Case Study #16: The Case in Which the Answer Doesn’t Arrive in the End
1
When I was in high school, I had an eight-by-eight cassette tape wooden cubbyhole set propped up above my bed on the headboard – a big leap forward from the two cut-open Kleenex boxes I had originally used for cassette storage in junior high school – and three of those 64 holes were occupied by Elvis Costello tapes. One of those was his 1977 debut My Aim Is True. Another was his 1986 album King of America. The third, which came out the next year, was The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions. This one, while only containing a paltry 16 songs (in contrast to later compilations of his), nonetheless got played a lot on my bedroom stereo because it contained all his hits that I’d come to know from the radio. Still, there were a handful of songs I wasn’t already familiar with and would generally skip past. Over the years, though, as I delved deeper into Elvis Costello’s back catalog, even those earlier shunned tracks came to be like old friends whose predictable sounds I could depend on to put me in a certain mood – albeit friends who continued to have an intriguing foreign aura about them.
Today, when one of these songs – “Beyond Belief” off of 1982’s Imperial Bedroom – came on my car stereo, it finally clicked for me what the source of its particular exoticism had always been: for maybe 80% of the track, I can’t tell what the hell Elvis Costello is saying, and I like that. I realized today that the fact that so much of “Beyond Belief” is unintelligible is one of its strengths, and suddenly I saw it as part of a through line in culture so massive it’s become a blind spot for us, like a load-bearing beam that goes through all floors but in each room gets decorated until it’s indistinguishable from the rest of the setting. I mean the importance of all that we don’t understand in life.
I come to sing the praises here not only of the unintelligible, but also the illegible, the inscrutable, the unknowable – all the blurry and opaque infrastructure we take for granted when enjoying the metaphorical vivid framed pictures and fixtures and well-appointed furniture we place upon it. I come to sing the praises of the role of the shadows around what we’re paying attention to, that which not only casts into relief the seeming solo star of the show, but also speaks to us in its own right, in a subdued shadow language we didn’t know we knew.
2
To be sure, if you were listening to this Elvis Costello song in a hermetically sealed room, with no other sounds or distractions, many of his words – perhaps most – would be discernable. And if you had the lyric sheet in your hand, fuggetaboutit. But that’s not how the real world works – and it’s how we interact with the real world and form subconscious skills and aesthetic preferences based off of that that I’m talking about here.
For me, cruising along a rural road with very few cars passing with their doppler woosh sounds, nor even with the heater up high enough for its fans to be frequently blowing, and the car stereo up as loud as I like because I was alone, I still didn’t understand any of Elvis Costello’s quickly mumbled cadence until the 1:09 mark of the 2:34 song, where his voice rises into a crooning lament for the line: “Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?” (Perhaps as a literal shoutout to Nick Lowe, who produced Elvis Costello’s first five albums – but not this one or the one before – and himself had a 1979 hit with his song “Cruel to Be Kind,” which the younger singer would later cover live).[1] Before and after that, sure, I caught a random word here or there, like a trout jumping out and then back down into a river’s rippling surface. But then it wasn’t until the 1:56 mark, when the chorus belatedly hits and repeats until the fadeout, that I could really start singing along. That was a half-won victory, though, because I could still only understand the first two lines of the chorus: “I got a feeling/I’m going to get a lot of grief.” The last two lines (“Once this seemed so appealing/Now I am beyond belief”) would have to wait to reveal themselves when I later looked the lyrics up for this essay. None of that experience produced frustration, however, because the futile detective work my half-perked ears indulged in wasn’t the point: the point was the relief I felt knowing this largely unintelligible song gave me permission to let go of knowing for once.
That lesson imparted as its textures washed over me is one we experience daily in many, many unnoticed ways.
3
To begin with, of course, “Beyond Belief” isn’t unique: we mishear or fail to hear altogether song lyrics all the time. (This is such a notorious phenomenon that Gavin Edwards’ 1995 gift book ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: And Other Misheard Lyrics is still selling well 26 years later – #148 on Amazon’s “Limericks and Humorous Verse” list!).[2] And in most of those cases, it’s not because the musician deliberately muttered the verses in order to make the explosion of the chorus at the end stand out, as Elvis Costello does in this case. Throughout the day, whether at home or in the car or walking around with our earbuds in, most of us rewind a song – or a podcast – dozens of times at least, to better catch a favorite part that got obscured by the ambient noise around us or even just by our own overlapping thoughts. This involves a degree of annoyance, yes, but I contend that that reaction is the deceptive, superficial tip of the iceberg of how deeply not quite grasping things impacts our lives.
