The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get

As I risk dragging us into the realm of Halloween and Friday the 13th, and initiate Dominique III, a word about 1994. The Nineties were, in some places, in some ways, a revolutionary time. Cheltenham and Abington dropped their respective battlements and became friends. Kurt Cobain expressed something for a lot of us that couldn't be hidden. Pop culture got more real, as the Alternative Revolution and Lollapalooza made all the changes communal (I went to '93). Morrissey had his first real hit in the United States, in Philadelphia, from WDRE on out (who themselves emanated from Jenkintown, right next to Cheltenham). The center of Pennsylvania was set to be more revolutionary, too. But Morrissey's first bona fide hit was a source of comic relief for Chris and I, who did have moods in which we were completely fed up with Dominque's posturing antics. The song is funny on the surface, but even more funny for Chris and I, who understood that that was something true about Dominique: she liked jokes, but intensely disliked when the joke was at her expense. After all the antics were said and done, a real self-serious broad. And a master, she'd be happy to tell you, of human psychology, of why people say what they say and do what they do. Yet, in the spring of '94, we watched Dominique make a flaming fucktard of herself, as victims or semi-victims, and were happy to engage in the catharsis, through Morrissey, of a good laugh. The revolution was on. 

Stone the Devil

The Twenties for me started exactly when they were supposed to: January 2020. It so happens that that month, Speck released the acid-jazz track Stone the Devil. The piece features a fragment from Stoning the Devil, which came out on Synch Chaos yesterday. All the musical issues behind acid-jazz are built into Stone the Devil, as is the sense that this is a creepy version of acid-jazz, and also one with resonance towards cities, the urban, Center City and West Philadelphia for example, or Los Angeles, where Speck is partly from. Not that I can forget the night in January 2020 when I had the song in my head as I crossed the bridge from West Conshohocken back into Conshohocken, onto Fayette Street. And Stone the Devil, with other tracks from the CC Mixter crew, have seen some reasonable chart action around the Net, and enfranchisement onto the Acid Dropping EP. The early Twenties for me were partly about this issue: here's what to do if they use you in music. To the extent that I've flexed what muscle I have in the direction of the CC Mixter tracks, I've also, as someone mostly self-taught who plays and writes rock music, learned how much I don't know. And the eerie glow of Stone the Devil rings down the ages, from This Charming Lab into the Twenties, about sophistication and sophisticated marriages of literature and music, and about the possibility of new, attendant worlds opening up all the time. 

The Walk

Dominique Part 2.And if The Cure do manifest as Dominique (Dominique) Part 2, it's because they're the band Dominique chose to front with when we were kids. Chris fronted with U2. Consequently, we went (sans D) to see the Zoo TV tour at the Vet in late summer 1992. By the time Paul Hewson spoke at my Penn commencement in the Aughts, the whole adolescent adventure of band-fronting, individual by individual, was over. I myself never fronted with any one band. My front at any given time depended on my mood. Could be classic rock or Alt-Revolution. When Chris and Dominique visited me in State College during my first summer there ('94), I was fronting with Nirvana, and being Kurt, who was Holden Caulfield for tons of kids in America then. The Catcher in the Rye. By the end of '94, the Pumpkins replaced Nirvana. Dominique to The Cure in the 90s was easy to understand. Dominique's whole posture had a wide streak of being Goth down the middle of it. No black eyeliner, just a sense of drama around darkness, the night, and a steady devotion to serious, brooding gravity. Being heavy. I always thought black eyeliner would look good on D, and boutique/fetish attire, and piercings, but she never took it that far. I had been through The Cure when I was younger. People forget: The Cure in the Nineties were for sociologists as much as they were for music fans. They themselves fronted for an entire social movement. The Cure meant, on a semiology level, Goth, and Goth meant what it meant. Dominique in State College maintained her dyed-blonde hair, and managed to look, herself, like Kurt Cobain. We were like half-siblings. She hid in the closet of my room in South Halls, where I was briefly ensconced. Being Goth. The Cure is something worth knowing about her, and the Nineties. Black eyeliner or not.

Couldn't Cause Me Harm

It's astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll. It's time to do the Time Warp again. The time and place: Manhattan, 1999. Not a smart-phone in sight. Not even too many cell-phones yet. Pay-phones are still operative. Compact discs and DVDs rule a bunch of commercial, cultural roosts. Bubba survived his impeachment trial with a little time left. And, in the middle of doing my dance with Dominique, who was eventually to be Dominique, Manhattan indie hipsters found time to go gaga over Beth Orton. The album Central Reservation became a staple one for the hot months in 1999, and it was said Beth Orton kept popping up at different places in Manhattan to bedazzle the natives. The song here offered itself, Couldn't Cause Me Harm, was my favorite tune on her definitive '99 platter, and I can't hear it accept to travel back to the places I lived then. Right next to Brownie's on Avenue A, for example, and Park Slope into Bay Ridge, where I was transfixed by the Night Fever of how Ms. Orton was More Than A Woman. By August, I was gone, and by the August 20s had set up shop in Logan Square. But the singing version of Dominique that would have to be Beth Orton will always be about what Manhattan means, and how its inhabitants stab the city in the back and get close against social distancing mores. Manhattan, as an enterprise, is a stiff challenge against human impulses, emotions, and predilections. Dominique and I had the guts to rise to the occasion, and Ms. Orton, as the indie Queen of the moment, did too. 

To Bruce Nauman (Live at the Writers House)

Todd Swift on Simple Minds

 

Simple Minds were the band that moved me most as a teenager. I remember discovering them in 1982 or so— albums like Sister Feelings Call, Sons and Fascination, and then their masterpiece, New Gold Dream, seemed to reflect, for me, what it was to be young at a golden time. Their early work— before the commercial success of the second half of the 80s, post Don’t You (Forget About Me), their number one American hit— was both strident and exalted, purposeful and transcendent— in other words, very Scottish Protestant (half my roots).

Songs like 70 Cities as Love Brings the Fall, Wonderful In Young Life, Careful In Career, The American, and of course Love Song were, to me, the epitome of poetry— shimmering, cosmopolitan, political, anti-empire, and yet sexy— Jim Kerr’s voice flaunted a kind of arch-dandyism. I still think their work from twenty to twenty-five years ago matches and sometimes betters the work of U2 from that time, and, with Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure, and a few others, are the great New Wavers (you could add Depeche Mode and Duran Duran and Tears For Fears). Simple Minds were crypto-Christians, at a time when I enjoyed reading German theology in translation (Letters From Prison being my favorite), and I somehow managed to convince myself that they were singing just for me. This was when the spring came like thunder and ice cracked just like that and suddenly it wasn’t colder than Siberia, so all life was good and strange and hard then.

From a 2005 interview with Todd Swift on Art Recess 2

Everything Reminds Me Of Her

The bizarre journey of discovery towards the summer 2026 re-release of What Needs No Myth in Eratio I've already told elsewhere. The journey starts at Personal Mythologies II at KWH in 2003. Elliott Smith's life ended in 2003. Elliott Smith was a singer-songwriter from the Pacific-Northwest who lit up the Nineties into the early Aughts with a series of highly melodic, if melancholy, records. Everything Remind Me of Her, from Figure 8 from 2000, hits a note not far from Alex and Third/Sister Lovers. Musically detailed enough to satisfy purists, Elliott Smith was big enough to be a sizable cult star by the time of his 2003 suicide. Over twenty-three years, the records he made seem to be lost in the shuffle. All the records from the early Aughts- remember Conor Oberst? Jack White? Stephen Merritt?- have that quality now. The point of bringing up Elliott Smith is to do a Time Warp back to 2003, and announce that yes, like it or not, the Bush administration were just as hated as the Trump administration is now. Bush was NOT okay with everybody. The Elliott Smith records were heard by Mary and Abby and everyone in my circle. They, especially Figure 8, do a wash over my memories of Logan Square at the time, and color them. So, when we got home from KWH on September 20, 2003, this is a record we might've put on. And mourned, also, that the difference between the mythology of what the rock biz is supposed to be and what the rock biz actually is, is what killed Elliott Smith. The records themselves needed no myth. The music was there, and still is.