The Making and Meaning Of Naked Lunch

If William S. Burroughs truly feared a word virus, an idea he often made reference to in his later Nova Trilogy, then Naked Lunch was the ultimate inoculation against that verbal disease. Though it was written before the three books that would comprise the Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express), Naked Lunch was the cure that came before the illness. It was his version of the needle to cure all literary lesions and stem the tide of evils that language has the ability to produce through its constantly changing, adapting, regrouping control systems.


Burroughs' war against language was ironic, though, as he used the very language he sought to destroy in his attempt to develop his arsenal. Only through his use of language could he disentangle the web that all words have the ability to create. It was fighting fire with fire, and through the medium that culminated to become Naked Lunch, he launched a career of constant battle against words and their constraints. Naked Lunch, a collection of old stories turned on their ear and hilarious routines at one time devised as tools to romantically entrap Allen Ginsberg, became Burroughs' expression system.

An expression system is the vehicle used by a pharmaceutical company to deliver the drug that has been developed to combat against an identified disease or ailment. It can come in the form of a pill or a liquid, a powder, even a gas. Either way, it is the vehicle used to deliver the drug product itself. But, no drug is ever delivered in its pure form. All drugs are delivered in a form that encapsulates the active ingredient that is intended to cure the stated problem, watering down and diluting the drug to make it safe for human consumption. In Burroughs work, Naked Lunch is the initial inoculation, a less concentrated form of what was to follow immediately after in the Nova Trilogy.

Because Naked Lunch is an expression system, the vehicle designed to deliver the message that will become an ongoing mantra, a continuous death knell for language and words, it introduced a new way of telling stories meant to be guideposts for the reader. At the end of Naked Lunch is the famous line that Burroughs wrote about releasing his Word Hoard, virtually unleashing a legion of his Words designed to kill the Word Virus that had invaded and taken over the minds of all humans everywhere. In much the same way a pharmaceutical is designed to combat an enemy virus, Naked Lunch was designed to combat the conservative Western ideas that proliferated throughout the Western world at the time of the book's writing.

The vaccination that Naked Lunch proposes is the forerunner to all of Burroughs later novels, and specifically the novels of the 1960's and 1970's. The race to eliminate language, and then take it back form those who would use it for nefarious purposes is still an idea in its infancy in Naked Lunch, drawing on his earlier work and realized in the letters he wrote home during his exile in Tangiers, but quickly evolving into a realized attack against morals that appear outmoded and literature that, in Burroughs estimation, could have been written by anyone. A totally different work form the writing he had done up until that point, Naked Lunch became the model for the rest of his career's work.

However, the extreme graphic nature of the work, as well as its ambiguous take on accepted morals of the time caused much controversy, and has often lead, even in the present, to readers looking more to the life of the writer than to the content of the novel. How could anyone write such things and not live the life described in the book himself? For many writers, this would be a case of mistaken fantasy. Writers often observe and record the lives of others instead of actually experiencing something for themselves, being a relatively conservative lot, on the whole. What caused many to question, and eventually confront in court, was that Naked Lunch and its writer, Burroughs, never really denied his lifestyle to the outside world.

He certainly didn't apologize for it. Often in early interviews he could be found side-stepping more complicated issues such as homosexuality and its reality below the surface of society in the early 1960's. Yet, this was never an admittance of guilt or criminality (especially in regards to drugs), but a cautious approach to his new found interest from the media.

This ambiguous feeling towards what many consider "wrong" has both hurt and helped the book. As will be discussed, this is often the real naked Lunch for the first time reader: the life of the author, Burroughs, which many readers know about and assume the book is an accurate description of.

This is not exactly true.

Naked Lunch is fantasy, for the most part. It is a description of many real events that have been stretched and twisted even farther along than thought possible, making them part of a world beyond real, but somehow still mocking ours. Often, upon reading Naked Lunch for the first time, readers do not understand this.

And perhaps it is not a book that can be readily understood. It has been widely read (though not nearly as other books by Burroughs), but it is not always taken seriously. It is known to be a powerful work of satire and the perfect indictment of conservative social morals, but somehow it is too extreme for many college or university curriculums. Somehow, in the present day, it is still often considered to be distasteful, or irresponsible to put it on the reading list. This is as likely due to its structure and accessibility, which are deemed low or difficult by many, as it is due to its sexual content or rampant drug use.

So, quite often, though it is a valuable antidote to the typical class syllabus, it is passed over for more conventional novels that are both easier to teach and require less background work on behalf of the teacher to make the initial, difficult reading more sensible to the class. Truthfully, to get anything valuable from a reading of Naked Lunch, a fairly large amount of time and discussion is needed.

Readability is probably the major factor in making Naked Lunch a book that is often a novelty item, rather than a distinct part of the canon of English. Part of this is due to the very slow changes that come to the written language and the human consciousness' ability to accept new forms of telling stories and relating fictional ideas. It takes time to go from one convention to another, as the move from poetry to the novel in the 17th century shows. However, it is inevitable that English always changes and adapts to reflect the way the world around it is changing, sometimes being the impetus, sometimes being the reflection.

Naked Lunch and its influence lay clearly on the side of impetus. Its influence is fairly astounding if one traces the roots of its influence back from the present to 1959. If one wants to take into account the work of Ginsberg and Kerouac, an argument can be made that it began seriously influencing other writers long before it was published.

However, it is an often overlooked, as well as often misunderstood, as has been mentioned. The goal of this book is to try and illuminate the fact that Naked Lunch is a very readable book, designed to engage the reader. It was written through the medium of letters in its earliest stages, and so the intention was always to try and draw out the reader and evoke a reaction of some kind.

Without the outlet of Ginsberg as a `receiver', Burroughs could not have formed the book. His letters to Ginsberg throughout the mid-1950's are a continuous appeal for response and reaction, as well as leaving much of the editing to him. In a sense, though Burroughs was very detailed in when it came to his published, or soon to be published work, he was open to Ginsberg using only the portions he felt were useful in the formation of the novel. While he often wrote things on the fly, leaving previously admired protions out atfer a re-read of the manuscript, or spontaniously including something new, when it came to the finished product, Burroughs became exacting. Nonetheless, and to the benefit of the novel, Ginsberg changed very little and made sure to edit out what he felt was irrelevant rather than demanding rewrites of sections. Much of the novel's immediacy comes through because of this, leaving the complicated structure and difficult language intact, even though Burroughs did not edit the early portions as much as Ginsberg did.

