Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (1992)

We have discussed here and there in previous weeks how children encounter murder ballads–what role such songs may have played in children’s upbringing in earlier times, and how that role may or may not be different in our current age.  Our contemporary time being one of both high anxiety and, perhaps not unrelatedly, of childhood being more protected, supervised, and safe.  The songs that we addressed earlier, be they “Down in the Willow Garden” or others, usually reflect life situations that affected young adults, rather than children.  The songs often represent morality tales that told children and others lessons about the potential consequences of unchastity or of disobedience of parents.  

We have discussed songs where parents have been cruel to their children, but have yet to go into the territory of songs that show us a child’s violent response.  (We haven’t gone completely into the “Cruel Mother” territory yet, but I’m sure we will at some point.)  Both real life and narrative logic suggest that such vengeance may often be delayed, served cold, or channeled toward unrelated others–fury vented when fury can accomplish something.  

This week, we’re going to take an initial look into songs that explore this territory of the violence that may emerge from the powerless (i.e. children), when they come to find their power. In other words, these are some songs which contemplate the vengeance of the “inner child.”  “Inner child” is a well-lampooned concept, to be sure, but I think gets at an important dynamic of these songs. We’ll be paging Dr. Freud a few times, no mistake, but in the process finding a set of songs which relate music and violence in a very different way from some of those other, more traditional murder ballads.  They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, all of recent vintage.  It will be an incomplete look, but I came across these songs through the recommendation of a friend, and one of our readers, and found some value in putting them into conversation with each other, and into the broader conversation about how these songs may or may not “function” like other material we’ve discussed. 

“The Wound That Never Heals”

Jim White (Michael Davis Pratt)

Jim White includes  “The Wound That Never Heals” in the soundtrack for his movie Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.  It also appears in what appears to be White’s preferred arrangement on his 2007 album, No Such Place.  I was immediately intrigued by the film noir character of the song’s opening scenes.

Let’s give it a listen. The lyrics are here.

White discusses in this interview the challenges this song presented for him when it comes to arrangement.  He wants to be a storyteller first, and the challenge in arranging the song was to put the story in the foreground.  This accounts for the more stripped-down setting.

The one song that really bedevilled us was “The Wound That Never Heals”. From the moment the record company heard it (before [Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus] was even released) they considered that song the cornerstone of the next album. However when we tried to make the song big and cornerstone-ish, it sounded forced. We went back and tried to make it smaller and it felt confused. David Byrne, remembering the fiery version of it I used to do live, offered to produce the track as a live endeavour, and flew me to NY, brought in some heavy hitters in the music biz and we did it live, and it sounded like a great blues song in need of a great blues singer. Needless to say, that great blues singer doesn’t live in Jim White’s body. Then I recorded a version of it with my band down here (Ed: Jim’s home in Florida) which was very very cinematic and disjointed and everybody agreed that while it had moments of cathartic beauty, it was too much of a Frankenstein song. 

Finally, Luaka Bop decided to do a remix with Mark Saunders in NY.  He listened to the track and said, “This isn’t a single. This is a story,” and he proceeded to pull back the music until the story emerged clearly and everyone breathed a sigh of relief because it meant a lot to all of us. It’s a real message song and concerns an issue I don’t mind being didactic about.

Jim White

There are a few obvious themes and aspects to this song where we could go into a close reading:  the intimate link between sexuality and homicidal aggression, the history of sexual trauma, or the betrayal of parents and relatives.  We have the unpleasant ambiguity as to whether the song’s title functions as a play on words invoking either the protagonist’s unresolvable trauma or a crude slang term for female genitalia (alas, there are some things one learns from an internet search that cannot be un-learned), or both.  

There’s an immense expanse of darkness beneath the narrative of the song.  Whether or not such a close reading would spoil the song for you, me, or anybody else, I’m not sure.  You could take a healthy (I suppose) and mind-bending excursion through the psychology and gender theory behind such songs (as musical equivalents of film noir). You may also find some things of aesthetic interest in the flat delivery of the spoken-word verses that narrate significant and vivid emotional moments on the one hand, and the more impassioned, sung chorus, which nevertheless still reinforces an idea of emotional inertness or deformity–“Baby, why don’t you cry?”–on the other.

