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Previously appeared March 2013 in:

Scott Walker, The Only One Left Alive
"We've gotta have a great show, with a million laughs... and color... and a lot of lights to make it sparkle.
And songs - wonderful songs. And after we get the people in that hall, we've gotta start em in laughing
right away. Oh, can't you just see it...?" Judy Garland, "Babes In Arms", 1939.

Not far from my home theres a small
dilapidated inn thats over one hundred
years old (hardly a venerable age by
European standards, but a cause for
hyperventilation in history-starved
America.) Id mention its name except the
owner would probably spit in my next draft
beer. Its not like he needs the publicity.
People routinely line up to get in.
This inn is more than a shithole. It is a
gratuitous shithole. Something between
gallows humor and esprit de corps pervades the well-heeled clientele who flock there. Soggy hot dogs
get forked out onto paper plates and communal piles of condiments litter the tables in nondescript
plastic pouches. No detail has been spared that could possibly obscure the owners abiding contempt
for his patrons. Surely his refusal to fix the gimpy tables is tied to some perverse, service-sector pique.
On Saturdays the average wait time for a bench exceeds thirty minutes. Splinters cost extra as do refills
on sodas.
Adding insult to appetite, there are probably a dozen new restaurants within a half-mile radius where
the thoroughly mortgaged owners sweat every detail: the menu, the dcor, i.e. that whole obsequious
and tiresome mlange known in marketing circles as the dining experience. Such can be the affection-
bias enjoyed by venerable acts and storied buildings. Chef Gordon Ramsay would also do well to note
that, while the customer is king, the latter sometimes prefers, in lieu of a before-dinner aperitif, a swift
kick in the balls; as to why, well, thats sort of between the king, his blue blood and his dominatrix.
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I mention the Shithole Inn as a run-up to discussing Scott Walkers new album Bish Bosch not because
theres a picture of him in the back grinning shyly beside the asshole who splits his time running the
joint and running all the way to the bank. I mention it only to point out the massive and under-
exploited masochistic seam in the Western consumers overly catered-to psyche. People are sick of the
patronizing entreaty to buy this and that because theyre worth it, especially when, deep down, they
believe theyre not worth much. Universal appeal is a watch-phrase for weve got you read like a thin
book. The time has come to steer the car inexplicably into the trees if for no other reason than to fuck
with the product placement folks at GM. Inscrutability is the next big thing. So, listen up all you would-
be marketing Svengalis: Weve been patronized to distraction and were not going to take it anymore!
Some quarters are fighting back. The deluxe version of Bish Bosch comes with a fold-out nail bed.
Curiously, there is also a barcode on the back. This tells us some label flunky wakes up every morning
needing to sell this bitch. All coy posing aside, an album release is a social gesture. Otherwise it would
have remained a basement tape. A serious artist (as opposed to, say, a funny one) sometimes fancies
himself diminished or compromised by his audience, poor precious dear. Certainly he doesnt want to
be seen working for the general public like a circus pony. Its a timeworn avant-garde trope to invite
an audience to crane forward provided they dont make any noise. And for Gods sake dont ask inane
questions ala Mel Brooks in The Critic (1963): What da hell is dis? Candor is for oafs. No, cutting-
edge art must be allergic to plebian accessibility. Mass appeal is a sign something has gone horribly
wrong. Obviously the mineshaft canary isnt far enough ahead of the dopes with the pick axes if some
kid with a Justin Bieber t-shirt can hit it with a BB gun.
In art pretension is currency and funny money all at once. Indeed within this highly ritualized being-
seen scene the honest artist, much to his dismay, may find himself surrounded by a dilettantish clique
who, for social (or self-identity) reasons of their own, want to be noted primarily for frequenting exotic
locales. They glom onto the Walkers of the world, not as unabashed appreciators of art, but as conscious
tailors of their own salon experience. Indeed theres a whole sub-genre of marketing that hinges on
snob appeal, people using product as a pry-tool to distance themselves from, say, Nickelback while
nudging themselves closer to Grey Poupon mustard. The contour of the lever becomes incidental. The
art becomes an instrumentality. Within this consumer-driven formulation, the artist himself is little
more than an affinity marketing label, not an artist at all. These inauthentic responses to an artists
work can make him feel lonelier still. Better to be honestly misunderstood than dishonestly embraced.
*******
"You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read....
It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself." Samuel
Beckett in a letter to Sylvia Beech (commenting on an early draft of James Joyces Finnegans Wake)
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Fair enough, its music. But is it to be heard?
Beneath Walkers willful obscurantism, there pulses an unmistakable earnestness and a strong sense of
artistic mission. Scott is as honest as the day is long. Its just that, ever since 1984s Climate of Hunter
he has been cataloging his night terrors in the broad daylight of sound with an encroaching private
resolve that practically necessitates an expanding audience remove. He alone can attest to the fidelity
of the completed albums which is another way of saying Scott needs Scott and a handful of indentured
studio musicians who take orders well. Increasingly, we are becoming dispensable listeners on a
Doppler shiftvoyeurs reallywith no audible, coherent way in. The songs have been scrubbed of
silly hooks, an innovation that has to distress the marketing department. Nothing is trying to pull you
in. All assistive listening devices have been shorn.
