Niche by Momus

Author:Momus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Actually, this is the beginning of a concept album released in 1982 by the Happy Family. It’s called The Man on Your Street, and subtitled Songs from the Career of the Dictator Hall. The woman goes to Lake Geneva, abandoning her salesman husband and her teenage son. Hall becomes a neofascist demagogue, a dictator. Sam, the son of the salesman, meets Maria, Hall’s estranged and abused daughter. They become lovers, join the Red Brigades, and set out on a mission which culminates in Hall’s assassination, one early spring day in Turin. This all unfolds in nine songs. My plays don’t have songs in them. That would very much spoil the music of the language, I feel.

Roland Barthes: The Happy Family is named after a line N wrote in one of his sociology assignments, a semiological analysis of a single edition of The Radio Times: “Myth thrives by incest, but there’s always room for the reader in the happy family.” In the group, the relationship between bassist Davy Weddell and Neill Martin, the Happy Family’s new synth player, is—to paraphrase Saussure—arbitrary. Neill is clever (he knows the names of chords) but cruel and competitive: he adapts the bass player’s surname until the sound-image shifts to “Widdle,” which brings with it an unsavoury series of connotations. Davy responds by launching a campaign to cast Neill as an interloper and a neurotic. Up to this point Davy has been—as one review of their album puts it sarcastically—“the group’s glittering prize.” His sheer inarticulacy has given him the power of proletarian otherness in the eyes of N, who is keen to escape the bourgeois doxa. But Neill’s intelligence, dark ectomorphic looks, and warm, ingratiating manner are seductive. Visually, he has some of the appeal of the young Paul Haig, whose photo used to appear in the music press above the ironic caption: “Is this man too talented to live?” Neill’s story is that he’s a classical piano genius whose hands are slowly being crippled by arthritis. He is interested in the near-death research of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. His girlfriend Gillian is an art student. From the perspective of the other musicians in the group, what makes Neill most dangerous is the fact that he owns machines—a Korg M1 synth, a string machine, a clavinet that used to belong to Midge Ure of Slik, a drum machine—that could make them redundant. Like Paul Haig, the Happy Family could decide overnight to abandon drums and wires and become a “synthpop project.” It’s not as if the others write anything, and the more the group rehearses the worse—and the louder—the music seems to sound, with Ronnie Torrance bashing away on the floor toms and everyone else turning up to compete. There have been a few concerts—one in Glasgow, for instance, supporting Jah Wobble from PiL—but not enough to feed five hungry mouths. The Happy Family is unsustainable. A family or a pop group is a good example of a syntagm, which can be imagined as a sentence comprising various paradigmatic elements that are notionally in competition with each other.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.