Michael Gira's Genius

B

Bleak&Icy

Grimscribe
Lyrics from GOD DAMN THE SUN by M. Gira, Young God Records.

"When, when we were young, we had no history. So nothing to lose, meant we could choose, choose what we wanted then, without any fear or thought of revenge. But then you grew old, and I lost my ambition. So I gained an addiction to drink and depression. They are mine, my only true friends, and I'll keep them with me, until the very end. I'd choose not to remember, but I miss your arrogance. And I need your intelligence, and your hate for authority. But now you're gone. I read it today. They found you in Spain, face down in the street, with a bottle in your hand, and a wild smile on your face, and a knife in your back--you died in a foreign land. And they found my letter rolled up in your pocket, where I'd said I'd kill myself if she left me again. So now she's gone, and you're both in my mind, I've got one thing to say, before I am drunk again: God damn the sun, God damn the sun, God damn anyone that says a kind word, God damn the sun, God damn the sun, God damn the light it shines, and this world its shows. God damn the sun."


Even more powerful when accompanied by acoustic guitar and Michael's cavedeep voice.... the soundtrack to my life.
 
Last edited:
I love "cavedeep," thanks for that. That's so exactly how his mesmerizing singing so often is/was with Swans. I return to those guys quite often. Sometimes when I'm happy I still wanna play Swans, though I've learned how to also refrain. My man hates the pestilential sun, yes he does, just like I do most times. I wanna take a walk, I gotta slather gunk all over me or take my Solumbra umbrella which flaps in the WIND, let's ain't forget the goddamned wind too!
 
It's a strange thing: I discovered the music of Swans and the writing of Thomas Ligotti together, in the same week, ten years ago. Needless to say my mind has woven the two great artists together. Michael's voice is a physical need for me. More than alcohol or sex or cigarettes (I quit last year--the smokes, not the sex or booze), Michael's voice and his music quenches a physical need in my body. I don't know how else to put it. Like that first drink of the evening, or the afterglowing inward smile following sex, Michael hits the spot. Tom Ligotti affects me in a similar way, yet on a different level: on a purely cerebral plane, somewhere in the cerebral cortex or cerebellum or wherever the hell it is in the spongy meat of my mind that sends the dopamine shooting.

I recently came across an interview with Michael Gira in a German folk music magazine which hurt to read. The interviewer asked MG if he planned to write any more books (The Consumer, by the way, is an appallingly beautiful book, a ruthless and gutsy self-examination, literally a vivisection of the collective damaged psyche)... long parentheses, sorry. Michael responded that he wished he had never published The Consumer. He disowned the book, said it was worthless, said he was ashamed of it. Why? the interviewer asked. Because the book is devoid of hope, Michael replied. He went on to say that his Angels of Light musical outfit would try to present a more redemptive vision.

This saddened me immensely, because The Consumer (2.13.61 Publishing) is filled with so much beauty. Take Michael's story "Empathy." Here is a passage in which the narrator recounts the day his murderous sister was taken to the asylum:

"I never went outside anymore except to buy alcohol and meat. I'd get drunk, loosening my attachment to myself, and I'd eat the meat raw, pretending it was my sister, planting her flesh inside my stomach so she could grow and live through me, like a cancer. When they sentenced her to that place, my own life started to drain out of my body immediately. As I walked away from the courtroom out into the poison sun of Los Angeles, I felt the light shooting straight through my eyes into my skull unfiltered, causing a tumor to grow in the center of my brain. The tumor was shaped like a rose and its petals were as sharp as razorblades. With each new thought, a petal would spiral away from the body of the flower and slice a passageway through the meat of my brain, slowly boring out large sections of my identity.

"I hadn't seen her in three years when she arrived. It was the middle of summer. A constant regurgitation of corrosive yellow soot spilled out over the houses from the elevated freeway, burning my skin and eyes and tinting the neighborhood with a golden pigment that sparkled like sharkskin in the sun. The heat clung to the smog."

Oh, the tumor, the rose petal, the razorblades....
 
I've not seen much on this subject in these forums, so here is probably the best place to put it, but what do people think of Jarboe's solo albums? Not to change the subject at all. Each one (Gira and Jarboe) has their own voice that is so similar, and yet so very different.

'The Consumer' did in the realm rendering sickness, addiction, and filth into hypnotic living poetry (something I usually hate unless its in prose or song form), what all of these modern American and Japanese films fail miserably at, though how they ever try. I remember reading the first few stories when I got it in high school, taking it to school and telling my friend, "Man, you have to read just this first story."
He did, and in doing so, cracked one of the most lascivious smiles I have ever seen, laughed and said, "This is some good shit." Pretty much as though he were referring to a substance rather than something intangible. So I can certainly understand the idea of being almost pathologically fixated on the music of a specific artist.
 
