replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Thursday, December 7, 2023
Inca rock and Aztec boogie
We all know "Cortez the Killer". Right up there in the Top 3 Neil Young songs ever (right next to "Powderfinger" and something as yet to be settled in my head). A song that makes a mystical connection between the fate of the Aztecs and the fading of a love.
But did you know ol' Neil wrote a second song that references the indigenous civilizations of pre-Columbian America? "Like An Inca", one of the least electronic tunes on Trans.
Not Top 3 material, for sure - possibly not even in the Neil Young Top 300.
Wonder why he returned, even glancingly, to the subject?
I can empathize, having been fascinated by the Aztecs and Mayans and Incas as a budding 8-year-old archaeologist (one of my first ambitions, soon to vaporize when I witnessed an actual dig and saw how much tedious painstaking graft was involved. But later on I did do a school project on the Aztecs. Also did one on Vlad the Impaler, switching to red ink for the gruesome bits of the text)
Talking of grue... "Cortez the Killer" is a bit of an idyllic romanticized view of Aztec society, which did after all practice human sacrifice.
Still, that doesn't make the conquistadors look any better - at all. (I started reading a book on the European conquest of the Americas ... the cruelty and avarice of the first waves of invaders is mindbogglingly horrific).
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There is a probably an essay to be written on rock and its fantasies and projections vis-a-vis Native American folkways - spirituality, connection to the land, tribal intimacy, warrior honor, freedom etc.
Starting with this fellow....
Then there was Ian Astbury, an earnest student of Native life and lore, who fashioned his own bone necklace out of chicken bones from KFC. Southern Death Cult were named after a particular tribe's belief system and sacred rites.
And of course before that Adam Ant
"A new royal family, a wild nobility
We are the family
I feel beneath the white
There is a red skin suffering
From centuries of taming"
Well, you couldn't get away with it, now, could you!
Not forgetting the Ants's severed twin - Bow Wow Wow
And for this one, Annabella and crew would get doubly cancelled
Talking of KFC (Astbury's chicken bone necklace), in "Go Wild in the Country" fast food is referenced as the anti-Natural thing Annabella and the Wow boys are fleeing in search of naughty frolics 'n' fun amid rusticity
I don't like you, I don't like you, town
I don't wanna like you, I'll shop around
I can get a train, I don't need no hamburgers
No take-away, I want my own game
No bake and take, no strawberry milkshake, I wanna kick it
I'm sick of seeing signs to eat walking down these lonely streets
Wild, go wild, go wild in the country
Where snakes in the grass are absolutely free
Swing from the trees, naked in the breeze
I want no boiled chicken, I wanna go hunting and fishing
I can get a plane, I don't need no suitcases, 'cause truth loves to go naked
I wanna picnic, 'cause I get sick
Got no boiled chicken, I wanna go hunting and fishing
Rousseau 'n Roll innit - "I don't like you, town"
My favoritest groop, they were - during that period from My Cassette Pet to the See Jungle album. On the wall of my college room, I had an enormous album promoting poster that I'd ripped off a hoarding in London by cover of night.
Bow Wow Wow were also the subject of my very first published (if a college arts magazine counts as "published") piece of writing on music (and no I'm not exhuming for public view- no way no how!)
Yes it does all seem, now, more than slightly silly.... and yes there are some very questionable aspects to McLaren's marketing of the band and to his managerial practice
but, but the music remains such fun
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Many further examples of rock and pop fetishism of Native American culture in the comments
here's a couple I just remembered from the technotronic community
This has what sounds like wardance samples
there's another Spiral Tribe track that has MC Simone reciting some 19th Century lament from a defeated chieftain: "I am a savage and I can't understand, how the beauty of the earth can be sold back to man"
update 12/12
a more recent example of flirtation; the hypnagogic pop duo of Pocahaunted, who put out late 2000s releases with titles like Hunted Gathering, Peyote Road, and Moccassinging
snippet from a Tiny Mix Tapes interview with Amanda and Beth
With the aesthetic -- the vision quest kind of native Indian vibe you have going on -- I was wondering if you have any personal connections with the native Indian culture or anything like that?