In that metaphor, we are the floating block of ice, for the most part stolidly continuing along as, one after another, the ships of imparted communication and sensory input crash against our ken and break. But, unbeknownst to us, over time, those successive impacts subtly redirect the trajectory we’re drifting in – as individuals with particular aesthetic preferences, and as a society with a penchant for producing culture that celebrates the challenging and problematic aspects of living in this chaotic world.
Probably the most famous example of the symbiotic relationship between an individual creating what I’m talking about and the masses latching onto it – and thus guaranteeing that more of the same will pop up in other quadrants of high and low culture – is how Charles Schultz (on his own in his long running comic strip and in collaboration with others in the animated tv specials) depicts adults in Peanuts. They are not just unintelligible, with their “Wah Wah” vocalizations, but they are also literally out of sight. Schultz had both a humorous explanation for this (“I usually say that [adults] do not appear because the daily strip is only an inch and a half high, and they wouldn’t have room to stand up”)[3] and a more profound one:
It’s absurd to think of this dog and this bird wandering through the woods going on hikes and camping out. So as soon as an adult is in the strip, bang, the whole thing collapses. Because the adults bring everything back to reality. And it just spoils it.[4]
His workaround was done in service to maintaining the magic of childhood that made his characters and their world so popular to millions of people. But inadvertently, Schultz was helping to make something else seem magical: the unintelligible and hard to see elements in our lives. In a sense, he contributed to the mainstream fetishization of this phenomenon.
That may sound extreme, but to clarify I of course don’t mean fetishization in the sexual sense, but rather in the sense of something that crops up again and again in a half-conscious, obsessive way, to the point that it becomes a trope of its very own, able to transport new meaning as well point back to its origins – or even to serve as a note on a musical scale. For that last manifestation of what I’m talking about, I need only to point to something that would have been a rare faux pas 40 plus years ago, yet has become more and more deliberate and common in songs in the decades since it began to be heard at New York City block parties in the late-70s: the record scratch.
What started off as an accidental audible breach of the songs’ clarity, as DJs switched records, soon became a hallmark of those professionals’ dexterity, highlighting the fact that they could back us up to the beginning of a favored clip of music just by feel. That going backward and going forward scratch sound came to stand alone as an appreciated aspect of DJ culture – and then of mainstream culture by 1986, the year Run-DMC released their cover of Aerosmith’s 1975 hit “Walk This Way.” Forty seconds into the famous video for that cover, Jam Master Jay is shown throwing down record scratches that bleed seamlessly into Joe Perry’s guitar licks, performed with his rock band on the other side of a styrofoam wall that gets smashed apart. By the time I bought my kids a used electronic keyboard at Goodwill around 2010, that sound was so prevalent that even that old piece of equipment came with a setting that turned every key into a different record scratching tone. In 2007, my favorite rapper, Canada’s Buck 65, took this sound to a hard-to-top meta level on his song “1957” off his 2007 album Situation. His verses listing historical details from the titular year are overlaid with not just beats and a piano melody, but also samples of a dusty record’s popping sounds. The meta part, though, is in the chorus, which starts with the lines: “No joke/Hit the low note/We all go to heaven in a little row boat.” Buck 65 then repeats that, with this addition at the beginning: “Like chtssh,” vocalizing the record scratch sound in a Bobby McFerrin-like, very modern musical ouroboros.
