George Jones
shares a veggie burger with Jim Morrison at McDonald's, where
their order is taken by Jerry Lewis. The chef is Franz Kafka.
The background muzak is Mahler's Symphony No. 1.[i]
Gravity
is not the only force at work in this world.[ii]
This
is how it goes in the vernacular of rock journalism: the more
idiosyncratic the artists and the more distinctive their sound,
the more insistent are the attempts to embellish that uniqueness
with a plethora of motley, and often crudely chiseled, monikers.
Thus, the music of The Handsome Family has been variously tagged
as alt. country, Americana, backwoods noir, post-millennial
folk, American Gothic, Appalachian folk, murderous balladry,
and, perhaps most imaginatively, "honky-pop and avant-tonk
country music" (McLeod, 2000: 133). None of these descriptive
labels are necessarily erroneous or even imprecise; it's just
that they seem somewhat reductive. Contemporary though hardly
conventional hymnologists of the lingering influence of the
Puritan unconscious, Brett and Rennie Sparks are the husband-and-wife
team behind the band name The Handsome Family. Over the course
of six epochal studio albums they have established themselves
as arguably the foremost practitioners of present-day American
folk music, certainly related to, yet noticeably different,
from a slew of other artists and bands whose work has made
the last decade the rock'n'roll equivalent of that kind of
American literary renaissance promulgated by F.O. Matthiessen
in his landmark 1941 study.[iii]
Enigmatically combining
the self-conscious and the authentic, the records of The Handsome
Family transcend not only country music but even the more heterogeneous
Americana genre. While fraught with tensions between the metaphysical
and the material, the spiritual and the secular, the unorthodox
folk songs of this eccentric band nevertheless envision a distinctive
and internally coherent narrative universe populated by characters
who hear angels' voices inside potatoes ("Gravity") and who
are pulled under by supernatural forces to drown ("Lie Down").
What I would like to explore here are the ramifications of
the persistent emphasis on the extra-sensory and otherworldly - in
short, that which remains hidden - in the work of the Sparks.' This
thematic gravitation aligns their art with the tradition of
American Transcendentalism, whose acute sensitivity to the
wonders of the invisible world is shared by The Handsome Family.
Moreover, implicated in this postmodernized, Neo-transcendental
aesthetics is an overarching awareness of the unity of past
and present, as well as a sense of the inherent, fundamental
continuity of life's rich secrets. In the slow-motion waltz
of "The Forgotten Lake," for instance, "covered wagons/and
the wings of missing planes" manifest the spatial contiguity
of different pasts within the same dreamy seascape. According
to Greil Marcus, it is nothing less than a conception of "the
old, weird American" (Marcus, 2002) that The Handsome Family
brings into the present. But is this notion of a barely tangible,
sepia-tinted, and ultimately inscrutable past really just a
metaphor for that 'other country' - not that of George W. Bush
but of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne - which may
exist today underneath the veneer of mass mediated images of
corporate America?
The recent history of American folk music
has its own shadowy signposts, releases whose significance
goes beyond the merely influential to become representative
of entire aesthetic and cultural traditions. Harry Smith's Anthology
of American Folk Music (1952), Bob Dylan and the Band's The Basement Tapes (recorded in 1967,
officially released in 1975), and Uncle Tupelo's No Depression (1990) are works which may make audible "the palavers
of a community of ghosts" (Marcus, 1997: 86), but they also
resonate, perhaps paradoxically, with a peculiar agelessness.
