Comfort Music (Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”): Essay by Su Zi

GAS: Poetry, Art and Music welcomes Su Zi as a monthly columnist!

Zoeglossia Fellow 2023

Poet-writer, artist, equestrian

Creates Red Mare, an eco-feminist, poetry chapbook series that is handmade (each cover is a numbered block print, each copy is bound by hand sewing, editions limited to under 50, publishes at summer and winter solstice).

Publications in zines as well as full titles in poetry, essay, art – Multiple contributions to Unlikely Stories, automachination, GAS.

Titles from various publishers include: Danke, Flux , Chirp, Sister Woman, Solstice Epistles, Three Days, Chicago Poems, Pillar of Salt, Lit, The Tissue of Language , Building Community, Transgression in Motion,Tropical Depression, #100TPC

 Comfort Music (Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”)

In the social unsettlements of spring, we might find ourselves spiritually beleaguered. For those for whom the old ways of community interaction are no longer viable, there’s respite in archival music. While current times see archives themselves as being under a bit of a barbaric threat, it’s our history—the embers we pass forward as our legacy. 

If we consider the span of time for a generation to be around the half-century mark, we may find the influences of our forebearers upon our current culture. In the case of music, many automated playlists will routinely include music composed at a different time. Of all the arts, music has become the most accessible form, for while it might be some privilege or risk to attend live music performances, recorded music allows for a timeless and global experience.

In the case of plundered libraries, archival activism exists to ensure preservation and often these are curated from private collections; in music, these collections might include the holdings of a broadcast company, or someone’s private collection, and a variety of swap meets. Of course, there’s the accessibility of cyber download, from songs to the entirety of an artist’s work, and for the reason of accessibility, let us consider a widely disseminated work as viable for general social solace.

A half century ago, a single musical work that was widely disseminated was a hit, a cultural moment; as our culture has staggered into our current era, how hot is that once hit tune? While the complete works of this artist are indubitably influential, for our needs for solace, allow a listen to Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”, which has an Apple AI falsely cheerful introduction that includes “the revelation is that political music [...] can be inviting” and an odd reference to hippies.

A cautionary note for this-century listeners: this is analog music. There’s an orchestra playing every line of sounds on this recording—the credits list some twenty-five musicians, including two groups for additional vocals, and two people playing violin. The production team—those who published this work a half a century ago, number just under a dozen. This vintage work, an auditory composition of just over three minutes—a work of art with minimal physical existence—was the collaborative effort of dozens of people.

The piece itself begins with multiple instruments, including a piano, playing a chord twice, followed by two chords a half step higher on the scale, and then the initial vocals, which begin with the song’s chorus, it’s thesis “things ain’t what they used to be”, the repeated refrain occurring four times in the song’s three minutes. Gaye sings the single, seven syllables within the four beat bars as ditrochaic, emphasizing the “Things/What/Used /Be” and sometimes using a more trochee rhythm to stretch his tenor on the vocals for the following line. The song’s lyrics are two-line stanzas that may or may not employ end rhyme or consistent meter; instead, they read like koans, although they are structured as three citations of evidence with a fourth being conclusionary. This conclusionary stanza poses the still unanswered rhetorical question:

“What about this overcrowded land? /How much more abuse from man can she stand?”

Gaye sings the multiple syllable word as a ditrochee, speeding up his enunciation in a manner that was (and still is) a demonstration of technical ability, but which both matches the timing of the song’s general tempo. 

In counterpoint to Gaye’s smooth vocals is a saxophone solo that comes at about a minute, and after the lyrics conclude with a five-line supplication that is a change from the four, two-line lyric stanzas that support the song’s thesis.  The saxophone plays for six bars that climax with the blues squeal famous from that instrument.  It is here that the tempo’s emphasis on the third stress is most audible, and listeners often find this opportune for dancing—for interaction with the work. The final minute of the piece engages additional vocals for six bars, and a kind of denouement of instruments, a soprano voice.

