Tenha sido o poeta Robert Browning, o pintor Ad Reinhardt, ou o arquitecto Mies Van der Rohe a criar o conceito “less is more”, a verdade é que, por muita selva – estética, política, filosófica – que o minimalismo tenha desbravado, persiste um considerável número de fortalezas que essa ideia nunca conseguiu assaltar. Uma das mais inexpugnáveis praças-fortes é, sem dúvida, a indústria discográfica. Só um exemplo: Jeff Buckley que, em vida, gravou um único álbum (Grace, 1994), entre compilações e registos ao vivo, possui, actualmente, uma discografia póstuma com dez títulos, um box-set de cinco CD e cinco DVD. Mais é sempre mais e nunca é suficiente. Exactamente aquilo que, no "booklet" indesculpavelmente... err... minimal (quinze curtas linhas laconicamente informativas) de .. It’s Too Late To Stop Now... Volumes II, III, IV & DVD, fica absolutamente explícito quando afirma que oferece “even more of Van Morrison and The Caledonia Soul Orchestra”.
Para que conste, o volume I (intitulado apenas It’s Too Late To Stop Now e publicado em Fevereiro de 1974) é consensualmente considerado um dos mais memoráveis álbuns "live" de sempre: incluindo gravações de concertos do ano anterior, no Troubadour, de Los Angeles, no Santa Monica Civic Auditorium e no Rainbow, em Londres – nos quais Morrison se fez acompanhar da Caledonia Soul Orchestra, uma sobrenatural máquina de fazer música (rock, jazz, folk, blues, soul) de onze elementos –, apanha-o naquele instante supremo como intérprete de palco que o transformaria numa “religião” para Springsteen e a E-Street Band. Para trás, estavam Astral Weeks (1968), Moondance (1970), His Band and the Street Choir (1970) Tupelo Honey (1971) Saint Dominic's Preview (1972) e Hard Nose the Highway (1973) e seria daí (e do reportório dos mestres Sam Cooke, Willie Dixon, Ray Charles ou Muddy Waters) que extrairia o combustível para esta avassaladora demonstração do “inarticulate speech of the heart”. O “even more” anunciado (à excepção do DVD registado no Rainbow), consiste, então, de um eleborado jogo de tabuleiro em que os temas, todos, alegadamente, “previously unissued”, são, inevitavelmente, os mesmos embora retirados de concertos diferentes. Mas, tratando-se de Van Morrison, quem ousaria queixar-se da pequena trafulhice?
02 June 2016
DIZER A VERDADE
Em Fevereiro do ano passado, aquando da atribuição do galardão MusiCares Person Of The Year pela National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Bob Dylan – como não faz desde que, há doze anos, publicou o primeiro (e, até agora, único) volume das Chronicles –, no discurso de aceitação, abriu o baú das memórias e falou sobre as suas canções e tudo o que, em torno delas, gira. Começou por afirmar que as vê enquanto "'mystery plays' do género daquelas a que Shakespeare assistiu quando jovem; suponho que a origem do que faço poderá recuar até aí. Estavam nas margens e nas margens continuam, após uma caminhada por terrenos escarpados”. A seguir, depois de oferecer uma pessoalísima definição dos blues (“são uma combinação de violinos árabes e valsas de Strauss a tentar resolver um problema”),enumera diversas peças e autores e, a partir deles, estabelece a genealogia do seu cancioneiro: “Não se deixem enganar, todas estas canções estão relacionadas. Apenas abri outra porta de um modo diferente, dizendo o mesmo. Não me pareceu nada de extraordinário, pensei que era uma coisa muito natural. Estas canções não cairam do céu, tinham uma ascendência: a folk tradicional, o rock’n’roll tradicional e as big-bands de swing tradicionais”.
Nas Chronicles, tinha já dito algo semelhante quando confessara que “nas canções de Harold Arlen, conseguia ouvir os blues rurais e a música folk”. Não espanta nada, por isso, que tanto em Shadows In The Night, do ano passado, como, agora, com Fallen Angels – volumes I e II da expedição ao Great American Songbook – se tenha lançado sobre o reportório de Arlen mas também de Johnny Mercer, Hammerstein & Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Cahn e vários outros clássicos, unidos pela circunstância de todas as canções (à excepção de "Skylark") terem sido interpretadas por Frank Sinatra. De certo modo, é também uma forma elegante de reparar a injustiça de há meio século quando foi um dos responsáveis por todos esses terem sido expeditamente despachados para o arquivo morto da história da música popular norte-americana (na introdução de "Bob Dylan’s Blues", em The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963, podemos escutar a sua gabarolice juvenil de que “ao contrário das canções que, hoje, vêm lá de cima, da Tin Pan Alley, na 'uptown' de Nova Iorque, esta não foi escrita lá, escrevia-a cá em baixo, nos Estados Unidos”), como se os tempos que estavam a mudar precisassem obrigatoriamente de apagar o tempo que os precedia.
