Steel in the Age of Angels: Flying to the Future with Goodbye to Language
IASPM CA
By Sarah Chodos
I have been listening to an especially beautiful instrumental album titled Goodbye to Language (2016). It is a collaboration between Daniel Lanois and Rocco DeLuca. There are only two instruments: DeLuca on the lap steel and Lanois on the pedal steel. What is incredible about the album is the diversity of sound created by two instruments, transcending genres and communicating, of course, without words.
Now I am listening to as much of Rocco DeLuca’s work as I can, but I was already familiar with Daniel Lanois’s work; it has been very important to me throughout my life. Lanois is a musician and record maker who has seamlessly blended languages and genres in his work and has a very thoughtful and dynamic approach to the technological reproduction of music.
From his bio, Soul Mining: A Musical Life (2010), we know that Daniel Lanois spoke only French until age 10, when his parents separated and his mother moved him and his siblings from Quebec to Ontario. The move meant not only learning a new language but also being exposed to radio from Buffalo and Detroit where he became fascinated with the soul and Motown scenes in those cities and with the very concept of recorded music. Prior to moving, most of the music he had heard was traditional French-Canadian music played by his family members.
I want to look more closely at three interdependent factors which have influenced Lanois's life and work: technology, language, and the merging of and creation of new genres of music. These factors are interdependent, on both a specific and a general level: technology created a more connected world which would merge languages and genres of music (and create new genres). These factors are also interesting in light of the work of three European philosophers: Walter Benjamin, his colleague in the Frankfurt School Theodor Adorno, and Michel Foucault.
In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin expresses his concern about a Marinetti-style futurism which sees beauty in the physical destruction of the human through technology — the humans conquering nature, of which they are, ultimately, a part. But he also felt that art would connect with its true nature through technology’s ability to free it from its own mechanisms, the rituals from which art developed. The tragedy of the human and art becomes the dialectic of flesh and machine, to play on the name of the album preceding Goodbye to Language.
Adorno (Aesthetic Theory, 1970) was inspired by Benjamin’s work but had a different view on the changing role of art in society. Adorno felt that art’s separation from ritual was not new; in fact, that is what makes art what it is. Adorno felt the concern lay in the new genres of music that were emerging as a result of both connectivity and technological reproduction. Adorno saw jazz, in particular, as more structured than classical. Hence, the subjectivity of the artist and the subjectivity with which the art would speak were diminished.
Foucault (The Order of Things, 1966) spoke not so much about music as about language. He believed that once languages moved towards unity, they would lose their objectivity and take on a subjectivity of their own. This would then diminish the human’s subjectivity in relation to an objective way of thinking, understanding, and relating to the world.
When we are accustomed to speaking one language, that language gives us means of thinking, understanding, and relating to the world. When we become aware of other languages, we not only acquire the ability to communicate with more people, but we also become aware of the existence of slightly different frameworks for understanding the world — and of the very concept of language.
Adorno and Foucault both deal in matters of objectivity and subjectivity: the structures around and within which we exist and our relation to those structures. Are they fixed and inanimate or do they allow for movement and change? Adorno’s perspective seems a bit funny, in retrospect, that classical music is less structured than any other, but that was the music with which Adorno was familiar, so the structure seemed objective. Music, like language, was moving towards unity and taking on its own subjectivity. And the unity was made possible with technology. New technology was facilitating people hearing different genres of music as well as different languages, and this made apparent that different genres of music, like different languages, have different structures.
Both Adorno and Benjamin send the message that the art we create is bigger than us and potentially dangerous when it runs out of our control. Foucault sends the message that what seems to be bigger than us is really of our creation.
Foucault, whose career began a few decades after those of Benjamin and Adorno, believed post-enlightenment Europe had developed some ideas about what a human was and that this conception of the human was neither inherent nor innocuous, that it both perpetuated and was perpetuated by violence.
The events in Europe in and around the World Wars facilitated the Frankfurt writers in seeing the evil in Europe’s “enlightened” systems of thought, but they could not completely see outside of those systems. Whereas the direction art was taking seemed to represent the epitome of enlightenment, it was also the beginning of the end.
Adorno (Aesthetic Theory, 1970) speaks of the conflicting relationship of art to changes in society at the time:
“The revolt of art, teleologically posited in its ‘attitude to objectivity’ toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art, it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it.”
In passing through an evolving Marxist perspective and into a Foucaultian one, the revolt of the human becomes the revolt against the human. If what Adorno and Benjamin said was true — that the art we create can transcend our sense of subjectivity as well as its dependence on us, its creators, and that we can see beauty in our own destruction — then art will be fine; the human, not so much. But where do we go from here?
Several decades later, across the ocean, Lanois also speaks of the transcendent nature of art in recollecting a conversation he had with Billy Bob Thornton (Soul Mining, 2010):
“As much as we are driven by the wonderful vehicles of music and film, we are still only trying to burn out the anger…”
Here Lanois is separating the drive to create art from the drive to burn out anger. In this manner, art is not so much a revolt against anything as a drive towards something else, though Lanois still gives credit to the anger as a driving force, too. Although this art must seem to be a product of the anger, anger stemming from within the human, it transcends that anger.
