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anthonyeaston.livejournal.comYesterday, 2 am or so, and two friends of mine both artists, were gathered around the computer, watching kitsch videos on you tube. A perfect postmodern evening of fan created entertainment. Rosie and Elizabeth destroying each other, Martha Stewart consuming Lindsay Lohan like Grendel redone by Donna Karan, that Atlanta woman who likes to talk about her vagina, the bitch please queen, etc. I thought I was moving from camp atrocity to camp atrocity, so I moved in for the killer, one of two videos made for John Michael Cameron’s Alyssa Lies.
These videos, features images culled of childhood abuse, from crim. manuals, records of abuse, illustrations, just a general grasp and insert job made easier by google image search. Like God’s Will by Martina McBride or that Tim McGraw story about angels protecting orphaned children, I find Cameron’s song really funny. There is a magnificent and obvious heart pulling that is so lurid that it comes kitsch. The death of Alyssa, even the abuse of Alyssa does not remind me of how awful innocent children are, but of how much I don’t really like kids and how sentiment can be used to sell records. I am reminded of how people would gather on the docks of New York, begging for any news about Little Nell, and how still in England Wilde cut through Dickens moralizing with: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” Like in the Victorian populist fiction that it sprung from, kids die with an alarming regularity in country music. I keep thinking about songs about he deaths of children in the last 20 years are continuing a tradition that lost its usefulness. Like those pretty blonde kids that show up dead every few months on the cover of the tabloids, that are written about with an almost religious devotion.
The thing is, in the Victorian era, kids actually died, often before infancy. They did so in certain regions where country music was popular well into the second half of the 20th century. We can make fun of musicians who wrote and performed about death with such goopy melodrama, or we can give them a pass, because the songs are sad. They move us. I keep thinking about Dolly, because she manages the severity of the dead kid genre with the slick production of pop. She manages to make her songs, well legitimately earnest. This should be reason for some kind of camp reclaiming, and there has been an attempt or two. Like the punk band the Goblins, whose EP Songs of Child Abuse and Mortality made Famous by Dolly Patron anthologizes and recasts the best of them, as examples of populist theater that should be mocked: "Down From Dover," "I Get Lonesome By Myself," "Bloody Bones," "Malana," "Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark," "Me And Little Andy," "The Party," "Letter To Heaven.” Listening to the EP, I keep being reminded of the Sex Pistols remake of My Way. The sneer was a fuck you to the fat corpse of Frank Sinatra and his weepy self-reliance, but it were also a reclaiming, a punk colonizing of rotary lunches and martinis at 5.
The songs they covered were the most mawkish. They had child singsong choruses, ghosts, the uncanny, elements of folk legends, but also of the countrypolitian sound, of Nashville and television, it does something else. The Goblins do the most damage to Down From Dover, with its plain speaking; quotidian details and childe ballad narrative form were interrupted with hesitancies, quietness, lacunae and discussions of weather. Alyssa Lies has some similarities, but it is told in third instead of first, it names the child victim, and the details of the death are left unspoken. Dolly tells every detail of every death in those songs, she sings like she has had people die in front of her, and like she grew up with it. Reading Eric Wesibands essay on the song from Gruel Marcus’ book on balladry: …”a list of folk songs the siblings absorbed growing up…Barbry Allen, Eastbound Train, The Letter Edged in Black, Two Little Babes, Little Bessie, Letter to Heaven and Little Son Hugh”. He goes on to talk about how Little Man Hugh was a storysong about gypsies or Jews coming to kidnap and kill a child. It becomes the myth of explaining the unfairness of God by scapegoating the other.
I think, that the dead child stories that are sung in traditional ballads, are used to explain death. Those fan videos of the child abuse pictures and stats, could be considered in the same tradition, except the mystery comes through with Dolly, the death becomes an example of the cruelty of everyday life. There is no thought that by singing the song, Dolly would prevent anything from happening. There is an idea in Alyssa dies so others don’t have to. She becomes this weird redemptive force, like how the suffering of Will in Gods Will provides a way to cohere and save a usual heterosexual family. I think this might be why I am moved, though I recognize the instinct of the Goblins, when listening to Dolly, and sometimes I find the death of children hysterical, I think the more hard-handed the approach, the more I find it more ripe for that postmodern youtube rib kicking.
A couple of side notes:
I wonder if the kitsch that surrounds the anti abortion movement in the states: the tiny fetuses, the lapel pins of baby feet, performances like Lil' Markie (the creepy kid singing the lines “why did you kill me mommy”, a perennial favourite of the hyper aware, hyper ironic WFMU), are a way of attaching that Victorian sentiment to a political energy. I also wonder if one of the reasons why we have fewer mothers and less children dying is the expediency and safety of abortion. I wonder if the recent spate of Children’s trauma songs is about that.
If you want to see a really good example of spaces and lacunae in song that is used to talk about grief, McGraw’s Red Rag Top is fairly close to the methodology used by Dolly.