Mas, há um ano, em Los Angeles, Dylan, pensando muito provavelmente nos que torceram o nariz à ousadia de abordar o reportório de Sinatra, não conseguiu também impedir-se de disparar: “Há críticos que dizem que canto como um sapo. Porque é que não dizem o mesmo de Tom Waits? Dizem que não tenho voz. E Leonard Cohen? Porque tenho eu um tratamento especial? Dizem que desafino e falo mais do que canto. A sério? Nunca ouvi isso acerca de Lou Reed”. E, socorrendo-se de uma figura de autoridade, contou que Sam Cooke, quando lhe elogiaram a sua bela voz, respondeu:”É muito amável mas as vozes não devem ser avaliadas pela beleza. Apenas são importantes se são capazes de nos convencer que estão a dizer a verdade”. E, em Fallen Angels, logo na primeira faixa, "Young At Heart", diz uma verdade, (“If you should survive to 105, look at all you'll derive out of being alive! And here is the best part, you have a head start if you are among the very young at heart”) que é seguramente mais convincente na boca de um homem de 75 anos do que na do Sinatra de 38 que a gravou em 1953.
Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be
Don't know much about geography
Don't know much trigonometry
Don't know much about algebra
Don't know what a slide rule is for
But I do know one and one is two
And if this one could be with you
What a wonderful world this would be
Now, I don't claim to be an "A" student
But I'm trying to be
For maybe by being an "A" student baby
I can win your love for me
“It’s been a long time comin’, but —” So said Barack Obama in the first moments of his victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago on election night, calling on Sam Cooke along with the other familiars — Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. — he invisibly but unmistakably gathered to his side. “If you ever hear me sing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’”, Rod Stewart once said of Cooke’s song, released in late December 1964, just after Cooke was shot to death outside a motel in Watts, in Los Angeles, “you’ll know my career will be over” — because, Stewart seemed to imply, he would not be able to look an audience in the face after failing to live up to the song. But Obama had more confidence — or, because he was perhaps testifying that, not four years old when “A Change Is Gonna Come” first aired on the radio, he had lived out his life under the shadow of the song, had carried it with him like a manifesto, Obama was asserting that he could not only sing the song, in his own way, in his own cadence, but rewrite it. “But I know, a change gone come”, Cooke sang. “Change has come to America”, Obama said. Did he really do that? Did Sam Cooke really do that? For Obama it was not his last song, but his first song.
I wasn’t in Chicago that night. I was in Minneapolis, in Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, in the audience, as Bob Dylan played for the first time on the campus of his erstwhile alma mater. The second song was “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, from the year before “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song I’ve never liked. It always seemed as if it were written by the times, which is to say it felt like a manifesto written by a committee, or commissioned by one. But on this night so much history was loaded into the song it was impossible not to be sucked into its gravity. Dylan paced the song with space between the words, the rhythm the steps of someone making his way through an empty mansion with both care and dread. It was as if the song, or the history it carried, was moving in slow motion, carrying — as Obama would say later in the night of a 106-year-old voter named Ann Nixon Cooper, “born just a generation past slavery” — not only the history the song was made to celebrate — “She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people ‘we shall overcome’” — but the history that remained to be made: the history that the song and those present to hear it would witness as it and they had witnessed what had come before. But it was more than that.
As Dylan took all of the triumphalism out of the song, the cheering, the defiance, all of the easy ride the song had promised when it first appeared, he turned it into a kind of dirge. He divided history in two: the time the song had, now, outlasted, and the time that would, now, test it. As a dirge the song became a warning: in the past, the people listening had or had not made the history the song spoke for, but now they would have to make it, or fail the song just as Rod Stewart believed he would fail “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The last song of the night was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” another song I’ve never liked, another song that, this night, for me rang a bell it never had before. “I was born in 1941”, Dylan said just before he began the number. “That was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been living in a world of darkness ever since. But it looks like things are going to change now”. I only caught the last line; when the song ended, everyone crowded into the Northrop lobby, under a giant television screen tuned to CNN. It was ten o’clock, just as the polls closed in California, just as the announcer over our heads announced that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Dylan had not gone a minute past where he knew the show had to end.
