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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com an individual as himself, so much as his difficulty in being at all. The “I” of the song is only a possibility set against harsh reality. Will Oldham’s ‘honesty’ then is the clarity of his exile. The various names he adopts is a natural off-shoot of this. In this respect, it’s appropriate that Oldham first became well-known by acting in films, most notably co-starring in John Sayles’ trade union drama Matewan (1987). His performance as a teenager caught up in the brutal repression of a mining union in 1930s America is startlingly good. Yet no matter how connected his songs and his acting are, the displacement of identity central to the actor’s existence is perhaps too limited. In my experience, actors are less interested in others as being others full stop. They tend to be indiscriminate, mercenary and heartless. The self is willingly exiled. It is not the most appropriate medium for an artist concerned with the play of self and its exposures, ellipses and effacements. While Oldham is certainly stagy, it’s a stage with the trapdoor fully in view. In a rare interview, Oldham is clear that the movement between the self and its productions plays a major part in his writing. Asked if there is anything he does consciously when writing songs he says “Doing and not doing. But it’s not that hard cause that’s mostly the nature of what’s going on, or that’s the reason for these things to be there. That is the answer to what makes them occur. The answer is that they BUY Will Oldham music online from and are that way. The reason that they become is because they become what they are. The listening is begun at the very beginning, at the writing, then it’s continued in the performing and recording, and then is continued with whoever listens to it but it isn’t completed … it’s something that’s never completed.” “Doing and not doing”: this is basically what it is to be a human animal. We hold against the “not doing” because it leads to boredom and melancholy. We half envy the animal who just lives; who just does. But it’s still us as not-doing individuals that desires it. One of the great analysts of modern human nature, Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of this in 1874: “Consider the herd grazing before you. These animals do not know what yesterday and today are but leap about, eat, rest, digest and leap again: and so from morning to night and from day to day, only briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this, for he is proud of being human and not an animal and yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants nothing other than to live like the animal, neither bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the animal: why do you not speak of me of your happiness but only look at me? The animal does want to answer and say: because I always immediately forget 386 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com what I wanted to say – but then it already forgot this answer and remained silent: so that man could only wonder. But he also wondered about himself, that he cannot learn to forget but always remains attached to the past: however far and fast he runs, the chain runs with him.” (translated by Peter Preuss) It’s a neat coincidence that the opening verses of the great song ‘The Brute Choir’ presents a similar situation: Cow-call, and they were all calling together describing the way to go I never hurt someone so young and I never held someone so sweet Makes me want to holler with them All the way down All the way down their voices show the way how to hold it back see the end of the day shut their mouths, shut their mouths and rip the pictures down withdraw, withdraw, you live so far from town Confirming the tension, two of Will Oldham’s LPs feature cover designs of animals on the way to being human, or the other way round: a compelling portrait of BUY Will Oldham music online from and a broad-shouldered leopard on Viva Last Blues (1995), from which the above song is taken, and a goat performing on its hindlegs on Joya (1997). On a sublime recent EP, the subject is even more explicit. ‘One With The Birds’ is a love song sort-of, to birds I guess (“Juan with the birds” he joked at his Water Rats Theatre gig in London). The song seems to be again about human infatuation with animal freedom. Oldham fits in as many bird names as possible: a purple martin in my house, she hollers at me. why be inhuman, why be like me? like so many robins, like so many doves, like so many lovebirds, with so many loves, like the songs of the bobwhite without any words when we are inhuman, we’re one with the birds. (An anorak’s aside: I wonder if with this song Oldham is paying a discreet homage to Dick Gaughen’s song ‘Now Westlin Winds’ – a setting of a poem by Robert Burns? On Joya, there’s a song based on another of Gaughen’s from the same LP, his 1981 masterpiece A Handful Of Earth. Burns’ poem is equally resourceful in mentioning the birds of Scotland: the moorcock, the 387 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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