This sense of being firmly anchored in space yet adrift in
time permeates the songs of the Sparks family as well, and,
taken collectively, their four successive albums Through the Trees (1998), In
the Air (2000), Twilight (2001),
and Singing Bones (2003)
are themselves in the process of becoming the preeminent voices
of this community.[iv] But The Handsome Family is far more than just an
avatar of Marcusian Americana; in order to encompass the group's influences,
range, and preoccupations one would have to anticipate a conception of this
particular brand of American aesthetics much broader than that presently
evoked by the even eclectically folkloristic.[v] In approaching this tradition critically, it would
not be unwise to eschew the increasingly anaemic and uninformative notions
of cultural studies or popular culture. What concerns us here is a transhistorical,
inter-medial, cross-disciplinary poetics of folk noir, an art of the basement
tape which lays claim to an almost surreal, semi-mythical, and mostly imagined
topography that is home to anyone from Emily Dickinson to Johnny Cash. At
the current moment The Handsome Family occupies a space that reverberates
with the crazed, distorted accents of the inhabitants and stories of this
slanted, enchanted universe.[vi]
Like so many of their peers, the Sparks
family has a much larger audience in Europe than in the States,
a situation that somehow seems oddly appropriate; artists who
evoke a forgotten, unofficial country are themselves largely
forgotten or overlooked by their own mainstream republic.[vii] When I talked to them in May 2004, Rennie and Brett
Sparks told me that they felt like expatriates, polemically invoking a connection
between themselves and the artists who fled Germany in the 1930s. The analogy
divulges an unmistakable, yet hardly unexpected rhetorical slant delicately
inflected throughout the band's lyrics. Although The Handsome Family's ostensibly
hermetic world of sad milkmen and snow-white diners may appear to negate
any political propensity, their songs are in no way devoid of cultural critique
(a subject I shall return to below).
An appraisal of the work of the Handsomes
might as well begin, circuitously, in the realm of the visual.
As I write this, I am taken in by the cover of their fifth
regular album, Twilight, released by Carrot Top Records
in October 2001. Different shades of grey outline a background
that accentuates a rigid formation of thin, bare, black trunks
with some empty space between them. Muted and severe, the image
is only vaguely figurative, defined more by contours than content.
What the faintly foreboding depiction immediately recalls is
in fact the titles of the band's two previous albums, Through the Trees (1998) and In the Air (2000). There are trees, to
be sure, within the frame of the former cover, a pine wood
winding its way along a lake and climbing toward a majestic
mountain, patches of snow near its summit. Unlike the Twilight image,
that of Through the Trees is
rendered in a realist mode. Its focal point - the main object - is
not the trees referred to in the title but the towering mountaintop;
and the lake down in the left corner one hardly even notices
at a first glance. The subsequent album In the Air presents an image that - despite the spatial dominance of gently
sloping green fields - is fraught with a sense of rarefied
weightlessness. Its vista appears calm and vertiginous at the
same time. Gazing at the scene for a prolonged period one may
actually start to feel a slight twitching in the stomach. Reminiscent
of the work of Grant Wood, particularly his Haying and New Road (both 1939), In the
Air conveys a dizzying openness that is serene yet menacing.
Try placing a copy of Fairport Convention's Over
the Next Hill (2004) next to The Handsome Family cover,
and the juxtaposition will yield a conspicuous disparity of
tone. While both images feature motifs that are to some extent
similar, the former seems rather sanguine compared to the latter's
unaccountably ominous vibe.
With its turbulent cover depicting waves
crashing against some sea cliffs, Singing
Bones (2003) at present concludes the band's predilection
for elemental imagery. The frenzied movement captured by this
illustration entails a drastic re-orientation away from the
stasis of the three preceding album covers. Nonetheless, the
configurational sense at work in the image is much the same
as before. Singing Bones gives
compositional precedence to the narrative moment in which a
wave breaks in an explosion of ocean spray, thus suggesting
a structural correspondence with Through the Trees while also reinforcing
the emphasis on vertical lineation so evident with regard to
that record and Twilight in particular.[viii] As indicated, the tempestuous image extends the
range of the group's concern with elementary forces by adding water to earth
and air. But the kind of referential slide that occurs between image and
title in In the Air and between
the title of Through the Woods and
the cover of Twilight is even more
pronounced in Singing Bones. Two of the album's songs
are named "If the World Should End in Fire" and "If the World Should End
in Ice," denoting two phenomena or states of nature that strangely contrast
with the cover's delineation of the raging waves. The title of the record,
furthermore, invokes no less of a discrepancy in its dialectical collapse
of two largely opposing forms of matter, epitomized, respectively, by the
surf and the brittle bones.
