The old fools can't get it

[imomus]

What do they think has happened, the old fools, to make them like this?

2007 was the year when two seminal figures from postpunk music turned 50. Nick Cave and Mark E. Smith were both born in 1957. With them, we could say, postpunk music itself turned 50.

Smith and Cave celebrated the irrefutable middleness of their middle age (one has lost his teeth, the other is losing his hair) with two of the year's best singles, both on the same theme: sex, and, specifically, not being able to get any. They could so easily have turned out limp, self-pitying and menopausal, but these records about not getting any sex were hard, manly, weird, funny and sexy. Here they are, then. "Fledermaus Can't Get Enough" by Von Südenfed (Smith's collaboration with Mouse on Mars), followed by "No Pussy Blues" by Grinderman, Nick Cave's version of his hero David Bowie's big, hilarious hard rock mistake, Tin Machine.

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Smith has become the W.H. Auden of postpunk, prematurely wrinkled beyond his years. "I've fucked more women than you've ever seen," he told Caitlin Moran in a 1994 interview, but now seems happily married to Eleni, The Fall's keyboard player. "Can't get it now, but I can get it" is his repeated refrain in "Fledermaus". Cave -- also happily married, and bringing up his children in Brighton -- builds his menopausal masterpiece on the refrain "She didn't want to".

The reason these records are sexy is because sex is about desire, and desire is about incompleteness -- you want something you don't have, something outside yourself, something across an important divide. Someone who can always get it, and get it now, can't really evoke that part of sex -- its dynamic uncertainty, its pathetic dependence, its lurch into potential hurt and indignity. The young Nick Cave -- the Cave of the Nick The Stripper video, for instance -- was a bit of a sex god. It's difficult to imagine him finding it difficult to make the girls want to. But, like Samson in reverse, Nick has been made stronger by losing his mane of hair. Stronger, that is, at portraying the essential weakness and vulnerability at the heart of sexual desire.

Their looks show that they're for it: Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines - How can they ignore it?

But I wonder if there isn't something else, something equally poignant, going on here. Rock music used to use other things (holding hands, for instance) as a metaphor for sex. But now it uses sex as a metaphor for other things. Sex in these records might be a euphemism for a bigger menopause, the menopause of popular music itself, a medium in which the word "mojo" is more likely to evoke a museum-like magazine about the music of a fading baby boom than a vibrant contemporary libido.

It wasn't just their (announced) sexuality which collapsed around Cave and Smith's ears in 2007, it was also the music industry they knew when they were hip priests and insect strippers, that whole world of record shops and physical singles and albums. We could say that as their bodies decayed, so did music's "body", its physical support on plastic, and therefore the distribution and retail system which had spread their seminal postpunk influence (Nick Cave and his bad seed!) all over the world, making these oddballs so oddly fuckable in the first place. In 2006 Tower Records closed down, and in 2007 it was the turn of the Virgin Megastore chain. The management of the LA Virgin Megastore on Sunset Strip said that music sales, which accounted for 70% of their revenue just four years ago, had shrunk to just 40% today. The store is to close in January.

That is where they live: Not here and now, but where all happened once.

One less rock virgin on the strip, then. A couple more fogies complaining that they can't pull any more. The silver lining in the cloud is that maybe sex is sexier when it isn't institutionalized. Maybe the virgins are lovelier when they're actual virgins, not retail chains. Maybe mojo is best when it isn't a magazine. And maybe sex is sexier when you can't always automatically get it.

Well, we shall find out.

(Philip Larkin, The Old Fools)

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Oh Lordy I don´t even know what to make fun of.

Virginity and Kevin Ayers´ slut Richard Branson? Stripper Nick Cave? NO PUSSY BLUES? PHILIP LARKIN???! LOLZ OVERLOAD, CANNOT COMPUTE!




I think I´ll go back to my post about Rapingsteen´s arse.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHA INSECT INCEST.
Somehow I feel Nick Cave is unfamiliar with this sketch:

[imomus.livejournal.com]

INSECT WITH A LITTLE CHILD?