To me, this song operates quite a bit differently than some of the more familiar folk music ballads–in two ways.  First, it seems far less of an advance warning or admonishment, as many songs we’ve looked at have seemed to function.  With others, though, it does represent a kind of interpretive lens through which to understand the emotional traumas of past experience, however much they may or may not resemble those of the wounded serial murderess in this song.  Second, its spoken-word nature and its story make “The Wound That Never Heals” more art piece than folk song.  It’s frankly difficult to envision a song like this entering into the culture in the way of, say, “Frankie and Johnny” or “Tom Dooley.”  It doesn’t strike me as a song one would want to pick up and sing outside of wanting to provide a very particular aesthetic experience for an audience. While all songs are “message songs” to a certain extent (otherwise why would we sing them or listen to them?), this one brings a certain bent that links it very closely to performance.  Perhaps it is more haunting than entertaining.  I want to spend the concluding lines in this post zeroing in as much as possible on what White may intend as far as this didactic element of the song goes.    

Looking for the gold tooth in God’s crooked smile

Goethe

If the song is a didactic one–teaching while entertaining–the idea that its lesson is only that abuse of children may lead to the creation of adults who are wounded, troubled, and may become violent and hurtful themselves seems far too facile.  It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t seem to me to be all that the song is saying or illustrating.  Frankly, it also doesn’t seem to me to be anywhere close to the reason with which one might start.  That is, to take such a view of the song as providing instrumental reasons (if bad things happen to children in our society, further bad things will ensue) seems to ignore a whole lot of intrinsic reasons (reasons for their own sake) why the harm of children is an awful, horrible thing.  White is up to something more.  

For more perspective on this question, and on what’s going on in the song, it’s helpful to take a look at a few clips from White’s Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Each of the clips below includes some rather penetrating perspectives from novelist Harry Crews, who died earlier this year and is featured prominently in the film.  In the first, Crews reflects on a kind of human kinship through common guilt.  He uses Goethe, but the concept of original sin would probably also do the trick.  The clip also includes excerpts from White performing “The Wound that Never Heals.”



Here’s the second clip, in which Crews reflects on the nature of storytelling and moral formation.

What I expect comes through loud and clear in both clips is the importance of storytelling, and the role that these stories play in the culture and moral formation of the South.  This is not particularly new territory for us.  What also becomes clear is a characterization of the ever-present judgment of God and view of human nature involving a pervasive sense of bearing the “mark of Cain.”  “There is no crime of which I cannot conceive myself guilty,” says Goethe, via Crews.  This is a kind of emotional, moral, and religious landscape that we have discussed before, for instance in listening to “Barton Hollow.”

What may emerge for some listeners from the concluding verse of “The Wound that Never Heals” is a psychological exculpation of our serial killer.  She is the walking wounded.  This is a very different dynamic, though, from typical views of male serial killers (Shaleane explored some songs about them in conversation with the music of Neko Case).  In another way, however, the world that White creates in the song is a world with no heroes, only villains and dupes, and perhaps the hope of salvation coming undeserved.  Perhaps this too is wrong, however, and what we have is a world populated entirely by the walking wounded.  Our protagonist is not a villain but a deformed soul trying to answer a tragic and unresolvable question.  

She is, in Crews’s words, among the “maimed and mutilated,” either physically or emotionally. While this winds up being a rather extreme way to put it, it provides, I think, a crucial part of White’s “message.”  Despite our shock at our protagonist’s actions, and her cold, distant attitude to her own brutality, we are able to flip an empathetic switch in that third verse–not excusing those actions, but making them understandable. However emotionally alien she might appear at first, she inevitably concludes the song as one of our fellow creatures, fighting a particularly hard battle.  This has important lessons not only for how we think of her, but how we think of ourselves.  The song, therefore, leaves the audience–you and me–with an important question:

“Baby, why don’t you cry?”

Next up

We’ll change settings a bit for more musical exploration of children navigating sexual awareness and betrayal of/by parents.  Not exactly a light-hearted week, I know.  We tend to go where the songs lead.  Perhaps by the end of the week we’ll find another tune with an opening for hearts to be lighter.