B: Nah, I took a few native anthropology courses and got really into the culture, rituals, imagery... We have drawn some of our song titles and art from what I've learned, but we're trying to move away from ‘moccasins' or the pun of our band name.
A: Native Americans have amazing traditions, and their storytelling rituals through chanting are absolutely mesmerizing and something we would love to emulate. But now I don't know. Now I guess we're into Africa, haha. Northern Africa at this exact moment.
"Toronto, Indigenous artist Daniel Monkman, aka Zoon, crafted a gorgeously ethereal take on shoegaze rooted in his Ojibway heritage, which he calls “moccasin-gaze.” "
Update 12/22
And another unexpected one, Charlie Drake, comedian turned hitmaker
He did the aboriginal peoples inspired but probably too offensive (he does "voices") to play here "My Boomerang Won't Come Back" (produced George Martin), a hit on both sides of the Atlantic (cleaned up a bit in America, apparently)
Drake also drew on Native American folklore for the character of "Puckwudgie" - varying from tribe to tribe, but generally a gnome-like creature, someone best not to get on the wrong side of, but for the most part benign, if mischievous
I was going to go on about this in my shelved book on The Doors, whose main theme was going to be the strange and distorting effect that California seems to have on the Caucasian mind. It really seems to be a poisoned chalice of a state, beguiling and yet somehow corrosive - a heavenly hell.
I was going to reference the work of the native American author Vine Deloria Junior, whose work is about the innate power of certain locations, and how much of the land in the US is hostile to the interlopers. It's something that I think that Morrison, for all his buffoonery, seemed to have an inkling of.
Might have another crack at it one day, who knows......?
Well I've been here 13 years, I don't know if it's corroded my mind.
Most people here lead boringly normal lives - the bulk of it (meaning Southern California) is a gigantic suburbia, not unlike where I grew up in the UK (West Hertfordshire) but with nicer weather and palm trees. (A lot of streets in a neighbouring area to ours have UK names - St Albans Road - adding to this coming-home effect)
The overwhelming prettiness of so much of LA and the strange seasons are disconcerting. On Christmas day, it'll usually be warm and sunny, like June in England - but the sun goes down early, slightly later than in the UK, but still winter hours. And you will see fallen leaves and autumnal trees but also other trees in full greenery still. So it's discombulating but also charming.
For sure there is something entropic about the lifestyle here, a tendency to isolation... and a cultic undertow.
There is something eerie too about the proximity of absolute wilderness to built-up stuff like freeway flyovers, shopping malls, etc. You are often driving past areas right where a man could easily die, from thirst, in the right wrong circumstances. One time I recall driving right into downtown past a bit of wilderness-y area that was on fire with helicopters dropping water on it.
But visiting is recommended I think. I had all kinds of preconceptions based on film and things I'd read- also the music. C.f. Mark Fisher, whose ideas about Los Angeles were entirely based on Michael Mann's Heat and relevant portions from Baudrillard's America.
Northern California is something else altogether. I
Off the top of my head, musicians who have claimed Native American heritage include Link Wray (who probably was), Johnny Cash (apparently DNA tests found no evidence, though he recorded an album of protest songs about the Native American plight), Anthony Kiedis (about as credible as Johnny Depp's similar claim) and Joey Belladonna of Anthrax (Iroquois on his mother's side).
Joey Belladonna has reminded me that you've forgotten perhaps the most oddly conspicuous trope pertaining to Native Americans within rock: the metal song about the travails visited upon Native Americans by the pernicious white man. Anthrax themselves had their song Indians (the video somewhat spoils everything due to Joey Belladonna frugging around in a Sioux headdress). A Google search has revealed an ongoing avalanche of such songs by metal bands of whom I've never heard, so I'll stay in the 80s and name as examples Venom's Manitou, Europe's Cherokee, and by far the most totemic choice, Iron Maiden's Run to the Hills.
