Inner City Blues: Sixto Rodriguez and Suttree

Like many people these days I recently saw the documentary on Sixto Rodriguez and have been caught up in his music and life story. It's beautiful that he is receiving recognition now and the way he has cultivated his ideas and stayed true to his original direction is admirable. Of course the way he just had two albums at the start of the 70s and hasnt been releasing dozens of albums like his peers means that his message and image are clearer to see. I like how these albums from the early 70s are like a time capsule, and how that little message from the 70s is receiving attention today, that the counter-culture values can still find an audience.



The way the counter-culture from the 1968-75 has been buried is actually kind of astonishing when you think about it. The values were absorbed to a small degree by the general population but a materialism and celebrity culture have taken over. The internet age is also quite isolating to the degree that we couldn't have another Beatles or Bob Dylan today anyway, because the message is diluted against the stream of competing memes and infotainment. This is most likely a purposeful strategy on the part of TPTB to pacify public opinion. Rodriguez is made into product too, but the message in the lyrics is strong enough to counter that commodification. I've read that his lyrics were really too strong for radio in 1970 and that's the main reason he didn't get almost any airplay at the time. I've also read that Hollywood is considering making a film about Rodriguez's life story with Johnny Depp in the lead. Pretty crazy, and somehow I doubt it will happen. But it would bring more attention to Detroit and Rodriguez's message, so that would be good I guess.

I'll Slip Away is about ending a relationship, but it's also generally a "drop out-tune in" song about making one's own values in the world.

And you can keep your symbols of success
Then I'll pursue my own happiness
And you can keep your clocks and routines
Then I'll go mend all my shattered dreams

Maybe today, yeah
I'll slip away



Detroit is the "city of victims", and Rodriguez is an ambassador from the working class, from the every day world of life lived in labour, in creativity. What has happened in Detroit is indicative of the general apathy and neglect people in power have for the suffering poor. for the quality of our daily lives. America's social fabric is torn and fraying and all we get from Washington is stale-mate politics in the House and a puppet show of empty words and no action. The inner city blues have been around ever since there were cities, capitalism creates a victimised class, it requires it. America the melting pot has changed to a pressure cooker. Detroit is being left to rot by our new economy, and the cancer is spreading. We turn our back on Detroit, we turn our back on the poor. And they say it's a Christian nation.

Going down a dirty inner city side road
I plotted
Madness passed me by, she smiled hi
I nodded
Looked up as the sky began to cry
She shot it

Met a girl from Dearborn, early six o'clock this morn
A cold fact
Asked about her bag, suburbia's such a drag
Won't go back
Cos Papa don't allow no new ideas here
And now he sees the news, but the picture's not too clear

Mama, Papa, stop
Treasure what you got
Soon you may be caught
Without it
The curfew's set for eight
Will it ever all be straight
I doubt it


image source: tidal magazine

When I saw Searching for Sugarman I had also been rereading Suttree by Cormac McCarthy. Suttree takes place in another desolate city, McAnally Flats (Mechanicsville) in Knoxville, TN, by a fetid river under a relentlessly blazing sun. Set in the 50s it focuses on the drunks and misfit rebels who, like Rodriguez, refuse to take the straight road. Now clearly the comparison is not so direct, Rodriguez is much less alienated than the character Suttree, he worked, had children, wrote these great songs. Suttree, on the other hand, is trapped with his own dark despair, plagued by existential questions which remain unanswerable. But what they do have in common is an abiding acceptance of the world, of their lots in life. The surprise surrounding Rodriguez has focused on his quiet acceptance of his recognition, and also his fierce belief in his life lived in poverty and hard-labour. But why should he not be proud of who he is and what he has done in his life? Our materialistic, celebrity-driven culture only focuses on success, but what about living, what about our day-to-day lives? This is the existential fact of time passing which is embodied in Rodriguez's story, as well as in the character of Suttree. There is an excellent essay online by John Rothfork called Redemption as Language in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree which examines the book in light of pre-Socratic philosophy, Meister Echkart, and Camus. A quote there from Eckhart reminded me of Rodriguez:

"A disinterested man, pure in heart, has no prayer, for to pray is to want something from God, something added that one desires, or something that God is to take away. The disinterested person, however, wants nothing, and neither has he anything of which he would be rid. Therefore he has no prayer, or he prays only to be uniform with God…. When the soul achieves this, it loses its identity, it absorbs God and is reduced to nothing…. Nothing helps toward this end like disinterest."

