XVII/VI/MMX



When Oscar Wilde arrived in the United States aboard the SS Arizona back in 1882, he reputedly told a customs officer that he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” When Sebastian Horsley arrived in 2008, he humbly acknowledged that he had “nothing to declare but Oscar Wilde’s genius,” before being promptly sent back home to England. Whilst on tour promoting his memoirs, Dandy in the Underworld, Horsley - who is perhaps best known for having himself crucified in the name of “beauty” - was denied entry into the U.S. on grounds of moral turpitude: a wide net that encompasses everything from fornication to simply being a public nuisance. And whilst crimes of fashion are not normally deemed qualifying acts, the customs incident is believed to be incited by Horsley’s appearance of top hat, three-piece suit, and nail polish. His reputation had indeed preceded him; the bon mot voyage may have been cut prematurely but the triumph was all Horsley’s… “I am the only thing of value in this country and I am removing it immediately.”

After Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842-1843), the dandy author became somewhat synonymous – or rather notorious – as being a champion of socialism and ‘friend of the People’. By the publication of Horsley’s ‘unauthorised autobiography’, however, he was no longer such an enthusiastic preacher. Horsley was far more concerned with the melodrama of life; too titillated by the lurid back alleys, the prisons and the brothels he haunted. He loved the masquerade of his daily fare just as he did the exposure to society’s nocturnal underworld. The Regency once held scorn over the bourgeoisie for its relationship between the fashionable ‘high’ and the criminal ‘low’; one class that esteems itself above the law, and the other that finds itself too frequently below it. Yet Horsley recognised a likeness in their libertinism and made himself a welcome guest at both parties. He had entered The Harlot’s House and found a home away from home.

‘My tastes are to the tacky and tasteless. I like the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the low-brow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the under-privileged, the exclusive clubs of the excluded masses. I waltz through life with one foot in the grave, the other in Woolworth’s.’

Every anarchist dandy has crumbled into his own ruins and so Horsley’s fate was perhaps inescapable. Like the sunflower with which the dandy identifies himself, Horsley’s impulsive radiance heralded an equally sudden collapse at the age of 47. It is believed that how a man dies shows his true character as much as how he lives. If that be so then Horsley’s end was rather apt; he died of a heroin and cocaine overdose, alone in his Meard Street flat (a brothel in all but name). There is no such thing as innocent or mischievous pleasures. There are only pleasures. That is all. 

Horsley did not want to be a man; he wanted to be a mannequin. His life was a performance in search of an audience and now, the first anniversary of his passing, he has achieved that aim. Now he has become a work of art.

Casablanca

This Must Be The Place

One of the trends on display at last year’s Cannes festival was of EuroAmerican mash-ups that were to receive varyingly felicitous receptions. Not least so was Paolo Sorrentino’s return with This Must Be The Place: a road trip movie featuring Sean Penn as an aged rock star-turned-Nazi hunter, set, for the most part, in Ireland - for absolutely no reason whatsoever. 

Having kept himself in hermit-like retirement for two decades, Penn’s Cheyenne - an overgrown oddball somewhere between Robert Smith, an old lady, and a fey adolescent – finally rouses himself in a bid to track down the concentration camp guard who served as his late father’s enduring obsession. This is a tale of catharsis and redemption, just as Sorrentino’s earlier works have all been in their own way, with atonement for the pain of the past being sought in the unlikeliest of places. 

It is a picture that seems to have first been guided by a simple premise, of a displaced Cheyenne coming home to his family and facing his own personal, and musical, demons. That Sorrentino then interweaves a plot of loss, revenge, and the Holocaust (not to mention a frankly jolting cameo by David Byrne) is something of an absurd miracle. As it stands, This Must Be The Place is a baffling, oddity of a movie; enough of a curiosity item, perhaps, to secure its future cult status.

M.T.V.

Morrissey

It is the modus operandi of all dandies to be deeply contradictory. If they are flamboyantly decadent and fashionable, they are also reviled and insufferable. And with his fastidious devotion to style and culte de soi-même, Steven Patrick Morrissey has undertaken the role no differently. He has played the glamorous and the gauche, the pop star and the anti-pop star, the outspoken celebrity and the reclusive introvert, the aesthete and the icon of ordinariness.  He has single-handedly popularised the creased brow, and second-handedly affirmed that a wit that transcends all else is still no criterion for decency. A bastion of l’étranger; his is the voice of the healthily deprived, and the healthily depraved.