Naked Lunch tends to confuse many readers, as they are unused to having to tackle difficult language. However, there is no question that a book of its nature would not have the basic purpose of instruction and methods for better living. As Burroughs writes near the end of the book, Naked Lunch "is a how-to book." The very real moral purpose behind many of the routines, grotesques though they might be, is clear: this is a book designed to point the reader in a direction, offering a way of living and seeing the world, which was certainly a part of the character of Burroughs himself.

The very nature of the book is to involve the reader at a level beyond that of the common novel, forcing them to choose between simply continuing to read on, or putting down the novel because they object to the idea of its ambiguous message on issues that were generally considered controversial at the time of its publishing. It should be noted that the issues at hand, homosexuality, drug addiction and the power of governments to do with common people as they will, are still very controversial and complicated subjects for most writers to adequately confront. Burroughs made this kind of confrontation his prized possession. With the added element of difficult format and brutally succinct language, couched within a specifically satirical structure, Naked Lunch stills maintains its place in the early 21st century as a "difficult" novel for many to read.

The purpose of this book is to discuss the various aspects of Naked Lunch in a close reading that shows the book as an accessible, but cacophonous novel. The reader is forced to participate in the fantasy world that emerges from the pages of the book. Through examinations of Burroughs' own personal myth, and the way it takes away from the book at times, the use of drugs, the use of sex, irony, satire and the use of the book as a tool for social criticism (especially of the powers that control the world as we know it), we are able to show that Naked Lunch is a very relevant book even nearly fifty years after its publishing.

The view that is taken of the novel in this book is that much of it relates exclusively back to Burroughs first, and then has a wider significance for the rest of the world after. This is due to its being formed initially in the letters between Burroughs and Ginsberg throughout the 1950's, making it a very personal book, though very much set in a satirical fantasy world.

The expression system Burroughs developed with Naked Lunch would go on and continue with varying degrees of success for the rest of his career. Naked Lunch is clearly his most famous book, though probably not his most read book. That honor is reserved for Junky, an obviously important document, but one that lacks the complicated structure and language which allows Naked Lunch to have such a deep reservoir to draw from. Though Junky is widely read, and it showcases the talent Burroughs had for straight narrative, it was never considered by Burroughs to really demonstrate what he wanted to in writing. Naked Lunch was his first attempt to truly convey ideas in what he considered to be an original form. Through the vehicle of his routines and extended grotesques, he was able to formulate a way of telling a story that has been literally impossible for anyone else to emulate with a credible voice.

The Prototype Of The Personal Computer: Altair 8800

The MITS Altair 8800 was a microcomputer design from 1975, based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Sold as a kit through Popular Electronics magazine, the designers intended to sell only a few hundred to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month. Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the personal computer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

Contents 1 History 1.1 The design 1.2 The launch 2 Description 3 Software 3.1 Altair BASIC 4 References 5 Emulators 6 External links

History

While serving at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, Ed Roberts and Forrest M. Mims III decided to use their electronics background to produce small kits for model rocketMicro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Roberts' garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and started selling radio transmitters and instruments for model rockets. hobbyists. Roberts and Mims, along with Stan Cagle and Robert Zaller, founded

In 1969 Roberts bought out the others and moved to a larger office, where he manufactured calculator kits for hobbyists. Mims assisted by writing manuals for some of the products in return for kits. In 1972, Texas Instruments developed its own calculator chip and started selling complete calculators at less than half the price of other commercial models. MITS and many other companies were devastated by this, and Roberts struggled to reduce his quarter-million-dollar debt.

With the release of the first 8-bit microprocessor, the Intel 8008, in 1972, and the more powerful 8080 in 1974, a number of hobbyists started designing microcomputer kits. In July 1974 one such design, Jonathan Titus' Mark-8, based on the 8008, was advertised in Radio-Electronics magazine. The design was purely on paper, requiring the builder to track down the parts one at a time, a task that was virtually impossible outside of California. Although the Mark-8 was not a success, the editors at Popular Electronics wrote that someone would eventually decide to supply the public with a "real" kit, and decided they wanted to be the ones to do it. At this point the story becomes somewhat less clear.

The design

Ed Roberts had designed and manufactured programmable calculators and was familiar with the microprocessors available in 1974. The Intel 4004, 4040 and 8008 were not powerful enough and the Motorola 6800 was still in development. He chose the 8-bit Intel 8080. At that time, Intel's main business was selling memory chips by the thousands to computer companies. They had no experience in selling small quantities of microprocessors. When the 8080 was introduced in April 1974, Intel set the single unit price at $360. "That figure had a nice ring to it," recalled Intel's Dave House in 1984. "Besides, it was a computer, and they usually cost thousands of dollars, so we felt it was a reasonable price."^[1] Ed Roberts had experience in buying OEM quantities of calculator chips and he was able to negotiate a $75 price for the 8080 microprocessor chips.^[2][3] The name finally decided upon for the computer came from Popular Electronics' editor Les Solomon's 12-year-old daughter, Lauren. She suggested Altair, which was the destination for the Starship Enterprise during an episode of Star Trek that she was watching.^[4]

The first working sample was immediately shipped, by train, to New York City. However, it never arrived due to a strike by the shipping company. The first example of this groundbreaking machine is thus lost to history. Solomon had already taken a number of pictures of the machine and wrote the article based on them, while Roberts got to work on building a replacement. Everything came together, and the kit was officially available on December 19, 1974.

The launch

Popular Electronics, January 1975

The kit was first announced in the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics. The timing seemed to be just right. The electronics hobbyists were moving on to computers as more and more electronics turned digital, and yet they were frustrated by the low power and inflexibility of the few kits that were already on the market. The Altair had enough power to be actually useful, and was designed as an expandable system that opened it up to all sorts of experiments. Roberts needed to sell 200 over the next year to break even, but instead received thousands of orders in the first month, including 200 in one day.