[(Anonymous)]

It might be amusing to see a couple of old fucks moaning about their lot, but this is just the flipside of a fundamental misogyny. I'll bet Cave's estranged partner's and their son's (to whom Cave refuses to pay a cent of maintenance) hearts bleed for him.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about his personal life, but Who's Dated Who (http://www.whosdatedwho.com/celebrities/people/dating/nick-cave.htm) lists his partners as Anita Lane, Viviane Carniero (with whom he lived in Sao Paolo for a few years), PJ Harvey and Susie Bick, his current partner. Which one of those are you alleging he had sons with?

[xishimarux.livejournal.com]

Sort of reminds me of the later works of Picasso with all that Minotaur imagery. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe it's just that Smith and Cave have run out of ideas and are reverting to rock cliches of old ("(I Can't Get No)Satisfaction") - Cave more than Smith.

A great deal of of music is about demonstrating/empathising/channeling the 'First Noble Truth' - life is suffering.

Can't agree that Nick Cave was ever a sex god - check out the 'ugliest musicians' thread on ILM.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Can't you be ugly and sexy too, though? Or, rather, borderline? I personally find jolie laid more interesting than jolie jolie, in men and women.

If I'm right that getting older can be sexy because sex is all about wanting, about desire, about incompleteness, then being ugly is also a sexually more dynamic thing than being conventionally good-looking, because it too contains the dynamism of desire, and space for creativity. I designate someone attractive, and it's my decision, my creation, I feel part of the curatorial process.

Having a partner that everyone finds attractive is generally, in my experience, pretty tedious. Having a partner that only you find attractive is great.

[(Anonymous)]

So Momus, you say that these old men could be \"limp, self-pitying and menopausal\", but are instead \"hard, manly, weird, funny and sexy\"? I suppose that says a lot. Maybe you should take some vitamins or something?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I did a limp, self-pitying and menopausal song on my last album, actually. It's called "Ex-Erotomane". But it's sort of funny at the same time, and as tongue-in-cheek as either of the songs I'm talking about today.

I think my next album will probably have that sort of warm, middle-aged glow that certain Leonard Cohen albums have. You know, just lush and sentimental and torchy, with no beats at all, no machismo, no complaint. Just bathed in a sort of ever-so-slightly sexist old man-style adoration for women.

[(Anonymous)]

You plan to copy Leonard Cohen next? Yes, that might help.

[(Anonymous)]

Might have a bit of trouble with the adoration of women bit. But I suppose you could just rephrase what he says. He seems to like women.

[(Anonymous)]

Momus does like women. Just so long as they're Asian and they look like 14 year old boys.

[(Anonymous)]

Nick, maybe get the suit drycleaned too

[(Anonymous)]

No its a loser. What about advertisements for something?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

my personal theory is that it's the terminal decline of the toobacco industry that's directly responsible for the end of rock music.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

I want to fuck this post, which is odd because I have not really had that hard desire for sex for years. Maybe I am fucked but it feels okay.
Only this weekend a female stranger grabbed me in a bar and held my face in her hands. I thought this was leading to a kiss when she cupped my beard in her hands and said, "Get rid of this. It just makes you look older."
I had to laugh and say, "but honey, I AM older!"

[(Anonymous)]

Someone who can always get it, and get it now, can\'t really evoke that part of sex -- its dynamic uncertainty, its pathetic dependence, its lurch into potential hurt and indignity.

Maybe not a new girlfriend but a new health regime nick?

[(Anonymous)]

You might want to ditch the floral pillow slips too?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You know, you might have got somewhere in life if you hadn't wasted all your spare time shooting tiny musicians harmlessly full of even tinier bullets.

[(Anonymous)]

Get some with little bow-ties on them?

[(Anonymous)]

What aboot a design of little tiny guns shooting streams of pokari sweat/calpis at the breasts of young pregnant women? That would enhance your suave crooner image.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a good idea, do you want to work on some rough sketches?