And yet, to say that Morrissey is your traditional dandy would be an injustice to both parties, for it belies the ‘carnivalesque’ side of his persona, which is at once in tension with his dandyism and yet equally essential to his vocal style. While his verse is nimble, melodious and plangent there is also a reflexive protest involved in its delivery. His baroque ululations dip and swerve in search of an alternative strategy for communication. That distinct, operatic yodelling being a desperate attempt to express his interiority without language; it is, ultimately, the sound of feeling straining to communicate itself unclothed; primal and pure. This carnivalesque spirit is also apparent in his manhandling of language; in his bold stretching out of words, far beyond their customary length or shape, and squashing of words and syntax into conventional spaces of popular music.  And what beautiful words they are... Even those which would most rather be spat. Borne out of complete physical necessity, they tug at the straps of our own inner straightjackets. Why do you smile at people who you'd much rather kick in the eye?

Alas, Morrissey's aristocratic aversion to work is now finding him unhappily without it. It is with great sadness and little surprise to learn that no imperious record label has yet to blow the dust off his unreleased tenth studio album, which has long been ready to flutter wildly against the bars. And of course, no man of wit preserves his integrity by living in retirement. It is his duty to go purposefully among the bores of this world to remind them of his superiority. He must be given a stage to impart his epigrammatic gift; to miraculously invert the most conventional and apparently reasonable values so as to reveal to us the perfect sense of their antitheses. Morrissey, by his very nature, is terrible at being dull and criminally wasted when unseen. For the time being, we may only attempt to endure without him…

Insatiable

'I got a Jones, Martha,
Oh yeah, it be like this...'

Justice

Bible-dance outfit Justice recently unveiled their long gestating second album, Audio, Video, Disco. It is that record every artist who has romanced the big leagues has had to make: the comeback. You’ve read the hype numerous times before, with hope and hidden fear, headlines proclaiming “the return of your favourite [fill in genre] heroes” and “the second coming.” You may remember The Stone Roses, in a particularly admirable move, even calling their sophomore effort just that. After the five-year wait that followed their eponymous debut, however, The Second Coming couldn’t have proved itself more of a false prophecy. Surrendering their hazy-pop sound in favour of Led Zeppelin-lite blues rock, that album’s legacy stands only to document the death throes of a once great and adored band; one that almost destroyed them.

By all accounts, it is rare nowadays for new artists to offer us a good mystery to unravel; a discovery to explore; a zeitgeist for us to adopt and fight for. Yet 2007's † was arguably such a product. A stunningly immediate record – propulsive, over the top, and era-defining - it also raised a conundrum: How do you top, or even follow, something so unabashedly big? Historically, success has had a strange way of changing how artists relate to their talents, their appeal, and the newfound expectations of them. In the wake of their first album, Pablo Honey, Radiohead virtually drove themselves crazy trying to ensure that their second had the next ‘Creep’ on it. It was only when producer John Leckie persuaded them to road-test some of their new songs with a string of dates did the band have a breakthrough. For that, we were blessed with The Bends. Of course, it’s never always so easy, nor artistically warranted. The graveyard of pop is littered with the corpses of bands struck down by the crippling self-analysis that comes with the pressure to emulate what it was that worked in the first place.

When the Klaxons recently bowed to the pressures of their label to re-record their follow-up with more hits, they were treading a well-worn path indeed. Whereas The Stone Roses were able to milk Geffen’s goodwill for the best part of a decade, the Klaxons have had to deal with a different beast entirely; an industry so in flux it was already in recession before the rest of the economy hit the skids. According to singer and bassist, Jamie Reynolds, Polydor gave the band just over a month to pen something more pop, less “dense” and not so “psychedelic” - in short, not the album they’d made. Inspiration much? Of course, following up any cult-classic can be an onerous task at the best of times. More than once will you come across the words “sell out” in search of an online ‘fan’ consensus of what eventually became Surfing The Void. And the worst of it is, the historical verdict on that album will most likely be offset by the tedious strictures the band faced from their paymasters whilst making it. We should be thankful, then, that Ed Banger is no Polydor; Audio, Video, Disco may have arrived much sooner, but would have sounded far less interesting otherwise...