Within only six months competition arrived in the form of the IMSAI 8080, which was available with a keyboard, monitor and a floppy disk controller. Roberts was furious, and spent an increasing amount of his time trying to "knock off" these competitors instead of improving the Altair. By 1976 there were a number of much better built machines on the market, and when Roberts started demanding the newly-appearing computer stores sell only Altair machines, they instead turned to the competition and, in a turn of irony, MITS was quickly squeezed out of the market it had created.

Description

In the first design of the Altair, the parts needed to make a complete machine would not fit on a single motherboard, and the machine consisted of four boards stacked on top of each other with stand-offs. Another problem facing Roberts was that the parts needed to make a truly useful computer weren't available, or wouldn't be designed in time for the January launch date. So during the construction of the second model, he decided to build most of the machine on removable cards, reducing the motherboard to nothing more than an interconnect between the cards, a backplane. The basic machine consisted of five cards, including the CPU on one and memory on another. He then looked for a cheap source of connectors, and came across a supply of 100-pin edge connectors. The S-100 bus was eventually acknowledged by the professional computer community and adopted as the IEEE-696 computer bus standard.

For all intents, the Altair bus consists of the pins of the Intel 8080 run out onto the backplane. No particular level of thought went into the design, which led to such disasters as various power lines of differing voltages being located next to each other, leading to easy shorting. Another oddity was that the system included two unidirectional 8-bit data buses, but only a single bidirectional 16-bit address bus. A deal on power supplies led to the use of +8V and +18V, which had to be "pulled down" on the cards to TTL (+5V) or RS-232 (+12V) standard voltage levels.

Altair 8800b computer front panel

The Altair shipped in a two-piece case. The backplane and power supply were mounted on a base plate, along with the front and rear of the box. The "lid" was shaped like a C, forming the top, left and right sides of the box. The front panel, was inspired by the Data General Nova minicomputer, included a large number of toggle switches to feed binary data directly into the memory of the machine, and a number of red LEDs to read those values back out.^[5]

Programming the Altair was an extremely tedious process where one toggled the switches to positions corresponding to an 8080 opcode, then used a special switch to enter the code into the machine's memory, and then repeated this step until all the opcodes of a presumably complete and correct program was in place. When the machine first shipped the switches and lights were the only interface, and all one could do with the machine was make programs to make the lights blink. Nevertheless, many were sold in this form. Roberts was already hard at work on additional cards, including a paper tape reader for storage, additional RAM cards, and a RS-232 interface to connect to a proper terminal.

Software

Altair BASIC

Main article: Altair BASIC

Around this time Roberts received a letter from a Seattle company asking if he would be interested in buying its BASIC programming language for the machine. He called the company and reached a private home, where no one had heard of anything like BASIC. In fact the letter had been sent by Bill Gates and Paul Allen from the Boston area, and they had no BASIC to offer. When they called Roberts to follow up on the letter he expressed his interest, and the two started work on their BASIC interpreter using a self-made simulator for the 8080 on a PDP-10 minicomputer. They figured they had 30 days before someone else beat them to the punch, and once they had a version working on the simulator, Allen flew to Albuquerque to deliver the program, Altair BASIC (aka MITS 4K BASIC), on a paper tape. The first time it was run, it displayed "Altair Basic," then crashed, but that was enough for them to join; the next day, they brought in a new paper tape and it ran. The first program ever typed in, was "2+2", and up came the "4." Gates soon joined Allen and formed Microsoft, then spelled "Micro-Soft".

References

1. ^ Thompson Kaye, Glynnis (1984). A Revolution in Progress - A History to Date of Intel. Intel Corporation, pg 14. Order number:231295.
2. ^ Freiberger, Paul; Michael Swaine (2000). Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, pg 42. ISBN 0-07-135892-7. "Roberts was sure he could get the chip price much cheaper, and he did. Intel knocked the price down to $75."
3. ^ Mims, Forrest (January 1985). "The Tenth Anniversary of the Altair 8800". Computers & Electronics 23 (1): 58-62, 81-82. Ziff Davis. "But because the 8080 sold for $360 in single quantities, few people could afford it. Ed Roberts bought the chips in large quantities and was able to get a substantial discount…"
4. ^ Milford, Annette (April 1976). "Computer Power of the Future". Computer Notes 1 (11): 7. Altair Users Group, MITS Inc.. Retrieved on 2007-12-01. "Les Solomon entertained a curious audience with anecdotes about how it all began for MITS, The name for MITS' computer, for example, was inspired by his 12-year-old daughter. She said why don't you call it Altair -- that's where the Enterprise is going tonight."
5. ^ Greelish, David (1996). "Ed Roberts Interview with Historically Brewed magazine". Historically Brewed (9). Historical Computer Society. Retrieved on 2007-11-22. Ed Roberts said: "We had a Nova 2 by Data General in the office that we sold time share on …The front panel on an Altair essentially models every switch that was on the Nova 2. We had that machine to look at. The switches are pretty much standard of any front panel machine. It would have taken forever if we would have had to re-decide where every switch had to go. "

Tom Waits II The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)

A cab combs the snake,
Tryin' to rake in that last night's fare,
And a solitary sailor
Who spends the facts of his life
like small change on strangers...

Paws his inside P-coat pocket
for a welcome twenty-five cents,
And the last bent butt from a package of Kents,
As he dreams of a waitress with Maxwell House eyes
And marmalade thighs with scrambled yellow hair.

Her rhinestone-studded moniker says, "Irene"
As she wipes the wisps of dishwater blonde from her eyes

And the Texaco beacon burns on,
The steel-belted attendant with a 'Ring and Valve Special'...
Cryin' "Fill'er up and check that oil"
"You know it could be a distributor and it could be a coil."

The early mornin' final edition's on the stands,
And that town cryer's cryin' there with nickels in his hands.
Pigs in a blanket sixty-nine cents,
Eggs - roll 'em over and a package of Kents,
Adam and Eve on a log, you can sink 'em damn straight,
Hash browns, hash browns, you know I can't be late.

And the early dawn cracks out a carpet of diamond
Across a cash crop car lot
filled with twilight Coupe Devilles,
Leaving the town in a-keeping
Of the one who is sweeping
Up the ghost of Saturday night...

An American Orginal: Tom Waits

The below paper was something that I can across via Internet. As I write this now, I am listening to a little known yet great track "The Ghosts of Saturday Night(After Hours At Napoleone's Pizza House". It brings back a lot of very good memories. Waits is one of those rare artist that somehow has never left my mind. There is something archetypal going on here, I know. His brilliant oddity can not be matched nor copied.

