'Trouble Songs'

A musicological poetics

Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics is an investigation of the appearance of the word trouble in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. It is a book-length project, comprised of three parts, each broken into modular chapters, or Trouble Songs, which build on one another as a series of albums, but are also intended as remixable and programmable singles. What follows is a compilation that spans those three parts. The project looks at the ways “trouble” signifies (and resists signifying) all kinds of trouble — from bad luck and disaffection to infidelity, impotence, destitution, and the specter of death. In doing so, it explores the role of the trouble singer, who performs a particular, nuanced role in the communities through which s/he (and/or the song) passes. The trouble singer can be imagined as a modern troubadour who sings not of courtly love, but of the modern (and postmodern) condition, and of all that ails singer and audience. This figure is not quite a soothsayer, but an invoker of “trouble” in place of trouble — the performance is in this sense a ritual transformation. The song is a spell that conjures trouble in a temporary form that can be dis-spelled, if only for the length of the song. Thus, the trouble singer can speak the unspeakable by replacing it with a generic (and relatable) term. Meanwhile, the trouble singer delivers a sense of (quarantined) authenticity that is also guarded: the community is shielded from trouble by “trouble,” and “trouble” hides the singer’s trouble as well.

This poetics of trouble is grounded in readings of particular songs, poems, and cultural events. The three parts of the full-length, unpublished manuscript Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics break down (with exceptions and variations) like this: part 1 establishes essential concepts, part 2 focuses on reading individual songs, and part 3 explores Trouble Songs that do not include the word “trouble.” The following samples the full manuscript, usually in original sequence, though the song readings are threaded through the selection to help suture gaps and present a unified remix. Where “trouble” does not appear, trouble often follows.


Trouble Songs: An invocation
 

But before long, the words lost their sense completely, becoming little more than a means to regulate breath — which, she soon supposed, was as good a use for them as any.

Ted Mooney, The Same River Twice

 

Denaturalization of one’s personal and cultural premise.

Caroline Bergvall, “Middling English”

 

Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days / It seems like trouble going to follow me to my grave

Bessie Smith, “Downhearted Blues”

 

Language is not only a means for saying, language is what we are saying. Record, we say, and we mean album, or we mean vinyl, or we mean history. Let the record show.[1] That we say record and not CD, tape, album, or document is integral to what we are saying. We place ourselves in history, and we place history in ourselves when we use particular language.[2]

History exists as Trouble Song and is troubled by its[3] representation. Distinctions between Trouble Songs collapse into versions, iterations, variations, and interpretations. Just so, trouble is inescapable, and can be only partially elaborated. To speak the word “trouble” is to invoke trouble. The “Trouble Songs” project is such an invocation and elaboration. When we say “trouble,” we refer to the history of trouble whether or not we have it in mind. When we sing trouble, we sing (with) history. We sing history here; we summon trouble.

A Trouble Song is a complaint, a grievance, an aside, a come-on, a confession, an admission, a resignation, a plea. It’s an invitation — to sorrow, frustration, darkness. It’s part of a conversation, or it’s a soliloquy, and it’s often an apostrophe. The listener overhears the song, with sympathy. The song is meant for someone else, someone dead or gone. The singer doesn’t care who hears, and the song is a dare. Or it’s a false wager — to speak trouble is to summon trouble, but it’s already here.

Trouble is loss — or the threat of loss, which is the appearance of loss. A Trouble Song is impossible speech; it speaks about the inability to speak. Trouble is a lack of what once was possessed, a desire in absence, an absence in desire. Trouble is the presence of absence, a present of loss. It is impotence and despair, but a Trouble Song is not a negation or a denial. Its admission is its invitation. Trouble is spoken not only in resignation and exasperation, but also in defiance. Trouble is spoken as a challenge to death and defeat. In a Trouble Song, there is history, but there is no past — trouble is here and now. Which is to say, there is history, but it is not (the) past.

Trouble has a cousin: problem. They are related, but not by blood. The problem can be articulated, while trouble doesn’t need an article, slips away from the most slippery terms, escapes parts of speech, without leaving us. “Trouble” is the signifier that refuses to signify, or will only call itself. Trouble is its own copula.[4] When we sing trouble, we are inextricable with it — and indeed we sing along as we listen. Troublemaker[5] and trouble are one. To trouble is to haunt, and a haunting cannot be grasped, only felt. The problem can be grasped, if not resolved. It’s strictly nominal, and can be designated. Trouble is free to change form, to embody the problem. The latter can lead to trouble but cannot become it. Trouble has no limit, no end. Like suffering, it is transferable, even and especially upon death. Trouble is what gets you.

The word is an evocation, but it is also a talisman. To summon “trouble” is to replace trouble with the word — to have the word instead of trouble. “Trouble” is a magic word, an incantation that protects the singer, and the listener, from trouble.[6] The word also replaces description. Context in and around the song may bring us closer to the real trouble and its sources, but such investigations also bring us closer to danger and ruin — the danger and ruin of history. “Trouble” is in harm’s way, or in the way of harm — it is between the singer and actual trouble. Or the singer keeps us behind him as he faces trouble, turns to whisper “trouble” over his shoulder. If we peek around him we are on our own. Or the singer embodies trouble, stands between us and the real, facing us. “Trouble”[7] is the singer, “Trouble”[8] is his song; trouble[9] is behind him, “trouble”[10] is before us. We step around “trouble” to face the real at our own peril. We have been warned by the song.

If trouble runs through song it runs through time. The body of Trouble Song, when considered as such, is a single text, the map laid over the territory of history.[11] Time collapses into this text. Trouble Song is its own genre, or it is the collapse of genres. It is genre trouble.[12]

Trouble Songs,[13] like the Trouble Song, is necessarily[14] unfinished.


Dock Boggs.

“Country Blues,” Dock Boggs[15] 

Come all you good time people[16] is the only way it starts. The banjo may have been playing forever — waiting for the singer to arrive, or indifferent to his presence — : a stage. Or the singer is the instrument of the (infernal) banjo.[17] Still, it is impossible to decide whether the voice or the banjo comes first, though both does not seem to be an option. The dynamics are too irregular, too separate, for simultaneity. The third instrument, recording static, holds them together.[18]

One or the other, the voice or the banjo, might be in a different world. Or they are not in the world together, or they are each in a world that is not this one — three worlds.

Forty dollars won’t pay my fine. The song goes around and around, insisting that it play all night (for it is always night in the song, always night when the song plays, though the song is always playing — the song doesn’t stop; we stop listening to it). Money can’t reach it, and we can’t believe the singer can reach heaven, though he sings to us from the afterworld, where corn whiskey and pretty women surround him, sweet heaven when I die. Meanwhile, before or after, pretty women is a-troublin’ my mind. He’s in a prison cell, he’s in a hole in the ground, dead drunk and buried by all us good people, (he’s) grinning his empty grin at us. It shines through the soil we throw on his face.

When I’m dead and buried / My pale face turned to the sun …

The singer calls us around while he has plenty of money. As long as his pockets are full, we drink along. When the money’s gone, so are we. He’s gone too, all alone with a woman drinking to his memory:

Last time I seen my little woman[,][19] good people,
She had a wine glass in her hand,
She was drinking down her troubles
With a low-down sorry man.

Her trouble is a man, and she’s drinking with a trouble man,[20] and she’s drinking her troubles, and he sees her as he dematerializes. She joins the invisible chorus of betrayal, along with a woman who promises to bail the singer out of jail but never gets around to it before she leaves the song. We, good people, join the chorus as we leave, and we can never leave, and our voices dry up in our throats. Boggs too is both here and not here, as we are there and not there.

If I don’t quit my rowdy ways / have trouble at my door. There it is now, Boggs’s fingernails scratching the banjo’s face, digging at the dirt scattered there. If I’d a-listened to my momma[,] good people / I wouldn’t a-been here today. Wherever he is, we can find him in the soil of the song, that too-shallow grave we pass right through if we don’t watch our step. If we do (watch our step), that death’s-head keeps nodding away at us. Come all you good time people  


Modes of trouble — terms — elaboration, embellishment, embodiment
[21]

Now heavens. Or should I perhaps give up troubling to correct such nonsense altogether, and simply let my language come out any way it insists upon?

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Delivery format/conveyance, temporality, part of speech (n. vs. v. etc.), representation/non-representation (and replacement), referential vs. poetic language, vocalization/enunciation: all of these are integral to what is being said (or elided), and to the nature of trouble’s appearance (as “trouble,” or as inference of trouble).