If you haven’t caught the whole album yet you would have sampled it in the first apéritif, ‘Civilization’, and perhaps more so in the second single and title track. Hear it? That’s the sound of backlash. Yet it’s also the sound of a new direction; of a band trying its utmost not to emulate themselves; a band scratching away at its own veneer. So much nostalgia comes with the passing of four years, and such changes, however great or small, can prove critical for a band’s audience. Not that Justice seem to be paying much attention. Audio, Video, Disco is unmistakably a gambler’s record; purposefully straying from the overly familiar sample-heavy noize that formed much of †'s success for a more laid-back, ‘70s dad rock approach. As such, you’ll struggle to find your next hit of ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ amongst these 11 new tracks. That isn't to say that the Parisian duo have delivered anything less than what you'd expect from them, however. Only now there's a newfound sense of risk that pervades their sound.You only need listen to the first few strains of the operatic, opening volley ‘Horsepower’ for immediate recognition of its cinematic scope; this is an event album, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. And yes, it is truly something to behold.

Artists who stumble in their later work often do so because they have grown into preconceptions and all of its suffocating boundaries. Some just remove themselves entirely from it and offer a curveball so bizarre it seems almost non-canon. Hello MGMT’s Congratulations. Yet for the most part, artists listen to what is said about them and become, for lack of a better term, musically farmed. You can’t condemn them for it; they are human too. It’s just a far cry from what at first may have been some friends mucking around in a studio or bedroom and having fun. Indeed, naivety can be the essence of great art; it can be a skill. There are mistakes in a beginner’s work but these are itself a kind of quality. As it stands, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay have yet to iron out the creases of their greatness. “We do music in a really naive way,” they told Pitchfork recently, “We're not always fond of well-painted paintings, and [the] same goes with music. We make music without knowing much about the real process of writing or recording, and that makes us do things that are not logical or well-done in a strict technical way.” There is a beautiful irony, you could say naivety, to this considering that arena rock is a démodé genre known for its technical proficiency. The concept of a pastoral daytime record that is also intrinsically electronic is a conceptual underpinning that alone deserves to be commended. Electronica has always been for the night, the cities, the clubs. It's too lazy to critique Justice, as many are doing, of simply delving into the sounds of yore, especially when they are progressing into their own realm with such formidable force as this. Maybe it will be recognised as such by the time they finally get to LP3.

T.L.N.D.

Wilde

The Regency period was a time that swung between extreme elegance and sodden brutality; exoticism and excess; an age when William Wilberforce was denouncing the slave trade as Beau Brummell was denouncing an imperfect cravat with equal gravity. As such, it was also an age that saw Oscar Wilde promote the life of Jesus without recognising his divinity, whilst blending Christianity with his own self-realised Aestheticism without a hint of facetiousness. It was Christ who showed Wilde that sorrow is the ultimate type of existence; that by turning one’s life into a compelling subject for aesthetic appreciation, he could transform his into the most perfect work of art, the most sublime of tragedies.

By uniting personality with artistic perfection, creating himself out of his own divine imagination and imparting beautiful words, Christ had fashioned himself as the supreme individualist. He proved once and for all the power of personal magnetism and what it can accomplish. His life was the prototype for all dandies; one that affected others through its very existence rather than through any efforts of work or persuasion. Christ sympathised with sinners as Wilde sympathised with criminals; he was a precursor of the Romantics and a master of paradox; he was the first modern artist.

Alas, Wilde enticed his age to crucify him, and of course it was acquiescent in such matters as other ages. Style is when they’re running you out of town and you make it look as if you’re leading the parade. Wilde wanted the public to see him pilloried – with the court at the foot of the cross - for like all dandies worth their name, his belief in the ultimate autonomy of martyrdom was his sword, his shield, and his crown. He wanted his audience to see him, like Christ, as a male heroine; a passive public sufferer. Indeed, after being taken into custody, passive resignation would be Wilde's only performance. Self-pity hereby became the dandy’s own mesmerising litany - their grief being too exorbitant, too pure for this world. And so by making his life a spectacle, Wilde had emasculated himself just as Christ had done before him, leaving nothing but his own glorious image.

Living in a self-made tempest for all to see, the true dandy finds solace from mediocrity; Christ was crucified for our sins, Wilde for our gaze; both for our adoration.

‘The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It will always worship you… Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.’

Chivers