In what ways, then, do these album sketches
promise a gateway into the uncanny cartographies of The Handsome
Family? First of all, these covers are all manifestly about
nature, and not only that; there is also, in some of the titles,
a suggestion of a powerful immersion in it. The prepositions
in Through the Trees and In
the Air imply a resolute movement into nature that, presumably,
may be construed both literally and figuratively. In both these
images, nature appears hospitable and conciliatory, though
maybe deceptively so. Conversely, in Twilight nature is mainly intimidating and unapproachable, the dark
array of trees arranged as if to protect the primeval integrity
of the woods from any human trespassers. The concept of twilight
both underscores the existence of such a fearful boundary and
portends a tentative passage between different realms of being
parallel to that suggested by the preposition in Through the Trees. Singing Bones, finally, portrays nature as a violent, untamed force
that is not only ambiguous and daunting, as in Twilight, but has turned downright antagonistic, encroaching upon
the world beyond it. In the image of Singing
Bones, nature itself has become the trespasser.
The visual consistency of The Handsome
Family's four most recent albums is only matched by the notable
thematic and stylistic unity of Rennie Sparks's lyrics, which,
it should be pointed out, are not so much lyrics in the ordinary
sense as narrative poems or even short short stories.[ix] While most of these narratives converge on the subject
of nature, they also comprise various topical clusters. There are the murder ballads ("Up Falling Rock Hill," "My
Beautiful Bride," and "Down in the Valley of Hollow Logs" to name a few);
the songs about animals (like "3-Legged
Dog," "Don't be Scared," "In the Air," "Passenger Pigeons," and "White Dog");
the songs specifically about the natural world, often in conjunction with images of entrapment (for
example "I Fell," "Stalled," "Where the Birch Trees Lean," "Bury Me here," and "There
is a Sound"); the shopping mall songs
("Peace in the Valley Once Again" and "24-Hour Store"); and, finally, songs
about different forms of transcending
the physical world ("Weightless Again," "The Sad Milkman," "Birds You
Cannot See," and "Gravity"). It is to the latter categories in particular
that I want to turn in the following.
For The Handsome Family, the surface
of the external world is malleable, and the texture of fathomable
existence may be easily perforated. Singing
Bones, for instance, is according to Rennie Sparks "designed
to rip holes in the veil between this world and the next" (Handsome
Family, 2005). She has also explained that a chance encounter
with a blind girl in a shopping mall parking lot became the
inspiration for the whole album. Unperturbed and at ease within
her own blindness, the girl, Sparks said, revealed a "weird
form of fearlessness" (Gr¿nstad, 2004). Like a Walgreen Tiresias
the girl seemed to possess a kind of intuition or insight that
only the blind have access to. A source of contemplation as
well as aesthetic creation, the encounter must only have confirmed
Sparks's somewhat counter-empirical belief that our bodily
senses can perceive no more than about twenty per cent of the
multifarious phenomena that exist in our immediate ecology: "I
just want to make people consider," she reasons, "that life
may be more mysterious than we are aware, that our senses are
limited" (Hughes, 2004). "[W]e have a thousand preternatural
things every day before our eyes" - this is not Sparks, but
Cotton Mather, who in 1692 was asked by judges to record his
impressions of the case against those accused of witchcraft
in Salem, Massachusetts (Mather, 2003: 393). Mather, who remained
unconvinced by the evidence collected, published his examination
the following year as The
Wonders of the Invisible World.
