The Devil Has the Best Record Collection
It's that old Faustian Myth again (Order From Chaos - Raise the Banner)
The other night, as I was reading further into Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, I realized an inadvertent thread I was pulling on with this week’s selections: the mythology of the Devil’s Deal.
Robert Johnson never spoke it out loud. As the history goes, he first appeared to the elder Delta bluesmen and did not impress. So he disappeared into the wild, only to return with what seemed like a remarkably unlikely amount of new talent and skill. Son House famously suggested Johnson must have made a deal with Old Scratch and the myth of The Crossroads was born. As more has become known about the mystifying Johnson, it’s become apparent that in truth he was so dedicated to his craft that he willed it into being through the more banal culprit of practice; lots and lots of practice. His untimely death, the circumstance of a life lived in the realities of which he sang about, only seemed to confirm the belief around the supposed price he paid for such prodigious improvement: his very soul. His body died at 27, but through legend and influence, his spirit remains eternal. As could be said about any artist, he drafted his own immortality through the work he left behind.
Selim Lemouchi did the same. After he became frustrated with and then ditched his first band, Powervice, he sank into a deep depression (a theme throughout his short life) and like Johnson some seventy years before, disappeared into the wild (an extended stay in a mental health facility actually). When he re-emerged from this chrysalis state, he had the entirety of what would be The Devil’s Blood formed into a vision. Unlike Johnson, though, he was not shy about his arrangement. He, in favour, dedicated himself to The Devil, exchanging his creative desires with that of the lawless darkness. In true self-service, he chose the time to forfeit his end of that bargain, something he’d been quite open about planning to do both in the media and with his family. Again, he was not timid about any of this. And like Johnson, that posthumous legend held so tightly by an enduring audience who never knew the actual man allows for his immortal place of having both never really lived and having never truly died.
Perhaps it’s something ingrained in our universal history regarding magic and the role of musicians. As Ted Gioia points out in the excellent and provocative Music: A Subversive History, until Pythagorus imposed mathematical order onto it, music functioned primarily as a wildly loose channeling of the divine. Mathematics created order from chaos. Simplified, order was used to create control, to harness God through discipline, and to impose patriarchal will. The creation of a notational scale, order thrust upon the free will of magical music, equates musicianship with the patriarchal God that becomes centered to a new type of power structure within these developing societies. Humans developed cities, which replaced nomadic necessity with rooted stability.
Math, like science, requires discipline. And although in less enlightened ages, mathematicians and scientists alike have been crushed as heretics (see Hypatia), it’s a crackpot extremist view to suggest openly that Marie Curie signed her soul away to Lucifer in exchange for being the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. We recognize that math is a skill set, although some people have a particular knack for it. My four year old nephew is fascinated with numbers; at three years of age he first began a routine we do every time we’re together where we count to higher and higher exponents of ten. Though discipline, order and (key word here) practice, he’ll develop that, and whether or not he becomes a great mathematician, only time will tell. But I highly doubt anyone will suggest he has some extraordinary skill bequeathed by God.
Artists get this often. It’s a huge disservice to them. We can probably trace this back to the role of the artist in Renaissance Italy, and the relationship to church patronage. I’d also suggest the German Albrecht Dürer was one of the first and best to equate his talent with the divine touch, as evidenced in his most famous self-portraits looking pretty white Jesus-like. So this idea of the god-given gift of artistic talent squishes artists who didn’t quite make the cut into the category of hack, even though every artist has one thing in common, which is that art of any nature requires time invested. Everyone is born with the ability to create. Some just became what was considered better at what they practiced. Just like doctors. Just like mathematicians.
Back to the Faustian pact.
Because music became ordered, scaled, mathematicized the idea that these usually transgressive (read: pioneers) would sell their soul to harness that highest ability fits in with this notion of the divine / genius artist. We can accept the mythology because culturally we’ve forgone the idea that music, or any other art, requires discipline. Instead, artists continue to have their hard, boring work ignored in sacrifice to this original schism between order and chaos. It makes for a great myth, and rock n roll (and most popular culture) loves great myths.
Like what I’m doing here? Let me know by suggesting it to someone else that may like it. Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music