More music

It is a part of British middle class life, to which I have been rather inefficiently glued, to wonder what would happen if one were summoned to Desert Island Discs. Friday night I remembered the idealism of a California folk/hippy musical youth, and yesterday evening I dug into what happened next. I found Chris Cutler’s page at ReR and spent the next two hours weddling (web waddling?) through Recommended Records, Hannibal Records and who knows what else. Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser, Tom Cora (I was there for a Skeleton Crew concert at Reed – I talked to Fred! – I pushed their drumkit back onto the stage when it threatened to fall off) – the West African marimba bands, who formed and reformed like the CBeebies bloblets but played four six hour sets; the Golden Palominoes, Pere Ubu, John Zorn a bit but boy was he full of himself. And now where has it all gone? I have written to Simon W-S to complain.

Lyrics

I was just listening to the Bush Tetras, and they said, 

‘You can’t be funky if you haven’t got a soul’. 

(‘Can’t be funky’, from New York Noise, Rough Trade.)

Not, ‘if you haven’t got soul.’ No, they said, ‘a soul’. I think the only way out of this is to read it as a-soul, that is, the ‘a’ of the Perfection of Wisdom texts, a negating prefix cognate to the a of anomie and apathy. Hence, we can take this to mean, 

‘You can‘t be funky if you haven’t got no-self.’

Taken this way, a proper experientially grounded realization of enlightenment is a necessary but not sufficient precursor to being funky.

There, now I feel much better.