How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Horsewomen

Nico, "Ari's Song" - Senior year of high school, my friends Nick and Joe (who may or may not read this blog) started up a band called the Horsewomen. I don't even think they'd argue with me characterizing the Horsewomen as one of those bands that's going to slip out of normal people's minds as time marches on; the Horsewomen may have been generally beloved by Riverside High School's aspiring actresses and burnouts, but it was always pretty obviously at least partially a piss-take - at times, it seemed like the band's raison d'etre was just to give Nick & Joe a chance to take a stab at playing surf music* punctuated by shouts of "THE HORSEWOMEN MOTHERFUCKERS OH YEAH", and sadly I just can't help but think that that's the kind of thing that eventually gets written over in one's memory banks in favor of stuff like your taxes or remembering whether you left your kid in the grocery store. I, on the other hand, am the kind of guy who has a third-favorite single by the Rakes**; keeping the memory of my friends' high-school bands alive might as well have been what God put me on earth to do.

You'll notice, however, that I'm not keeping their music alive; this is at least partially because I lost the Horsewomen tape somewhere in my Black Hole of Calcutta of a freshman year dorm room, but more accurately because if you ever went to a high school band's concert (if not "high school" in general), you know exactly what the Horsewomen sounded like. I'd like to think that we've reached a point where science has proven that it's just not possible for an American high-school band to sound good; American pop music is all about the musicians and the artistic impulse (as compared to British pop music, which is arguably all about the songcraft), and most high school musicians simply aren't good enough as musicians, especially at that point, to come up with anything all that compelling. There is, of course, at least one obvious workaround for this problem, namely "playing in front of a high-school audience", since while Joe Ben might not be too compelling a bass player, Joe Ben's classmates might find it independently compelling just to see Joe Ben play the bass. I guess it's really no different from a school musical.

The Horsewomen, though, were different; their music may have been shitty and amateurish, but it was authentically shitty and amateurish - they sucked just like how a high-school band should suck, and consequently to this day I remember their music as being more authentic and worthy of discussion than even Nick or Joe probably would. "Sucking", in the rock and/or roll sense, isn't necessarily a bad thing any more than "down" is bad for being the opposite of "up"; it's just the term people use to describe being in the presence of something that has absolutely nothing to do with them, and as previously mentioned, the Horsewomen were, once you get to a certain point, basically just an excuse for Joe to bash away on the drums while Nick played "Greensleeves" on a Fisher-Price keyboard - in other words, I'm guessing the rehearsals were pretty similar to the actual shows. And while this is obviously of slight global significance at best, it's also inarguably what makes them live on in my mind as a success - they set out to have a very loud and ridiculous good time in front of people, and then they did it.

I'm bringing all this up because I've been listening to Nico's The Marble Index with the kind of creeping regularity I've learned from experience to recognize as meaningful, and it kinda seems like the same situation. It is, on the whole, one of the very most unsettling records I've ever heard; I went with "Ari's Song" since all those dischordant synths and seasick strings would probably unnerve the dead, but I probably could have thrown a dart at the CD jacket and picked something equally fucked-up. But The Marble Index isn't fucked-up like, say, a Tom Waits album - Tom Waits may be cracked in the head-bone, but Rain Dogs is the kind of album that comes from someone who's fucked-up professionally. The Marble Index, on the other hand, sounds like something that grew out of the earth around Three Mile Island: it's the soundtrack to a poisoned wasteland which just happens to be contained entirely (and only) within Nico's head.

That's not to call The Marble Index an unappealing piece of music, of course; lesser albums have been praised to high heaven for musical imagery one-one thousandth as potent as that on Nico's album. It's the sorting-out process that reaches to the jet-black sky; every track is just so packed, either with layers and layers of intentionally not-quite-right sonics ("Facing The Wind") or an overpoweringly blank solitude ("No One Is There"), that it can be exhausting to keep tabs on all that bleakness. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that I can't for the life of me imagine a record so nakedly honest from the surface on in - I mean, Nico only got swept away by the filmmaking industry when she was fifteen, only got passed around from one guy with a black turtleneck and a smack habit to another, only fronted the most infamously and significantly unsuccesful record of all time at someone else's behest; surely it's reasonable to assume that her mind might kinda move along more uncertain vectors than yours or mine. Well, that's what The Marble Index sounds like, right down to its core - it sounds like "fucked up" should sound, and it's coming out of someone who's long since resigned themselves to the fact that they know what that should sound like. I mean, yeah, of course it switches direction on you without being particularly polite about it, and of course it goes places you might not necessarily want the music that compels you to go, and of course it's all delivered without so much as a bent knee for all its overpowering, near-Phillip Glass levels of pretension - would you really expect "My Boyfriend's Back" from a girl who got knocked up by Alain Delon? Sucking honestly may not be first among virtues, but "honesty" is pretty high up there, and thank God every so often it's kinda hard to separate the two. (Click here to buy The Marble Index from Amazon.com)

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*Keep in mind that this was 1998, smack dab in the middle of Merge Records country - who exactly did you think was buying all those Man Or Astroman? records?

**"Work Work Work Pub Club Sleep", for those of you keeping score at home
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Vashti Bunyan, "Somethings Just Stick In Your Mind" - As a sort of palate-cleanser, and as long as we're revisiting all the chixxx of the seventies permitting me to pay a gloriously small amount of attention to Joni Mitchell, I figured I'd post almost inarguably the least Vashti Bunyan-esque song I've ever heard from Vashti Bunyan. Long-time readers may remember me flipping out over Lookaftering or even her reappearance on Animal Collective's Prospect Hummer EP last year; humorously enough this may actually make me a reasonably circumspect student of her work (always a nice change of affairs from my normal fling-poop-at-the-walls-and-nobody-notices-my-incompetance approach), but it sure never prepared me for her 1970 debut Just Another Diamond Day, which actually manages to be pretty good in spite of the fact that it's nearly impossible to listen to it and not marinate on how in the FUCK it could have possibly been overlooked for thirty years until its 2001 reissue. I actually give Mrs. Bunyan just as much credit as Nico for making nakedly honest records, except that she's being honest about a gentle, well-intentioned world instead of Nico's untethered and savage one - maybe it's fair to say she make s records that allow me to ignore Sufjan Stevens too. Of course, tucked away at the end of the Diamond Day remaster is this, her (Jagger and Richards-written!) debut single, popping and snapping the album's magnificent and measured elan away without a care in the world - if people thought the album was going to sound like this, maybe it's not so much of a surprise that it sold about five copies worldwide (although since the members of Animal Collective each seem to have one, I guess it all worked out in the end). (Click here to buy Just Another Diamond Day from Amazon.com)