There is nothing more plaintive than a blue-haired lady on a Scott Walker Internet forum hoping
against hope the next album offers the long-awaited return to form: The Sun Aint Gonna Shine
Anymore, part deux. In his efforts towards dismantling easy listening (see comedian Billy Connollys
hilarious take here on that rather ludicrous MOR genre), Walker has banished the familiar guideposts
of bridges, refrains, hooks and grooves. He has retired his signature baritone because he knows it
produces a surfeit of listener enjoyment and a bridge to a determinate past. As fan David Bowie notes
(quite apropos here despite the obvious Dylan reference) in his recent Walker peon Heat: all love is
theft. Walker wants no part of the love of millions. And why should he? Not only does the only man
left alive loathe sharing himself, he has allowed certain personal idiosyncrasies to have run of the place.
Surely Omega Men Charlton Heston and Will Smith proved beyond dispute that, left on our own too
long, eccentricity has a habit of taking over. Soon Mickey Rooneys hambone exhortations to put on a
show recede into that seductive goldmine, the artists head, where weird scenes rapidly take center
stage. Think of performance then as a dilutive salve that works against the artists inward darkness. Act
out or die not trying.
Todays Scott Walker has become all about drawing the curtain down. The Holy Grail he seeks is the
hermetic seal. His fear of self-dilution is a strangulation device that refuses to allow even his beautiful
voice a proper voice anymore. He is caught up in an onanistic self-embrace. Was the young Scottie
Engel bedeviled by a suffocating stage mom, one wonders, not unlike poor Judy Garland? Sadder still,
Walker is winning back his public persona with each successive abyss, err, album, which means were
losing Walker to Walker. Soon, as one of his work chums pointed out, there will be nothing left to
release. His audience will evaporate (with the possible exception of Jarvis Im a genius too Cocker who
clearly harbors his own motives for fanning the avant-garde flames.) To all this, Scott may one day soon
collapse blissfully into his own rapt embrace. Hell, hes been singing to crowds since he was a kid.
Perhaps hes earned the right to crowd all crowds out and be left to his sonic experimentations, fellow
lost travelers welcome.
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In my hurry to register official disappointment with Bish Bosch did I fail to mention Walker is a genius?
Certainly hes flashed the right stuff in moments past, genius being an intermittent condition at best.
But all the swirling Scott-is-god talk strikes me at this moment as an empty appellation reflecting
peoples fundamental sense of failure and consternation at not being able to connect with Bish Bosch.
Genius is the most laudatory term they have in their market basket of responses. Apparently, and for
reasons other than the music, they seem convinced something is there, though they are unable for all
the world to lay their minds ear on it. Thus they applaud out of mystified yet dutiful respect, burying
their confusion in superlatives while holding their ears. The resultant critical response is an abdication
where grade inflation abounds:
Like the movie director David Lynch,
Walker is an artist that people-- fans and non-
fans-- seem bent on "getting," as though there
was anything to "get" in the first place. Let's
pretend there isn't.Mike Powell,
Pitchfork magazine (8/10 stars)
it's music that clearly requires a lot of time
and effort to fully unpick, while defying you
to play it often enough to actually do that. For
a lot of listeners, including his fans that would make Bish Bosch a pretentious failure: who wants
to buy an album you can hardly bear to listen to?Alexis Petridis, The Guardian (4/5 stars)
maybe he's still a cultural vegetable, just a good name to drop before you get signed to Sub
Pop, even if you never actually listen to the records.Joe Gross, Spin magazine (8/10 stars)
Once upon a time before modern music sought the reassuring shadows of elder gods, Walkers work
arrived to genuine acclaim. The incomparably insightful David Bowie blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame
beat me to the explicatory punch recently with an extended reflection on Scott Walkers 1978 song
The Electrician (ostensibly released as the Walker Brothers last official single). Lets say Im glad my
shock and awe is shared over this piece of music as it remains for me, even after all these years, perhaps
the most evocative and disturbing song the pop genre has ever produced.
The flamenco interlude is an ebbing siesta-daydream chained to the rack of programmatic, puritanical
soul-destruction. Lorcas blue guitar (a loaner from Stevens) is no match for all that sustained voltage.
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The last few bars of the song have the naked light-
bulb in the ceiling relinquishing its 60-watt juice
for the Larger Cause. Even more ominous, that
god-awful throbbing sound is the Spiritus Sanctus
bleeding out beneath the onslaught of state-of-
the-art terror techniques employed by some Josef
Mengele wannabe under Henrys Kissingers
careful tutelage. Yes, The Marathon Man is there
too. You can practically smell cindered soul-
content and burnt flesh wafting in amidst the
torturers mantric recitation. The clash of cultures
gets weirder still. Both victim and perpetrator are enjoying the moment in some sort of sick-assed,
trans-hemispheric BDSM symbiosis. Walkers music is awash in power imbalancesa toppled
Mussolini, galloping Cossacks, lashed eyes, nails applied to facesthe more extreme the imbalance, the
better it seems to fulfill Scotts power-drenched vision.
