The Living and the Dead
Shane MacGowan, R.I.P.
The Pogues’ front man Shane MacGowan passed away this week, at the age of 65. He was a full 35 years younger than that horrible old war criminal who died a few hours before him, and for me, it was disconcerting to hear about their deaths so fast upon the heels of one another. Both of those men plunged their hands into history, but Kissinger’s hands came up bloody, and MacGowan’s were clean as a whistle, scrubbed in death of every possible defect. Indeed, the timing of their deaths was practically Catholic in its symbolism, since one of them cursed the world, and the other one seemed to be cursed himself - though I am not sure it counts as being cursed when, like Shane MacGowan, you leave the world so much better of a place then you found it.
Of course as always happens, the news of his death sent people rushing back to their Pogues records, and then to their keyboards to post all their favorite songs. It sent me there too, but somewhat reluctantly. I know this sounds weird, because I prize the Pogues work above almost all other music. And yet, there’s a small part of me that would be OK if I never heard any of it again.
Ridiculous, right? But the thing is, there are certain pieces of art - music, films, books and so on -- that I don't ever need to revisit. It's like they exist in my mind in a state of perfection, fragile and intact: bubbles that would pop if I looked at them again, because I remember not only every word or every note, but also what I felt like when I read or heard or saw them. You know the sort of thing I mean: Sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens on a hot July afternoon, eating my very first falafel and finishing "The Red and the Black." Listening to the record "Pink Frost" as the plane descends on Aukland. The song "Star Telegram," heard anywhere, any time...these are like little lost loves or something, such exquisite memories that it almost hurts me to remember, and chief among them - looming over it all in fact -- is the body of work of the Pogues. To quote John Cameron Mitchell: Remember Mrs. Lot and when she turned around?
The songs of the Pogues are like a huge open wound in my heart, so far above all other musics that I wouldn't even bother to put it on a list of my top ten anything because it exists in a space all its own. I don’t even remember how they entered my life, but I do recall I had a cassette with the words "Rum/Fell" on the cover. It was a C-90, which means it was curated, and I can just picture me now hunched over the record player, carefully dropping the needle on all my favorite tracks. Everything about that experience is now so old-fashioned, but children, listen: if in 1985 you didn't want to buy a record called "Rum, Sodomy and the Lash" with a cover like that one, then you, my friend, are lost to all romance. The title is a quote from Winston Churchill, who said it about the Royal Navy, and the picture is an altered version of Gericault’s painting The Raft of Medusa.
Back in the day when things like that mattered, I can recall poring over that cover, trying to figure out who was who on that terrible ship. The Pogues were clearly the enterprise of Irish pirates, out to revenge themselves on history, and the sound of their vengenance was cataclysmic. The tin whistle, the fiddles, the horns and the rhythm section…the crack in his voice, the muddy Irish vocal fry, and most of all the articulation: there are individual words pronounced on these records that contain little novels in each plosive or glottal stop. If like me, this kind of lyric-based music consumes your mind whenever it enters it, then you had to be very careful where you were when the Pogues came on, because they could instantly carry you away with them to all kinds of startling places, and not only might that place not be comfortable, it might not even be in this century. Mentally, you might discover you’d just boarded a bus or a train or a boat and been carried off to the New World; you’d come to and find that you were desperately missing home - when of course, you’d never actually left.
Because it was so evocative, I could never listen to the Pogues unless it was for a long and concentrated stretch at a time, so Rum/Fell lived in the cassette player of my Toyota Tercel, along with the sacred ashtray hording the ashes left by singer Paul Westerberg. At that time, I didn't drive that car very much except to go places that were pretty far away, and as I drove, I would listen to that one tape over and over, and the stories and the songs and the sounds of it populated my brain in a way that I think no other music ever did fore or since.
At their best, Pogues songs render the lost parts of the world we know visible, from the wounded of World War I to the cells of the Maze prison. They taught me many as well, like what the effect of the repeal of the corn laws and how the chaos of Gallipoli went down. At their finest, MacGowan’s voice can make you understand exactly what it felt like to be a convict transported to Australia, a whaler rounding Cape Horn, or a Skid Row souse. Not only that, but the band’s body of work makes one of the strongest anti-war statements made in the 20th century: it speaks to and for all subjegated people, because you could read both "Goodbye to All That" and "The 900 Days" and still not understand what being in a war is like as well as you do if you listen to “A Pair of Brown Eyes” or “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” Similarly, you can visit the Tenement Museum in New York City and not really feel inside what it's like to be an Irish immigrant as well as you do after every single hearing "Fairy Tale of New York.”
Their records have taught me so much about war and religion, famine and poverty, love and hate, and so much more: I actually think that listening to the Pogues has made me a better person. After all, there’s a part at the end of the James Joyce collection the Dubliners, when his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end upon the living and the dead. MacGowan’s soul swooned slowly as well, and thanks to him, now mine does too.