The television equivalent of the record scratch – which has been played with and normalized just as much by this point – is the harsh static sound and salt-and-pepper visual combo that we used to get when we’d flip to a spot in between well-broadcast stations. The use of this kind of “white noise” began in the 1980s for narrative or meta self-referential effect in movies, tv shows, and commercials. But in 1992, for the mixed-media, unprecedented production design of U2’s 157 stop Zoo TV tour, this televisual scribble trope got elevated to the pedestal of an old master’s paint stroke. Their longtime stage production designer Willie Williams enlisted Carol Dodds, whom he had worked with on David Bowie’s Sound + Vision tour, to oversee a crew of 12-18 people, split between the “front of house” ones capturing live footage of the band, as well as satellite television clips, and those in a below-stage production facility nicknamed “Underworld,” where they edited everything together on the spot and threw it up onto the massive screens hanging above the stage, along with painted old East German cars.[5] When I saw them at the Oakland Coliseum stop of this tour, everyone stopped milling about after the end of the opening acts (The Sugarcubes and Public Enemy), as the lights went down and this parade of static crunch-cut video clips began to parade across the giant tv screens. That intro segment ended with a reworking of George H.W. Bush speech clips made to show him saying: “We. Will. We. Will. Rock you.” As with Run-DMC and Aerosmith, those staticky sounds bled seamlessly into the sound of U2’s instruments, as they kicked off their set with “Zoo Station” and then “The Fly.”[6] Tellingly, the impetus for this aspect of their stage show was a desire to lose themselves and their music within the wash of broader culture at the time, as explained in this June 1992 tour personnel profile from the official fan periodical Propaganda:
Unlike other rock tours where sophisticated video equipment accompanies the band in order to make them more accessible to the audience, Zoo TV almost seems to make U2 less accessible, more obscure and enigmatic in their stage presence, competing for attentions with a manic host of moving images. A million miles from so-called “video reinforcement.”
“Video destabilization,” Bono calls it, and then clarifies further, “Video deconstruction would be the art term.”[7]
Another term for this would be an audio/visual moiré effect, which is to say: the overlapping of two slightly similar patterns at inexact alignment, with the result that a mesmerizing third pattern rises up, distracting one from apprehending either of the original two.
An online article on this visual quirk says, “Moiré effect can produce interesting and beautiful geometric patterns. However,” it goes on to say, “the phenomenon degrades the quality and resolution of graphic images.”[8] But in all the instances I’m talking about, that very degradation of clarity is the goal. Sometimes, it can be deployed at a fundamental level, like a base coat of paint, to tilt all the particulars layered on top toward destabilization – of their own meanings, their relations to each other, the certainty that the creator’s intent will reach us accurately, etc.
The song and video “Satellites” from the 2014 album The Future’s Void by South Dakota musician EMA (Erika M. Anderson) picks up the baton U2’s Zoo TV tour passed onto culture at large decades earlier, both in terms of visuals and lyrical content, but also in terms of its basic building blocks. It opens with long stretches of flat television static sounds, like Morse code dashes, which then begin to be adorned with beats and urgent low piano notes and EMA’s distorted vocals. As with that old synthesizer on which my kids could play “Fur Elise” with nothing but record scratching sounds, here we have another example of an indicator of being between two patterns (or records, or channels) being used as part of a language for communicating something distinct (a pattern), while also infusing it with the destabilizing aura of its origins.
This effect doesn’t always result in a grim, mathematical experience – just as often, it’s fun and organic-feeling, and a source of inspiration for our own out-of-the-box, playful endeavors. I’m thinking now of the 1972 song “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” written by the Italian singer Adriano Celetano and performed by him and his wife Claudia Mori. (After being used in a 2017 episode of the tv show Fargo, the song has seen a resurgence in popularity, appearing on other shows and tv commercials).[9] Celetano wanted to write a song about communication barriers – especially for Italians who listened to popular American music yet didn’t often understand it – so he wrote lyrics that are all gibberish (in any language), except for the repeated phrase “All right,” and sang them with an American accent and in the propulsive style of the overlap between rock and early disco.[10] Here is a song that, unlike “Beyond Belief,” remains unintelligible even with the lyric sheet in front of you. Yet that quality is its strength – something that is also true even of many, varied examples of American culture.
Though the jury’s out on whether these descriptors are pejorative or just objective, the last two decades have seen the rise of both the mumble rap genre in music and the mumblecore genre in film. The former is hardly unique, because the words to many songs in pre-existing genres – such as punk and heavy metal – are not very intelligible. The latter also has its precedents in the “realistic” yet hard to follow dialogue styles of indie film auteurs, such as Robert Altman and John Cassavetes. Pretty much any modern-day manifestation of what I’m talking about here will have deep lineage we can track back to see how having the incomprehensible everywhere we turn has become increasingly important to us.