I have a copy of Gira's The Consumer. I read bits of it from time to time. I've never heard his music. For some reason, I don't listen to music any more. Ever. I like it as quiet as the tomb.
 
Jarboe:

There is a book called Angry Women of Rock (in two parts) which features an extended interview with Jarboe. She discusses her early life, Michael's chronic alcoholism, her influence on Swans.... Without Jarboe, Michael might have self-destructed, replaying the whitehot aggression of his Filth period until he died. And certainly, without her, he would never have released his solo album Drainland, in which Jarboe taped telephone recordings of Michael attempting to justify his out-of-control drinking. As to her solo projects, I have largely avoided them--perhaps out of vicarious pain of the couple's split.

Warms my suffering heart to see Ligottians interested in Gira:)
 
I'll say it again, what I've said before -- well, what I've said before is that Swans are one of the five most important artists ever, in any field of art. I may now say they belong in the top 10. I have to put Beckett and Ligotti there too.

I'm so glad you spoke to the strange fact of the physical need. I too have that in relation to Swans, praise their name. And yes, in particular to MG's voice and especially his songs, though I agree about Jarboe and am amazed as well by her. This craving is a cool thing to have I think. I have to say, I also have it, though much less often, for the Beatles. When I want Swans, it's a need.

About Gira's interview. Well, that's kind of a letdown. I understand what he's saying and where he's coming from, but it may show he just isn't interested in staying open, but rather something in him had to close against all he delivered...to us?, from himself certainly. After catharsis it's sometimes difficult to empathize with what you were or was a part of you. I don't follow him much these days but have bought all the AOL albums. I've never strayed from considering them in terms of a much diminished level of impact/importance from Swans' work.

Drainland is superb. Jarboe's best is Sacrificial Cake. Even she's on a hope thing now, it seems. Okay, so that keeps them around... Doesn't matter; their main work is probably done.
 
In my local weird bookshop today I was flicking through a recent publication on the NY No Wave music scene in the late 70's, which of course featured a few pages on Gira. The author Marc Masters cited a very amusing quotation by Lydia Lunch. In a review of Swan's Filth period for Forced Exposure magazine, she wrote: "THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST... IF THIS IS THE APOCALYPSE HERE'S THE SOUNDTRACK." The lineup for the band at the time included two bass players who used their instruments more like drums, and a guy with metal rods, steel pipes, tyre irons, ect... The result was the most visceral and hypnotic music I have ever heard. I can only imagine that the effect of attending one of those early performances would have resembled the catharsis of an ancient Greek tragedy, staged two thousand years ago on a rocky peak overlooking the wild Aegean Sea. Luckily for us today we have American Idol and Brittney... Is it my imagination or have things moved in the wrong direction?
 
Last edited:
Bleak&Icy said:
In my local weird bookshop today I was flicking through a recent publication on the NY No Wave music scene in the late 70's, which of course featured a few pages on Gira. The author Marc Masters cited a very amusing quotation by Lydia Lunch. In a review of Swan's Filth period for Forced Exposure magazine, she wrote: "THE BEAUTY OF THE BEAST... IF THIS IS THE APOCALYPSE HERE'S THE SOUNDTRACK." The lineup for the band at the time included two bass players who used their instruments more like drums, and a guy with metal rods, steel pipes, tyre irons, ect... The result was the most visceral and hypnotic music I have ever heard. I can only imagine that the effect of attending one of those early performances would have resembled the catharsis of an ancient Greek tragedy, staged two thousand years ago on a rocky peak overlooking the wild Aegean Sea. Luckily for us today we have American Idol and Brittney... Is it my imagination or have things moved in the wrong direction?
Click to expand...

Another reason that I think I'm in the wrong time period. Alas... Attending a Swans performance circa 1984 would probably be akin to being devoured, in a good way. Intentionally, too; Gira in many an interview has stated that his early musical intent was to obliterate himself.

Speaking of early Swans and the like, I'm planning upon writing an essay on the intellectual obsession with human power dynamics in industrial and noise music and its memetic sub-strains (extremity as absurdist exercise, etc.). The early lyrics of Swans are a perfect example of this prevalent fascination, in particular that with violence and degradation as fulfilment of a psychological need (greed, self-loathing), or as a parallel to "normal" behaviour. Look at "Power for Power", for example, or "Cop", "Weakling", "I Crawled"... It's a very interesting pattern, if you look at it from the long view.
 
Soundtrack to my life, number two, after "God Damn the Sun":

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 
Music to play during the apocalypse:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top