Despite the remove of time, Gaye’s lyrics are unfortunately relevant still, and, in certain lights, the use of the pronoun “she” to reference the planet might still be controversial. Indeed, the song itself might be seen as controversial, since the thesis is one that asks for compassion for our obviously distraught planet. Nonetheless, the song’s elegant orchestration, still-relevant thesis, and Gaye’s sensitive tenor are still a rich offering of musical food for our soul.

Su Zi's Essay/Interview with Chester Weber

Chester Weber

There are endeavors which transcend culture, which transcend time, which have centuries of esoteric skills, and which ever lie under threat of extinction.  Sometimes, those practices have been memorialized in museums, visited in a hush; sometimes, those practices have modern play -- a common enough notion when considering theater. That which is lost we rue. Unfortunately, modern culture encourages an agoraphobia that has progressed to a bomb shelter mindset; children meet cartoon creatures and rarely pet a real rabbit. Eventually, some of us sense this loss of felt fur and become seekers: we begin to look to our most ancient lore, our most revered traditions and lost arts. Eventually, there will be a habit we can add to our lives that brings us that ancient comfort, be it birdwatching or the herbal garden; however, we cannot be true to history without eventually remembering the horses.

When one practices a skilled endeavor, there is craft involved, there is history. We walk where our ancestors once did. So too did horses. Our history is built with their strength: our roads and vehicles based upon the width of a hitched pair of horses and is thus the measure of what we build to house those vehicles since. Horses are our heritage; yet, they have been forgotten too often, and what they have to teach us is being lost.

Horses require land, and it is the land itself being taxed and stressed these days—a veritable tumult in atmosphere. With the human sprawl thoughtlessly ejaculating concrete into agricultural lands, those of us in areas of human density might feel only the need for food without care of where it comes from: the core of disposability. Yet it is the land which tells the air here is glowing green life, or here is a smelter of poison. Yet, we still revere that ancient lost green. Our language includes a horse pasture as an homage to natural beauty; our iconography includes horses in a variety of ways—yet some cities resent even a two-mile loop for a leisurely carriage ride welcoming visitors. This amputation of horses from human life parallels the untethering of human concern from the very planet upon which we live.

Perhaps it’s a matter of if we see ourselves as transient, or rooted, mused Chester Weber, in a recent (20 February 2024) interview. Weber was born in the community in which he resides, is raising his children there as well, and says that “My family has been here in the horse business since the roads were dirt. We were raised with the values of stewardship of the land.” He thinks that people feel when “it really is your home” that they are “rooted there, are people who care about the community and land.” Weber himself is a competing equestrian, having had “some luck in the sport of carriage driving”. While the history of carriage driving extends to before that of written language, Weber says that “there’s a lot of tradition in horse sport by its own nature. It became a joy, a hobby, a sport. Horse sport grows in popularity because of these magical creatures, the horses and this energy that is very open and pure”.  

It might seem impossible to remember when the arts and the sciences, the loftiest doings of humanity were all seen as that of craft. It does us well to remember the musical arts, a revered history that involves collaboration. So too does it happen that a dance with a horse becomes its own ballet. “Driving horses is a lot about harmony. The art of it is the ability to connect. I am proud when I train, and I make the most beautiful music. Horses have taught me about life and people. Horses communicate in nonverbal ways; they communicate in energy. Horses are these magical creatures. That ability to create harmony has to do with creating synergy.” It is this energy, this joy of feeling, that draws us to the arts, all and any of them. We seek to remember what we don’t know we have forgotten.

As we stride forward, seeking solace, it is our most ancient wisdoms which resonant with us. We search beyond the sterile for that which frees us. We are required to halt and squarely consider our position. Let us remember and honor more ancient practices, as we can; but we must always honor in the now as the then, our debt to the horse.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

On Literary Lineage: Considering JT Leroy by Su Zi

 

                                            

   A trilogy is a considerable artistic achievement. We ought to rightly salute such efforts to contribute to the culture, whether the culture of their time does so or not. In the canon of the literary arts, its critical history, there are lines of development for craft, for philosophy, for even the intermedia conversations of groups of artists that may or may not exist in face-to-face time.

