Disintegration, Decay, Disease 

The common usage definition of decay—the sad, slow disintegration of just about anything material or corporeal—has a slippery connection to the history of music. You can hear it in the dusty, time-weathered intonations of Johnny Cash and Bettye LaVette, and in the prematurely battered vocals of Billie Holiday or Marianne Faithful. And it’s impaired presence is overwhelming in the work of some of the 21st century’s most important sound artists like William Basinski, The Caretaker, and Yasunao Tone. 

The strings, speaker cones, wax cylinders, magnetic tape, disc players and digital machinery that inevitably break (or break down) and the body’s own susceptibility to disease and unstoppable degradation often provide the spark of innovation—evolution born of obsolescence. As author Henry Miller once explained, “I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.” He could’ve been talking about the busted, abused technologies at the heart of two critically important innovations in 20th century music: fuzz guitar and vinyl scratching.

Willie Kizart, the guitarist for Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, may not be a household name to most music lovers, but the guitarist’s performance on 1951’s “Rocket 88”—a song Sam Phillips, among others, have called the very first rock recording—is a critical moment in modern music history. En route to record at Phillips’ now-legendary Sun Studios, Kizart’s amplifier was serendipitously hobbled by a burst speaker cone when it fell from the roof of the group’s van onto the hard asphalt of Highway 61. In an attempt to repair the cone Phillips stuffed the amp with newspaper and after experimenting with the newly deep, fuzz tone, he decided to run with it, arguably giving birth to both guitar distortion and rock and roll at the same moment.

In the 1950s poets Ian Sommerville and William S. Burroughs experimented with what they referred to as “inching” tape, which Burroughs’ described in his own grammatically inventive manner as a sound “produced by taking a recorded text for best results a text spoken in a loud clear voice and rubbing the tape back and forth across the head.” Over two decades later Grand Wizzard Theodore began experimenting with the same disruptive sounds, using vinyl records rather than tape, integrating the sharp bursts of noise into rhythms and turning the “inching” of tape into “scratching,” the heart of hip-hop music. And even though scratching has taken a backseat in recent years to the digital wizardry of beat production, its import to the form is undeniable.

In musicology, “decay” is a relatively simple idea indicating the slope between the highest point of a note or tone’s initial “attack” and the moment it hits a level of “sustain,” as displayed in the diagram of an ADSR (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release) envelope below, but decay is also decomposition, ruination, and declining strength, size, quality, or condition. As a tool in a composer’s toolbox, this common usage idea of decay has been rarely used, even as technology makes its use now nearly unavoidable.

The human singing voice is created by a complex group of systems and aging affects nearly every aspect of this chain. Over time the lungs, which push the air needed to vibrate the vocal folds (vocal chords), lose elasticity and precise control over intake and output is compromised; the vocal folds dry out, atrophy and lose bulk just as other muscles do; the flexible tissues that are responsible for vibrato during voicing become thinner and stiffen; and the cartilage frame of the larynx gradually ossifies, all of which results in reduced range, a wider vibrato, a dry or gruff sound, and a loss of projection. It remains a medical mystery as to why some people retain a youthful and resonant speaking voice well into their 80s while others begin to sound old as early as their 50s, though genetics seems to play a large role.

In William Styron’s classic missive from the depths of depression, Darkness Visible, he recalls hearing the voice of a friend who had fallen into a long period of despair:

 “I remembered that his hands trembled and, though he could hardly be called superannuated—he was in his mid-sixties—his voice had the wheezy sound of very old age that I now realized was, or could be, the voice of depression; in the vortex of my severest pain I had begun to develop that ancient voice myself.”

Billie Holiday was perhaps the first popular recording artist to take full advantage of that “ancient voice.” Her final release, 1958’s Lady in Satin, is a contentious recording among jazz vocal fans partly due to the cloying string arrangements, but also because by that time Holiday’s voice had weathered into a hollow illusion of what it once was. Hearing her sing on these final recordings, her voice struggling and anemic, it’s hard to believe she was only 44 years old when she died.