Indeed, I'm inclined to say that this trend stems wholly from Run to the Hills. I've heard Maiden fans declare Run to the Hills to be the Baby One More Time of metal, and I reckon that when a metal band does their song about Native Americans, they're tipping their titfers not to the persecuted minorities but to the biggest band of the NWOBHM. Bit disheartening, that.
Yes it's a big thing in metal isn't it - and also in funk-metal, perhaps via the Chilli Peppers.
In recent time, Kesha got some flak for appropriation of imagery (and did an album called Warrior). https://culture.affinitymagazine.us/its-time-to-call-out-keshas-cultural-appropriation/
Loads more examples I'm sure. (Well, there's The Sweet's "Wig-Wam Bam").
Jimi Hendrix had some Cherokee ancestry and "I Don't Live Today" is meant to be partly inspired by the plight of those living on the reservations. Ah here's the quote - he said the song "was dedicated to the American-Indian and all minority depression groups"
It is strange though how the cultural artifacts of California always seem to have that, I dunno, uneasy element to them. I suppose the Beach Boys are the classic example - originally supposed to be wholesome and family-friendly, and yet they soon went awry.
I might put the book together as a hobby, rather than as a Big Important Project. It won't be so burdensome that way.
I hadn´t heard about "Cortez the killer" but a song that is arguably the most famous in mexican rock "Triste canción" is just a ripoff of Neil Young´s "like a hurricane", and it´s almost like nobody knows. I heard that after decades of "El Tri" claiming it was their song somebody noticed and now they sorta kinda acknowledge its a Neil Young cover. To their credit El Tri´s version is much better. Theres also a symphonic, awful , version of it.
If you consider mexicans, there´s also native american heritage there. About eerie California when I saw Mulholland Drive I thought its weirdness had some mexican taste, like Lynch was channeling something, there´s this singer character Rebeca Del Rio and the whole Rita Hayworth (Real name Margarita Cansino) theme. Did you know Marilyn Monroe´s mom was born in México? There´s lots of connections of California weirdness to native americans and Mexico. Even Yoda was modelled on Don Juan fron the Carlos Castaneda books, Lucas himself, an anthropology student said so. And here´s The Lizard King with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake
I guess so, I can´t compare, but an american who was living here told me so. Also if you walk around downtown here in Mexico City you´ll very likely hear street musicians playing a Doors song or see peolpe wearing a shirt with Morrison´s face or something. There´s a funny story, the Doors actually played once in Mexico, when no rock groups ever played here. And Jim Morrison went drinking, and who knows what else, with the mom of a guy who would later be the organizer of "the mexican woodstock", after which rock became practically banned in the country. Maybe they also played in a bordertown bar, I kinda recall reading about it but not sure
I understand all the white rock star fantasies embedded in 'Cortez the Killer' but its understated and somewhat stark lyrics still strike me dead. Neil was really at his absolute peak here. He managed to somehow arrive at the perfect words, both in meaning and syllabic power ('Cortez, Cortez, what a killer...'), to communicate something otherwise inexpressible -- the power of rituals lost to time, the ghosts of Native history, and the looming threat of genocide. And some of the live versions -- especially the one on 'Weld' -- are utterly gorgeous, his guitar like molten lava, sustained on one or two notes for a small eternity. Definitely one of my top 3 Neils.
As far as Our Dear Lord Jim of Venice Beach, like all of his lyrics, balanced on the sharp edge between ridiculous and sublime. "Indian, Indian, what did you die for / Indian says nothing." Was he joking? Was he fucking serious? It didn't matter. Jim had spoken. Back in college, we derived so much sheer joy from 'An American Prayer,' the album that the three surviving Doors made in 1978, using Jim's spoken word poetry. It's easily one of my favorite Doors-related products and probably the most easiest to make fun of, just utterly ridiculous, including its faux disco beats. Still, Jim's live concert banter was preserved on that record was priceless.
I love An American Prayer - but not as something to laugh at, just straight up love it for the music and for the poetry. The stage banter is hilarious, especially Jim's riff about astrology and the flip-around ("I think it's a buncha bullshit").
