons. It’s even more minimal than “Customer,”
but expressed with such urgent conviction that the listener may be convinced
that these are the only two basic needs (and
maybe they are, if not “bacon and cigarettes” or pictures on the fridge that
are never filled with food)—in the consumerist America of the 80s. And then it
hits me---well, at least he had a goddamn
band!
In “Hanging
Downtown,” things don’t get swell until 3AM. Westerberg’s timing is way
off. So was mine (college all-nighters). Via
Negativa? Another Variation on The Westerbergian Sublime: The singer
doesn’t want to do anything, but doesn’t want to do nothing either. If nowhere
is home, everywhere could be? Maybe just maybe! My needs tell me that. What the hell: let’s go downtown by default!
At least it’s semi-peopled with pimps and whores and liquor
stores, some lonely loner stick figures out of a Beckett set-design by
Giacometti. This may make Westerberg feel less lonely than he would in a crowd (unless it’s the ward where
he’s the doctor, or front-man) There is a lot of nothing to see, and
this “nothing” in the Westerberg sublime could come straight out of Alan Watts!
Despite the quasi-Ashberian heightened ambivalences of the
Westerbergian sublime, he still does fall from it, like the boy on “The Ledge,”
or at least into mere inversion: “one
foot in the door/the other foot in the gutter/the sweet smell you adore/I think
I’d rather smother”---is he talking to a goddamn job, like record label (as
the cover image to Pleased To Meet Me
suggests) or to a woman? It’s probably either at different times, but it
changes the meaning of those words.
But crucial to Westerberg is the pain, the cry, in the voice
even when he uses the most aggressive vox he can summon. And, yes, all these
songs tell us as much about 1980s culture, and even for many “our 2013 culture,”
as it does about Westerberg as person and persona. “Customer” was the 1980s,
before many cashiers were replaced by machines, or just less cashiers were
hired, which caused longer lines and thus more strained relations between
workers and customers (as anyone familiar with 19th century social
philosophy will understand, alienating the laborer—who is also a consumer—from
him or herself)
“Hanging Downtown” feels as true in Downtown Oakland, San Francisco,
Philly and the Skid Rowkio (Skid Row meets Little Tokyo) section of LA today
(and probably The Twin Cities as well; the only possible exception in the USA
is NYC) as it was in the 80s. BLEAK; oh and I forgot to mention the police
presence (they’re in other early Westerberg songs); you probably got to be the
20 something kid Westerberg was then to navigate it—not that he really
navigates it outside the studio. It’s a short moving picture. At least you get
a two-minute song out of it.
The Piano Van version is 2:29, and performed at Von’s
Hollywood around 9PM—about as much as a 40-something disabled guy can muster,
but I needed to spread the word of The Westerbergian sublime…and appeal to Jeff
Feuerzeig’s love of “lost classics” from the 80s, like Richard Hell’s “Time.”
And Sorry, Ma is definitely more of
an underrated lost classic than Let It Be
and Tim are—and, besides, it’s true
I, desperately…..need…..a goddamn…..job! (I mean woman!)
Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSIPdIw-DcY
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