I wonder if this personal as well. My mother lost several children, and cannot listen to songs or read books that deal with violence towards Children. I find my instinct to mock songs about Divorce, even at the glurgy height (i.e. Dottie Smiths “Mommy, Can I still Call him Daddy”) much lessened, most likely because I am a child of a single mother.
These videos, features images culled of childhood abuse, from crim. manuals, records of abuse, illustrations, just a general grasp and insert job made easier by google image search. Like God’s Will by Martina McBride or that Tim McGraw story about angels protecting orphaned children, I find Cameron’s song really funny. There is a magnificent and obvious heart pulling that is so lurid that it comes kitsch. The death of Alyssa, even the abuse of Alyssa does not remind me of how awful innocent children are, but of how much I don’t really like kids and how sentiment can be used to sell records. I am reminded of how people would gather on the docks of New York, begging for any news about Little Nell, and how still in England Wilde cut through Dickens moralizing with: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.” Like in the Victorian populist fiction that it sprung from, kids die with an alarming regularity in country music. I keep thinking about songs about he deaths of children in the last 20 years are continuing a tradition that lost its usefulness. Like those pretty blonde kids that show up dead every few months on the cover of the tabloids, that are written about with an almost religious devotion.
The thing is, in the Victorian era, kids actually died, often before infancy. They did so in certain regions where country music was popular well into the second half of the 20th century. We can make fun of musicians who wrote and performed about death with such goopy melodrama, or we can give them a pass, because the songs are sad. They move us. I keep thinking about Dolly, because she manages the severity of the dead kid genre with the slick production of pop. She manages to make her songs, well legitimately earnest. This should be reason for some kind of camp reclaiming, and there has been an attempt or two. Like the punk band the Goblins, whose EP Songs of Child Abuse and Mortality made Famous by Dolly Patron anthologizes and recasts the best of them, as examples of populist theater that should be mocked: "Down From Dover," "I Get Lonesome By Myself," "Bloody Bones," "Malana," "Jeannie's Afraid Of The Dark," "Me And Little Andy," "The Party," "Letter To Heaven.” Listening to the EP, I keep being reminded of the Sex Pistols remake of My Way. The sneer was a fuck you to the fat corpse of Frank Sinatra and his weepy self-reliance, but it were also a reclaiming, a punk colonizing of rotary lunches and martinis at 5.
The songs they covered were the most mawkish. They had child singsong choruses, ghosts, the uncanny, elements of folk legends, but also of the countrypolitian sound, of Nashville and television, it does something else. The Goblins do the most damage to Down From Dover, with its plain speaking; quotidian details and childe ballad narrative form were interrupted with hesitancies, quietness, lacunae and discussions of weather. Alyssa Lies has some similarities, but it is told in third instead of first, it names the child victim, and the details of the death are left unspoken. Dolly tells every detail of every death in those songs, she sings like she has had people die in front of her, and like she grew up with it. Reading Eric Wesibands essay on the song from Gruel Marcus’ book on balladry: …”a list of folk songs the siblings absorbed growing up…Barbry Allen, Eastbound Train, The Letter Edged in Black, Two Little Babes, Little Bessie, Letter to Heaven and Little Son Hugh”. He goes on to talk about how Little Man Hugh was a storysong about gypsies or Jews coming to kidnap and kill a child. It becomes the myth of explaining the unfairness of God by scapegoating the other.
I think, that the dead child stories that are sung in traditional ballads, are used to explain death. Those fan videos of the child abuse pictures and stats, could be considered in the same tradition, except the mystery comes through with Dolly, the death becomes an example of the cruelty of everyday life. There is no thought that by singing the song, Dolly would prevent anything from happening. There is an idea in Alyssa dies so others don’t have to. She becomes this weird redemptive force, like how the suffering of Will in Gods Will provides a way to cohere and save a usual heterosexual family. I think this might be why I am moved, though I recognize the instinct of the Goblins, when listening to Dolly, and sometimes I find the death of children hysterical, I think the more hard-handed the approach, the more I find it more ripe for that postmodern youtube rib kicking.
A couple of side notes:
I wonder if the kitsch that surrounds the anti abortion movement in the states: the tiny fetuses, the lapel pins of baby feet, performances like Lil' Markie (the creepy kid singing the lines “why did you kill me mommy”, a perennial favourite of the hyper aware, hyper ironic WFMU), are a way of attaching that Victorian sentiment to a political energy. I also wonder if one of the reasons why we have fewer mothers and less children dying is the expediency and safety of abortion. I wonder if the recent spate of Children’s trauma songs is about that.
If you want to see a really good example of spaces and lacunae in song that is used to talk about grief, McGraw’s Red Rag Top is fairly close to the methodology used by Dolly.
I wonder if this personal as well. My mother lost several children, and cannot listen to songs or read books that deal with violence towards Children. I find my instinct to mock songs about Divorce, even at the glurgy height (i.e. Dottie Smiths “Mommy, Can I still Call him Daddy”) much lessened, most likely because I am a child of a single mother.
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