Now a voice chiseled into such creaky compromise has become something some singers desire. The earliest records in Tom Waits career—1973’s Closing Time and ‘74’s The Heart of Saturday Night—showcase a bluesy singer/songwriter with a boozy, adenoidal, but easygoing voice. It wasn’t until 1975’s Nighthawks at the Diner that he began dramatically pushing his vocal chords to their breaking point—it’s rumored that he would scream into a pillow until his voice gave out—achieving a smoke-damaged growl that gave a wounded gravitas to his numerous ballads and has personified the iconoclastic singer ever since. In fact, his rusted-through croon is so tied to Waits that he has had to sue on multiple occasions to stop advertisers from using soundalikes, a notion that should bring to mind Harley Davidson’s attempt to trademark the growling exhaust sound of its crankpin V-Twin engine. Marianne Faithfull became a star during the mid-sixties as a wide-eyed waif with a seductive, clear voice, but before the singer was in her thirties she had deeply damaged her instrument through extreme drug use, alcohol, cigarettes, and stress. Like the Velveteen Rabbit who learned early that “by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby,” Faithfull says she considered her new voice a relief, claiming that her pure, classically trained voice simply “didn’t say anything.”

The final act in Johnny Cash’s long career pivoted on his own deeply weathered voice. For the first American Recording sessions producer/guru Rick Rubin and the singer chose a handful of dark songs including Danzig’s “Thirteen,” Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire,” Tom Waits’s “Down There by the Train,” and Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me,” and recorded them with the same stark simplicity that Bruce Springsteen used to record his bleak American masterpiece, Nebraska. Rubin filled the Cash’s Tennessee cabin with recording equipment and captured him in his element: just the man, his plaintive guitar, and his gravelly intonations. The masterfully produced recordings kept purposefully subdued to give ample room to what was left of the legend’s weakened, degraded baritone.

Many composers and musicians have overcome disability to contribute to the history of music and even the shortlist contains a staggering amount of genius: Beethoven began going deaf in his mid twenties; Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Ray Charles, and Stevie Wonder all lost their sight early in life; and contemporary drummer Evelyn Glennie—who has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12—performs barefoot to better feel the vibrations from her drums. (Glennie wrote a brief essay to describe her condition and its effect on her music in which she states, “my hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers me.”)

Czech composer Bedrich Smetana went deaf suddenly in 1874 and in 1876 completed the autobiographical String Quartet No. 1 (“From My Life”), which dramatically captures his transformation. During the first three movements of the quartet the composer recalls his youth and his love for his wife and the arts, but things take a stunning and dark turn in the fourth. It begins as a representation of the professional recognition the composer had attained for his nationalistic music, and the joy that welled up within him following his success, but as the music pulses forward Vivace the unsuspecting listener is caught off guard by a swift gathering of black clouds through which instantly pierces one lone and extended high E—a piercing note reflecting the fateful ringing in the ears that preceded the composer’s surprising deafness. He would later write in a letter that his joy was “checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into the sad future."

 With the knowledge that our health can be stolen just so suddenly it’s little surprise that disease would take a place as a thematic element in the history of song.

The most dramatic and widely known example of disease in song is likely the popular children’s nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie,” which is often thought to have been written during one of the two major European outbreaks of the black plague (1347 or 1665)—evidence suggests it was written much later and has nothing to do with any disease, let alone the black plague. For a truly great black plague listening experience dig up Eric Burdon and the Animals’ proto-goth “The Black Plague,” a spoken-word concoction that creeps along to the toll of bells and gloomy chant, and features lines like, “The bodies of unfortunates bloat in the hot sun outside the castle walls.”

While tuberculosis inspired songs such as “TB Blues” and “Whippin’ That Old TB” (both recorded by Jimmie Rodgers) and Van Morrison’s “TB Sheets” (also recorded wonderfully by John Lee Hooker with Morrison’s aid), and served as the cause of death for both Mimì in Puccini’s La Bohème and Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata, the influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919—which killed more people than WWI estimates range from 30-50 million people died worldwide—interestingly resulted in very few songs beyond a half-baked children’s rhyme—“I had a little bird and it name was Enza / I opened the window and in-flew-Enza”—the “The Influenza Blues” and “The I-N-F-L-U-E-N-Z-A Blues,” alongside forgotten music hall songs—one of which contained sneezes in the score.

Perhaps unsurprinsingly music’s enduring connection to sex resulted in a greater number of songs dedicated to venereal disease, many of which sprang up in the 1920s and 1930s as re-workings of the seminal ballad “The Unfortunate Rake,” including “Bad Girls Lament,” “Pills of White Mercury,” and the British barrack favorite “Young Trooper Cut Down In His Prime” (“Flash-girls of the city have quite ruined me”); Evidence also links  “The Unfortunate Rake” to blues standard “St. James Infirmary” and “The Cowboy’s Lament.” Bob Dylan even recorded a handful of VD songs that originated in the Woody Guthrie songbook, including “VD Blues,” “VD Gunner’s Blues,” “VD City” and “VD Waltz.”