    We who read, who read with knowledge of the literary arts, do more than taste a plot; a text exists both inside its time and in conversation with other texts, and a far more rich reading experience is to be had with awareness of these intertextual conversations. In consideration of a trilogy, the text continues this conversation with considerable commitment.

   And if the trilogy in question is taboo, this conversation between texts exists outside of the dominant culture of its creation. Many art forms have had entire genres that existed as taboo in their times and often beyond into history. Our current century has had a philosophical flux of both reconsideration of previously marginalized and taboo voices, and renewed efforts to silence them. At the release of the first volume (Sarah) in what is now a trilogy, the work of JT Leroy entered the arena of controversy, not for the text, but for the performance art that accompanied the publication: a controversy that still excites some emotion, but again not for the text itself.

    The folly of this lack of a formalistic view has historical antecedents dating back to mythic histories, and current culture is now just embracing the work of the last century that has previously been taboo. Since the trilogy’s first volume, first edition (Bloomsbury 2000) bridges the timeline of centuries and continues into those first years with the culminating edition (Harold’s End, Last Gasp, 2004), we who read ought to avail ourselves renewed consideration.

    While Albert Mobilio’s New York Times (2005) review does reference Genet and Selby, and Lindsey Novak’s Bomb Magazine interview does mention Wilde, the trilogy’s more overt antecedents seem to be somehow shadowed. The trilogy’s protagonist, Jeremiah in one work, Oliver in another, is a Dickensian child: a first-person point of view of disenfranchised denizens still not spoken of in polite company. However, there’s no sense of the dire and dirty here, but rather a comedic aspect: in Sarah, the protagonist is being fed steamed wild onions and compares that meal to his previously experienced “fine French shallots he sautés in a delicate saffron-infused lobster-chocolate-reduction sauce” (50), and it is the reader that realizes both meals are from truck stops. The elegant elaboration of Dickens is visible throughout the trilogy, with a certain timeless resonance:” there’s only the hum of moths batting against the caged-in light bulb in the middle of the row, crickets, and the low rumble of an isolated truck driving down Orange Blossom Trail” ( the heart is deceitful above all things 112). The streetwise cast aways of Dickens’ London have emigrated in the intervening time to American truck stops and strip clubs, and again to the street itself: “Everyone thought he was a vice cop when he started coming around, just cruising the block slowly in that big old silver Pontiac” (Harold’s End 9). Thus, a view of this trilogy only for the revisionist recontextualization of Dickens, it would position the work as post-modernism.

    Towards the last third of the twentieth century, deconstructed and taboo works found (and still find) a variety of genres available to them, but few were as potent as Punk. The rightful heir to the now-recently-re-esteemed Beat movement, Punk still has performing musicians. In the literary realm, there was the work of and now the namesake award for New York’s Kathy Acker. Jonathan Thornton described Acker’s work as’ “intentionally transgressive, engaging in shock tactics […]to engage with such issues as childhood trauma and sexual abuse” (tor.com); and although Acker died in late 1997, her namesake award is still given, the value of that literary approach recognized. In this trilogy of Dickensian-Ackerian gist, released within a handful of years in a continuing conversation of topic, of text, we who read are faced with three different publishers for one trilogy. That the Bloomsbury and Last Gasp editions can be located in hard bound format, with the Last Gasp edition being particularly lovely, these are still disparate volumes. While reconsideration of the work more appropriately recognizes it as postmodern, at least, and Punk for whenever that becomes as recognized as the Beats now are, the presentation of the trilogy overall is an overdue concern. For a press neither afraid of the taboo, the marginalized, or of work that poses critical considerations, this trio ought to be in a rightly deserved boxed set. For we who read, our dissimilar editions will be cherished, nonetheless.

Literary Saga of J.T. Leroy

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.