Great Albums – COP/GREED/HOLY MONEY
My first exposure to Swans was inauspicious. I’d never heard of them and they were supporting my beloved Fall at some toilet venue of a London Polytechnic (remember those?) Because I am short-sighted, I always sought to get to gigs early so I could get as close to the stage as possible, since you can’t mosh in specs (yeah okay, now they’ve got those twisty indestructible ones, but not back then). Anyway, I think I spent the entire set of Swans with my fingers in my ears hoping they wouldn’t bleed. I didn’t give it a further thought, until Uncle John Peel played “Clay Man” and my ribcage started resonating from physical memory of the gig. OMG (to employ an anachronism), suddenly it all made sense. Primal doesn’t do the music justice. In fact it slanders it, since this was pure urban in the way that dub step today could not have emerged from Devon.
Okay, how to describe the music. Slowed down, repetitive, but so insistent that it can’t but help penetrate your skull and whirl around there like the devil is doing a slow foxtrot with your grey matter. This is trance, not done electronically, but with electrified strings. Then there are Michael Gira’s lyrics themselves. Gira wrote about naked power relationships. The I and You of love songs, but these were tales of debasement, abuse, domination and submission. Not in any sexual way, but two people up against one another, one will prevail and one will go down to the canvas. For this is how New Yorkers back in the day interacted with one another. Possess or be possessed.
“your flesh is soft.
your flesh is clay. flesh is easy to shape.
flesh is easy to shape. now you’re a clay man” “Clay Man”
I read up everything I could on Gira, which wasn’t much cos Swans were very much avant garde. I tried to buy his prose – I sent an air mail letter with a $20 bill and a note saying “I know I shouldn’t send cash through the mail, but I’d simply love a copy of your book and you can’t get it in the UK”. Nothing for months. My envelope came back redirected, assumed I’d had the wrong address. But then I noticed carefully typed along the bottom borders, “If you shouldn’t, don’t”…
And that sums up the man. Intense. Clipped. Self-contained. What I did manage to uncover in time, was that Gira’s writing starts off as anybody’s, but then he takes a scalpel to it and removes every last pound of verbal adipose. He pares down and pares down, until he is left with a basic, unadorned expression of pure power relationship. I’m sorry, but this man and this album are overlooked works of genius. Of course, I acknowledge the heaviness of the delivery will not be to most people’s tastes. But when I want to ramp it up in my life, on “Cop” goes and the first bars of “Half-Life” take me straight there.
“No one beats your head in like a Cop with a Club in jail” never a truer word sung…
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Clay Man
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Cop
Great post Marc, Swans we’re a new band to me but I’ve been listening to the album all weekend on my headphones and luved it (the kids weren’t so convinced)- I’m a total sucker for anything that’s really “out there” ans Swans certainly fit the bill.
It seems that for all of music lovers of our generation all roads lead to John Peel. l I wonder who is playing and championing new “difficult” bands now? Mary Anne Hobbs is doing a great job on R1 for dubstep but that’s only one genre, Peel would have been playing the new ‘Burial’ next to the new ‘Morning Benders” track, who’s doing that now?
I miss him so much!
Absolutely concur. He once came into Rough Trade and one of my fellow workers was telling him about his wife being overdue with their third child and Peel said he’d play her something to induce labour. Can’t remember exactly which band it was that night, but he played either napalm Death or Godflesh and dedicated to the expectant Mum. A class act all round, let alone the cultural impact he and on growing up in Britain.
I started listening to Cop/Raping A Slave again last summer – insanely intenese and wonderful. I remember hearing them for the first time on headphones in an old Our Price – it was the heaviest, densest thing I had ever heard and sparked an obsession which ended with Time Is Money (Bastard) which felt a little more conventional. A slower East Coast avant garde Flipper?
Strangely when I was regularly listening to them again last year, I left the office for a bit of lunch and turning a corner almost walked into Michael Gira who was wearing a stetson and smoking outside The Dog and Duck in Soho.