 When AIDS first began to spread through niche communities during the early and mid-1980s, taking a global spotlight with the death of actor Rock Hudson, British Parliamentary member Anthony Eden, and Queen singer Freddie Mercury, the music world took note and organized awareness and fundraising events, such as the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992. In the years that followed many artists penned heartfelt material about the toll of the disease, including Elton John, Sarah McLachlan, American Music Club, Lou Reed, and Bruce Springsteen.

Though heart disease remains the biggest killer in developed nations, cancer’s unkind progress seems to have more fiercely gripped the imaginations of songwriters. Writing for Slate in May 2007, author Ron Rosenbaum dubbed a pocket of country songs that appeared in the mid-2000s, “cancer country” and asked if the genres “relentless effort to make you weep at all costs” had finally gone too far, naming Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying” (2004), Rascall Flatt’s “Skin (Sarabeth)” (2004), and Craig Morgan’s “Tough” (2007), all of which were country hits. But country wasn’t the only genre to tackle the mystery and pain of cancer at that time, as evidenced by Sufjan Stevens’ “Casimir Pulaski Day”—about a young woman dying of bone cancer from 2005’s Illinois—My Chemical Romance’s “Cancer” (from their 2007 album, Welcome to the Black Parade), and a number of songs written by Mark Oliver Everett of Eels following the death of his mother from lung cancer. Written and recorded as his body succumb to mesothelioma, it’s impossible to listen to Warren Zevon’s final, subtle heartbreaking message, “Keep Me In Your Heart for Awhile,” without being moved: “Sometimes when you’re doing simple things around the house / Maybe you’ll think of me and smile.”

 Mental health—beyond the looming specter of depression—has also played a part in musical history via drug-damaged souls like Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and sufferers of schizophrenia and other mental ailments, like pioneering producer Joe Meek (who eventually shot his landlady and himself), Moby Grape’s Skip Spence, and Chicago’s Wesley Willis (who famously greeted his fans with a loving head butt).

It’s long been recognized that Alzheimer’s sufferers can often recognize and sing songs long after they’ve lost touch with names and faces and more recent evidence suggests that it could aid in the creation of new memories. Alzheimer’s is just one of the diseases of memory at the conceptual center of much of James Leyland Kirby’s melancholy dark ambient work. Recording both under his own name and as The Caretaker, Kirby has explored the memory on multiple releases, particularly the 2008 album, Persistent Repetition of Phases, which features songs built on the themes of Alzheimer’s, lacunar amnesia (when the memory erases a specific event), and past-life regression, among other vagaries of memory. The grief-shedding Chocolate Genius song “My Mom” is one of the few to tackle the pain of Alzheimer’s disorienting decay of memory, and does so with a mixture of patient understanding and swelled heartbreak: “five times exactly / No more or no less / She says “How you been eating boy?” / I say, “Okay, I guess.”

Whereas cancer and Alzheimer’s may be largely neglected in the history of music, it would be hard to limit yourself when calling out classic miserable material about drug and alcohol abuse. They don’t call it sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll for nothing. Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” John Prine’s “Sam Stone,” Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done,” Townes Van Zandt’s “Kathleen,” The Replacement’s “Here Comes a Regular,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” Elliot Smith’s “King’s Crossing,” etc. ad infinitum. One noticeable commonality in these songs is the close personal connection to the material of the artists who composed and performed it. After all, “write what you know” is the first advice writers receive, and none of these artists ever had cholera.

Any addiction—video games, shopping, smoking—can have deleterious effects on the abuser, but drugs and alcohol are particularly pernicious in both their chemical command over users and the way they speed the breakdown of the body and mind. As just one example, heroin has had a persistent grasp on the imagination of artists for decades from Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis during the height of jazz in America to the “heroin chic”—wiry limbs, sharp bones, dark-rimmed eyes, and a distant, hollow gaze—that dominated fashion during the 1990s. Heroin played a part in the deaths of Tim Buckley, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Frankie Lymon, Layne Staley (Alice In Chains), Sid Vicious, and Andrew Wood (Mother Love Bone) among many others. Alcohol, cocaine, codeine, morphine… they’ve all played their part in stealing away artists before their time.