This is the secret that Rodriguez knows, he is at peace because he has detached himself from needs. Like Suttree, its not that he doesn't feel for the world, but rather he has come to see that all men are equal, that life itself is enough and full of riches if we know how to look. Just let his lyrics speak again:

Rick Folks Hoax

The moon is hanging in the purple sky
The baby's sleeping while its mother sighs
Talking 'bout the rich folks
Rich folks have the same jokes
And they park in basic places

The priest is preaching from a shallow grave
He counts his money, then he paints you saved
Talking to the young folks
Young folks share the same jokes
But they meet in older places

So don't tell me about your success
Nor your recipes for my happiness
Smoke in bed
I never could digest
Those illusions you claim to have going

The sun is shining, as it's always done
Coffin dust is the fate of everyone
Talking 'bout the rich folks
The poor create the rich hoax
And only late breast-fed fools believe it

So don't tell me about your success
Nor your recipes for my happiness
Smoke in bed
I never could digest
Those illusions you claim to have going

Burroughs's Bunker

I was in the States this summer at my mother's outside DC and we went into town a few times to the National Gallery to see the George Bellows exhibit. But two years before that I was also down on the Mall and it blew my mind to see giant photos of Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac displayed on the outside of the National Gallery. They had a small exhibit there in 2010 of Ginsberg's photo's. You can see a review here

To see a photo of Burroughs in the heart of DC is freaky. He has been consumed by the culture and canonized, but his work remains highly subversive. Burroughs used the language of technology against itself. He recognized that culture is at war, a war between techno-fascism and true anarchic freedom. Burroughs represents a potent threat to the current power structure, but he knew very well that as long as the great majority of people follow the national "dialogue", as long as they believe the state propaganda, then the radical opinions of a few intellectuals are rendered harmless and ineffective.

picture credit
But as an expat I find that I am thinking of Burroughs in terms of his lifestyle, his peripatetic wanderings. Burroughs was a state of one, an odd mix of old school St. Louis and radical fairy, dapper gentleman and junky pervert. The guy was brilliant, but creepy. Returning to the great Moloch from England in 1974, Burroughs was a celebrity by that time and he sequestered himself inside the Bunker, a windowless apartment on the Lower East Side. Or did he have the windows covered over? I'm not sure. But the name itself, the Bunker, is indicative of Burroughs's sense of isolation, of statelessness. This is what happens when you leave your home behind, you become rootless, drifting. Burroughs's junky monologues also float out into the ether. He's a fantastic writer, but the subject matter is vile. In this way he broke taboos and became famous, by imagining the unimaginable. This is the task of the artist. If the Moderns, of which Burrough is arguably, along with Samuel Beckett, one of the last, were grappling with the psychic despair of World War II and the atom bomb, what is the great issue of our time, if we are in fact post-modern? I suppose it could be the nihilism that Burroughs himself foresaw, the slippage of meaning as the flood of text that is the internet surges against rational thought and silts over any attempt at dialogue. Ideas cannot move against the muck of constant media. Like Burroughs we must become nomads, for if community has broken down, all we can hope to have left is a bunker in the wastelands of civilization.

We need mystery

Interesting quote from an interview in a German magazine with JG Ballard over on Ballardian:

An example of such extreme situations in your books involves coldly Modernist architecture.

Yes, Modernism brings with it an emptiness that seems dangerous. It’s not for nothing that 20th century dictators were fascinated by it.

Is it this emptiness that brings out the madness in Super-Cannes?

Modernism brings out the dark drives that slumber in us. It reserves no place for the unexplainable or the mysterious – and for precisely that reason causes a return to barbarism.

Because it shows everything…

Exactly. We need mystery, that little bit of poetry. Seeing everything makes you sad.

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The decline of the use value of art in society together with the end of the ornament in architecture .. the end of the mystery of art in public. Decoration enriched our lives, mass-production has turned us into units.

The Cat Inside

I got a hold of a 4 cd collection of William S. Burroughs reading from his writings .. incredible.

I'll post more here soon on Burroughs, but for now have a look at these links

http://www.ccru.net/archive/burroughs.htm

Great BBC documentary on William Burroughs on youtube
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