This work does in fact figure prominently
in the intertexual tapestry that adds an aspect of historical
three-dimensionality to the kind of narratives told by the
band. Not only has Rennie Sparks acknowledged her keen interest
in Puritan literature, that of Mather and William Bradford
in particular, but Mather's conflation of the imperceptible
and the invisible with the wilderness, madness, and evil generates
a forceful cultural syndrome whose influence can be traced
through much of American history. As Richard Slotkin has shown
in his monolithic work on American mythology, the Puritan settlers' response
to and negotiations with the wilderness became the matrix for
the formation of the cultural consciousness of the colonies
and later the nation.[x] Projecting their own neurosis onto the wilderness,
nature - in short - came to represent
everything that the colonists feared. This perception of the wilderness in
terms of its impenetrable, overwhelmingly malevolent alterity is something
that Sparks continuously addresses in her narratives, but, unlike the Puritans,
she infuses her stories with an ambivalence which assumes that solace and
sin may co-exist in nature. While the song "Whitehaven" (from Singing Bones) - directly inspired by
Bradford[xi] - evidently recapitulates the archetypal scenario
in which the narrator is being seduced and lured away by nocturnal feminine
energies, "Stalled" (from Through the
Trees) offers a much more unresolved situation where it is difficult
to tell whether the speaker is paralyzed by, or may be simply content with,
being devoured by the wilderness:
"Whitehaven"
What a hideous forest
Surrounded Whitehaven
Twisted black mountains
Wolves howled in madness
Never I ventured beyond the stone towers
As dusk spread her black wings
At the edge of the dark, wild wood
But one windy evening gathering timbers
Under white elm trees in shadows I saw her
The darkest of beauties
With her basket of cherries
The wind at her black skirts
Like the hands of the wild, dark wood
She turned in her terror
A madness possessed us
In shadows she pulled me
"Stalled"
Falling snow spun above the road winding
through the dark woods where my pickup stalled.
Falling snow hissing through the air, painting my
windows
white till the trees disappeared. Even though I started
to
feel cold and I was far from town, I just sat there
in
the dark.
Ensnared by nature's volatility, the protagonist
conjures a palpable sense of resignation, even acquiescence,
at the prospect of being snowbound in the woods. This eerie
yearning to become one with nature is conceivably the origin
of what I would refer to as the topographical uncanny in Sparks's poetics; that is, the uncanny
does not arise so much from the space of nature itself as from
the emotional complexities of the narrator's response to it.
In "I Fell," also from Through the Trees, the desire for a communion
with nature, however violent, is even more urgent: "Walking
under those swaying trees, branches bowed with ice, I wanted
one to fall on me, to pin me in the snow." And, three cuts
later on the same record, the first-person narrator of "Bury
Me Here" wants to be submerged "with the spiders and fish" at
the end of a murky road where "black bears crawl to sleep,
tree sap slowly seeps and the sunrise never comes." Sometimes
nature intervenes more directly, as in the aforementioned "Lie
Down" from the In the Air album, where the narrative point of view oscillates between
an external narrator and the sea itself:
Tuesday at dawn Michael's glasses washed ashore with
a
styrofoam box and two broken oars. He'd been digging
for
clams in the muddy swamp weeds when he heard the
salt water
whisper to him, 'Lie down, lie down in the dark rolling
sea.
When you get to the bottom we'll kiss you to sleep.'
Michael threw his glasses in the cold
green water.
Elsewhere, as in "Don't be scared" (also from In the Air), nature is imbued with a more
uplifting element, featuring a gathering flock of swallows - harbingers
of hope - that "fall in a wave and tap" on the protagonist's
window "with their beaks." For Sparks, the wilderness and its
agents seem invariably to be capricious, the motive of her
characters wholly indecipherable.
The allusions to Puritan literature aside,
the prevailing literary context for Sparks's fiction may be
located in the partial affinities with the Transcendentalist
rhetoric which several of the band's songs forcibly animate.
Rennie Sparks considers herself a Romantic writer in the 19th century
American tradition - always significantly informed by a certain
perceptual sensitivity and intuition - and though she half-jokingly
claims that her muse inheres less in the pan in pantheism than
in the pan in panic (Gr¿nstad, 2004), there are recurring intimations
of the supernatural, oneiric, and ethereal in her work.[xii] One of the key songs in which the theme of invisibility
merges with the metaphysics of the wilderness and with a more affirmative
vision of nature is "Birds You Cannot See" (from Twilight). Here, there is no dark forest
beckoning the narrators to go with the chilling apparitions of the woods,
no conspiratorial swamp weeds talking the protagonist into suicide. Instead,
nature's messengers are not only friendly but even philanthropic in their
relationship to people:
There are birds in the darkness who douse electrical
fires
flaring up in nursing homes and the bedrooms of blind
men.