He is a man and an artist that stands alone.

He is truly An American Original.

Musical Apocalypse: Tom Waits’ Bone Machine Angela Jones – (University of Western Australia)

Apocalypse derives from the Greek apocalypsis, meaning the act of uncovering,unveiling, or revelation (Frye 135, Derrida 64). It has been suggested that originally apocalypse did not embody the concepts of violence and destruction, which we now come to associate with it;1 however, at least since its inception as a distinctive genre, it has also come to entail an “end-of-history scenario” which involves not only revelation but catastrophe, destruction, and disaster (Boyarin 42). While the apocalyptic theme or genre continues to inform and inspire a number of different media and discourses into the twenty-first century, the representation of apocalypse within popular music remains a largely overlooked field of enquiry.2 Therefore in this paper I would like to discuss Tom Waits’ 1992 CD, Bone Machine, as a popular musical rendition of the apocalyptic theme, in order to explore what the apocalyptic might sound like, were it to be rendered musically. To do so, I will be drawing on Jacques Derrida’s essay “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” in which he formulates an idea of the apocalyptic as “tone”: the “revelator of some unveiling in process” (84). This idea of an apocalyptic tone destabilizes and undermines some of the dominant assumptions central to narrativebased understandings of Apocalypse; and indeed, my analysis aims to foreground the ways in which Bone Machine enables an original and, at times, subversive musical perspective on what has proven to be a remarkably resilient cultural theme. Derrida’s “Apocalyptic Tone” To begin with, it is necessary to clarify what Derrida means by an “apocalyptic tone;” however, he is explicitly resistant to providing an absolute definition. On the contrary, he suggests that as soon as any conventions were established, the apocalyptic tone would be precisely that which disrupts and destabilizes them. The tone consists of only so many interruptions and fluctuations: “a Verstimmung multiplying the voices and making the tones shift” (83). Nonetheless, for the sake of illustrating what he means by an apocalyptic tone, he allows us to “imagine” that there is such a thing as “an apocalyptic tone, a unity of the apocalyptic tone” (83). In this (impossible) case, he contends: Whosoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you; the tone is the revelator of some unveiling in process. Not only truth as the revealed truth of a secret on the end or of the secret of the end. Truth itself is the destination, and that truth unveils itself as the advent of the end (84). The apocalyptic tone is that which signifies that it reveals the truth – whatever that truth might be. That is, the tone reveals that it reveals; it signifies that it is in the act of unveiling and that this unveiling is the ‘truth.’ This revelation, however, is a process that is endless; the end never comes, or rather, is always, already coming. Far from revealing the truth or the end, the apocalyptic tone constantly defers and obfuscates, unravelling and disrupting ostensibly straightforward transmissions to reveal the sites at which they break down, and moving in the in-between spaces where clear-cut distinctions intersect and collide. Indeed, what Derrida is effectively arguing for in this essay is not some idea of a preordained Truth or God that will be uncovered at the end of this revelatory process, but rather that the process itself is the revelation, the unveiling gesture is apocalyptic. Thus, what is apocalyptic here is not something that will be uncovered at the very end, and which the revelatory gesture seeks to show through its unveiling, but rather the tone itself, the tone that signifies that it is in the act of revealing. The tone is a gesture in terms of delivery, and this gesture is apocalyptic. This apocalyptic gesture culminates for Derrida in the word “come” or “viens,” which is both the ultimate limitation and the site of an opening – an issue I will return to in my discussion of Bone Machine’s fourth track, “All Stripped Down.” What makes Derrida’s essay so compelling for a ‘reading’ of Bone Machine as a musical representation of apocalypse is the way it disrupts understandings of the apocalyptic genre which are dependent on genre-specific imagery or a familiar narrative trajectory (wherein the apocalypse is equated with ‘The End’), in order to focus on the apocalyptic as a distinctive mode of delivery or tone.3 This, in turn, allows for a discussion of Bone Machine which does not simply engage with the (admittedly abundant) eschatological imagery of the lyrics, but rather with how the sound of the album and Waits’ vocal delivery might be heard as apocalyptic. I would like to briefly engage with the album as a ‘whole’ – its overall sound, production and artwork – before moving on to examine how such elements can be interpreted as constructing an apocalyptic tone on two tracks: Earth Died Screaming and All Stripped Down. While I will be attending to the lyrics in each case, what I am primarily interested in foregrounding is how the organization of sounds on Bone Machine can be heard as delivering a popular musical re-presentation of apocalypse; and I believe that Derrida’s formulation of the apocalyptic as tone provides an illuminating vantage point from which to do so. Bone Machine The cover artwork of Bone Machine features a black-and-white, close-up image of Waits’ face frozen into a contorted howl, surrounded by a blurry black-and-white background. The sense of shadows and depth created by the interplay of darkness and light, combined with the blurriness of the shot, makes it appear as though he is momentarily suspended in a deep, dark tunnel before being sucked down into a vortex of glaring white light. He is wearing what looks like a skull-cap with horns, his eyes covered by protective goggles like the kind one would wear when operating a blow torch. The goggles reflect nothing but more light, like that of the light behind/below him, contrasting with the black pit of his mouth, framed like a smaller, blacker version of the tunnel surrounding him. The soundless scream and blank goggles suggest a kind of gaping emptiness: a void. Unlike Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, the surrounding space around Waits is not buckling and warping through the intensity of the screamer’s anguish. There is none of the technicolour brilliance of Munch’s painting here either: darkness and light have been reduced to nothing more than shades of black and white. It is, indeed, a void. Across the upper and lower right-hand corners the words “Tom Waits” and “Bone Machine” are scrawled in spiky white letters; the scratchy, almost child-like lettering, occasionally mixing upper and lower case, printed in a brilliant white against a black background. The letters are smudged and blurry at the edges, glowing like a faint satellite transmission or an SOS; you can almost hear the words crackling and hissing. From the back-cover image of Waits wearing protective goggles and gloves, his profile blurring, smoke-like, into a white background, wielding his guitar like a weapon or a tool; to the images of industrial machinery, engines and smoke that recur throughout the CD booklet. The sleeve-artwork can be seen as evoking an aura of white-heat, sheet metal and crackling electricity: a machine. Yet, as the title suggests, it is an animalistic machine, a bone machine, and I would argue that in fusing seemingly disparate entities or ideas, drawing attention to the points at which ostensibly clear-cut boundaries and distinctions merge and intersect, Bone Machine, like Derrida’s apocalyptic tone, can be heard as “the revelator of some unveiling in process.” Sonically, the album registers this idea of an ongoing, simultaneously corrosive and revelatory tone by constructing and dismantling dialogues between multiple discourses and genres, playing with the intersection at which noise coheres into recognisable musical structures, and music dissolves back into the noise from whence it came. Much of the album is produced in such a way that it sounds as if it is in the process of falling apart while it is being built: tracks bleed into one another, lyrical and melodic motifs recur throughout the album, and songs are recorded so that they seem to be growing out the remnants of the last, making it difficult to tell where one track ends and the next begins. One review at the time of Bone Machine’s release described this effect: Many of the songs begin with rough sounds of instruments struggling to find their place before locking in step to play together, and just as many end with the instruments collapsing separately. The percussion, often played by Waits himself, is (to put it mildly) loose, though oddly compelling. The effect is similar to listening to street recordings of parade music, where the sounds build slowly, come together, and then pass by (Pick 160). The album sounds as if it is self-reflexively stripping itself back and exposing its own processes: a skeletal framework that is registered through an emphasis on rhythm and hollow-sounding acoustics. The shambling percussive backbone of the songs is pushed up in the mix, turning the songs inside-out and making rhythm the raw focal point. But all this skeletal framework reveals, in the end, is itself: an unstable structure constantly in the process of being built up and stripped away. Earth Died Screaming This emphasis on rhythm as an unstable ‘skeletal structure,’ is set up with the album’s opening track: Earth Died Screaming. This track is recorded so that the percussion fades in, with the ostensibly random tinkering and clanking growing louder to create a sense of sonic spatiality, with the sound gradually moving from the background into the foreground. It is as if a small procession, rattling cans and tapping sticks, is emerging from a distance and rapidly moving in to surround the listener. As the percussion reaches its maximum volume the auditory impression is that “The Boners” – the name given to the percussionists in the liner notes – are upon the listener, surrounding him or her,4 and it is at this point that a bass and electric guitar are added to the mix and a rhythmic structure ‘emerges’ from the seemingly random percussion. The sound fills out, and the lyrics begin: Rudy’s on the midway And Jacob’s in the hole The monkey’s on the ladder The devil shovels coal With crows big as airplanes The lion has three heads And someone will eat the skin that he sheds As the title suggests, Earth Died Screaming lyrically sets up the apocalyptic theme in fairly unambiguous terms, alluding directly to Revelation and other Biblical prophecies in its evocation of the end of the world. Hence, the cataclysmic floods and storms, mutants and beasts, forecasts of doom and devastation, all piled up on top of one another to create a hysterical picture of a world going to ruin. In an interview with the film director Jim Jarmusch, Waits even went so far as to cite secondary sources for the character of “Rudy” who appears “on the midway” in the opening line, claiming that it belongs to one of “the lost books of Bible”: “the Book of Rudy” which, he argues, is “still being held in a library somewhere in Russia” (182) However, I am less concerned here with the significance and authority of these allusions than with their use within a performative popular musical context. And, as we shall see, this transposition into a pop musical context is rendered explicitly in the transition from verse to chorus. As the chorus of Earth Died Screaming begins, the song appears to shift gears without actually changing key or timing; a second bass guitar is added to the mix and the instruments lock together to form a steady percussive beat. Waits’ voice rises into a higher register and bellows: Well the earth died screaming While I lay dreaming Well the earth died screaming While I lay dreaming, dreaming of you Compared with the raspy vocal delivery and the rambling percussion and instrumentation of the verses, the chorus is a veritable ‘sing-along,’ its catchy tune and repetitive lyrics reminiscent of the kind of chant one might sing at a sporting event. Indeed, there is almost a joyfulness or playfulness to the chorus which is exemplified by the line: “While I lay dreaming of you.” Waits’ voice hangs on this last line (“dreaming of you”), converting it into a croon, and doubling up as a soto backing vocal, further cementing the rather sentimental twist this final line adds to the song. “The earth died screaming while I lay dreaming of you”? In what context could this be taken as anything other than a startlingly flippant or whimsical response to the end of the world? The most obvious answer is: within a popular musical context, and it could no doubt work to cement the antiquated belief that popular music is ‘narcissistic,’ ‘standardized,’ ‘sentimental,’ and utterly incapable of dealing with the kinds of ‘real’ issues raised in other, more serious art-forms.5 Or perhaps this “standardized” lyric is being held up or “framed” for ridicule, quoted in an act of “postmodernist irony;” a stepup from standardized lyrics only insofar as it is “a more sophisticated way of avoiding the question of modern life” (Scruton 493), but narcissistic and sentimental all the same. Or, finally, it could be an instance of what Frederic Jameson refers to as “pastiche” or “blank irony,” wherein the “satirical impulse” has been lost (5); no longer “avoiding the question of modern life” so much as missing the question altogether. To begin with, I do think the line “While I lay dreaming of you” is being framed and distanced from the rest of the lyrics, but not in terms of semantic meaning. Rather, the framing is enacted in the delivery, and this is essential to understanding how popular music, and hence a popular musical rendition of Apocalypse, is unique or different from other kinds of texts. When listening to the song, the line does not obviously jar or sound ‘false,’ and I do not find it to be delivered ironically or playfully. In fact, where Waits’ delivery through the verses is wizardly and dramatic, as if playacting the role of apocalyptic prophet, in the chorus his voice rises into a pained, guttural bellow suggesting a shift in emphasis: the apocalyptic imagery he relays does not rattle him so much as the realisation that the “earth died screaming, while I lay dreaming of you.” And the way Waits croons this final line, holding the “you,” not only suggests sincerity (according to the conventions of certain pop music genres) but also indicates that this line is different or special – that this may, indeed, be the dominant sentiment to the song.6 In moving from one language to another – from the apocalyptic language of the verses to the love lyrics in the chorus – Waits’ vocal performance could be interpreted as a way of drawing attention to his own delivery, and to the tension between the meaning of words when spoken/written and their meaning when delivered musically. In order to understand how this works, it is necessary to recognise how sung language is different from the same language when used in other kinds of contexts. As popular music theorist Simon Frith argues: “to sing words is to elevate them in some way, to make them special, to give them a new form of intensity” (172). That is, to sing words is already to have framed them, to hold them up and use them in an unusual way. In putting words to music we are taking them out of their everyday context and putting them in a performative, musical context in which meaning is not just semantic but sonic, determined not only by what the words ‘say’ but also by how they are delivered. Thus, what a word signifies in a book, on a billboard, or in ‘everyday’ speech, may take on an entirely different meaning when sung. According to Frith it follows that: “There is […] an inevitable tension in the popular lyric between its colloquial vernacular language and its use in a “heightened,” elevated way, framed by music. A pop song is ordinary language put to extraordinary use” (168). This “tension” would not be possible unless there was a disjunction between words as spoken or written, and words as sung or performed, and what they signify in these different contexts. The “tension” is what bridges this disjunction, and it is possible for singers or songwriters to make this tension more or less noticeable by drawing attention to the delivery – to the way in which the tone of an utterance frames and impacts on the meaning of the lyrics. This idea of “tension” is also important to Derrida’s explication of an apocalyptic tone. Indeed, as Derrida suggests, the tone of an utterance (whether written or spoken) is a form of tension: it is that which bonds one thing to another, the signifier to its “original reference” (68). Derrida continues: “The tone’s pitch is tied to tension; it has a bond to the bond, to the bond’s more or less tight tension” (69). This pitch signifies how tight or loose the tonal bond is which secures a name to its thing. Thus it is apparent that tone can be disguised; it can be made more or less inaudible or neutralized, in order to secure the tension between sign and thing, and so guarantee the straightforward transmission of an utterance. On the other hand, by being made explicit (for example by the slackening of tension, or by a feverish pitch), tone can also get in the way of a transmission, hence increasing the possibility for miscommunication and subjective interference. Derrida argues that tone must be considered “distinguishable from all discursive content” (84), and that such an “attention to tone, which is not just style, seems rather rare to me” (66). On the contrary, I would argue that Derrida’s formulation of tone, and his insistence on tone as distinct from, and potentially disruptive of, “discursive content” is not particularly foreign or strange to those popular music studies which have attempted to move beyond the strict analysis of pop lyrics. As Frith has consistently argued, while pop lyrics are certainly important to audiences, critics, and the musicians themselves, and are deserving of critical analysis,7 it is nonetheless imperative to recognise that in popular music the words are only one part of the way a song communicates, and their meaning depends very much on the way in which they are used: how they are sung or delivered in the context of the other sounds that form part of the song’s entire delivery (Frith 163-4). Frith writes: in listening to the lyrics of pop songs we actually hear three things at once: words, which appear to give songs an independent source of semantic meaning; rhetoric, words being used in a special, musical way, a way which draws attention to features and problems of speech; and voices, words being spoken or sung in human tones which are themselves “meaningful,” signs of persons and personality (Frith 159). And, as Derrida suggests in his essay, any one of these things – words, rhetoric or voice – “can always contradict, deny, make drift, derive, or derail the other” (Derrida 84). Thus the idea that the tone of a song’s delivery is capable of impacting on the meaning of a lyric, and potentially destabilising what that lyric might mean when written or spoken, is not at all unfamiliar to popular music.8 Therefore, in arguing for Bone Machine as a popular musical transposition of the apocalyptic genre, I am not only talking about the lyrics, although lyrically a song like “Earth Died Screaming” certainly fits the characteristics commonly ascribed to the apocalyptic genre: There was thunder There was lightning Then the stars went out And the moon fell from the sky It rained mackerel It rained trout And the great day of wrath has come And here’s mud in your big red eye The poker’s in the fire And the locusts take the sky Indeed, in terms of the conventions of the apocalyptic genre Earth Died Screaming does everything ‘right’: the imagery is all there, the end of the world is announced, there are explicit allusions to the opening of the Seven Seals in Revelation – even ostensibly obscure secondary sources are cited (the Book of Rudy). But this in itself does not make Earth Died Screaming, or Bone Machine as a whole, any different from other art-forms’ renditions of Apocalypse. Rather, what makes Earth Died Screaming significant as a popular musical re-presentation of apocalypse is its delivery, which draws attention to the tension between tone and content and thus interrupts and scrambles a semantic reading of the song’s lyrics. All Stripped Down This idea that the apocalyptic tone is capable of intercepting the seemingly straightforward transmission of a song’s lyrics, and imbuing them with a decidedly less straightforward meaning, can also be heard on Bone Machine’s fourth track, All Stripped Down. As with Earth Died Screaming, All Stripped Down emerges out of the clanking and banging which threads throughout the entire album, gathering momentum gradually so that it is uncertain precisely where the song actually begins. A shaker gives a prolonged rattle and then, virtually unnoticeably, the noises become less congested and scatter out into a fairly coherent pattern; with Waits performing a call-and-response pattern with himself throughout the entire song: Well the time will come When the wind will shout All stripped down, all stripped down And all the sinners know What I’m talking about All stripped down, all stripped down When all the creatures of the world Are gonna line up at the gate All stripped down, all stripped down And you better be on time And you better not be late I want you all stripped, all stripped, all stripped down Like many of the tracks on Bone Machine, All Stripped Down lyrically takes up the theme of revelation, the overall message of which was summarized by Waits in an interview as “you can’t get into heaven until you’re all stripped down” (Jarmusch 182). And in terms of the lyrics, this is certainly what the song is about. It constructs a fairly traditional oratory on salvation and redemption, urging “sinners” to put away their lust for all things sensual (“Well take off your paint/Take of your rouge”), earthly and material (“Well you know in your heart/What you gotta bring…No big mink coat/No diamond ring”), and instead “Let your backbone flip/And let your spirit shine through.” However, the song is delivered in a manner which works to obstruct such a reading of the song’s meaning via its lyrics; for while the ‘first’ voice – a high-pitched, hyperactive take on a soul falsetto – delivers his lines of love and devotion with feverish enthusiasm, the tone of the ‘second’ voice – a low, leery, growl repeating the lines: “all stripped down/all stripped down” – is increasingly fraught with sexual innuendo. Each voice intercepts the other, derailing the meaning of each other’s utterance through the tonal difference between them, and “all stripped down” is effectively converted from a seemingly innocent call for salvation and redemption, into a call for something far less innocent. Indeed, there is almost a predatory quality to the second voice which changes the tone of the entire song, so that the very idea of revelation takes on a distinctly sleazy twist alongside its spiritual associations. Thus the act of revelation, of stripping things back and unveiling, takes on a meaning here which is both sexual and spiritual, creating a tension between the two that becomes more pronounced as the song continues. As I have already argued, according to Derrida it is the act of unveiling that is apocalyptic, the gesture “that lets be seen what up to then remained enveloped, secluded, held back,” and the example he provides here is of “the body when the clothes are removed or the glans when the foreskin is removed in circumcision” (65). Indeed, Derrida implies that this tension between the sexual and the spiritual in the apocalyptic act of revelation is built into the ancient Apocalypses, writing: “apokalupsis, disclosure, discovery, uncovering, unveiling, the thing lifted from, the truth revealed about the thing: first of all, if we can say this, men’s or women’s genitals, but also their eyes or ears” (64). On All Stripped Down this dual meaning of revelation as both sexual and spiritual unveiling is played out in the tension between tone and lyrics, so that it would be almost impossible to hear the lyrics sung without noting the sexual thrust implicit in the act of revelation. Moreover, this tension is not framed as a simple opposition – between sexual and sacred – but rather as a continuation, as if the limit or extreme of one is where the other begins. Thus what the act of revelation reveals, in this instance, is its own limitations; however, rather than constituting an absolute end-point, the limitation is here understood as an opening: the point at which something else – another tone, for example – intrudes or breaks in. This idea of limitations is crucial to Derrida’s explication of the apocalyptic tone (after all, this is precisely where eschatological discourse aims to lead: “the eskhaton, the end, or rather the extreme, the limit, the term, the last” [68]), and culminates in the tone’s seductive “come” or “viens.”9 Like “revelation” or “unveiling,” this “come” is imbued with both a sexual and spiritual meaning that is framed less as an opposition and more as alternate dimensions of the same word, and which in both its sexual and spiritual sense can be read as apocalyptic. James Berger contends that as a euphemism for orgasm “come” denotes “a site where language stops, both for reasons of internal logic and of social prohibition” (14), and as such can be read as apocalyptic: [M]erely the self-shattering experience of orgasm is apocalyptic, and, as jouissance, it has assumed an important role in critical terminology as a trope of radical inexpressibility… When we come, our personalities disperse, our autobiographies are suspended, we are over, are coming, have come. What is revealed or unveiled in orgasm? Exactly what is revealed in any apocalypse: nothing, or nothing that can be said (14). Derrida plays on this sexual meaning of “come” in much the same way as he does with “revelation,” without being overt, but making his inspired reading of “Come” in the Biblical Revelation quite astonishing nonetheless. As in its sexual sense, the spiritual meaning of “come” or “viens” designates the ultimate limitation: that which cannot be spoken, which does not belong to discourse, to the realm of the familiar, or to ordinary, lived time. “Come,” or “viens” forms the crux of Derrida’s argument; it is the limitation of both his own demystification of the apocalyptic tone and of the apocalyptic tone itself. As John Caputo suggests, for Derrida “viens” is “the apocalyptic word par excellence, if it is a word at all” (95). “Come” is the site of an intersection, an in-between space, but it is an unstable site which defies an absolute location or definition. “Come” eludes analysis; it cannot be explained in terms of existing paradigms or discourses of “philosophy, metaphysics, onto-eschato-theology” (93). Derrida argues: ““Come,” opening the scene, could not become an object, a theme, a representation, or even a citation in the current sense, and subsumable under a category, whether that of the coming or of the event” (93). Rather, “Come” crosses from one to another, whilst not being determined by either. Like music, it designates a space of movement, belonging to neither addresser nor addressee, and hence complicating the notion of a secure, identifiable origin or destination. Derrida evokes the transitory, fluid nature of the “come”s as a choir or “exchange of appeals and responses that precisely is no longer an exchange. The voices, the places, the journeys of “come” traverse the partition [paroi] of a song, a book of citational and recitative echoes, as if it [ça] began by responding” (92). I find that such a description could just as well apply to the play of voices on All Stripped Down, with each voice intercepting, complimenting and subverting the other. In the end, the difference between these voices does not lie in the semantic meaning of the lyrics, but is, as Derrida concludes, “tonal” (94). The song closes with the voices collapsing into one another – they no longer mark out a coherent space for themselves in the rhythm of the song, but rather appear at the edges of each other’s articulations, as if they are but variations of the same voice (which indeed they are, given that Waits performs both of them). In a sense, one could say that each voice completes the other, except that this completion only offers up further possibilities for the voice of the other to intercept and derail it. Which is to say, whatever meaning might be read into All Stripped Down lies in the movement and play of the tonal differences between the voices: the spaces where they intersect, collide and depart. Conclusion As a popular musical re-presentation of apocalypse, Bone Machine, like Derrida’s apocalyptic tone, can be understood as registering an idea of the apocalyptic as process and movement, wherein the act of revelation is conceived as a continual, often turbulent and confusing, unveiling. The result is an understanding of apocalypse which is not simply an ending to a narrative trajectory, nor which relies on genre-specific imagery or themes; on the contrary, Bone Machine’s apocalyptic tone constantly disrupts and destabilizes the eschatological visions and imagery detailed in the lyrics, drawing attention back to itself as a revelatory gesture which nonetheless obscures as much as it reveals. I believe that Bone Machine can be interpreted as offering a popular musical perspective on the apocalypse, thus opening up new and subversive ways of engaging with this seemingly timeless (and tireless) cultural theme. 1 Derrida writes the Greek word “apokalupsis,” and cites the argument forwarded by Andre Chouraqui that: “nowhere does the word apocalypse… have the sense it finally takes in French and other languages, of fearsome catastrophe. Thus the Apocalypse is essentially a contemplation… or an inspiration… at the sight, the uncovering or disclosure of YHWH and, here, of Yeshoua’ the Messiah.” (64) 2 I am using the term “popular music” here broadly, to designate any genre of music that is, according to Georgina Born’s definition: “primarily produced and circulated through commercial market mechanisms” (51). I admit that such a definition is problematic, in that it ignores the fact that Waits, as an artist, can be interpreted as resisting or challenging such market forces, and that it basically conflates a number of diverse genres (Waits’ music might be better defined as “folk” or “blues”). Even more contentiously, this definition overlooks the way in which many (some might say all) genres of popular music have systematically appropriated and exploited African-American musical cultures; however, a thorough interrogation of the manifold meanings and complexities of a term like “popular music” is not possible here. For more on this see Born (1987), Grossberg (1997), and Corbett, J. (1990). 3 In his influential 1967 text, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode formulates an understanding of the apocalyptic as a paradigmatic imagining of the End, not only the end of the world and earthly history as literally described in Revelation, but also as an imagining of the end of the individual human life span: the “common death” (Kermode 7). Thus the apocalypse works to provide an apparently much needed “sense of an ending” which endows human life and history with narrative coherence. While Derrida does not specifically refer to Kermode’s work, I believe that his conception of an “apocalyptic tone” can be understood as challenging Kermode’ narrative-based formulation of the apocalyptic paradigm. For not only does the apocalyptic tone not contain a beginning, ending, or anything remotely resembling a narrative structure, but it actively destabilizes and subverts the kind of definitive ending that was so crucial to Kermode’s argument as to how the apocalyptic paradigm works to “make sense” of “reality.” 4 This spatial effect, wherein it sounds as if a small group of tinkers are moving in to surround the listener, is particularly strong if you listen to the track on headphones. In an interview with film director Jim Jarmusch (with whom Waits has collaborated both as an actor and musician), Waits claimed that he recorded the percussion outside the studio in the parking lot, using “two-by-fours, anything we could find, logs from the firewood. About nine people. Just different people walking by. We’d say, “Come on, play some sticks!”” (189) 5 For a discussion of these kinds of accusations leveled at popular music see Frith, S. (1996) p. 160-163; on popular music as “narcissistic” and “sentimental” see Scruton, R. (1997) p. 457-508 6 In order to understand how ideas of sincerity relate to pop lyrics, it is necessary to recognise that such ideas rarely attach themselves to song lyrics alone, and nor do they represent strictly musical properties (sincerity is not a musical sound; one cannot hear sincerity in the sound of a particular note or chord, although it may be interpreted as such). Rather, ideas of sincerity have to do with the way words are used within a performative context in which both audience and singer play an active role, and where framing and delivery can have just as much effect on the understanding of a song’s lyrics as the words themselves. Indeed, Simon Frith suggests that one way in which sincerity is expressed in pop music is through emphasising the tension between lyrics and delivery: In popular cultural terms, good talkers are mistrusted as well as admired: people who have a “way with words” – the seducer, the salesman, the demagogue, the preacher – are people with power, and the power to use words is a power to deceive and manipulate. Sincerity may then be best indicated by an inability to speak (as in soul convention) or through an aural contradiction between the glibness of the lyric and the uncertainty of the voice (as in much male country music) (168). As Frith suggests, interpretations and expressions of sincerity within popular music are genre-specific, their meanings negotiated within the particular communicative framework set up between audience and singer. What remains paramount (perhaps irrespective of genre) is the idea of a tension between words and delivery; and, as I discuss above, this tension (which may be made more or less explicit) is in fact what will be identified as tone. 7 A brilliant and exhaustive recent instance of this kind of critical analysis is Christopher Ricks’ study of Bob Dylan’s lyrics: Ricks, C. (2003) 8 Indeed, many of the qualities Derrida ascribes specifically to an “apocalyptic tone” are the same phenomena which are “naturalized” within many genres of popular music, and have made it so difficult to write about: the multiple, inter-cutting voices, the splicing-together of different discourses and genres, the “jump” in tone signifying delirium and exaltation, and the “slackening” of tone signifying a subversion or perversion of reason and order (Derrida 68-72). It is also worth noting that they are the very same phenomena which have incited, and continue to incite, such alarm among censorship groups since rock n roll’s inception as a dominant popular cultural art-form in the 1950s to rap music in the late-twentieth century– a point that is also made by Derrida in relation to the apocalyptic tone (89-90). 9 Throughout his essay Derrida frequently returns to this idea of limitations in the form of a question: “to what ends…?” The meaning of this question is two-fold: on the one hand it refers to The End, as proclaimed by apocalyptic discourse and invoked by the apocalyptic tone; on the other hand, it also refers to the underlying motive behind such apocalyptic proclamations and invocations. Thus the question becomes: “With a view to what interests, to what ends do they wish to come with these inflamed proclamations on the end to come or the end already accomplished? (67-68).” The apocalyptic tone is where these two ‘ends’ come to meet, which means that Derrida’s own position is implicated; as he announces in the opening line: “I shall speak then of (with) an apocalyptic tone in philosophy (63).” For Derrida, “come” or “viens” forms the limit of both the apocalyptic tone and his own demystification of the tone (which, it turns out, are not necessarily distinguishable); however, this limit is, of course, the site of yet another opening. For further discussion of these ideas of limitations and “viens” in relation to the apocalyptic tone, see Caputo (1997) p. 88-100. Works Cited Berger, J. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Born, G. “Modern Music Culture: On Shock, Pop and Synthesis.” New Formations No. 2: Summer, 1987: 51-78. Boyarin, J. “At Last, All the Goyim: Notes on a Greek Word Applied to Jews.” Postmodern Apocalypse. R. Dellamora (ed.) Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press 1995: 41-58. Caputo, J. D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997. Corbett, J. “Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Musical Object.” October 54, 1990: 79-101. Derrida, J. “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy”, Semeia 23, 1982: 63-97. Frith, S. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Frye, N. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1982 Grossberg, L. Dancing In Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997. Jameson, F. The Cultural Turn. Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998. London & New York: Verso, 1998 Jarmusch, J. “Straight No Chaser.” Innocent When You Dream. Tom Waits. The Collected Interviews. M. Montandon, ed. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005: 167-204. Kermode, F. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Pick, S. “The Fire (and Flood) This Time.” Innocent When You Dream. Tom Waits. The Collected Interviews. M. Montandon, ed. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005: 159-161. Ricks, C. Dylan’s Visions of Sin. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Scruton, R. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.