I am currently on a mission to bring back ELO and I begin my online portion of the argument with this deliriously mental essay from Jonathan Lethem, originally published in Black Clock this year. You can find a whole host of essays and other cool stuff from Lethem here and should invest in the excellent Da Capo Music Writing Anthology he edited and his superb tale of a Tourettes-suffering detective, Motherless Brooklyn.
An Orchestra Of Light That Was Electric
an orchestra of light that was electric how fine a thing would that be? i’d been waiting for and envisioning one wondering what its name would be for all my twelve years and now here one was and its name was the name of the idea itself generic and why not since there could never be two such orchestras. in sublime stupidity i took this for music from the future messaged to me by the occult stations of top forty am radio which to my understanding no one on this earth listened to and which could only be tuned in at night. the instruments and voice stirred and twitched me at some native level. activated me like a robot programmed with feelings. do ya want my love and i did. power chords washed in strings, organized and sugared by a mathematics i couldn’t enter only savor. i could detect the telephone line the music was a farheard thing crushed into nearby radios never as clear as i wanted. i sensed this might be commercial art surrealism slicked by madison avenue guilty and intoxicatingly sweet like a bottle of stolen kaluha but for me somehow idealized a livin’ thing so that my guilt became the secret champion of its fragile science fictional yearning for a future music and defender of its indefensible glamour and finish. When i located some critic who tendered praise for their earliest records as an extension of the beatles’ abandoned work i felt a whoosh of vindication. and when they were lumped like coal in the irredeemable bin of pink floyd boston eagles steve miller that punk convicted of corporatism or worse of vichy collaboration with disco olivia neutron bomb i held out quiet certainty that their turned to stone mister blue sky candy bar compression kept faith with radio miracles and wasn’t completely unrelated to the ramones reaching for spector’s wall that unreachable epic shape as distant as kafka’s castle. never had to speak this defense but kept quiet faith with shine a little love and i did and don’t bring me down and i didn’t. never had to worry about the songs i didn’t like, just the ones i did and this robot candy love never moved closer and had to be resolved or moved further away and had to be renounced and now they live in my jubilant secret ipod and i can’t get it out of my head.
posted by Sam at 3:26 PM
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