We need only look at the last 170 years of art movements: from Realism, to Impressionism, to Symbolism, to Art Nouveau, to Expressionism, to Cubism, to Futurism, to Dadaism, to Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism – the trajectory has clearly been toward less and less graspable subject matter in the visual arts. Far from this being a fringe manifestation in culture, this trend has long influenced what hangs in office building lobbies and in the aisles of home decor stores. Occasionally, works by these artists might strike a chord with us for personal reasons (e.g., color field paintings could act like big, flat mood rings, reminding us how nebulous our own emotions can be; or Cy Twombly’s loopy scribbles could perk us up about our own illegible handwriting). But mostly direct one-to-one significance isn’t the point here. The point is letting go.
Just as while many people have staked their academic careers explaining to us how to understand dense, nearly-unreadable, canonized literary works – such as Finnegan’s Wake and Naked Lunch and Miss MacIntosh, My Darling – and others have done the same for similarly challenging films – such as Mulholland Drive and Tree of Life and Upstream Color – all that analysis, while satisfying in its own right, isn’t the point when it comes to the role these works play in the broader trend of the inscrutable in our lives. The point is letting go.
In the late 1980s, the first Where’s Waldo book illustrated by Martin Handford was published. In the 1990s, a fad took off of “magic eye” posters sold in malls. Both of these required long, unfocused gazing at their subject matter for the viewer to finally “get” what had seemed hidden in them. But that reward was really secondary to a paradoxical first one available to anyone, even those who could never find Waldo or have an elephant or flower suddenly jump out of that psychedelic moiré pattern: the gift of letting go of needing to know what the answer is.
That is why we surround ourselves with so much that is hard to know, and much that can’t be understood at all: as insurmountable, externalized examples that help us forgive ourselves for not having the answers to the mysteries that really matter – all the things that have happened in our lives that will never get any explanation.
4
We have been caught up in events beyond our control that have had lasting repercussions. People we thought we could trust and depend on have let us down and even hurt us badly. Concerted efforts in one area yield no results, while other things seem to happen to us due to dumb luck, good or bad. Patterns that we know so well we could write a book about them nonetheless keep repeating. And we ourselves have said and done things that are inexplicable aberrations from who we think we are. Each day for us is a cornucopia of things that can’t be explained, strewn before our every move in such abundance that we can hardly choose which to give our futile attention to first.
But all that relentless effort is for naught, and there is sweet relief in letting it go.
In the 1997 Don Delillo novel Underworld (a title that will now remind me of the Zoo TV tour), the protagonist Nick Shay becomes obsessed with a real-life 14th century Christian mysticism text called The Cloud of Unknowing. According to Wikipedia, “The underlying message of this work suggests that the way to know God is to abandon consideration of God’s particular activities and attributes, and be courageous enough to surrender one’s mind and ego to the realm of ‘unknowing,’ at which point one may begin to glimpse the nature of God.”[11] I don’t mention that here to swerve this essay onto a religious track at the last minute, but rather to draw a parallel to what I’ve been describing. Or perhaps some among us might see them as being one and the same: acceptance of our own life’s mysteries requires of us a near spiritual act of restraint, of turning away from our impulse to try and understand what can’t be fathomed.
I’ll end, though, by mentioning another, more secular book of his, my favorite Don Delillo novel: 1985’s White Noise. That title says it all: it evokes the history of the record scratch, the use of tv static as an artistic trope, the Wah Wah’s of Peanut’s adults, the nonsense of that Italian pop song washing over our ears, abstract art, and bits of music and news and podcasts we miss as they blend in with the background of everything else in our lives. That white noise is our talisman, our cloud of unknowing we already exist within, empowering us to glimpse all the answers we need through the act of not looking at all.
[1] http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php/Cruel_To_Be_Kind
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/4471/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_books
[3] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/598218/peanuts-comic-strip-no-adults
[4] ibid
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_TV_Tour
[6] https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/u2/1992/oakland-alameda-county-coliseum-oakland-ca-3bd6f89c.html
[7] https://archive.ph/20130117070637/http://www.atu2.com/news/zoo-tv-station-talent.html
[8] https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/moire-effect
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol
[10] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/164206468
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing