33 rebellions per minute
"Am I the triste that dares the whip to sully steel within me?"
1995
Mephisto Waltz, THALIA
Although I make it my working theory that my music-review column -- if only because it is called a "music review column" -- should be dedicated to reviewing music, regular readers have probably noticed my occasional tendency to fire off half-considered moral broadsides. I'm not, perhaps, entirely generous in my written assessments: that buying cigarettes is wrong (though shoplifting them is fine), that eating meat is wrong (though it's okay to hurt fish cuz they don't have any feelings), and that even doing your job is wrong if the consequences of your assigned work are harmful to others. I've been honest enough to wonder, at times, who the hell I am to be offering these judgments. Any intactness of my own moral virtue, after all, has survived quite a while without serious temptation or required effort. If I pine at times for pepperoni or cajun chicken, I rest easy knowing that white cheddar Cheez-Its and homemade bourbon-pecan chocolate pie are, for moral calculations, vegetables. If I've been known to befriend and loan sleeping quarters to the homeless, it's certainly come to my attention first that at least that way I didn't need to give a dollar, let alone a six-hour shift at a soup kitchen. And how many votes would a politician win for responding to "Have you ever committed adultery?" with "Yeah, right, I wish"? (oops, sorry; back in the years when I was reliably unattached, that was funnier...)
Therefore I count, as one of the most remarkable discoveries of my learning-filled year, this new one: that I genuinely believe the shit I preach. The scenario: I'm a Customer Service Representative for Citibank. As assigned, it is my job to listen to customers just closely enough that I can hit the correct keys on the keyboard, read them the resulting script, and listen until a next script is called for and/or it is time to say "thank you for calling Citibank, we do appreciate your business, if you have any further questions please call [appropriate number], good night". It is a simple job, one my co-workers do correctly; we are measured by how accurately we read the scripts, and how often we sell customers on Balance Transfers and Credit Protectors. It is, as simple and scripted jobs go, endlessly more tolerable than being measured on number of Jews loaded into train, or number of environmentalist lawsuits quashed; but it still my assigned job, given the nature of the scripts, to manipulate money _away_ from human beings, who could use it to do things, and _towards_ a disembodied, parasitic, all-consuming idea called a "corporation", where it will function as a mere number. Anyone who could meet the one goal to perfect corporate satisfaction is, I fear, qualified to meet the others. (Note that, as an optimist, I regard this as the banality of evil, more than the evil of banality. Powerlessness corrupts.)
I have taken a consistent risk, from the beginning, in seeing my job (don't ask where the notion came from) as providing Service to the Customer. This means, for example, that I paraphrase confusing paragraphs into short, clear ones. This also means there are many tape-recordings in the Citibank archives of me advising an unhappy customer about how (and how often) to apply for lower interest rates, or how to avoid bumbling into finance charges, or what's the best strategy to getting maximum use from a Balance Transfer. I am on tape, here and there, adjusting my sales pitch between "whoa! this here's a good offer" or "couple other things I have to mention here...". I am even on tape fielding direct questions like "is this really a good idea?", and asking the questions needed to work them to a fair decision. In my favor, my sales record is slightly better than average (the sincerity shows, perhaps? Beats me), and customer feedback has been lovely. By my hypothesis, Citibank itself is best served if its customers get fair and helpful answers to their quesitons, and if they don't feel angry and ill-treated. Then again, I was not asked to hypothesize.
Anyway. Last Thursday, Citibank gave a bunch of us our first session in becoming telemarketers. _Conceivably_ I could have handled this; the higher pay was certainly an incentive. Once upon a time I made outbound calls for Target Department stores and did well, though all I was asking Target's cardholders to do was quickly decide which school they'd like Target, at Target's own expense, to donate 1% of the money they spent at the store to; a genuinely nice marketing gimmick. However, Citibank's trainer also informed us, by-the-by, that a new program we'd been assuring customers had no transaction fee was actually, sometimes, subject to a fee in excess of $100. She said, when my co-worker Elizabeth complained, "but that's the past! What counts is that the future is a clean slate, let's do our best!" (now why didn't Jeffrey Dahmer employ that argument?). I said no way. I said I refuse to bother people in their homes to ask them to sign onto a program when there's no certainty, in my mind, that any pro or con I tell them will even be true. I said transfer me, because I won't do this. Since by their rules I have not worked there long enough to be transferred (except of course against my will), this may or may not be equivalent to pasting a "Fire Me" sign on my back.*
If music is in part a mood-altering drug, and I think it is, then music is as useful to me now as it's ever been. As it happens, there are no shortage of bands who seem more than ready to aid any inclinations on my part to righteous anger. The Alarm and Hunters & Collectors, and for that matter John Philip Sousa, are partisans of the generic anthem, standing with you for whatever you might randomly happen to believe in. Rush and U2 hint at grandeur, sweeping semi-complexity, and earnest thought and pride. Everclear vent rage with an unconscious but transforming bounciness. New Model Army and Fatima Mansions and Carter USM gear listeners for tough battle, noble causes, and glorious defeat.
None of which is what I need. The purpose of military music is to blast it _before_ the battle, generating the adrenaline that overwhelms judgment and briefly hides the simple fact that a number of the marchers are about to be macheted or deep-fried. The purpose of anthems of defeat is to remind you of your cause, so your suffering can be transformed into righteousness, giving you perfect posture as you dangle from the tree. I didn't ask to fight. If I had, this isn't the cause I would have chosen. Yes, the fight against corporate greed is important; even more so, perhaps, is the cause of educating people in their rights so that kind and reasonable people can be treated as decently as the skillfully pissed-off whiners. But as practical content, the rescuing of a couple hundred dollars a day for the use of people well-off enough to own credit cards is not quite on a par with feeding the starving millions. All I really ever demanded is that my mouth be used, when I so choose, to utter kindnesses and truths instead of obfuscatory mealy-mouthed bullshit that would be self-serving if there was, anywhere, some self being served. If that's too much, things are bleak.
The music world, fortunately, is also large enough to encompass people who want to celebrate bleakness. This wasn't always true, I think; there was that long period between Tschaikovsky's "Marche Slave" and the Cure's "Killing An Arab" when music was dominated by "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window?", "Hang On Sloopy", and the advertising world's 30-second prequels to MOZART'S GREATEST HITS discs. A turning point (branch-off point, really) in the history of rock, then, came three years after "…Arab", when the Cure recorded PORNOGRAPHY ('82), one of those albums it might be helpful to own even if you hate it, just for its historic role in setting the benchmarks for minimalistic bleakness. The bad news might be that Robert Smith, whose voice (which I quite like) could both virtually define "acquired taste" and demonstrate why the term really means "unacquirable if you aren't mysteriously born with it", is "singing" on it, song after song. Which is where Mephisto Waltz's THALIA might come in handy.
"Thalia", "a Precession For The Equinoxes", and "Aglaia At Auroras", instrumentals, demonstrate the PORNOGRAPHY musical recipe with precision. Drum machines thud repeated ominous patterns that are simultaneously obvious in their computerization, and reminiscent of the rhythmic breakdowns of terribly old sewage and power plants. Keyboards shimmer in whole-note intervals. Basses are soft and echoey, and resort only at transitions and high points to actual chord progressions. Guitars are recognizable as instruments only by their patterns they fingerpaint on the frequency charts. Everything is minor key, most sets of two measures are a repeat of the two measures before them, and structure is imposed only by the sequence of really cool weird noises layered on top. It's not designed to make us think, and that's fine, I have enough to think about; it's designed to make us shiver. Conveniently, the human wiring for that is much more person-to-person consistent.
Mephisto Waltz use those tricks always, but it would seriously underestimate them to credit them with nothing else. "Along The March", drumless, picks slowly along a 5-note synthesizer melody, a 3-note bass rumble, and the vocalist Cristina's reverbed plainsong delivery of a short but ambitious melody. "Euphrosyne"'s melody, though delivered with classicist passionlessness, is almost a merger of Tori Amos's "Girl" and "Mother", and the drums' insistent beat remind me of some old commercials that frantically chanted "D.P.! D.P.! D.P.! D.P.! For life! For life! For life! For life!" and would have been tremendously effective if 1) I had any clue what sort of product D.P. was and 2) the "for life" went any better with its vocal delivery of a thousand zombies psyching themselves into eating brains. The guitars on "the Hunter's Trail" are like tortured Furby dolls having their screams processed through the tubes of a pan flute, and Cristina rouses herself to sound like the sister of the computer voice on Radiohead's "Fitter Happier", running the beta test of first-draft a program to model petulance.
"Mephisto Waltz" has the haunted carnival swing of United States Of America's "American Metaphysical Circus" or, perhaps, "Being For The Purgatory Of Mr. Kite". "No Way Out" is a virtual pop song, a sweetly melancholic Guided By Voices-y melody supported by boppy new wave keyboards worthy of Game Theory's TWO STEPS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES (the drums and guitar, however, stay on task). "White Rabbit", the Jefferson Airplane song, is slowed with little difficulty to the dirge one hums on coming down, although the point of doing this is entirely opaque (though an American Library Association-endorsed website called "Go Ask Alice", in which a group of doctors promise direct and honest answers to any questions teenagers ask about their changing minds and bodies, is currently retreating, for the sin of really meaning it, under vicious attack from radio's "Dr." Laura Schlesinger and her teeming millions who clearly see "feed your head" as the death knell of civilization). "T-200 (Kokoro)" processes Cristina through a vocorder to sound like the irritated messenger of an alien race, giving Earthlings careful advice on how we can best reorganize our civilization to promote harmony, peace, justice, and not provoking the emissary's underlings to demolish us.
Nothing in THALIA is actively depressing - another reason, frankly, to prefer it to PORNOGRAPHY. The lyrics are too abstract and prettily sung to mean anything at all; the music is meditative and somber, with a hint of cathedralized majesty. It doesn't tell us what to feel, or whether feeling is better than anesthesia, or whether our job is to admire, to participate, or to let ourselves be peacefully surrounded and cleansed. Silence, I suppose, does the same, but silence is too weak to shut out all the other forces in life that are not so considerate.
* Late note for the concerned: valued by my bosses for hard work and (yes, really) peppy phone manner, I received the transfer to a different and lower-pressure customer service program. Time to unwind, cheer up, and review Tullycraft or something.
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