Birds you cannot see. There are birds in the darkness
who
nest in wooden crutches, eye patches, and bandages,
broken
spinal columns, and pots of withered plants. Birds
you cannot
see filling every tree, falling out of closets and
perched on the
hands of dying men. There are birds in the darkness
who lead
lost dogs off highways, steer boats past icebergs,
save children
stuck in wells.
The Handsome Family oeuvre is full of references to animals, birds and dogs in particular,
and they are probably meant to embody a diversity of traits
and features that are frequently incongruous. The birds in "Passenger
Pigeons" (from Twilight)
become a poignant figure of sadness and loss,[xiii] whereas the crows in "Poor, Poor Lenore" (from In the Air) signify both destruction and
melancholy as they fly Lenore "to the top of a dead tree where the heartbroken
go." Similarly, the four dogs that run past the first person narrator in
the infinitely enigmatic and surreal "In the Air" and the dog that "sat in
the branches with his glowing yellow eyes" in "White Dog" (off of Twilight) represent creatures that are
terrifying not because they are threatening but because they exhibit an undecidable
aura that may turn friendly or hostile depending on the mood or the circumstances.
As
the speaker in "White Dog" falls eternally down through the
nightmarish branches of white trees, he implores the eponymous
canine to show him "the door across the lake of fire to the
silver shore." Transcendence may be more unobtainable than
ever in a post-numinous world, but Sparks's neo-romantic imagination
is anything but dispirited in its desire to "penetrate into
that region where the air is music," to cite the enraptured
Emerson of "The Poet" (Emerson, 2003: 1179). In a body of work
not exactly unacquainted with the subject of murder, tragedy,
suicide, insanity, loneliness, and the ongoing battle with
nothingness, one can hardly fault the characters for their
longing for redemption and release from the constraints of
the physical world. This is no more eloquently stated than
in "Weightless Again," the seminal first track (which they
nearly left off the record) on the band's breakthrough album Through the Trees and perhaps the defining
moment thus far in their career:
We
stopped for coffee in the Redwood forest. Giant dripping
leaves.
Spoons of powdered cream. I wanted to kiss you, but wasn't
sure
how. Like those indians lost in the rainforest, forced to drag
burning
wood wherever they went. They had all forgotten how to
start
a fire. This is why people OD on pills and jump from the Golden
Gate
Bridge. Anything to fell weightless again. Those poor, lost
indians -
when
the white man found them, most died of TB; the rest
went
insane. In our motel room you're drinking Slice and gin,
reading Moby
Dick on the other bed. Remember the first time
we slept together? You said it felt like when you
learned to float.
At once relentless and gentle, sad and hopeful, the
pace of this lush elegy is almost unbearably insistent, like
a deranged, slow-motion locomotive wrapped in cotton traversing
cosmic prairies. For some reason that may be attributable to
the references to the "dripping leaves" and the rainforest, "Weightless
Again" always makes me think of humidity or dampness, connotations
that confer a tactile dimension upon the song. But what gives
the performance its inimitable, crucial quality is the absurdly
modulated contrast between the conceptual focus of the lyrics
and the singer's emburdened phrasing of those same words.
Intoned by Brett Sparks as if he had a mountain of lead in
his voice, the lyrics are enunciated in such a way as to counterpose
the topic of weightlessness central to the story. Even here - in
a song about how, standing before the abyss of disenchantment,
people turn to narcotics and sex to overcome their depressions - does
nature play a salient part. To be alienated from it appears
to be one source of man's unhappiness, though the escape into
buoyancy that an immersion in nature may secure is again accompanied
by potential risks. When Sparks gets to the word "forest" in
the opening line "[w]e stopped for coffee in the Redwood forest" his
voice descends even more, and in an instant it is made abundantly
clear that this Redwood forest is not the same as the one Woody
Guthrie extols in "This Land is Your Land." There may be malice
in The Handsome Family's neo-Emersonian wonderland, but that
is, perhaps, the price of weightlessness.
