THE DEEP FIX BY JIM COLQUHOUN COMMISIONED TO ACCOMPANY "THE RAW AND THE COOKED" BALDVIN RINGSTED & HRAFNHILDUR HALLÓRSDÓTTIR , INTERMEDIA, GLASGOW
The Deep Fix
“Rock began as a series of grunts, got hung up with language, and may yet evolve into a new poetry of laughter, chants and howls.”
Richard Neville Playpower
There is a point after which we lose ourselves – like an ecstatic dervish whirling his way towards divinity or a shaman drumming himself into the nagual each of us must find a way to exit this Slough of Despond, the muddy corporeality of everyday consciousness. Most of us will choose deep immersion in music as our primary route out and this escape is explicitly a journey beyond language. But where does this journey take us and how do we get there? As entities within our mother’s womb we are, as it were, pre-programmed to respond to music by our intimate relationship with the incessant sluice of blood, the crack and twang of bone and sinew, the relentless beat of the heart and the muffled intrusion of the outer world, all conspiring to hardwire a desire for sensory immersion. For 3 or 4 months, as a foetus we are subjected to a constant barrage of sound, a pummelling, relentless cacophony that, perhaps, we spend the rest of our lives trying to rediscover. Is our pursuit and enjoyment of music an elaborate way of reaching back to the primal source of all warmth and comfort?
The Hauntology
Ringsted and Halldorsdottir are hauntologists in the Derridean sense of recapitulating our relationship with the dead, in their case a specific disinterment of the lovingly embalmed corpse of Rock & Roll. They wish to decipher the secrets of the pantheon, search its rotting entrails for signs and portents, seeking ritualistic, fetishistic, even chiliastic immersion in its (waning) power to realign the everyday. The Spectre of Rock & Roll stalks the land, neither dead nor alive, shedding and re-growing its skin in an endless cycle of death and rebirth – but always a little more threadbare, a bit more shit. Is it any wonder that Ringsted and Halldorsdottir, like many of their contemporaries, are harking back to some notional golden age when purity of purpose was aligned with dumb-ass attitude, when boys (and occasionally girls) could reconfigure the reality of millions through the (in)judicious use of a killer riff? But is the continuing reanimation of Rock & Roll an insidious cultural cul-de-sac, a trans-generational trauma of bad drugs, bad karma, crap sex and macho posturing set on endless repeat? Or is it a gnostic-style escape route from the deep despond of being?
The Heavy Metal Kid
“Cut word lines – Cut music lines – Smash the control images – Smash the control machine – Burn the books – Kill the priests – Kill! Kill! Kill!
William Burroughs The Soft Machine
William Burroughs describes the rock concert as ‘a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy’ comparing the rock star to a priest (1) and reminding us that the origins, of all art, music and theatre is in religious ritual. The trappings of Rock & Roll – displays of triumphant machismo, frenzied performance, flamboyant costumes and lubricious sexuality – all point to rock’s use as a mass psychic placebo, a manifestation of control, but as with the Gnaoua musicians of Morocco, who use music explicitly to heal both psychic and somatic disorders, rock music can also direct us towards a decisive break with consensus reality. Like an encounter with the magical reality of the shaman, deep immersion in the wilder shores of music can help to smash the habit of conformity and inaugurate the pleasurable negation of the straight society by calling into question all of the sacred verities milling around the social, the sexual, the geographical, the political, the geometrical, the mathematical and the economical. In other words it is an antidote to PSYCHIC CONTROL.
ALL HAIL ROCK & ROLL!
“rock & Roll addiction is a festerin’ habit
you gotta keep playin’ like a paranoid rabbit
you can hook me on your tail, penetrate my soul
make me feel the sting of rock & roll
I’m a heart & soul, rock & roll, heart & soul, rock & roll junkie”
Herman Brood Rock & Roll Junkie (2)
1/ ‘The Jimmy and Bill Show’ William Burroughs interviews Jimmy Page, Crawdaddy magazine (June 1975).
2/ More on Herman Brood by the inestimable Stewart Home at: http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/