As a project, conceptually - unilateral "collaboration" with a partner who if alive might have totally refused to participate; phonography as the art of ghost preservation - An American Prayer probably deserves some kind of ancestral honorary footnote mention in the annals of hauntology. At very least it's decades ahead of Natalie Cole duetting with her dead dad.
100% agree about the guitar on Cortez the Killer, which is indeed transcendent. But I am bit chafed by the lyrics, which as Simon says present a wildly romanticised view of the Aztecs, including what sounds a lot like a defence of human sacrifice.
The way I reconcile myself to the song is to think that maybe that's the point. It's not about the real historical Aztecs, it's about having a romanticised view of the past. And that applies to Neil looking back at his lost love as much as it does to Mexican history. What he is really trying to tell us, even if he doesn't quite know it, is that in reality the relationship was as cruel and deathly as the Aztecs, even though he looks back on it wistfully now.
Sometimes, I can even make myself believe that Young intended that interpretation.
It's the Garden of Eden myth projected on to "indigenous" cultures - the idea that the world was pristine and harmonious before the arrival of the white man. Obviously this world view is predicated on not examining the behaviour of indigenous peoples, or looking too closely at how they came to be indigenous (usually by conquest and slaughter).
"A Criminal History of Mankind" by Colin Wilson gives a good account of the behaviour of mankind in general when left to its own devices. The chapter on the early Mesopotamian civilizations is particularly good/shocking.
Slavery is a good example of this - practised in virtually every culture and "civilization' across the globe, since antiquity.... carried on in some parts of the world for a good while after it was ended in the Western European / colonial sphere.... and indeed, it's still with us today, horrifically and unbelievably.
Another good example is the general belief that the Vietnam War was an anomalous period of excessive violence in an otherwise peaceful and organic society.
Whereas if you actually do some research on Vietnamese history.....
It's a dream Aztec world, so the sudden break in from personal reality - which seems to be grafted on from a whole other set of lyrics - jolts harder, like a rip in the fabric of time. One compliments/justifies/explains the other.
The 'noble savage' myth is largely condescending, but I wouldn't go as far as Phil - there were peaceful tribes and warrior tribes. In general, the whole 'people are baseline brutes' hypothesis leaves me cold - some of the greatest good done is instinctual, and some of the worst evil is thoroughly premeditated. Le Guin had a very good term for this - 'the myth of the veneer', which she goes into here https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/87-the-myth-of-the-veneer
Well another way of putting this, is that it seems to be that the pattern of human history is not good versus evil but dynamic versus static. It seems to me that when an embedded, static culture meets a dynamic, disruptive one, it is the dynamic force that invariably comes out on top. And the dynamic forces are generally more aggressive and destructive than the static ones.
This also plays out in a more mild way in modern societies with disruptive technologies etc. That is not to say that this kind of pattern will pertain forever, because I do think that humanity is capable of maturing and changing its ways, although this is quite a slow process.
There's a documentary about this, featuring a whole lot of Native and non-Native musicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble:_The_Indians_Who_Rocked_the_World
Robbie Robertson is the biggest name I haven't seen mentioned here - he actually grew up on a First Nations reservation
Yes! There's a good piece here on his Native heritage and his soundtrack for Killers of the Flower Moon, the last work he completed before he died: https://variety.com/2023/music/news/robbie-robertson-interview-killers-flower-moon-martin-scorsese-1235764103/
How could I forget - the technotronic strand of Native American fetishism. Boards of Canada's "Kaini Industries" and "Pete Standing Alone", Spiral Tribe's track that uses a Native warrior's lament ("I am a savage and I can't understand / How the beauty of the Earth can be sold back to man")...
Going back to An American Prayer -- just wanted to say how much I loved that album as a kid. Weirdly, it was the very first Doors [sic] album I ever heard so the first thing that really resonated with me about the Doors as a band was Morrison's voice speaking in that weird and slightly hypnotic intonation of his. And the bits and pieces of earlier Doors songs scattered through and through that I'd never ever heard in their actual setting. And you (Simon) are so right that it deserves a mention in the now venerable tradition of singing duets with dead people. (On another note, Jim's "Orange County Suite"--also added music by the Doors after his death is one of the spookiest tracks every put to tape. It's on the Doors 'Rarities' collection).
