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Waltzer
BSN 973859
Somewhere at the other end of life, buried within early adolescence, are thresholds: tipping points where the child is put away and the burgeoning adult steps forwards. The modern Fairground is a psychological equivalent of the Forest in fairytales. It is a place of danger, a place in which to lose oneself, take risks, be cheated, be preyed upon. The Fairground, a forest of mirrors, lights and gaudy deceptions, is a homeless, fantastical place, where the moral jurisdiction of mummy-and-daddy breaks down and where desire holds sway: here, writ large and in neon, is greed, competition, cheap thrill, sexual licence. McPherson writes: “King in this arena is the Waltzer – dark and wavy undercover – just round the corner where the bad girls stand staring at the guys who spin the cars all blue eyeshadow and chewing gum nodding to androgynous Bowie and Ronson and Sweet – losing the downbeat in the screams and swirls and turns…..”
The impulses of the Fairground and popular music coordinate all too well. Sudden and irruptive; the allure, the merciless coercion of eye and ear, drive, energy. The parading of sexual craving… and again, here it is, a little way into Waltzer there is another troubling encounter; not with the dead, but, in the midst of a piece of modernist music, the piano breaks out into a shocking – no, a frankly embarrassing syncopated chordal riff. Is it an off-cut from a musical? It is probably too composed, too sophisticated to be that. Or perhaps this is a theme tune from an American TV show? It shares with that genre a bland, offensive inoffensiveness. What breaks here is a taboo. Modern concert music and “New Music” (always the struggle to know what to call the stuff) keeps out the voice, the sound, the psychological and ideological connotations of massified musics. If modernism is anti-popularism, or at least a cynicism with respect to popular, commodified music, then post-modernism lets that anxiety go. But such a move, one hastens to add, is no cheerful celebration of plurality. It is a bonfire of values. Wreckage.
© Martin Dixon University of Glasgow