A semantic constellation: genre, general(ity), generic, gender.[22] Trouble may be a man, a woman, a transgender person, a situation, an atmosphere, a condition — trouble is contingency, in a word. To speak of Trouble Songs is to invite genre trouble (via genre consciousness).[23]

Trouble[24] may be appropriated, and misappropriated.[25]

Is trouble (inter-)culturally transmittable? Is trouble historically transmittable? Is trouble chronological? That is, can it be discovered or elaborated along a line of time, according to a logic of transport and association?[26]

Trouble is a hiding place. The singer does not have to reveal what is behind the song. The Trouble Song is a veiled confession: nothing but trouble. Or, it’s a veiled threat: nothing but trouble in here. In that sense, is it a threat to the singer, the listener, or both? When is trouble the agent, or the subject, and when is it the object of the song?[27]

If “trouble” replaces trouble, the song might replace the singer (or the subject).[28] The song travels over time, transcending the moment of its conception or documentation, moving out of its context but carrying a[29] context. Judith Butler summarizes the philosophical tradition of mind/body dualism with reference to “relations of political[30] and psychic subordination and hierarchy”: “The mind not only subjugates the body, but occasionally entertains the fantasy of fleeing its embodiment altogether.”[31] If trouble is the anchor of the flesh, the predicament that is embodiment in an antipathetic world, song — and in particular, Trouble Song — is the entertainment of flight: from trouble, from embodiment, along the float lines of signification.


Jason Lytle.

When “trouble” replaces trouble, the singer enacts a relation to embodiment that the listener uses as a model for her own displacement. She is good and gone in song, as Jason Lytle of Grandaddy sings in “Lost on Yer Merry Way,” which begins, Trouble with a capital T. Escape is a trick of language — in the second verse, the line morphs into Trouble with people like me, which is followed by Tie ’em down and then they vanish instantly. If the song remains, if it plays over time, the vanishing is a continual present to the listener.

Why and when does “trouble” appear in songs?[32] How aware of its usage are arrangers[33] and performers of Trouble Songs?

The concern is not just — and not primarily — what “trouble” is (what it means, what it refers to) in a Trouble Song, but to investigate/analyze/diagram/trouble/vet/consider how “trouble” is used grammatically, which pronouns and characters it relates to, who delivers and reports trouble (cf. also subject/object orientation), etc. In his ethnomusicological study of working-class Texans’ identification with country music, Real Country, Aaron Fox considers modes and representations of affect — what these Texans talk about when they talk about “real country”:

“Feeling” and “relating (to)” are diffuse, integrative, summarizing ideas. These terms, which fulfill a variety of grammatical functions, often appear to refer to essentialized, ineffable properties of social and aesthetic experience: if you have to ask what “feeling” means, in other words, you’ll never know, and that’s the point. “Feeling” is an inchoate quality of authenticity. But this phenomenological knot can be analytically untangled to reveal an orderly, dynamic, and elegantly binary semantic field.[34]

Of course, the language of the academic clashes with the phenomenon under consideration, but simply put, Fox is coordinating two fields: verbal expression and embodied emotion. The singer relates to his audience — imparting a lyrical story, articulating emotion, connecting to common experiences — and the audience responds in kind — feeling it, singing along, moving to and being moved by the song.

The trouble singer also presents an “inchoate quality of authenticity,” which we — and she — might call “trouble.” We can ask what it means, but the singer can’t — or won’t — tell us any more than her song does. She relates by genre, or generically. Her trouble and ours might not signify the same way, and the Trouble Song accounts for this in its open feel (sic) of meaning. Perhaps What is trouble? is not the right question. Instead, the singer asks — or replies — What’s your trouble?[35] and the audience responds in kind. This rapport is the mutual feeling, the sharing, of trouble.

Retying the knot: What does “trouble” do/mean for the singer vs. the listener(s) — what role does the trouble singer play, and how do listeners charge/change the song (and how is that complicated by the lag and historicity afforded/effected by recording, along with complications of time and race displacement)? Here we (re)enter the trouble space. Whose trouble is this anyway?

These are the songs people call “the sad, slow songs,” and they typically tell of troubled moments in life: heartbreak, despair, regret, aging, leaving, desire for forgiveness, shame and sin. Such songs evoke an intensely felt sense of location and temporality.[36]

Consider the ethos and ambience of the Trouble Song as distinguished from a phenomenological classification of songs that include “trouble” in their lyrics.[37] Cat Power’s The Covers Record includes “trouble” songs, but is a collection of Trouble Songs in that the songs are infused with the climate(s) of trouble.[38] It is significant that one of the “trouble” songs (which is also a Trouble Song) is a Dylan cover (“Paths of Victory”), since Dylan is especially attentive to the Trouble Song mode/mood.[39]


Down the line

John, I // sd, which was not his / name, the darkness sur- / rounds us …  

Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man”

If, as has been suggested, trouble has a cousin — problem — it may be true the two might be confused for one another. The singer — the trouble singer — knows better, but isn’t telling the truth she knows. Problems have solutions, at least ’pataphysical ones;[40] trouble is insoluble, even in/with whiskey. José González (as trouble singer, if not speaker) sees problems down the line, and knows he’s right.[41] We hear trouble in the echo from “Trouble on the Line,”[42] and we hear it in his voice, even as he promises problems.[43]

A clue, then, to the difference between problem and [trouble][44] (or problem as trouble, or vice versa): a problem has a solution, but problems presents a series — potentially a whole lot of trouble.[45] So “Down the Line” hides trouble: first in its title, then in the song — absence, then replacement. But the refrain that swallows the song — Don’t let the darkness eat you up — is all portent and no pretending.[46] It’s also, after many listens, a cumulative[47] warning — not an affirmation, as at first it might have seemed.[48] The darkness is coming, the darkness has come, the darkness is here.

And here we are, in trouble again.


Trouble Song as speech act and magic language:
The trouble condition and the talismanic effect

But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said nothing, and tried to think nothing.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

These signs of distress signify distress only indirectly: what they indicate first is the effort to avoid showing distress.  

Chris Fujiwara, The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger

The artist’s sitters present themselves with an attitude and a sartorial flair, that, as the critic Kobena Mercer has argued, attract the gaze yet also defend against primitivist projection, carving out a space where the self and its aesthetic construction can take center stage.

Huey Copeland, “Barkley L. Hendricks: Figures and Grounds”

Just as a man (and a character in a film) might hide his distress in a gesture of distress, a singer might hide[49] his troubles — and himself — in an aestheticized (and potentially anesthetizing) evocation of “trouble.”

“Historical images, like mass-cultural ones, are hardly innocent of associations: indeed, it is because they are so laden that they are used.”[50] So too is “trouble” laden and useful. But does it necessarily reference identification in the listener? And if “trouble” operates as a shield for or against trouble, might it also operate as a shield against the listener (or for trouble in another sense), a way to protect the private concerns of the singer or speaker — a way to protect trouble?[51] Indeed (and in addition), “trouble” might protect the speaker from the singer, whether or not by design of the songwriter.

Consider the case of the cover, in which the singer might not (be able to) access the original trouble, or might more or less intentionally redirect “trouble” to her own trouble (or her own indication of trouble, which may itself be enmeshed in character representation). In this cluster-case, representation merges with production (and/or reproduction). What of Walter Benjamin’s aura remains in such handed-down “trouble,” and how might this be further complicated by cultural appropriations of Trouble Songs (by singers and by listeners)? If the aura or authenticity of “trouble” fades in this exchange, does the Trouble Song paradoxically become a more powerful (or, at least, effective) shield or talisman against trouble? Furthermore and at any rate, in all of these possibilities and contingencies, the Trouble Song may absorb the condition as trouble (that is, as part of its trouble condition).

The poet John Ashbery sings of this trouble condition in his long poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises.[52]

In the trouble light, we are tempted to ascribe the Parmigianino convexity effect[53] to a distortive affect of trouble. As with any cover, Ashbery converts his subject with an objectifying gaze, which is the troubling of representation, if not the trouble of representation.

In the next book Ashbery published after Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1977’s Houseboat Days, the second poem, “The Other Tradition,” calls trouble by name as it concludes

                                                    … You found this
Charming, but turned your face fully toward night,
Speaking into it like a megaphone, not hearing
Or caring, although these still live and are generous
And all ways contained, allowed to come and go
Indefinitely in and out of the stockade
They have so much trouble remembering, when your
    forgetting[54]
Rescues them at last, as a star absorbs the night.[55

We might look back in search of the referent of “this,”[56] and we can attribute it to a forest, or the idea of a forest, or the way “the idea of a forest had clamped itself / Over the minutiae of the scene,” and we will certainly find other candidates for “this”-ness, and perhaps this is also part of the trouble condition. We too (like they,[57] whoever they[58] are) have trouble remembering, or we hone in on “this” “remembering,” losing ourselves. So there is pleasure in “trouble,” just as trouble itself may be a source of pleasure, at least temporarily.


I’m new here: The trouble with covers

If most covers risk attrition, or the loss of potency, there are still examples of amplification, of powering up. Johnny Cash did it with Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt,”[59] dialing bathos to pathos. Every singer wants to make it her own, just as every listener makes it her own — again, the listener commands and informs the singer, a ritual enacted at the end of every rock show, when the hits are called out by the audience. Post-Cash, Gil Scott-Heron amplified an already affective version, making Smog’s “I’m New Here” sing truer.[60] Homage and interpretation, Scott-Heron’s cover reveals the aspiration of Bill Callahan’s (convincing) pretensions. Also distinguishing itself from the “Hurt”/“Hurt” dialectic, Scott-Heron’s version of “I’m New Here” leaves open the option/desire of hearing the “original” again, even while casting quotes around it.[61] Which is to say there is a difference between making it your own and stealing it, as there are different modes of stealing it. Both Cash and Scott-Heron steal it, but in the latter case, the stolen object is, magically, still in its original position, if not its original state.


History

Classic blues attempts a universality that earlier blues forms could not even envision. But with the attainment of such broad human meaning, the meanings which existed in blues only for Negroes grew less pointed.  

LeRoi Jones, Blues People

In Blues People, LeRoi Jones (not yet Amiri Baraka) attends the transition between the individuated, private “primitive blues” that followed emancipation and the subsequent white supremacist reaction that was Jim Crow — the transition between integral developments in blues as a result of privacy and independence, to the extent that they were newly available to black Americans in the late nineteenth century, and the nuanced disillusionment of qualified freedom — and the professionalization of blues music that followed. As black Americans were both relatively free to move around the country and desperately (and itinerantly) in search of work, blues became an occupation (or a side job), rather than primarily or only a mode of personal expression made possible by the solitary alienation of the free(d) black American.[62]

If emancipation allowed black Americans to be by themselves, together or separately,[63] and to cultivate private lives not strictly circumscribed by servitude, it also led to the development of a public blues form that communicated in a way that was not at issue in private blues. Black American slaves were not allowed to freely express their interiority in all its complexity, but their experiences were also limited by their circumstances. They did not have free time; generations of slaves born in America only knew servitude, and had little more to sing about. Emancipated black Americans had broadened, if not necessarily liberated — from racism, hunger, destitution — experiences. As blues developed from personal and personalized self-gratifying expression to public performance, its modes of signification also developed and diversified. The audience inflects the material, or the performer inflects the material toward (and away from) the audience. Perhaps before there is an audience, and particularly an audience composed of Others, there is no material — or, in Jones’s terms, there is expression, but no artifact (30), no song as song object.[64]

At any rate, by the early twentieth century, blues becomes public exhibition, and it takes on a universal inflection that is “less obscure to white America,” a “classic blues” that is “less involuted, and certainly less precise” (87). Considered in the “trouble” light,[65] this universality is analogous to a generality of reference that charges lyrical utterance. What trouble? Your trouble. The singer can protect herself while forming a performative bond with the listener. In effect, she sings to herself while singing to others, but the song does not necessarily sound or mean the same thing to both parties. Still, the self- and other-audience both inflect the song. As Gertrude Stein has it in Everybody’s Autobiography, she writes for herself and strangers. This emergent form of disjunction with and from the self[66] is what leads Luc Sante, in “The Invention of the Blues,” to describe the blues[67] as a development in American modernism.[68] Here we are spanning time, but it is a contingent, cumulative, even self-reflexive time. Blues forms are certainly aware that they are being followed (by themselves and by other, stranger selves).


One kind favor (“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”)

On behalf of the dead, the living are nostalgic for life. The dead bear this patronage as they must: they sing on. The song does not change when the singer leaves the world, though we hear a strain previously hidden to us. Perhaps the singer preempts our concerns[69] with instructions, but they twist in the passage. Bury my body by the side of the road formerly implied You treat me so mean. Now it signs off, What do I care?[70]

***

Blind Lemon Jefferson (shown at right, circa 1926) has a last request, one kind favor he’ll ask you[71] over and over until the recording passes completely into the aural fog that already obscures his appeal.[72] We can’t imagine the man alive, singing the song, paying forward the tribute he demands[73] — and it is a demand, polite as it sounds.[74] It also comes across plaintive, so we shroud him in longing for the breath he expels in the song. But the request itself, see that my grave is kept clean, resists our sentimentality[75] even as it appears to beg it. The clean grave is no tribute to life, and the dead have no use for flowers or songs. The one kind favor is asked of you, but you disappear in the request itself. You become witness without a body, or you pay forward[76] when you too pass into the fog.

***

Lou Reed stretches Jefferson’s two-minute-forty-two-second plea into seven and a half minutes of recording static transmuted into guitar feedback, texture, and sustain. He knows the singer is dead, even if he’s thinking of Jefferson.[77] He also knows he too will pay forward[78] the request. Meanwhile, Jefferson sings on.


Genre trouble

Blues is a music with trouble on its mind. The concerns and preoccupations of blues address — sing from, sing to — emotional and material conditions that may inform the Trouble Song. The question of who can sing the blues — which people, which culture has a right to the form, or even the mode — gets us into genre trouble, which is where we want to be if we are to locate the Trouble Song transmission in the present. Jones kills two blues with one stone when he writes of “the peculiar social, cultural, economic, and emotional experience of a black man in [1920s] America.” He continues:

The idea of a white blues singer seems an even more violent contradiction of terms than the idea of a middle-class blues singer. The materials of blues were not available to the white American, even though some strange circumstance[79] might prompt him to look for them. It was as if these materials were secret and obscure, and blues a kind of ethno-historic rite as basic as blood. (148)

On one hand, this makes us wonder how to categorize the country blues (and the “Country Blues”) of (white) 1920s Virginia mountain balladeer[80] Dock Boggs. On another hand, we wonder about later blues-inflected singers like Karen Dalton and Chan Marshall, who might be double-struck in Jones’s formulation (“black man”).

As Luc Sante will later do in “The Invention of the Blues,”[81] Jones talks about the blues, in its classic form, having a “twelve-bar, three-line, AAB structure.”[82] Sante goes on to say “Although the term ‘blues’ came to be applied to any minor-key lament — in the 1920s and ’30s to almost any kind of song — the authentic blues songs are those that hew to this structure.”[83] No music is authentic for long, and authenticity is a historically acquired quality. And yet, music is made. Songs follow other songs, stealing from one another, appropriating and misappropriating terms (and lines) and forms. Surprise in song is a function of recognition: it is the strange or wayward element, this mismatched detail, the anachronism or stray, the wrongness that fits in a way that changes the blood (flow)[84] of the listener.[85] The recognizable is made strange, but the strange is also revealed to be recognizable, or rendered as such. As the strange is recognized, it is incorporated into experience. As the song travels, as it is reencountered, the surprise is transformed into nuance, into style. This is what Sante calls innovation, which is based on deliberate decisions of individual artists, as distinguishable from “the inherited or instinctive moves of people following tradition without questioning or altering it” (196). However, here we also refer to the movement of the song as it finds us here, today. We recognize the way the song has come, to the extent that we know its (and our) history. It is an artifact covered with fingerprints which texture its surface and contribute to the depth of its surface. The song sings to what we know, but it also sings the past away, in its insistence that it has come for us, that it came for us all along. That it encodes a past that acts on us is as important in the moment we encounter the song as our apprehension of any turn of phrase or musical gesture. As we sing along, as we carry the song to others, we aid its travel, and we add (our baggage) to its cargo, further burdening it with the marks of our touch.

Blues, whether classic or derivative, sing trouble. In blues, we find Trouble Songs. We also find them in country, in rock, in folk and rap and anywhere else we find songs, and language, and “trouble.” We also find trouble where we cannot locate “trouble.” The Trouble Song is an example, or a mode, more than a genre — just as a particular blues is also a song, one that is perceived within a necessarily limiting generic category and may be heard outside those bounds.[86] We hear a song as blues until it gets hold of us, and then we don’t care what it’s called. We can only sing. If genre is a claim to contested terrain, the Trouble Song rolls through that terrain, gathering, mulching, and fertilizing its grounds. The process does not tend toward purity, rather admixture and cross-pollination. Borders are traversed, and territories are ultimately reconfigured. Maps, like songs, change.


You know that I’m no good — Amy Winehouse and the trouble barrier
Or, the semipermeable :trouble: membrane 

How long is the lifespan of someone who grows up in public? Winehouse (shown at right) died at twenty-seven, a luckless seven years after her debut album, Frank, turned eyes and ears in her direction. As a child actor, she was not unaccustomed to attention. Frank reintroduced an enormously talented, anachronistic vocalist who belted and cinched her own material, and assured all mics that she had more to give. She backed it up with 2006’s Back to Black, as she reached beyond Frank’s jazzy frame, embracing R&B, soul, ska, and ’60s girl-group pop. Damn. And damned by her own hand — she wove and wavered stories of dissolution and ache, popping her eyes under flared eyeshadow that obviated an eyetooth wink.

On July 23, 2011, sighs were mixed with flip are you surprised comments in the culture web, as her media carcass was sewn up for the day. Details would be forthcoming, but the judgment had been cast years ago: another cracked doll for fame to toss onto the pyre.

But a funny thing happened to anyone who put the music on again. It sounded fifty years old and right now, not always in the same song.[87] A few days later, it sounded back from the pyre, side two to Phases and Stages’s[88] side one: at turns degraded and destroyed, and back in the game. Climbing out of the whole mess. The strength of her voice became re-apparent. She sounded alive. Proud, in pain, alive. Broken, alive. Once again, her voice the best rebuttal to the worst footage of her we could find. The candor of her music made us fresh — who were we to think she wanted us to know her?

Here, we have her at her best, so overfull and leaning in we know there’s more.[89] Now, Back to Black is another old soul record — we can’t believe it ever ends.


Trouble with history

History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it — and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

For Barthes, here, history is transported, or perhaps replaced, by a photograph of his mother. The photograph — and its version of history — excludes him not (only) because he is not in it, or because his mother is dead, but because he does not remember her outfit. It is clothing before him. His mother in the photo cannot conceive of him.


Roland Barthes.

Does the song know we are there? Does trouble recognize us, or merely occupy our minds? Can we conceive of a song without hearing it in our heads? There is no trouble that is not called. Awareness is existence. No troubles is a negative value positively rendered. It is equal to Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days, just as They’ll wash your troubles, your troubles, your troubles away[90] is an accumulation. Trouble is history, and history is hysterical. The borrowed song is evidence of our nonexistence. The song comes before us, carries past us. We sound out trouble as we take it in. We absorb the sign of our absence, asserting ourselves as such. I’m not there is also a negative value positively rendered.

This is the trick of history, the illusion of historicization. Not there is not here. To historicize is to assert that one exists — a hysterical claim. The Trouble Song sings trouble away, then, as it sings before the self. Rather than sing the song here, the singing I transports itself to the song. No troubles, no self, and vice versa.

So the Trouble Song without “trouble” is a wish fulfilled, already happened. The “Trouble” Song is neutered, or imagines itself so. This is the lie of the present: now is neutral, a free wheel between past and future. If the “Trouble” Song is demystified language, all surface, the broken spell, it is a reassertion of (it)self. It is a pathetic I was there that trades the past for the present, or puts the present away. It is the failed cover, the thin wrap under which the self appears to gleam. It is a false preservation. It is a desperate attempt at meaninglessness, a willful forgetting. The Trouble Song makes the singer disappear; the “Trouble” Song makes the song disappear. Neither succeeds in making trouble go away.

Trouble is not the word, it is the singing. Unspoken language has no magic. Speech cannot act without us, but words can make us disappear. I was there is a sleight of hand that reveals But now I’m gone. In Nausea, Sartre is translated by memory: The record is scratched; perhaps the singer is dead. If Gil Scott-Heron has died, have your troubles, your troubles, your troubles washed away?


The secret rider
 

Perhaps we carry trouble of which we are unaware. A repressed anxiety, forgotten debt, secret rider, death’s envoy. An old record absorbed as a gift. Someone else’s father, the father of a friend, a strange father, perhaps an uncle, plays along with “Trouble in Mind.” Credited here to Bobby Blue, this countrified blues standard is the last track on Asleep at the Wheel’s Texas Gold (1975), whose cover image is a reverie on the text-masking from Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush. This “Trouble in Mind,” like numerous versions of Richard M. Jones’s 1924 composition, assures itself, through vicissitudes and permutations,[91] that the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday.

As ever, there’s a dusky comfort to the line. The sun doesn’t yet shine through the blue house. Anyway, it’s the singer who is blue, though he makes room for this confusion. The sun will shine in his back door and take his blue mind away. Will he be facing that back door, gazing at what’s gone, when that sun rises? Will he see it over his shoulder?[92] Or will it sneak up on his ass? Perhaps this is a vision of trouble catching up to him, the last light we wish to escape. If we don’t believe him, it’s because we know trouble won’t leave us alone with our thoughts for long. We’re more convinced the 219 train[93] can pacify[94] the singer’s mind, as he lays his head on the lonesome lines of his false, jovial song.

The song is scratched on the record, caught in the throat. The record is scratched; perhaps the singer is dead.[95] To sing trouble is to sing with the voice of the dead, to voice the death the singer carries. If the singer takes the song, as Johnny Cash does, as Chan Marshall and Bob Dylan do, he takes death as well. He does not sing the song alive, nor does he revive the dead singer. He becomes the dead singer, his own. It is a version of death that he sings. And all who hear, hear their own death.

After all, “Trouble in Mind” is a suicide song, a self-negating comedy. The singer reports his own death, sings himself away in each verse, laughing to keep from crying. It’s the last song he’ll ever sing, and if you buy him another round, he’ll sing it again: ’Cause I know the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday. If the trouble, the blues, is in his mind, and the sun can take it away, can light up the blue, it needs a way in. This is the singer’s secret rider, his clause: the microphone is a weapon pointed not at the audience, but at himself. He exhales death, but there’s a report through the back of his skull, letting the sun shine in.[96]

Is, then, I won’t be blue always a promise or a threat? Once we hear the threat in the promise (I feel like I could die),[97] it’s all the same. If the blues don’t leave me …[98]


St. Vincent (center) performing Big Black’s “Kerosene” at the Bowery Ballroom, 2011.

Annie Clark, becoming “Kerosene”[99] 

Set me on fire. Or, “ST. VINCENT covers BIG BLACK at BOWERY BALLROOM NYC May 22 2011.” As of April 6, 2013, the video registers 125,391 views on YouTube. Presumably, this represents at least 125,000 conflagrations. Annie Clark and her band set off through Big Black territory, covering not only the song, but also perhaps the performance documented in another video on YouTube, “big black — kerosene.”[100] This is a song Jerry Lee Lewis wrote before he killed one of his wives, Albini informs the crowd at the bottom of his breath, before he and his band angle into the performance. Albini appears to be covered in blood. His guitar is slung around his waist. Another guitarist walks in place as he carves out his part. Albini paces, hacking away at his dick. The bassist is all over the E string, winding the song.[101] The drummer punches his drums. I was born in this town / Lived here my whole life / Probably come to die in this ____[102] / Lived here my whole life. Ominous whine, murderous complaint. There’s kerosene around find something to do.

Someone is on fire. Someone is set on fire. Annie Clark carries her guitar higher on her torso, high on her belly, at her solar plexus. It[103] is a shield, and it will become a badge. It is a shield for the song, shielding her from it. It is the shell of the song, encasing her. She is carving her stomach. She is scratching the chakra aligned with Survival Issues. Or it is Manipura, city of jewels, associated with dispelling of fear and the power to destroy the world. Or create it. The solar plexus absorbs prana, or life, from the sun.[104]

Annie Clark is ablaze. She shakes her head, Bill Pullman/Balthazar Getty’s transformative Fred/Pete gesture in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Before this moment, Greil Marcus might say the band is looking for the song, or playing it. Then the song plays them. The band is aflame, whereas Big Black is merely on fire. The precedent is a pack of boys, and one boy on fire. The latter is the voice of Kerosene.

If in both versions, Kerosene is girl and fuel, and in the former version, the boy sets himself on fire, or sets upon Kerosene, the only thing to do in this town, as all the boys have learned,[105] St. Vincent is the apotheosis of Kerosene, not merely the living flame, but the singing flame. She is fire, is a flame, and as she touches the boys, she loses herself. This is her risk, her wager. Kerosene and the boys, the boy and the girl, becoming-flame. They consume themselves with otherness, and with the other.

The rest is two videos, a dancing pile of ash, flames in the eyes of the crowd.


XXII: Trouble on the line
[106]

Poem XXI[107] of Spring and All concludes “so lascivious / and still” and segues into XXII,[108] “so much depends / upon”[109] — the rest is on every schoolchild’s mind, or used to be, perhaps. People who don’t think they’ve memorized a line of verse can say most or all of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheel Barrow,” only it isn’t called that, and the only “the” in the poem indicates some (white) chickens.

This may sound finicky or even ingenuous, but here’s the trouble: we don’t know what we know. We have the words but forget the form that keeps them coming back to us. Worse, we don’t have the context. XXII is not a stand-alone poem, it’s a proof. It’s in conversation with the “poem”[110] before it, but also with the “prose”[111] that follows.

Let’s see this Trouble Song in prose stanzas, rather than graphs.

And how about a word from our sponsor?

The fixed categories into which life is divided must always hold. These things are normal — essential to every activity. But they exist — but not as dead dissections. (75)

From here Williams proceeds (as he has preceded) to show us what he has done,[112] and what he wants to do. Spring and All[113]is like that, a manifesto in action. Whereas Charles Bernstein in “Artifice of Absorption”[114] shows and tells us what he has been doing since at least 1976’s The Veil, while proceeding with a poetics that is surface and depth, Williams sets a program for what his poems will be by the time he finishes the present collection. He describes his poetics into existence, nearly abolishing the distinction between poetry and prose while insisting on that distinction:

[T]here is no use denying that prose and poetry are not by any means the same IN INTENTION. But what then is prose? There is no need for it to approach poetry except to be weakened. (77–8)

But then: “Is what I have written prose? The only answer is that form in prose ends with the end of that which is being communicated” (78). And here let us pause to admire that isolated question mark. Is it a typesetter’s error? No, it must be real! Or must anyway be real, even intentional!