Fans just getting out of the Bob Dylan concert at the University of Minnesota break out a dance party upon hearing the news that Obama clinched the presidency
What happened then, all over the country, and all over the world—people shouting through their tears — is not unrelated to the way Obama was able to call up “A Change Is Gonna Come” as he spoke that night. It is not unrelated to the sense of authority that has surrounded Obama since. Almost always, when someone is elected president of the United States, whether it is someone you supported or someone you opposed, it takes a long time before the attachment of the word president to that person’s name begins to sound even remotely real, and with Obama that was not true on election night and it has not been true since. That is, I think because of the way he speaks — a manner for which the world eloquence is merely pretty, and hollow. It’s the ability to speak of complex things to large numbers of people in a way that neither compromises the complexity of what the speaker means to say nor insults the intelligence of those who are listening — to speak in a manner that itself attunes those who are listening to their own complexity. I am thinking of Obama’s speech on race, from March 18 of last year, when controversy over statements and sermons by his longtime preacher, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, threatened to derail his campaign — a thirty-seven minute address that gathered listeners as if around a campfire — but I am also thinking of a scene from John Ford’s 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln as described in Short Letter, Long Farewell, a novel published by Peter Handke in 1972. The narrator, a young Austrian in America, goes to a theater. Lincoln, played by Henry Fonda, has agreed to defend two brothers accused of murder; a drunken mob arrives at the jail to lynch them, and Lincoln faces it down. He talks; he captures the drunks, the narrator says in wonder and awe, not missing the flicker of an eyelash, the turn of a vowel, “by softly reminding them of themselves, of what they were, what they could be, and what they had forgotten. This scene — Lincoln on the wooden steps of the jailhouse, with his hand on the battering ram — embodied every possibility of human behavior. In the end not only the drunks, but also the actors playing the drunks, were listening intently to Lincoln, and when he had finished they dispersed, changed forever. All around me in the theater I felt the audience breathing differently and coming to life again”. That is what eloquence is too weak a word for: speech that is not only about democracy, but that is itself democratic.
In The Human Stain, published in 2000, Philip Roth tells the story one Coleman Silk, a seventy-two year-old man from an African-American family from Philadelphia who has passed as a Jew — that is, as a white man — his entire adult life. Reading the novel now, one can hardly avoid imagining Barack Obama into its pages, not because he ever passed or ever could, but because as an African-America he seems to have invented himself as absolutely as does Coleman Silk. “What do we really know about this man?” John McCain asked throughout the fall campaign, and even without the innuendo — was he a Muslim, a communist, somehow a terrorist? — the question hit home because it was about something real. Obama’s very ease in his own skin, his apparent immunity from slurs and lies — like Jackie Robinson in his ability to trust in his own gifts and never betray his own rage at the slurs and lies that by election day had at Republican rallies become a torrent of hate, with crowds shouting “Traitor!” and “Kill him!” at the mention of his name — spoke for, as Roth wrote of Coleman Silk, “the democratic invitation to throw your origins overboard if to do so contributes to the pursuit of happiness”. Obama seems like his own creation: that is the source of his aura, the sense of self-command that draws people to him, and it is at least partly the sense that he is not quite real, not quite human, that terrifies, or sickens, others. The self-made American embodies America, a nation that was itself made up — “Everyday”, Roth wrote, “you woke up to be what you had made yourself” — but the self-made American is also a kind of Frankenstein.
The banner headline on the front pages of the New York Times the day after the election was queer in its affirmation of what the election had been about: RACIAL BARRIER FALLS IN HEAVY TURNOUT. As a self-invented American, one who could claim the history of the Civil Rights movement, as in his litany of place names from Montgomery to Atlanta, without excluding anyone from that history, Obama did not run as someone who had set himself against a “racial barrier.” A particular individual set himself a goal and achieved it; America was not less racist the day after the election than it was the day before it. But perhaps what was wrong about the headline was that it spoke in terms that were too narrow, too small, too merely functional for what had actually occurred. The country may not have changed, but its history did. It rewrote itself. For as a friend said, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Bob Dylan’s last word on election night, was not just “Blowin’ in the Wind”. It was also the song Dylan has long said he “took it off”, “a spiritual”, a song that dates to the Civil War, a song Lincoln might have heard, but not likely ever sang, as, one night in Greenwich Village, in a performance of an empathy so great is might better be called transubstantiation, a Jew in 1962 turning himself into a African-American in 1862, Bob Dylan did: “No More Auction Block”.