I was going to go on about this in my shelved book on The Doors, whose main theme was going to be the strange and distorting effect that California seems to have on the Caucasian mind. It really seems to be a poisoned chalice of a state, beguiling and yet somehow corrosive - a heavenly hell.
ReplyDeleteI was going to reference the work of the native American author Vine Deloria Junior, whose work is about the innate power of certain locations, and how much of the land in the US is hostile to the interlopers. It's something that I think that Morrison, for all his buffoonery, seemed to have an inkling of.
Might have another crack at it one day, who knows......?
Please to be unshelving that Doors book
ReplyDeleteWell I've been here 13 years, I don't know if it's corroded my mind.
Most people here lead boringly normal lives - the bulk of it (meaning Southern California) is a gigantic suburbia, not unlike where I grew up in the UK (West Hertfordshire) but with nicer weather and palm trees. (A lot of streets in a neighbouring area to ours have UK names - St Albans Road - adding to this coming-home effect)
The overwhelming prettiness of so much of LA and the strange seasons are disconcerting. On Christmas day, it'll usually be warm and sunny, like June in England - but the sun goes down early, slightly later than in the UK, but still winter hours. And you will see fallen leaves and autumnal trees but also other trees in full greenery still. So it's discombulating but also charming.
For sure there is something entropic about the lifestyle here, a tendency to isolation... and a cultic undertow.
There is something eerie too about the proximity of absolute wilderness to built-up stuff like freeway flyovers, shopping malls, etc. You are often driving past areas right where a man could easily die, from thirst, in the right wrong circumstances. One time I recall driving right into downtown past a bit of wilderness-y area that was on fire with helicopters dropping water on it.
But visiting is recommended I think. I had all kinds of preconceptions based on film and things I'd read- also the music. C.f. Mark Fisher, whose ideas about Los Angeles were entirely based on Michael Mann's Heat and relevant portions from Baudrillard's America.
Northern California is something else altogether.
I
Off the top of my head, musicians who have claimed Native American heritage include Link Wray (who probably was), Johnny Cash (apparently DNA tests found no evidence, though he recorded an album of protest songs about the Native American plight), Anthony Kiedis (about as credible as Johnny Depp's similar claim) and Joey Belladonna of Anthrax (Iroquois on his mother's side).
ReplyDeleteJoey Belladonna has reminded me that you've forgotten perhaps the most oddly conspicuous trope pertaining to Native Americans within rock: the metal song about the travails visited upon Native Americans by the pernicious white man. Anthrax themselves had their song Indians (the video somewhat spoils everything due to Joey Belladonna frugging around in a Sioux headdress). A Google search has revealed an ongoing avalanche of such songs by metal bands of whom I've never heard, so I'll stay in the 80s and name as examples Venom's Manitou, Europe's Cherokee, and by far the most totemic choice, Iron Maiden's Run to the Hills.
Indeed, I'm inclined to say that this trend stems wholly from Run to the Hills. I've heard Maiden fans declare Run to the Hills to be the Baby One More Time of metal, and I reckon that when a metal band does their song about Native Americans, they're tipping their titfers not to the persecuted minorities but to the biggest band of the NWOBHM. Bit disheartening, that.
Yes it's a big thing in metal isn't it - and also in funk-metal, perhaps via the Chilli Peppers.
ReplyDeleteIn recent time, Kesha got some flak for appropriation of imagery (and did an album called Warrior). https://culture.affinitymagazine.us/its-time-to-call-out-keshas-cultural-appropriation/
Loads more examples I'm sure. (Well, there's The Sweet's "Wig-Wam Bam").
Jimi Hendrix had some Cherokee ancestry and "I Don't Live Today" is meant to be partly inspired by the plight of those living on the reservations. Ah here's the quote - he said the song "was dedicated to the American-Indian and all minority depression groups"
ReplyDeleteThen there's The Residents's Eskimo album.
It is strange though how the cultural artifacts of California always seem to have that, I dunno, uneasy element to them. I suppose the Beach Boys are the classic example - originally supposed to be wholesome and family-friendly, and yet they soon went awry.
ReplyDeleteI might put the book together as a hobby, rather than as a Big Important Project. It won't be so burdensome that way.
Oh, btw:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL4c0A1-ekQ
I hadn´t heard about "Cortez the killer" but a song that is arguably the most famous in mexican rock "Triste canción" is just a ripoff of Neil Young´s "like a hurricane", and it´s almost like nobody knows. I heard that after decades of "El Tri" claiming it was their song somebody noticed and now they sorta kinda acknowledge its a Neil Young cover. To their credit El Tri´s version is much better. Theres also a symphonic, awful , version of it.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhtbVyG3wDk
If you consider mexicans, there´s also native american heritage there. About eerie California when I saw Mulholland Drive I thought its weirdness had some mexican taste, like Lynch was channeling something, there´s this singer character Rebeca Del Rio and the whole Rita Hayworth (Real name Margarita Cansino) theme. Did you know Marilyn Monroe´s mom was born in México? There´s lots of connections of California weirdness to native americans and Mexico. Even Yoda was modelled on Don Juan fron the Carlos Castaneda books, Lucas himself, an anthropology student said so. And here´s The Lizard King with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered snake
ReplyDeletehttps://mxcity.mx/2016/11/el-dia-que-jim-morrison-visito-las-piramides-de-teotihuacan-fotos/
And there are some folk, black metal bands exploiting pre hispanic / pre columbian, native american stuff out there
ReplyDeleteI am I correct in recalling that The Doors were/are particularly popular in Mexico, Fernando?
ReplyDeleteI think "Horse Latitudes" was expressly about the Conquistadors.
I guess so, I can´t compare, but an american who was living here told me so. Also if you walk around downtown here in Mexico City you´ll very likely hear street musicians playing a Doors song or see peolpe wearing a shirt with Morrison´s face or something. There´s a funny story, the Doors actually played once in Mexico, when no rock groups ever played here. And Jim Morrison went drinking, and who knows what else, with the mom of a guy who would later be the organizer of "the mexican woodstock", after which rock became practically banned in the country. Maybe they also played in a bordertown bar, I kinda recall reading about it but not sure
DeleteI understand all the white rock star fantasies embedded in 'Cortez the Killer' but its understated and somewhat stark lyrics still strike me dead. Neil was really at his absolute peak here. He managed to somehow arrive at the perfect words, both in meaning and syllabic power ('Cortez, Cortez, what a killer...'), to communicate something otherwise inexpressible -- the power of rituals lost to time, the ghosts of Native history, and the looming threat of genocide. And some of the live versions -- especially the one on 'Weld' -- are utterly gorgeous, his guitar like molten lava, sustained on one or two notes for a small eternity. Definitely one of my top 3 Neils.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Our Dear Lord Jim of Venice Beach, like all of his lyrics, balanced on the sharp edge between ridiculous and sublime. "Indian, Indian, what did you die for / Indian says nothing." Was he joking? Was he fucking serious? It didn't matter. Jim had spoken. Back in college, we derived so much sheer joy from 'An American Prayer,' the album that the three surviving Doors made in 1978, using Jim's spoken word poetry. It's easily one of my favorite Doors-related products and probably the most easiest to make fun of, just utterly ridiculous, including its faux disco beats. Still, Jim's live concert banter was preserved on that record was priceless.
I love An American Prayer - but not as something to laugh at, just straight up love it for the music and for the poetry. The stage banter is hilarious, especially Jim's riff about astrology and the flip-around ("I think it's a buncha bullshit").
DeleteAs a project, conceptually - unilateral "collaboration" with a partner who if alive might have totally refused to participate; phonography as the art of ghost preservation - An American Prayer probably deserves some kind of ancestral honorary footnote mention in the annals of hauntology. At very least it's decades ahead of Natalie Cole duetting with her dead dad.