Is Williams’s prose approaching poetry? Aspiring to it, even? And these are different aims: The first is an address, a correspondence; the second is perhaps what Williams describes as ends with the end. Let’s put a fine point on it: Poem XXII becomes itself, XXII, because it breaks the barriers of form while making form matter (again and henceforth). The prose that follows is free to see itself as poetry: as form and sense.[115]

We remember the prose, in prosaic line breaks:

So much depends upon
A red wheel barrow
Glazed with rainwater
Beside the white chickens

How different this is from “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens”! Three stanzas we love for their koan-like demeanor, their question as (unpunctuated) statement. Just what is it that depends upon what, again?

What we have here is a structure that makes sense: four stanzas of two lines each, always three words followed by one, with the following nearly palindromic syllabic scheme: 4/2 // 3/2 // 3/2 // 4/2.[116] More to love: the modernist insistence on the level playing field of lower case.

Those partner lines to each couplet are the most consistent formal element of the poem. Always two syllables, always a revelation without being a surprise. They always dangle and usually hinge. The first (“upon”) is the most formally obvious but also the most catchy. Even if we don’t remember the line breaks, Williams taught many of us how to break lines between the first and second stanza of this poem. Revelation, though, (be)comes cheap after a while. Prepositions make for obvious line breaks, particularly when they get visual (as in the tired “over /” and “under /” break). But this one has more than the sweetness of first blush. The stanza break is excruciating[117] if you look too closely at it. Our dangling prep hangs over a cliff — depends upon what? — then gives us this marvelous red wheel

barrow

.

Compare Williams’s meticulous but somehow naturalistic breaks to the prosaic parsing we recall. One poem is memorable (and memorizable), and the other is bland as fuck. A forgetful one. So we remember something we can no longer take seriously, while remembering it wrong, but only remembering it because of the formal precision of the original, which we cannot see.

Once we look at the form, and consider it in context (“The fixed categories into which life is divided must always hold” takes on the force of dramatic imperative rather than description; our hinges keep us whole), the structure speaks to us. The koan becomes an illustration.

XXII is not an imagist poem. Nor does it present an image, but the image of an image. One thing becomes four, but it also becomes words, and a poem.

If we insist on investigating the image, we find three things[118] right away:

wheel barrow
rain water
chickens.

One thing becomes four formally, but maybe imagistically, three things become four. But our three-count only counts the last three stanzas, cuz that’s where we see things clearly. Stanza 1 is all so much and depends on, so we don’t see ourselves seeing through language, or thinking we do. The fourth thing[119] is language. We see it in the form, as form.

What depends on what? Does the wheel barrow/rain water/chicken need language, or vice versa?

As the language goes on to say,[120] “There is no confusion — only difficulties” (78).


Death’s head, proud flesh[121]

Death shadows text and trouble emerges, even as it recedes; or the dead recede from trouble, leave it behind for the ones who can’t do without it.

January takes another light. Just as David Bowie’s last two videos, for “★”[122] and “Lazarus,” foreshadow the obvious[123] only after Bowie’s passing, a poet who departed with even greater haste left the sleepless remainder with death-charged books.

The American poet C. D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, in a passage from the previous decade that made the rounds of the living in the wake of January 13, 2016 feeds, writing her headstone, anticipating ours: “Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are all going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”[124]

Like Bowie, Wright left us with new work, though her next book of poetry, ShallCross, was forthcoming at her sudden passing,[125] so its consolation was yet a promise.[126] Nor was its maker likely to thumb her nose, hand us her bejeweled skull, and return to her wardrobe, only to reappear with rags binding her eyes, blind buttons winking over the top,[127] as in Bowie’s final, looping testaments.

In the days after Wright’s and Bowie’s deaths, those who mourn the poet and rock star with the particular, half-guilty displeasure of those who know them only by their works, a number that now includes us all, they dance together into the cabinet. Those left at the station will get there soon enough.

Meanwhile, we refrain, with the last book of poetry we do have: “the year in which this particular round / of troubles began.”[128]

Back to 'A Whole House': a belated[129] ‘Trouble Song’

Or, perhaps, I would rather not go / back to A Whole House, with respect to the Morrissey I loved for so many years, and with a lack of respect for whom Morrissey seems to have become. Even a few years ago, as I was preparing the final manuscript of Trouble Songs for punctum books, I held onto a thinning thread that perhaps Morrissey remained misunderstood, even willfully so, and that his misanthropic streak was not hateful, not reactionary, even if misguided or disturbed. But how could it be otherwise? Misanthropy is rot at the core, regardless of who the hated others are. I have it for presidents, developers, CEOs, other capitalists and exploiters — and it’s still hatred, still rot. We have to find it and dig it out, even as we attempt to free ourselves from both exploiters and exploitation. It might be the last thing we do, and it would be worthwhile.

Morrissey has been fucking with us for years, calling out Viva Hate, courting controversy with “Israel,” penning “National Front Disco” — which could be satire, except that we can’t get Morrissey out of our heads, repeating England for the English with or without quotes. I won’t go on (I’ll go on) and can’t bring myself to dredge it all up (and still): how Morrissey’s veganism seems to have given him a sense of license to attack whole cultures, his belligerent comments about Brexit, his shrugging conflation of awkward courtship and sexual assault (which makes a Smiths song like “I Started Something” turn sour[er]) — stop me, oh oh oh stop me. It’s all so disappointing, so tiresome and petty, even in its desperation to outrage and offend.

Why? To garner attention, vent a wounded spleen, strike out at a world to blame for a miserable life? Is it theater? Perverse pleasure in whom it provokes? Is this some adverse reaction to a looming fear of death? Stones cast on a long decline? Is it simply cruel babble from a self-important, privileged man?

I decree today that life
Is simply taking and not giving
England is mine — it owes me a living
But ask me why, and I’ll spit in your eye
Oh, ask me why, and I’ll spit in your eye
But we cannot cling to the old dreams anymore
No, we cannot cling to those dreams

Nor should we conflate singer and song (nor will I, in feeble protest, bother to properly cite those songs). Morrissey has certainly established himself as a literary mind, and he’s as capable as anyone of singing (or speaking) in false personae. But just as some of his more recent songs have turned merely bitter, stupid, or cruel, some of his earlier compositions are poorly inflected by his recent behavior. He’s managing to ruin his own songs (and those of his bandmates) for many of those who have grown up taking shelter in their wit and resolve (or their pointed or dramatically pointless irresolution: Will the world end in the night time? and Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body and Am I still ill? and of course I dunno).

And clearly, Morrissey, because I’m also talking to you, Oh, I can’t help quoting you, even as the things that you say cease to ring true. You gave me a vocabulary for heart and song. Finally I’ve pressed through my revulsion to listen through I Am Not a Dog on a Chain, after failing the one other time I tried, with the opening track’s exhortations to suicide, which are so unappealing in a world where we’re losing good people who can’t continue to swallow all the garbage we’re all forced to consume every day.

I’m loathe to admit the album does not sound bad. In another world I’d take comfort in it, and perhaps frown along with it in pleasure. In this world I’m scowling and typing, distracting myself from the barbs and mines, the petty, sharp stones the lyrics might throw.

And what meant something to you once does not go away even when it is ruined, even when it’s a gift that the giver has turned viperous. I have heaps of Smiths and Morrissey records I can’t listen to and can’t give away. Not because no one wants them, but because I still do. I probably hope Morrissey will tell us it’s all been a joke, and that even to him it’s not funny anymore. And I know jokes are not hateful, or jokes that are hateful are something other than jokes: just violent language. Not cruel jokes, merely cruelty. And I can’t help wanting to be convinced somehow that I can love those albums and songs again. But their elegant refusal is fast becoming, well, refuse: a miserable lie.

Maybe I’m aging out of fashion as well. I have more trouble listening to Joy Division because I can’t stop thinking about the gross reference to compulsory prostitution in German concentration camp “brothels” embedded in their name. I’m increasingly appalled by Siouxsie Sioux singing “Hong Kong Garden” and wearing a Nazi armband. David Bowie’s flirtation with fascist imagery remains nauseating. None of this feels edgy or dangerous, just young and dumb. What’s Morrissey’s excuse?

I stand behind “A Whole House,” the brief Trouble Songs chapter, even if I can’t listen to the song and album it heads, much as it has been deeply meaningful to me since 1994. I made a recording of the chapter, a sort of cover with pieces of song woven in, as a tribute to what I loved about Morrissey’s lyrics, and the empathy I heard there, even if it was solipsistic empathy. Maybe a sheltered love of self lends itself to a feeling of superiority, to a hatred or disregard of others. Once, though, I thought Morrissey cared about outcasts, and that mattered because I felt like one. Maybe I felt comfortable in his self-pity. And maybe there’s a deeper trouble in this song and others, something stale and cold. A fetid glimmer that seemed glamorous, but it’s only the moist rot in a basement corner, catching errant light from a blackening window-well. And I wonder: is there something there we need to revisit?

purple-toned image of a house with yellow text that reads "Back to a whole house"

A Whole House[130]

There’s gonna be some trouble / A whole house will need rebuilding — Morrissey

The trouble promised in the first line of “Now My Heart Is Full,”[131] which opens side 1, arrives in the first cut on side 2, “Why Don’t You Find out for Yourself.” The word “trouble” has flown the coup, but the feeling remains, sick down to my heart / well that’s just the way it goes.

No more named, trouble skims the sorry lake of the album, a brick in the small of the back again, as moaned by the Krazy Kat intoning “I Am Hated for Loving.” By the time it comes to rest near “Speedway” at the end of the album, the rumors are true: I never said they were completely ungrounded.

A step aside from Destroyer’s Trouble in Dreams, which obviates “trouble” while saturating the singer/listener,[132] Morrissey’s opening salvo makes a promise it does and does not keep. If you know you’re in trouble, you no longer need the signs.

You can order a print edition or download a free PDF of Trouble Songs from punctum. Visit punctum audio for recordings from Trouble Songs, including “A Whole House.” Jeff’s poetry book, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021), is available now. 



1.[return] that we were there

2.[return] Speaking of “the dispersed, intensely regional transformations” of English as it is used and altered over time, Caroline Bergvall (shown at right) reports: “This transport flows across both diachronic and synchronic routes, sheds as much as it drags historical account along with itself.”a The term diachronic refers, in linguistic study, to “the historical development of a language,” while synchronic refers to a descriptive approach to the state of language at a given time (Oxford English Dictionary online). Trouble Songs, as a study, explores the continuum between these approaches, which makes it essentially diachronic in scope, though there will be moments of synchronic reflection, particularly within the moment of song. To return to and reiterate Bergvall, “This transport flows across both.”

a. Caroline Bergvall, “Middling English,” in Meddle English (Callicoon: Nightboat Books, 2011), 14.

3.[return] History, Trouble Song

4.[return] To say She troubles me, or She is trouble — or “She was trouble,” as private dick Philip Marlowe, via Raymond Chandler, says in The Big Sleepais to bind two things that were different, but have become inseparable. Untie them, and they are still linked. To be in trouble is to be. (Copula is etymologically linked with couple and copulate; all of these forms are intimately linked with trouble.)

a. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage Crime, 1992), 17. Originally published in 1939.

5.[return] On the title track to his country gospel album The Troublemaker (1976), Willie Nelson is the song, which names him, an outlaw hippie Christ, as he sings it.

6.[return] It might also, as will be explored, protect the singer from the prying I of the listener.

7.[return] a name, an embodiment

8.[return] an eponymous song title, and the substance (insubstantial as it may be) of the song, framed by titular quotation marks

9.[return] of which he sings

10.[return] the song, the representation of trouble which we witness

11.[return] body, text, map — a mixed metaphor, or a signal fluidity

12.[return] Speaking to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Joan Retallack writes, “[T]o make ‘gender trouble’ is to act up as subtext: that is, to perform sub-versions: parody, pastiche, ironic mirrorings, deconstructive replications. … [But to] make real gender trouble is to make genre trouble.”a

a. Joan Retallack, “:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM: (three essays onto shaky grounds),” in The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 112.

13.[return] Here, let us sing the book, though elsewhere Trouble Songs (no italics) will be treated as a project, ongoing, a song about a song (so the quotation marks have not yet come to roost). 

14.[return] and always already

15.[return] This cover is influenced by versions and visions of Boggs by Greil Marcus, particularly in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), and his “Old Weird America” course at The New School. 

16.[return] Transcription fails delivery: peee-puuuuull … Trouble Songs style for quoting lyrics is italics, to indicate they are sung — slanted and inflected — and that they do not belong to the singer (are borrowed, transmitted, paid forward, lost). Quotations from texts other than songs are treated with standard quotation marks. 

17.[return] Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream presents Satan’s laugher as music, played by and playing the players of the song.

18.[return] See/hear Lou Reed’s version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” in which Reed plays (on guitar) the recording static from Jefferson’s 1928 record, as collected on volume 3 of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). Reed’s revisitation appears on The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited Vol. 2 (2006).

19.[return] The comma makes sense, but Boggs eschews (or transcends) the comma.

20.[return] Got me singing yeah! as Marvin Gaye had it (“Trouble Man”).

21.[return] an extended outline format, a set of expanding propositions, invitations to trouble space 

22.[return] A point in the Oxford English Dictionary’s constellation of meanings for “gender” binds it to genre: “Kind, sort, class; also, genus as opposed to species. The general gender: the common sort (of people).”Compare to “genre”: 

a. Kind; sort; style.
b. spec. A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose. (Oxford English Dictionary online)

23.[return] Once genre enters, the room is gendered (that is, troubled by gender, or gen[d]re).

24.[return] “We’ve got to show them we’re worse than queer / SUCK MY LEFT ONE    SUCK MY LEFT one” (liner notes) hollers Kathleen Hanna on Bikini Kill’s “Suck My Left One,” from the self-titled debut EP. At the time (1991), a wave of feminist punk, dubbed riot grrl (later mass-mediated as Riot Grrrl, that third r adding a cartoon growl — or purr), acts up during grunge’s USA-via-Seattle, crowd-surfing big splash, as Bikini Kill leads the charge into boy-strewn waters. Defiantly unladylike, Hanna belts out lines like Eat meat / Hate Blacks / Beat your fucking wife / Its [sic] all the same thing (“Liar”), troubling the waters of American commercial culture and calling women to the stage. The last song on the EP is a live recording of “Thurston Hearts the Who,” featuring Molly Neuman (credited as molly germs), who is invited onstage to recite a hostile review while the band plays the song (ostensibly for the first time) behind her. Neuman created the zine Girl Germs, along with Allison Wolfe, with whom she formed another influential riot grrl band, Bratmobile. Bikini Kill takes its name from a zine written by Hanna and the band’s drummer, Tobi Vail (who will be a founding member of Ladyfest, a feminist nonprofit arts and music festival). At the turn of the millennium, Hanna further troubles genre and gender with Le Tigre. The group layers electronic elements, including programmed beats and samples, with minimal traditional rock instrumentation to create feminist agit-pop, accompanied live by multimedia performances. The original trio includes a filmmaker, Sadie Benning, and another zine maker, Johanna Fateman. Benning is replaced by the band’s projectionist, JD Samson, between the group’s 1999 self-titled debut and its 2001 followup, Feminist Sweepstakes (both of which are released on the queer label Mr. Lady, itself an invocation of gender trouble). Samson goes on to raise genderqueer awareness in her dance music project (with Johanna Fateman) MEN.

25.[return] Misappropriation is (an) appropriation.

26.[return] Yes and no. Discovery leads to (or from) recovery, and an inevitable recovering; all things cannot be present — or accounted for — at once. This is concept trouble, or the trouble with concept(s).

27.[return] And how does this relate to signification?

28.[return] Cf. Willie Nelson, The Troublemaker, which, as noted, (also) (explicitly) replaces the singer with the album. The Is is silent (and/or replaced by a comma).

29.[return] if not the

30.[return] Here let us say “political” encapsulates — and embodies — the world that is the case, as Wittgenstein has it. Or: the body is the case, and the song will be the body, as “trouble” will be the word that is the case. And: the footnote is the case/song before (and after, and beneath) the case/body.

31.[return] Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 12. 

32.[return] And does it appear as the sign of a disappearance — of trouble, of the singer or subject?

33.[return] We could say writers, and we could say transcribers, or we could invoke conjurers (though perhaps only performers have the power to conjure, even if they need a spell).

34.[return] Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 155.

35.[return] though it comes out Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days

36.[return] Fox, Real Country, 88.

37.[return] Which is to say, trouble (and gen[d]re) may be in the house — here, consider verse and chorus as stanzas, or rooms — even when “trouble” is not in evidence.

38.[return] troubled by format for all those listening to The Covers Record on CD

39.[return] A list of trouble-saturated musicians and albums would be a long one, but a few notables spring to (this) mind (this moment): Dusty (Springfield) in Memphis, Judee Sill, Smog, Syd Barrett, Bonnie Prince Billy, Love — and of course, most of blues and much of country music (a study of the dynamics of trouble in rap and hip-hop could overfill its own volume). Every music list is a process of exclusion. The reader of a list makes her own, largely in opposition to the trigger list. All the better. Note also: Trouble might just as likely be a mood as a mode — a passing fancy, or the wake of (if not the waking from) one. Dylan has recorded at least twenty-four songs with some form of “trouble” in the lyrics (and countless Trouble Songs that do not mention the word), several of them far better known than “Paths of Victory,” which appears on Dylan’s Bootleg Series, Vols. 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. Dylan has also recorded “Trouble Songs” (songs with “Trouble” in the title) like “Trouble” and “Trouble in Mind,” and has avoided “trouble” by replacing it with “worry” in “Someday Blues,” his version of Muddy Waters’s “Trouble No More” (also worried by the Allman Brothers).

40.[return] Of course, ’pataphysics describes imaginary solutions to imaginary problems. (Thanks to Talan Memmott for the distinction.) And Trouble Songs are in our heads, if not only in our heads (like trouble itself, whatever it may be).

41.[return] The couplet that opens “Down the Line” is a variation on the AAB blues form, where I know that I’m right takes the place of the A-line repetition, simultaneously providing the B-line.a Such replacement is exactly the problem here. Repetitions (with slight differences) of the coming same mistake twice refrain will underscore the blues-form adaptation.

a. If we hear the line this way. If we believe the lyric sheet rather than our ears, the line is I know they’re not mine. It’s a better line, if perhaps less formally suggestive in a musicological sense (cf. the blues connection). On the one hand a hard rhyme (line/mine) replaces a more intriguing and less stable off rhyme (line/right). However, the lyric sheet version intensifies interpersonal tension and positions the singer more explicitly as harbinger. The insistence of I’m right suggests disharmony and doubt, but they’re not mine is an ominous twist, even a threat. Close listening has the line both ways in the song, and the ambiguity is an improvement on either line.

42.[return] and as reverb in the telephone game of floating versions (on March 8, 2014, an All Music Guide search retrieves 913,215 results for “trouble on the line”; by the time the echo drops “trouble,” results are 1,316,216)

43.[return] Promises, promises …

44.[return] that is, hidden trouble

45.[return] We — including the singer — may have troubles, but we don’t need them to have worry. Trouble is trouble enough.

46.[return] The opening couplet, then, might be an attempt to avoid the AAB refrain (and the problems the couplet foretells) — where the repeated first blues line, which often sets up a problem as a series (or same problem, different day) that is repeated (or repeatedly foils the singer), would be the same mistake twice.a The attempt seems to fail in several ways. We might hear that same mistake as the false assurance of the second line — in either variation, though it is particularly poignant on the lyric sheet. Either the first two lines are the same mistake twice (reiterated as I know I’m right) or the second line reads the first incorrectly (where they’re not mine fails to recognize problems as one’s own, and the sage is a fool). By song’s end, the problems of repetition (particularly if repetition — AAB — was to be avoided) worsen in accumulation, as the song is reduced to one line repeated over and over. Who then is the you in that line?

a. As the second song on In Our Nature, “Down the Line” might itself be the same mistake twice, and it might be a (failed) corrective to the first song, which also flirts with the repetition-compulsion death drive of the AAB blues form. How long, / How long are you willing to go suggests the AA form, and subsequent lines deliver a poetics of the B line (with a nod in the mirror to AA repetition): Punch line after punch line leaving us sore, leaving us sore. Here the B line substitutes the blues’ self-deprecatory comic relief with word play as suffering as eternal recurrence.

47.[return] and cumulus, as gathering and compiling clouds-becoming-darkness

48.[return] Thanks to Claire Donato for sharing this observation.

49.[return] or cover

50.[return] Hal Foster, “Against Pluralism,” in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985), 29.

51.[return] A related concern revealed (or, paradoxically, uncovered) by this conceit: Is “trouble” the shield, or is the singer the shield, or is the song the shield?

52.[return] John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 68.


Parmigianino, Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524).

53.[return] abetted — or conjured — by Ashbery

54.[return] Some poets indicate when a stanza break does or does not coincide with a page break, but few indicate whether a hanging line is a matter of typography or intention. See Lyn Hejinian’s The Cell (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992) for examples of clearly intentional hanging lines. Compare to the poems in C. K. Williams’s Tar (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), which habitually hang, perhaps only (if not certainly) by exceeding the width of the page.

55.[return] John Ashbery, “The Other Tradition,” in Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 3.

56.[return] Here we are tempted to throw clarity to the wind and say “‘this’ referent,” which improves upon the range and flow of sense.

57.[return] See Joshua Clover’s chapbook (with accompanying multivocal music-mashup CD), Their Ambiguity (Ypsilanti: Quemadura Press, 2003).

58.[return] “Their Ambiguity” also appears in the collection the totality for kids. Warning: Their ambiguity will remain, though they might refer to poetry and revolution. Note also: “The content of the town is our pleasure; everything that remains is form, // though one could say the same thing about the totality for kids.”a

a. Joshua Clover, the totality for kids (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 55.

59.[return] on Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002), part of a six-session covers clinic on song stealing; the song originally appeared at the end of Nine Inch Nails’s The Downward Spiral (1994)

60.[return] Originally, the song appeared on Smog’s final album, I’m New Here (subsequently, Bill Callahan recorded under his name); Scott-Heron made it the title track of his “comeback” album from 2010 (he had not made a studio album in fifteen years, and his previous album followed a twelve-year hiatus). No matter how far wrong you’ve gone / You can always turn around / … / And you may come full circle and be new here again, Scott-Heron sang with an authority Callahan cannot muster, despite how his (Callahan’s) version sounds.

61.[return] Bill Callahan’s cover of the Smog version, “performed at the benefit Letters to Santa, Second City, Chicago, December 15, 2010,” according to the YouTube video posted December 19, 2010, turns around on itself, a reflection of and on a reflection, an eye reflecting itself in a clogged sing (sic). The song is no longer his, but he remembers it well.

62.[return] LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It (New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1963), 87. It should be noted here that Jones distinguishes between “classic” and “country” blues singers: “While the country singers accompanied themselves usually on guitar or banjo, the classic blues singers usually had a band backing them up” (90). He also notes that classic blues, which was dominated by great female singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, was recorded years before country blues singers, who were “almost always men” (91). Jones notes that the “best-known country singers were wanderers” seeking employment, while women could not and did not need to move around the way men did. Not only were there societal and familial restrictions on her movement, but a woman could “almost always obtain domestic employment,” which meant she did not need to travel for work (91). Of course, there was a sense of glamour and prestige associated with the entertainment field and traveling shows, which was a draw for classic blues singers, “providing an independence and importance not available in other areas open to them — the church, domestic work, or prostitution” (93). 

63.[return] though perhaps no man can be denied the privacy of his mind, or of sleep — not for long

64.[return] This is complicated by the race record era of the 1920s, during which time country blues singers were eventually recorded (again, after classic blues was recorded). Not only did the proliferation of phonographic records provide a blues artifact, but it circulated country blues, making its more private expressive sensibilities public. “Classic blues was entertainment and country blues, folklore” (105), but both had become artifactual (and commodified) by the late ’20s. They also became ripe fields for floating signification, doublespeak, and encryption, all under the sign of accessibility.

65.[return] which projects and reveals trouble

66.[return] which flows along the line of alienation specific to commodity forms in production and consumption, to which performance points

67.[return] and more specifically, country blues, particularly because he concerns himself with the innovations of individual, primarily male, itinerant musicians

68.[return] Luc Sante, “The Invention of the Blues,” in Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005 (Portland: Verse Chorus Press, 2007), 177–206.

69.[return] or our agenda: if the dead keep singing, they sing for us as much as they sing to us

70.[return] In Robert Johnson’s version of this floating lyric, he grants permission — You may bury my body down by the highway side — then translates the line sotto voce, Baby I don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone. But he’s already made the accusation, also from the side of his mouth, You know you ain’t doing me right. We believe everything this man says, after his claim that he walked with the devil. He sells it with the (unhidden) strain in his voice when he sings Me and the Devil. That me is every bit as terrifying and unspeakable as I’m gonna beat my woman until I get satisfied.a It’s certainly leagues scarier than the Devil (which is not comforting company). Here’s a man beyond kindness, and here’s the song for which he traded his soul: “Me and the Devil Blues.”

a. So unspeakable, for Gil Scott-Heron, that in his version of the song, he sings the line I’m gonna see my woman until I get satisfied. 

71.[return] Much later, Bob Dylan will ask one kind favor, that you allow him just one more chance, but Jefferson knows he’s already had his last chance.

72.[return] though it does nothing to disperse its affect; on the contrary, it binds us, or hides us together

73.[return] or putting a down payment on it; the song, though, is free, as is the use of the lines he takes (and gives), so though he expects a return, he can’t receive it, and gives away his song, even if it isn’t his to give

74.[return] One kind favor I ask of you suggests “if it isn’t too much trouble,” but as we will see and hear, it might just be trouble enough.

75.[return] “No trouble,” we reply.

76.[return] or hand off (trouble or no trouble), though you don’t benefit from the gift; perhaps you pay backward, though Jefferson can hardly benefit, except as legend in our minds — and who benefits from that?

77.[return] The song was recorded live for The Harry Smith Project: Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited. Songs from Smith’s anthology were recorded by multiple artists during three concerts in 1999 and 2001, then released in 2006 as a four-CD box set. If you search today for Reed’s version, it will undoubtedly carry a new date — October 27, 2013, the day Reed passed into the fog of the song.

78.[return] Here, then, is where the kind favor is advanced. The singer passes his request (if it isn’t too much trouble) to the next singer (and listener), keeping the grave (and others in turn) clean, keeping the song (also a grave, or at least a headstone) in the world, wherever that is.