Please, this is far from a 911 apologia. Nonetheless Walker is choreographing an undeniable karmic arc,
a decades-long power exchange, uncoiling between seventies-era, third-world torture victims at the
hands of first-world imperialists and third-world terror perpetrators striking back at first-world citadels
near the outset of the new century. This bipolar world is delineated further by Elvis and his non-
surviving twin brother Jesse (the formers black cocaine shadow-form) rendezvousing climactically at
the Twin Towers 911 event. We suspect Jesse long ago lost his soul in a CIA-funded, Pinochet black
iron prison. His tormented ghost now returns with an unholy vengeancejailhouse rock indeed. (See
my May 2011 Skope magazine article here on the Walker documentary 30 Century Man and lost-twin
dynamics.) This is Walkers sonic boomerang. Spaced by nearly thirty years, he sound-scapes the global
feedback loop of cultural domination, submission and retributive recoil. In the latter phase bipolarity
collapses in upon itself. Violence and inhumanity form a ubiquitous atmosphere as both hemispheres
literally bleed together. Audience perishes in the collapsed towers, leaving Elvis to mutter inconsolably
to himself on the blank prairie:
Im the only one
Left alive.
Im the only one
Left alive. --from Jesse

So, The Electrician finds its seedy apotheosis in 2006s Jesse on The Drift. Im with Scott on much
of The Drift. God help us, we need more of this. He loses me though on Bish Boschs dwarf star
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SDSS14+13B which Im told is the coldest sub-stellar body yet discovered in some galaxy far, far away.
Thank you for that. Now bring me the cattle prod.
Admittedly, Im drifting into the realm of what literary critic Harold Bloom would call a strong
reading of Walkers text. Yet I believe his formidable art demands an equally formidable response.
Oscar Wilde called criticism, the only civilized form of autobiography. There is, as Wilde suggested,
no real division between art and criticism. One soul deserves another.
Speaking of souls, poetic voice (artistic soul to some) is a manifold admixture of native gift, honed skill,
indelible spirit, gritty experience, sound judgment, febrile imagination and tabasco sauce. Neurosis can
creep in and alter this delicate stew. As one astute critic commented of poet Philip Larkin, what has
generally been attributed to his morose voice almost certainly contained a strand of clinical depression.
This would be a discordant strand of coursesomething that took him further from himself, even as it
is no doubt (mis)read by many as greater fealty, or convergence upon an inner core. Presumably, the
extent of an individuals pathology dictates the distance false coordinates loom from true dead center.
Mind you, Im not diagnosing poor Scott herebut merely suggesting how psychological tics can
disfigure or occlude indigenous artistic voice.
In a similar vein, I wish to gently chide Walker (as I just know hes waiting for me to weigh in) by
saying that, with Bish Bosch, he has permitted the nooks and crannies of his psychological apparatus
(i.e. his taciturn, reclusive tendencies) to commandeer his poetic center. There is an unshakable
interpersonal and social component to art where the artist must endeavor to reach us as we will not do
all the reaching on our own. Every relationship is hard work. Self-absorption is a failed tactic, in art no
less than in love. In short, Walker is succeeding, devilishly well, at keeping himself to himself. Each
release finds him more withheld to the point where the solipsism on Bish Bosch becomes deafening.
Were still here Scott, some of us anyway, and we are not all store-room dummies. Now, while you still
have the chops (and you do), can you please put your back into a fucking song?
Music, and the watery-flat mp3s it wafts in on these days, is no less a consumable than are hot dogs;
whereas show business is still an old-school shrew that hangs on through all manner of calamity and
stricken-auteur-pose. In the Show Business for Dummies book, there are no Scott Walker references.
Judy and Mickey however have their very own chapters. So yes, were light years from Kansas, land of
unabashed show-biz lights and colors. Walkers not to blame for the culture slippage. Hes just one of
many artists, a chronicler, who elects to provide a narrowing window where we might still press our
noses against the studio glass and imagine music being produced about something and for someone.
If Scott Walker is, as his art seems to imply, the only one left alive, then the social dimension of
creativity is headed for a more reclusive or voyeuristic phase. In fairness, the very notion of audience
has become discredited or is now thought to consist of a dullard home-crowd hardly worth pitching to
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anymore. However this new frontier of music (should we even call it that) with neither antecedent nor
destination beyond itself, makes of Scott a dull Omega Man indeed, at least to these old-school ears.
Where there once was an abundance of showing (and the chaste belief in anothers active engagement),
there is now only watching a past master invoke insider-art from a roped-off distance. In the somnolent
words of the late David Foster Wallace, are you immensely pleased. Not I, Mr. Wallace. But Im getting
old and besides, I have a bench to warm.



NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George
Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet
whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His
new book "Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments" is
available here. Two essay collections, How Can We Make Your Power More
Comfortable? and The Frantic Force are spoken of here and here, respectively. A
collection of poetry Serpentrope is due out early 2014 from White Violet Press. He can
be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.