"Listen as the Syllables of Slaughter Cut with Calm Precision"

So, a new year is upon us, and I thought it somewhat appropriate to focus a little bit upon on music, seeing as how it is a somewhat under-represented category given this blog's subtitle.

And, as it happens, during the last few days I have been revisiting an old favourite of mine, which still holds up with razor sharp excellence. Dear readers, I give you Marillion's 1984 album Fugazi.

The album consists of seven tracks, "Assassing" (7.02), "Punch and Judy" (3.21), "Jigsaw" (6.50), "Emerald Lies" (5.09), "She Chameleon" (6.53), "Incubus" (8.30) and "Fugazi" (8.13); the B side of the vinyl starting with "She Chameleon". In the strictest sense, it is not a concept album. There is no plot running through the album, tying the songs together and shaping a unified narrative, but that having been said, I would strongly argue that it is a conceptual album. Because the songs are cleverly tied together thematically. Fugazi, as an album, is all about human relationships, and more specifically ones that "Fucked Up, Got Ambushed, Zipped In" (the acronym stemming back to the Vietnam war).

The brilliance of the album comes, to a large extent, from Fish's lyrical genius. As a huge Fish fan, I would say that this album in many ways constitutes one of the man's finest hours. Each song deals with the aforementioned theme, but each song does so by placing the theme in a certain semantic field. The reference is always to the human relationships going down the drain, but the fantastic metaphors used create seven very different tableaux.

In "Assassing", Fish opens up by creating a mixed metaphor of a battle and linguistics, appropriately expressed in a phenomenal piece de resistance of word play extraordinary. As the title of this post ought to demonstrate quite adequately.

The short, but very intensive, second track, "Punch and Judy" makes use of the commedia dell'arte character Puncinella, or more commonly in English, Punchinello or Mr Punch; or even more precisely it uses the old puppet show classic about a relationship taken to murderous levels (Mr Punch killing both his baby and wife before moving on to other pastures – for people interested in the story, I would strongly recommend Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's interpretation in The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch) to express the theme in a more modern, urbanised, and bourgeois setting.

"Jigsaw" is built up on several metaphors, from the notion of jigsaw pieces fitting together (or not, as it were) in the first verse, through the hopelessness in "Screaming out a ceasefire, snowblind in an avalanche zone" in the second one, to the utter despair of playing "Russian roulette in the waiting room / Empty chambers embracing the end" in the final verse. All of these, however, are nicely fitted together as functioning puzzle, almost working as a mise-en-abyme of the album as a whole (i.e. I would argue that it expresses the artistic and stylistic principle behind the lyrics on the whole album, neatly compressed in a single song).

Closing the original A-side of the album, "Emerald Lies" combines a medieval reference involving the Inquisition with a modern day courtroom drama. The colour green is obviously the colour of jealousy and this in turn suits the semantic fields of choice when it comes to the metaphors, since the invasive nature both of the Inquisition and a prosecution eloquently expresses this feeling that can almost literally tear a relationship apart.

Opening the original B-side, "She Chameleon" uses the metaphorical value of a chameleon as type of shape-shifter or deceiver to express physical encounters that somehow never amount to any true meaning, yet which the poetic I nevertheless do not refuse or abandon. Incidentally, I would dare anyone to find a better, more poetically apt use of the word fuck (repeated at that) than in this song.

One of my favourite tracks has always been "Incubus", with its use of photography-, cinema- and stage-related metaphors to describe the lingering remnants of the torn-apart relationships around which the album centres. The power in a phrase like "You who wiped me from your memory like a greasepaint mask / Just like a greasepaint mask" never ceases to amaze me, and never fails to affect me emotionally.

The title track, "Fugazi", brings the theme to a strong close. In some sense, it opens up the notion of failing relationships to a larger stage. It starts with the somewhat intimate lines – "Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a Blackheath cell / Extinguishing the fires in my private hell / provoking the heartache to renew the license / Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule" – but then moves this loss of faith in the Romantic beyond its simpler application on twosome relationships to human relationships on a larger scale, referencing the Holocaust, race riots and the ever-present (at the time) threat of nuclear annihilation.