79.[return] trouble, indeed

80.[return] as Greil Marcus characterizes him in Invisible Republic (20).

81.[return] As it is published in his 2007 collection Kill All Your Darlings, the essay carries the compositional date range of 1994–2002.

82.[return] Jones, Blues People, 62; cf. Sante, “The Invention of the Blues,” 177. AAB refers to an end-rhyme scheme and verse structure as well as describing the whole-line, perfect-rhyme (repetition)-plus-punch-line blues form. A classic example is “Downhearted Blues,” written by Lovie Austin and Alberto Hunter, and performed by Bessie Smith:

Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days (A)
Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days (A)
It seems like trouble going to follow me to my grave (B)

In this case, the AAB structure can be described as AAA, in terms of end rhyme (if the days/grave slant-rhyme is recognized). We might imagine an original (here: debut) performance in which the singer calls the A-line, the audience repeats it with her, and the singer answers with the B-line. In that case, we might imagine a floating-lyric composition, where the audience recognizes some or all of the parts — taken from “the great body of ambient tropes known collectively as the folk-lyric” (Sante 185) — but the whole is original.

83.[return] Sante, “The Invention of the Blues,” 177, 178. Sante also identifies the structure with “line length of five stressed syllables” (177).

84.[return] as singing changes the flow of blood, bulging the veins of the neck, pouring oxygenated blood on the brain

85.[return] and again, the singer is also a listener, the listener a singer

86.[return] We can also, if only for a moment, hear songs or parts of songs into the blues, even if they float on outside of it. And, of course, we might hear (or sing) the blues as a poem.

87.[return] To listen to her B-side cover of Phil Spector’s “To Know Him Is to Love Him” is to know, know, know and lose time and place; to hear “Rehab” is to nod no, no, no in 2006. To know and not know, to no — this is trouble, with Amy Winehouse.

88.[return] Willie Nelson’s 1974 broke-up-and-get-it-together concept album breaks it down side-to-side.

89.[return] The B-side “Valerie” is the crook-fingered siren calling us to the vault; we barely register the rattlesnake warning at the end of the track.

90.[return] from Gil Scott-Heron’s “Lady Day and John Coltrane” (1971) 

91.[return] Dylan borrows the title and rewrites the song. His version appears as the B-side to 1979’s “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the lead-off single from his born-again Slow Train Coming. If trouble is a death’s head in the back of the mind, Dylan’s A-side, with its concession, It may be the devil, is the service announcement that sets trouble aside for a moment.

92.[return] Ask Lot what he thought when his wife turned to stone, Dylan offers (and commands) in his version. He skips the sunshine in the back door, still warning: Dont look back (as ever, he leaves the apostrophe behind, or leaves behind the apostrophe, taking it with him on his way out).

93.[return] or 2:19 — time or number, it will surely come

94.[return] or ease (Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash et al.), or satisfy (Lightnin Hopkins), as other versions have it

95.[return] to make a refrain of Sartre’s Nausea

96.[return] Dylan’s version reads what he leaves out, talking to the other side and concluding:

Satan will give you a little taste, then he’ll move in with rapid speed,
Lord keep my blind side covered and see that I don’t bleed.

97.[return] Johnny Cash prefaces the line with Life ain’t worth livin’

98.[return] which Nina Simone follows with If the Lord don’t help me

99.[return] Thanks to participants in two New School Graduate Writing Program seminars, Deep Surface (fall 2012) and Making Text (spring 2013) — two discussions covered in this version. 

100.[return] 329,726 views

101.[return] or, the bassist marshals the E string, bearing the song.

102.[return] Here the “town” (if not the town) disappears.

103.[return] solar plexus, shield

104.[return] So says Wikipedia.

105.[return] as all the boys have taught her

106.[return] Thanks to participants in the New School Graduate Writing Program seminar Deep Surface (fall 2013), where some of these readings took shape.  

107.[return] Or is it Chapter XXI, or just XXI?

108.[return] Do we dare call it enjambment? No.

109.[return] William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (New York, NY: New Directions, 2011), 74. Originally published 1923.

110.[return] Let’s be careful here in anticipation of what follows XXII.

111.[return] Is prose poetry in sentences? Yes, prose poetry is in sentences. As for prose, let’s say prose is poetry that doesn’t know how it sounds, unless it’s prose poetry, which too often still doesn’t know how it sounds, distracted as it is by its lack of line breaks. All writing knows how it looks, but some poems look like prose.

112.[return] and call out our bad education, which will proceed to cast XXII as an isolated riddle; the trouble with us is we can’t see and read at the same time

113.[return] Better in previous editions (though New Directions’ 2011 standalone volume is commendable in numerous ways, including C. D. Wright’s feeling-it intro — method if not methodical, and better for that) by a ligature (perhaps courtesy of an expedient typesetter): Spring & All. 

114.[return] Bernstein notes that he completed his essay in verse in 1986; it formed the front-and-centerpiece of his essay collection A Poetics (1992); dates become important later in this sentence.

115.[return] Poetry, then, is not only prose that hears itself; it is prose that sees itself and shows what it says.

116.[return] If we think of this in terms of blues annotation (or a schematic version of blues scholarship), we have an ABBA structure, which is more properly palindromic.

117.[return] because unbearably exquisite, like a hair so fine it pierces your eye

118.[return] and twenty-three years later, Paterson will insist “no ideas but in things.” Let’s play the numbers game: Spring & All first arrives in ’23, Paterson twenty-three years after that. XXII has twenty-two syllables, and its middle two stanzas go 3/2, 3/2, which is backwards and slashed for 23 23.

119.[return] found much later, in the first stanza

120.[return] Recall Rosmarie Waldrop, who repeats in “Alarms & Excursions,” “language speaks for us.”a Let’s just say language speaks us, and call it a day.

a. Rosmarie Waldrop, “Alarms & Excursions,” in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: ROOF, 1990), 46–47. On page 47, she elaborates her initial proposition: “So, while language thinks for us, there is no guarantee that it will be in the direction we like.”

121.[return] for Danniel Schoonebeek and Claire Donato

122.[return] The song includes a choral provocation — Somebody else took his place and bravely cried: /  I’m a blackstar — possibly an open invitation meant for Kendrick Lamar, whose 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly was an acknowledged model for the sound Bowie wanted for ★.a  Reports that Kanye West almost immediately announced himself as Bowie’s torchbearer via Twitter were greatly exaggerated, perhaps an opportunistic Yeezy backlash that reflects the shadow side of Bowie’s blue-eyed-soul appeal.

a Though if Bowie has an alter-ego legacy, let it be mutable as he was, and more so. Let anyone wear the mantle of gender-abstract changeling — turn and face the strange — with or without guitar.

123.[return] Here with apologies: We all die, some sooner than others. The videos present a death rite and a temporary resurrection, a visiting wraith, respectively.

124.[return] C. D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 61. An inch higher on that page is a declaration of poetics that serves as a Trouble Songs credo: be critical and sing.

125.[return] though a poem by that title can be found at the journal Lana Turner’s website.

126.[return] Almost secretly available at the time (compared to the elaborate promotion for ★), however, was a new book of poetics, The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, released like Bowie’s album the previous week. A companion volume to Cooling Time, which mixed poetics in prose with line-broken poems in clear homage to William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All, Wright’s new prose work borrows also from sequencing techniques she used in poetry books and encouraged in the work of her Literary Arts students at Brown University. For example, as included in the book, her introduction to the 2011 facsimile edition of Spring and All is broken into multiple sections, as is a reflection on her friend and Brown colleague Robert Creeley, and an essay first published online in 2011 at The Volta (aka Evening Will Come), “In a Word, a World.”a Those sections are each given a page, and the essays are interspersed among the volume so one is in effect reading all of them at once, if she reads the book from front to back.

a This latter essay is notable not only for its excellence, but for the way its multipage online layout anticipated Wright’s formal, modular sequencing technique in the 2016 poetics volume.

127.[return] Bowie’s final character, Button Eyes, visually captivating if not as smartly attired in language as The Thin White Duke. David Jones, rest in peace.

128.[return] C. D. Wright, One With Others (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2010), 14. Poet and teacher C. D. Wright, rest in peace.

129. [return] “Belated” means overtaken by darkness, as when we do not make it home before the night takes us. We are benighted. And to be benighted is to be overcome by intellectual or moral darkness (Oxford English Dictionary). This chapter was written as an introduction to a recording of a chapter from Trouble Songs (punctum books, 2018). The original chapter, “A Whole House,” follows this answer song. The recording is available at the publisher’s Trouble Songs page, and at punctum audio, along with other Trouble Songs recordings.

130. [return] First published in Trouble Songs (punctum books, 2018).

131. [return] and the first line of Morrissey’s 1994 album Vauxhall and I

132. [return] That is, “trouble” sticks to the title and does not appear by name in the songs, but look here, we’re soaking in it.