Spiritualized’s “Death Take Your Fiddle” is unique in that it both thematically addresses the tight grip of addiction and unfolds over the distressing sound of a methodically gasping respirator, suggesting a medical death as well as a spiritual one. Matmos’s 2001 release, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, was built using the sounds of surgeries and medical instruments, tweaking them into one of the most fascinating electronic releases of the decade. Though much of the surgery is more aesthetic in nature than disturbingly bleak or necessary—“California Rhinoplasty” is composed of sounds from a nose job, as an example, the album still has it’s dark side in theory, if not in application: There’s a bit of cruelty hidden in using an audiologist’s tests for deaf children to create a driving dance-floor thumper and “Memento Mori” was built using the human skull as a percussive instrument.

Written by Marin Marais—one of the earliest composers of program music (music conceived to convey a narrative)—in 1725 “Tableau de l'opération de la taille”—also known as “tableau of a Lithotomy” or “The Gallbladder Operation”—is a little known piece for viola de gamba, harpsichord, and voice.

This oddity can be found in a handful of places, but the most curious is an old gatefold single from the 1960s created by the pharmaceutical company Norgine. Side one is a sleepy sales pitch to doctors about Norgine’s laxative products (“Can we begin by talking about constipation?”), while side two features Marais’s composition with the original French notes translated into English:

Aspect of the surgical apparatus
The patient quails as he beholds it
He mounts the operating scaffold
Seized with panic he thinks of fleeing
He reconsidereth
He is bound with cords of silk
The surgeon maketh his incision
The forceps is introduced
Hereupon the stone is brought forth
Here, as it were, the voice faileth
The blood, it floweth
The surgeon unloosens the silken cords
And now though art put to bed
Relief and rejoicing

A better translation of “Here, as it were, the voice faileth” is “He screams,” but it’s likely that the fine folks at Norgine didn’t want to share such a horrific surgical script with their doctor/consumers.

Thankfully the surgical arts have progressed since the days of Marais’ musical journalism, something that can also be said for the tools of music production. The wax discs, magnetic tape, disc players, and iPods that inevitably break or break down, often, on their way toward the trash heap, provide the spark of innovation: evolution from obsolescence.

Writing for Wire Magazine Rob Young wrote that “the glitch is only conceivable in a world where music has become partly or wholly mechanized.” In other words, the technological act of recording resulted in the kind of vulnerable objects necessary for “cracked” soundworks to spring into existence—i.e. you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs and you certainly wouldn’t invent the omelet without the eggs in the first place. Wax that melts, tape that decays, and dics that scratch are all critical pieces in the history of that is referred to as “cracked media” or “glitchwerks.”

An early example would be “Frippertronics,” used in numerous recordings by King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp in the late 1960s, and eventually coming to bear his name. Frippertronics is the fanciful term for a tape delay system created by stringing tape between two reel-to-reel machines as what is recorded on the first machine is played moments later through the second. This can also be treated as a degenerative delay if the initial signal is mixed into the inputs of the first machine, creating, over time, a decaying loop that slowly disintegrates into a warm haze of feedback. A more recent example of cracked media can be heard in Yasunao Tone’s “de-controlling” of CD player playback devices to create “skips” (random sound fragments)—an approach that modern error-correction technology has stilted, and the best example would be the work of William Basinski, particularly his “Disintegration Loops” series, which are based on the decomposition of tape loops first made by the composer in the 1980s—as the decaying tapes flake away a slowly evaporating new song is captured in the destruction.

From Herodotus and Ponce de León to hair dye and facelifts, the dream of eternal youth clouds our minds while the inevitable decay of our bodies and minds remind us of the brevity of life. Just as our own parts slowly wear down, tape slowly disintegrates and digital signals are pushed to their breaking point, and musicians adapt to include these changes, folding the rough and weathered edges of experience and cracked media into their art.

THE MISERABLE LIST: DISEASE

1. The Gallbladder Operation – Marin Marais
2. The Black Plague – Eric Burdon and the Animals
3. Needle and the Damage Done – Neil Young
4. T.B. Sheets – John Lee Hooker
5. Streets of Philadelphia – Bruce Springsteen
6. Skin – Rascall Flatts
7. My Mom – Chocolate Genius
8. Casimir Pulaski Day – Sufjan Stevens
9. Lacunar Amnesia – The Caretaker
10. Keep Me In Your Heart for Awhile – Warren Zevon