100% agree about the guitar on Cortez the Killer, which is indeed transcendent. But I am bit chafed by the lyrics, which as Simon says present a wildly romanticised view of the Aztecs, including what sounds a lot like a defence of human sacrifice.
DeleteThe way I reconcile myself to the song is to think that maybe that's the point. It's not about the real historical Aztecs, it's about having a romanticised view of the past. And that applies to Neil looking back at his lost love as much as it does to Mexican history. What he is really trying to tell us, even if he doesn't quite know it, is that in reality the relationship was as cruel and deathly as the Aztecs, even though he looks back on it wistfully now.
Sometimes, I can even make myself believe that Young intended that interpretation.
It's the Garden of Eden myth projected on to "indigenous" cultures - the idea that the world was pristine and harmonious before the arrival of the white man. Obviously this world view is predicated on not examining the behaviour of indigenous peoples, or looking too closely at how they came to be indigenous (usually by conquest and slaughter).
Delete"A Criminal History of Mankind" by Colin Wilson gives a good account of the behaviour of mankind in general when left to its own devices. The chapter on the early Mesopotamian civilizations is particularly good/shocking.
Slavery is a good example of this - practised in virtually every culture and "civilization' across the globe, since antiquity.... carried on in some parts of the world for a good while after it was ended in the Western European / colonial sphere.... and indeed, it's still with us today, horrifically and unbelievably.
DeleteAnother good example is the general belief that the Vietnam War was an anomalous period of excessive violence in an otherwise peaceful and organic society.
DeleteWhereas if you actually do some research on Vietnamese history.....
It's a dream Aztec world, so the sudden break in from personal reality - which seems to be grafted on from a whole other set of lyrics - jolts harder, like a rip in the fabric of time. One compliments/justifies/explains the other.
DeleteThe 'noble savage' myth is largely condescending, but I wouldn't go as far as Phil - there were peaceful tribes and warrior tribes. In general, the whole 'people are baseline brutes' hypothesis leaves me cold - some of the greatest good done is instinctual, and some of the worst evil is thoroughly premeditated. Le Guin had a very good term for this - 'the myth of the veneer', which she goes into here https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/87-the-myth-of-the-veneer
Well another way of putting this, is that it seems to be that the pattern of human history is not good versus evil but dynamic versus static. It seems to me that when an embedded, static culture meets a dynamic, disruptive one, it is the dynamic force that invariably comes out on top. And the dynamic forces are generally more aggressive and destructive than the static ones.
DeleteThis also plays out in a more mild way in modern societies with disruptive technologies etc. That is not to say that this kind of pattern will pertain forever, because I do think that humanity is capable of maturing and changing its ways, although this is quite a slow process.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThere's a documentary about this, featuring a whole lot of Native and non-Native musicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble:_The_Indians_Who_Rocked_the_World
ReplyDeleteRobbie Robertson is the biggest name I haven't seen mentioned here - he actually grew up on a First Nations reservation
Yes! There's a good piece here on his Native heritage and his soundtrack for Killers of the Flower Moon, the last work he completed before he died: https://variety.com/2023/music/news/robbie-robertson-interview-killers-flower-moon-martin-scorsese-1235764103/
DeleteHow could I forget - the technotronic strand of Native American fetishism. Boards of Canada's "Kaini Industries" and "Pete Standing Alone", Spiral Tribe's track that uses a Native warrior's lament ("I am a savage and I can't understand / How the beauty of the Earth can be sold back to man")...
ReplyDeleteGoing back to An American Prayer -- just wanted to say how much I loved that album as a kid. Weirdly, it was the very first Doors [sic] album I ever heard so the first thing that really resonated with me about the Doors as a band was Morrison's voice speaking in that weird and slightly hypnotic intonation of his. And the bits and pieces of earlier Doors songs scattered through and through that I'd never ever heard in their actual setting. And you (Simon) are so right that it deserves a mention in the now venerable tradition of singing duets with dead people. (On another note, Jim's "Orange County Suite"--also added music by the Doors after his death is one of the spookiest tracks every put to tape. It's on the Doors 'Rarities' collection).
ReplyDelete