It
could be argued that "Weightless Again" nicely crystallizes
the principal impulsion of The Handsome Family project - the
need to discard the limitations of the material world in order
to become part of the wonders of invisible continents. In this,
their work shows a profound continuity with 19th Century
Transcendentalism, only for this couple, the movement toward
the great beyond is weirdly graphic. Structured as an intricate
interplay of centrifugal and centripetal forces, the lyrics
at least from Through
the Trees and onward are frequently defined by acts of
either levitation or sinking/falling. In addition to "Weightless
Again," the songs "The Giant of Illinois" (Through
the Trees), "In the Air," "The Sad Milkman," "Poor, Poor
Lenore" (In the Air), and "Gravity" (Twilight)
all contain attempts to do away with gravity. Movements in
the opposite direction are configured in "Amelia Earhart vs.
the Dancing Bear" (Milk and Scissors), "Stalled" (which begins,
revealingly, with the phrase "falling snow"), "Where the Birch
Trees Lean," "Down in the Ground," "I Fell," "Bury Me Here" (Through the Trees), the Hopperesque "The Snow White Diner" (Twilight), "The Forgotten Lake," and "The
Bottomless Hole" (Singing
Bones). It is in songs like these that what one may choose
to call the vertical iconography of the album covers finds
its literary counterpart.[xiv] The spiritual craving for transcendence is thus
de-sublimated into a purely formal choreography consisting of inverse movements
of rising up and falling down.
Ultimately,
the rejection of the horizontal ambit of worldly affairs should
be seen as not just psychological but also political. The topographical
uncanny is the product of the artistic imagination's endeavours
to preserve and promote those aspects of life endangered by
the ubiquitous pressures of neo-liberalism and the globalized
marketplace: mystery, beauty, spirituality, and rapture. Fitting
it is, therefore, that The Handsome Family is able to return
that most endemic and contemporary of American wastelands - the
mall - back to their beloved though certainly unpredictable
wilderness. According to Rennie Sparks's theory, the immense
American malls now fulfill the same function as did the rugged
outback in the frontier days. Hunters have become shoppers. "The
sheer vastness of our warehouse stores is so strange," Sparks
ponders: "They are always windowless, as if designed to make
you forget there's another world outside" (Hughes, 2004). And
like Emerson's speaker in "Each and All," who comes to understand
that the luster of objects found in nature is lost once the
thing is brought home, the modern-day hunters always realize
in the end that - in the words of Sparks - "the bright shiny
things they buy will never be bright and shiny once the plastic
wrap comes off" (Hughes, 2004).
[xv] In lyrics such as "Peace in the Valley Once Again"
(from Twilight)
and "24-Hour Store" (from Singing Bones),
however, nature itself invades the malls. While Ginsberg's 1950s supermarket
pulsates with consumers amid "the brilliant stacks of cans" (Ginsberg, 2003:
2873) - "Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!"
(2872) - the
vision of the mall Sparks invents is markedly different:
When they closed the last shopping mall crickets
sang
in crumbling walls. Termites ate through the doors.
Rabbits
hopped along the floors. The empty shelves swarmed
with
bees. Cash machines sprouted weeds. Lizards crawled
the parking lot. Swallows flew the empty shops. And
there
was peace in the valley once again. Plants grew up
the
mannequins painting them with leafy skin. Their plastic
eyes
fell to the floor and were carried off by wild boars.
All the
mirrors cracked in half when wild horses galloped
past and
mourning doves built their nests on the escalator
steps. And there
was peace in the valley once again.
Animals and plants have taken over the mall, whereas
in "24-Hour Store" the only people left in the Wal-Mart are
ghosts. In this spectral suburbia "the sleepless and lost/Push
their squeaking carts/Down the rows of clothes/And see nothing
at all," a disturbingly accurate metaphor of the insomnia-inducing,
zombifying effects of consumerism.[xvi] If, as The Handsome Family suggests, Walgreen's
has become the new wilderness of the American collective unconscious, new
wonders of the invisible world are in urgent demand. We need anything to
keep us weightless again.
Sparks, Rennie.
(2005) "Cover Art." E-mail to the author. 10 Feb. 2005.
Notes