[hulegu.livejournal.com]

'It wasn't just their (announced) sexuality which collapsed around Cave and Smith's ears in 2007, it was also the music industry they knew when they were hip priests and insect strippers, that whole world of record shops and physical singles and albums.'

I wonder if there is an alternative to the axiom that online piracy and free file-sharing are responsible for the closure of record shops? one recent academic study (http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf) (via Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/primarysources), seems to suggest so:

'The recording industry can stop blaming sagging sales and profits on online pirates: They’re cheapskates who probably wouldn’t have bought the albums they downloaded, according to an economic analysis of file-sharing and album sales.'

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think it's a combination of things.

* People's expectation that they can and should get music free now.

* The demographics of the baby boom and the post-boom shrink in young people and therefore young people's culture.

* Alternative sources of entertainment (the web etc) providing competition for music.

* Over-exploitation of the talent pool by the music industry, over-marketing, over-hyping, over-fishing, over-heightened expectations (Rock Music will save the world! Bono! Geldof! Sting!), over-inflated profits, an over-heated retail environment (those music megastores that felt like carpet warehouses!)...

* Artistic exhaustion in the medium itself -- repetition and recycling, together with a failure of nerve, a failure to really change the basic template.

T.S. Eliot had the size of it when he said "No writer, however skillful, can say anything important for his own time or for any future time in a style, however good, that belongs to a past age."

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

fledermaus cant get enough is electroclash goodness.

Theres sex appeal and theres ego stroking. They over-lap each other to such extremes it's sometimes hard to tell them apart.

Wanting to fuck someone because you cant have them is ego-stroking and I try to avoid that shit at all costs. nobody likes to play heeeeeeeeeeead gaaaaaaaaaaames.

Raw sex appeal is the best sex you will ever have. You're sexually compatible, you both push each others buttons. thats it.

[morbid-o.livejournal.com]

Interesting take. I think the songs you chose exemplify some of the complexities (not particularly deep ones, mind you) that we are starting to see in Rock music as it fractures and matures (amidst the art world, decrying its demise).

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

By the way, it's happened again. I get a weird craving to listen to Mouse On Mars and Nick Cave (spent yesterday afternoon on YouTube looking for just that), and here we have a column about it (woo---oooo theremin noise).

When I went to see a show of yours in Portland, Oregon, Nick Cave music was playing after the show.

I'll only ever call you Momus, and only ever call Nick Cave "Nickers".

And good God, yes, Nickers was unbearably, freakishly attractive/ugly. Really mesmerizing to look at.

[errorgorilla.livejournal.com]

Curiously Philip Larkin managed to have three women on the go at once. Quite what Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth saw in him is another matter but I doubt the Don Juan of Hull minded too much.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Flirtations and/or advances from adult women are especially flattering, I think. Since the beard I've been getting more attention from lovely women over thirty. In fact, I was just hit on by a woman the night before last at my favorite bistro. Turns out she deals in organic seeds (*), and is sending a box to me (Is one a gigolo if he's paid in plant life?)

Saw an interview with Mark E Smith on Ian's Soft Focus show. Rather sad, I thought.

I do hope Cave is kidding here.

[(Anonymous)]

A famously truculent interviewee is our Mark, the u tube of Lauren Laverne's attempt to pin him to protocol is quite a hoot.
Thomas S.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

Odd, last year I drove past that LA Virgin Megastore and it was doing quite well! They had a ton of Morrissey advertising outside of the store that I wanted to steal. The other Virgin Megastore that I saw often in Burbank shut down a few years ago and was replaced by some random store I forgot the name of.

Also, where's Shelley and Devoto? :(

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

TAKE IT AWAY, PETE!

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

It's great that Cave pulled such a silly and honest song out of his bald spot after writing and scoring the very excellent and very serious Australian Western "The Proposition" in 2005.

[(Anonymous)]

I love how in the Von Südenfed film clip they look like Sophie Ellis-Bextor.



- Marc.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Obviously a man in drag. A real woman wouldn't do so many costume changes. Where the robes make the woman, the woman isn't one.