That’s right, folks, the most disturbing Halloween EVER! From now until Halloween, the Popdose staff are going to be thumbing through their record collections in search of the music that gives them the worst case of the heebie-jeebies. In this installment, Jack Feerick looks back at a John Cale album from 1982. —Anthony Hansen
I came to John Cale by way of Alan Moore. That sounds pretty roundabout, but I figure it’s not uncommon. See, Moore used a (misquoted and misattributed) Cale line as the epigram for the mind-blowing final chapter of Watchmen, and Watchmen has probably sold more copies over the years than any John Cale record has, ever. So there must be other poor souls out there who closed the book on that final panel — impossibly stark, just white text on black with the icon of a clock, hands pointing to midnight — and then flipped back to the indicia to find the source of the quote.
It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world to die in.
Because, you know, you read a line like that, a line that in itself seems to offer up (not unlike the ending of Watchmen) both a bleak judgment of the human condition and a steely glint of compassion. I was aware of Cale only by reputation — I had not yet heard the Velvet Underground, though of course I knew of them, and I knew that Cale’s solo work tended to veer between prettily orchestrated chamber pop and screaming maniacal rock, and that his lyrical worldview tended to be dark, bloody, and perverse. Yeah, okay. But a line like that begs for some context, is what I’m saying. (And, y’know, Alan Moore knows the score.) And so, in time, I hunted down a cheap cassette of 1982’s Music for a New Society — a title that seemed, again, both hopeful and ominous — took it home, slipped it into my Walkman in my bedroom, in the dark, late at night, to listen while I settled down to sleep.
It was weeks before I found the courage to listen to it again. Hell, it was a couple of days before I found the courage to sleep again. This was — well, it was scary stuff.
Now, “scary” covers such a broad range of emotion, from the enjoyable tingle of watching a horror movie to utter pants-shitting terror, and it shades into sadness or anger at either end. A ranting madman can be scary — but so can a whisper in a quiet house. Almost all effective music has a certain spooky quality (it’s no accident we speak of a catchy melody as being “haunting”), but self-consciously “scary” music is hard to pull off without turning into wretched self-parody (see the oeuvre of Brian “I’m the Devil! BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!” Warner, of the popular beat combo Marilyn Manson).
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