After establishing that "This world is totally fugazi," the song, and the album, closes with the repeated lines "Where are the prophets, where are the visionaries / Where are the poets, to breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary," which suggests a desire on the part of the lyricist to plead for a way out of the madness, or perhaps more accurately a way of seeing outside the box, when it comes to human relationships.

Ah well, do not take my word for it. Listen to the album yourselves. And be sure to give those lyrics some extra attention.

The Blank Sheet of Paper

First off, sorry about the delay. I have a few (hopefully interesting) ideas for upcoming posts in the pipeline, but all of them, unfortunately, require a bit of preparation each and I have not yet had the time and opportunity to get to that yet.

Consequently, I've had a lot on my mind that I wanted to say, yet nothing on my mind that I could say at this time. Or perhaps more accurately, nothing I felt was interesting enough to share here.

Last night, however, I casually quoted a bit from an old favourite song of mine, Marillion's "Bitter Suite" from the Misplaced Childhood album:

It's getting late, for scribbling and scratching on the paper
Something's gonna give under this pressure, and the cracks are already beginning to show

A good friend of mine commented on this by saying that songs about writers were always golden in his book, and I could but agree.

And not only songs either. It is really, at least for my own part, about texts and stories about writers and writing. There is something almost perversely pleasurable to read or listen to tales about writers and writing. Perhaps because it becomes so self-referential. After all, this type of writing does represent one of various forms of metafiction, that is fiction that calls attention to itself as fiction or to its own narrativity and fictionality as it were. In other words, it speaks a little bit extra to those who themselves wrestle with ink and blank pages, keyboards and empty screens. To those of us who enjoy breathing in ideas and letters and then exhaling words.

The comment, in fact, made me think about one of my favourite issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. It's a single issue story called "Calliope" (found in the Dream Country TPB) and it's all about a writer by the name of Richard Madoc. Madoc is a desperate man, because he's the author of the successful debut novel The Cabaret of Dr. Caligari with a sequel due (if not overdue) at the publisher's and a severe case of writer's block. This causes him to seek out the help of an older, reclusive writer called Erasmus Fry (who actually has a rather unconventional remedy to Madoc's problem).

When Madoc first meets Fry, the old man goes into a speech on bezoars (something which Madoc has brought along as payment for Fry's remedy) and the pressed Madoc rudely interrupts him desperately screaming, "Will you shut up? I haven't written a word in a year -- Nothing I haven't thrown away! Do you know what that's like? When it's just you, and a blank sheet of paper?" Everything that follows, the mystical remedy and the eventual cost for it, stem from this desperation.

In fact, this phrase has stayed with me ever since I first encountered it at some point in the early 1990s. Even without the context of the story, there is something haunting about the phrase. At least it is to someone who can just imagine what that's like; i.e. someone who's life is strongly tied to texts and their production. Within the context of the story, the phrase is not merely haunting but properly horrific. It is, as stated, what brings everything that follows (and without revealing too much and spoiling the story for those of you who haven't read it, what follows is, as always, the price we pay for the success we claim). It is, in effect, the fuel that drives the action, but it is also the horror itself.

While novels like Stephen King's The Dark Half cleverly play on other fears a writer may encounter, in a manner of speaking, in Gaiman's comic (visually brought to life by Kelley Jones and Malcolm Jones III), which is equally based in a fictional dark fantasy/horror reality (allowing more than a little for intrusions of the supernatural), the horror itself is not of a supernatural agency. Sure, there are dimensions to how the story unfolds that is clearly both horrific and supernatural in a combined fashion, but the basic horror is something rather more tangible. It is something that can happen to any writer and underneath the surface of that horror lies an empty despair.

In short (to put these ramblings to an end), "Calliope" as a story, besides being a really good story generally speaking and a mighty fine piece of dark fantasy in the medium of comics, is horror for writers.