Your Favourite Viola Player is an Evil Wizard

I Chose To Believe

The Magic of John Cale

The latest development in the Land of Nod
Says the animals got the best of us all
Lost in the miles of the 20th century
Cocktail parties and things

If we could work it out
We'd have done it by now
If we could work it out
Don't you think we'd have it done?

 -"Indistinct Notion of Cool," John Cale, Walking on Locusts

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When the postwar generation came of age, adulthood greeted them with a Dionysian orgy.  Long-suppressed pagan urges were let loose without cultural grounding.  Sex and drugs were freely enjoyed without a meaningful and historically-conscious social context.

For a semantically-softened populace, art stepped in to explain what was going on.  Rock provided the soundtrack, psychedelia and folk informing the optimism of the time.

Standing in the corner, dressed in black, arms folded, were the Velvet Underground.  The seed of a grungy, distorted tradition of musical nihilism was already planted, nurtured by Andy Warhol, and soon to bloom into glam, punk, noise, and eventually a mandatory music called "alternative rock."

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Lou Reed's lyrical subject matter would receive the most notoriety, but it was John Cale who arranged and refined the sonic backdrop that animated Reed's songs.  Cale didn't receive credit for producing the first two Velvet Underground records, but it's understood that he did the job.  He went on to produce debuts by the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, and Patti Smith.  When the lines of influence on subsequent artists are traced, Cale's reputation in New York in the late 70s as "the godfather of punk" becomes a reasonable proposition.

~~~

Before the Velvets, Cale had learned how to play drone music with La Monte Young.  This sometimes involved holding a note for an hour at a time.  The kind of entrainment following from such an exercise can be useful for the alteration of consciousness, but techniques first developed in India for getting closer to an ultimate mystic reality were now to be re-purposed to make the mud sound sexier.  With an insistent beat, loud volume, and persistent tones, any message can be delivered more forcefully, and potentially more subliminally.

~~~

Cale's social maladjustment may well be attributed to being abused by a priest as a child, and his drug abuse to being prescribed opiates as a child.  How should we understand his marginal success, expertly crafting a miserable canon of neglected art rock?

Willfully uncommercial yet doggedly hard-working, John Cale has cut an interesting path.  After making a profound impact on music history, he used the songs of his solo career as a series of masks and genre exercises, too eccentric to appeal to the masses.  This relative lack of attention permitted him to comment on society, psychology, and history in ways more direct than many of his contemporaries.  He was writing songs for sullen intellectuals with bitter tastes, and providing an artistic precedent for tools of crowd control to be applied to the maverick depressive set.

Among informed hipsters and music snobs, Cale's importance in bringing distorted psychosis to rock music is undisputed.  What may surprise some is that the sad jester has been recognised by the Crown for his efforts.

In 2010, John Cale was inducted into the Order of the British Empire, "For services to Music and to the Arts."  It's almost as if the Empire, such as it remains, is somehow served by hypnotic songs engendering apathy and debauchery.

~~~

You're just feeling some of the magic
But you're feelin' it
This is just some of the magic

I write reams of this shit every day
But you're feelin' it

Where's the heat coming from, Brotherman, Brotherman?

Very uncomfortable... but you're feelin' it

Where the hype coming from, Brotherman, Brotherman?
Out there in the courtyard with Uncle Sam

-"Brotherman," John Cale, blackAcetate

~~~

Further reading

Romanian witches to cast anti-government spell

The Queen witch Bratara Buzea said she would lead a chorus in casting a spell using a concoction of cat excrement and a dead dog. "They want to take the country out of this crisis using us? They should get us out of the crisis because they brought us into it," she said.

Beyond Synchronicity: Mind ≠ Brain

Scientists love to throw out evidence. It makes them feel powerful and important. They especially love to throw out evidence from mushy fencesitters who come to them, cap in hand, tail between legs, begging for validation for someone's pet obsession, whether it's ancient lost civilizations or psi or NDEs.

‘Magic’ Will Replace Normcore, Trend Forecasters Report

How does this all relate towards brands and the fashion landscape? "In the broadest strokes, it is saying, 'This is about people’s experiences.'" Segal says. "It is saying, ‘What’s important is how people are experiencing the world, experiencing their spirituality, experiencing anxiety, so there is a motion back toward the emotional landscape of consumers instead of their pocketbooks."

Over 2,000 Wizards and Witches Gather to Hold Ritual in Kiev

"One does not forget that apart from the God, there is also the Devil, which through such people can perform what can be first seen as a good thing, but with the use of dark forces."

Do New Age ideas speak to our high-tech world?

"But what if Weber and Thomas were wrong? Ironically, at precisely the time when Thomas was anatomising the death of magic in the 1970s, bohemian mystics in places such as California and London were reviving it."