The specifics of his anger may differ from that of Foucault or the Frankfurt writers, but the drive away from an unacceptable past is shared.
I am reminded of a passage from another Benjamin essay, “On the Concept of History.” Here Benjamin talks about Klee's “Angel” painting, which he sees as a metaphor for history:
“An angel is depicted there who looks as though he is about to distance himself from something he is staring at...he would like to pause for a moment so fair (...) to awaken the dead, and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them.”
The anger, the unacceptability of the past, is the storm blowing in, but, in Lanois’ case, music and film, the very forms of art that Benjamin spoke of, constitute another driving force, so the angel of history faces forward and looks to the future.
Not to say there is a silver lining to pain and anger or that people need to "move on," but it is on everyone to learn from the collective pain of the past and work towards a different future. This can mean questioning who we are and how we relate to the world. With art, this process can be beautiful.
On his album with The Burden, Mercy, Rocco DeLuca sings, "A father can give you his words, but words are just symbols for things, and after he's gone, that's when you learn how to sing."
I listened to Goodbye to Language and then went back to listen to what was probably my introduction to Lanois when I was a small child, his pedal steel playing on Raffi's “Listen to the Horses” (1977). In understanding the importance of the pedal steel to Lanois, I read his discussion of taking pedal steel lessons from Bob Lucier as a teenager:
“He was kind and wise and I felt a fatherly embrace in his guidance. When you don’t grow up with a father around, you notice these fatherly moments, even from strangers”
As a child who did not lose contact with either of her parents except when we all do (such as when they went were to working or went to sleeping) I remember finding “Listen to the Horses” to be very comforting (particularly in those times of separation, but other times, too).
Basically, a momentary parental embrace from a wandering stranger from the future who reminds you that the world is moving but that this is OK. I realize now that I have taken this with me throughout my life.
I dropped out of high school and moved to Toronto to pursue a career as a punk musician. While there, I made many friends who had built meaningful artistic connections through various post-secondary schools, so I decided to try that route. I studied psychology and fine arts cultural studies at York, but not until I was very heavy with my first child. I took some detours to other schools and other disciplines, eventually working as a counsellor in shelters and social service agencies while still trying to have a creative project on the go here and there.
For me there was no division between right and wrong, us and them, social service workers and social service users, social science and art.
I have little use for the idea that we can completely "know" the human condition through science and develop one formula to "help" everyone, that you can ever help anyone without looking inward at yourself, or that people who know certain truths of how society functions because of lived experience are the ones who need the most help, rather than being the most knowledgeable. Looking to the future will mean looking outside of our subjectivity in relation to the perceived objectivity of anyone else, or the world.
In The Making of Le Noise: the new album from Neil Young, Daniel Lanois says, “I'm trying to find ways to enter the future with sonics...I want to build new sounds for the future.”
In a Question and Answer video, Lanois talks about some key elements of the process of making Goodbye to Language. It is a very different album from LeNoise — as so many of Lanois’s projects are so very different from one another — but finding more new ways to enter the future is a connecting theme:
“And the deeper we got into this steel guitar music, I realized that it held a lot of emotion in it, what I’m talking about is this record, Goodbye to Language...my buddy Rocco DeLuca and I jumped on our instruments. This was after a European tour where we sang a lot of songs and we were happy to get back to the nest to just play and I felt at the time that we had a communication that was significant and I wanted to make sure that we captured it in the recording studio. What we did was we performed long jams, sometimes I called out chords, and it meant that everything was fresh and there was some kind of courage at the basis of it.”
Some important elements of this process are discussed here. The album contained no language and, as such, reached a deeper level of communication unhindered by the structure of language. While the album’s press release appropriately praised it for “compositional rigour,” the two musicians also just let the process evolve — Lanois states they initially did not even set out to make an album, they were just jamming. And they certainly did not set out to make an album of a particular genre. This method, of facing forward, of not being constrained by narrative, permitted this courage to show itself. Finally, while the process might seem, deceptively, to be low-tech, it is important to remember that it is technology that has allowed them to invite anyone who is interested into the receiving end of the communication process. How will we respond?
I return to “Listen to the Horses.” The words seem almost to be an afterthought, as Raffi’s vocals are minimal. But they do offer a direction and it is important: “listen.”
Works Cited:
Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. Les Mots et les Choses (1966), Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Order of Things, Alan Sheridan (trans.), New York: Vintage, 1973.
Lanois, Daniel, and Keisha Kalfin. Soul Mining: A Musical Life. New York, Faber and Faber Inc., 2010.
Raffi. "Listen to the Horses." More Singable Songs, Troubadour, 1977.
Acknowledgements:
Thanks to 27Transmissions for their support during the early stages of this piece.
Sarah Chodos is a former independent musician, currently working as a freelance writer and editor. She has also worked for over a decade as a counsellor and outreach worker, which she still does part-time.