Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
2.11
What Does Trance Need With Conflict?
by Travis Hedge Coke
The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds features significantly in The Invisibles, during Volume 2, and if I were to name a song without conflict, that ambient track might come up quicker in my mind than its backstory. Little Fluffy Clouds heavily samples from an interview with American musician, Rickie Lee Jones, samples they never cleared, which resulted both in a five thousand United States Dollar payout and Jones referring to the Orb as, “those fuckers.”
Tension hides in everything. Conflict is microcosmic and macrobiotic. The two of wands are on the same side of one tarot card.
It eats where it lives. We take unknowingly and knowingly.
It is not the total opposite which puts a thing in conflict, or even two things too close to the same. Conflict can arise when there is simply a disjunction of understanding.
Many of the characters in The Invisibles are seeking the same ultimate goals, even the same daily or nightly consequences. Members of the Invisibles or the Outer Church or the US military or the British government eat at equative restaurants based on their palettes and pocketbook. The diner in Texas suits an American billionaire, a British millionaire, and Jack and Fanny, English and Brazilian, who probably have the money in their pockets and that is it. That same diner would probably work for Colonel Friday and Mr Quimper would, at least, sit down in it, even if he did not eat from the menu.
The Invisibles and how much we feel there is conflict or there is only shadow play, can depend on the soundtrack we supply the action. Songs and bands, lyrics and tunes are presented throughout the comic, but we also sometimes listen to our own selections as we read, or as a culture of Invisibles heads, we adopt material on a communal agreement.
Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR, another album of buying brass sample by sample, is the official/unofficial soundtrack to The Invisibles Volume Three. Did Philip Bond or Grant Morrison declare that? Shelly Bond? Or, did someone at the old Nexus board make it up? It is true. It fits. Does not mean it is any less made up. Maybe I made it up, but I do not think so.
Like references to certain science fiction writers or Romantic poets, reference to art and artist in The Invisibles is about their context in the world, that art and artists exist, and anything beyond that resonance is as being the bass and the baseline as the overdub keyboards in a classic metal track.
The audience of The Invisibles is welcome to be ignorant of particular musicians or songs. We are free to mock the tastes or inclusions of any writer or artist, to reject mockery when it is presented.
Whether you hear David Watts or Psycho Killer during the invasion of the Dulce base is up to you. The fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fas scan either way. Each song, as a radio happenstance, brings its own cache of meanings, ironies, and entertainment value.
If you only know one, you are likely to pick that one, but if you know both?
Jim Crow and Ragged Robin share a bird in their names, named for things not birds.
The ouija bird spells. We know the language of ravens. Caw caw.
“Bang. Fuck. I’m dead.” Like in a movie with a soundtrack.
What song plays for you when you remember a movie?
What happens when a song is clearly referenced but you lack knowledge of it? How much is lost, or is gained by the absence of familiarity with Simply Red, Kula Shaker, or the Smiths? Do Root Doctaz sound more like Martina Topley-Bird or KRS-One? In my head, when I hear Root Doctaz, what I hear is between The Orb sampling Rickie Lee Jones and that maybe-faked magazine cover supposedly wrapped around Notorious B.I.G. rating various rappers. The one music video we see of theirs is a riff on an early episode of Doctor Who, a deeper cut reference, at the time, than even the Beastie Boys dive through Danger: Diabolik.
It should be important. It should be who they are. Who they are trying to reach, both musically and with their encoded messages and détournement. Are they a vodou version of ¡MAYDAY!, who rap about everything from raising kids right to fighting gorillas and zombies while high?
It is funny to watch Jack’s musical taste and points of reference shift over the years. His fronting with American gangsta rap, his tentative embrace of British dance music, that reference, towards the end of his life, to the Sex Pistols, which more than anything, just makes Jack feel, to me, like he got old.
Quoting the Sex Pistols is something you do when you’re old. A feeling not shared, by me, in regards to the Kinks, who are, arguably, the older act, in four to five different ways.
Fafafafa fafa fa fa.
“And all the girls in the neighbourhood
Try to go out with David Watts
“They try their best but can’t succeed
For he is of pure and noble breed”
David Watts – from which King Mob takes his catchphrase, “nice and smooth” – is a song about total envy and no small amount of homosexual yearning. The homosexuality is not at all hidden or obscured, but it was released in 1967, and like the Who’s I Am a Boy or, while the Beatles were masturbating together in hotel rooms, their covering Boys in clubs, it was treated as only slyly homosocial or accidentally gay. It is about the love a boy has for a boy who is free and gay and whom girls pursue but can never have, but yes, accidental. Surely. Except, of course, Ray Davies wrote it about a gay man he wanted to set his brother up with, and about a former head boy from his schooldays who he was obsessive about.
What you know changes what we are left, and what we do not know colors what we get. We never will be David Watts, but who could be?
We will never hear Root Doctaz. But, how could we?
*******
NEXT: Practical Techniques, vol. 1
And previously…
- Prologue/Series Bible
- Chapter One: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 1)
- Chapter Two: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 2)
- Chapter Three: Robin Roundabout
- Chapter Four: How Did Helga Get in Here?
- Chapter Five: Boy Our Embarrassment
- Chapter Six: Once I Was a Little Light
- Chapter Seven: Sacrificial Greed
- Chapter Eight: Dreams Like This
- Chapter Nine: Whose to Tell
- Chapter Ten: The Dead Weight
- Chapter Eleven: Non-Causal Time
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
Flying Cowboys. Rickie Lee Jones. Geffen. 1989.
Smash and Grab. ¡MAYDAY!. December, 2012.
The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld. The Orb. Big Life. 1991.