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IN TERROR SITS THE BLACK-HAIRED BRIDE, by Michael Skeet

A TOUR OF WEIRD MUSIC

Weird is both emotion and sensation. It’s the realization—the more abrupt the better—that your understanding of the world is completely wrong, and the unsettling sensation of your guts trying to coil themselves around your spinal column when that realization hits you.

We are familiar with the weird in fiction but we also dine at a vast buffet of other weird media. If one looks at fiction and film as platters of weirdness, allow me to suggest that weird music is the equivalent of tapas or dim sum: small bites of something that get inside, twist you around, and are gone again before you’ve had a chance to fully digest their meanings.

Because of the bite-size nature of popular music—and because a steady diet of weird music loses its effectiveness in a way that doesn’t apply so much to other media—music has different “weirdness requirements” than those of literature or film. In the case of fiction, at least, we tend to know going in whether or not something is weird, and the pleasure comes from the way the author satisfies our expectations—including the ones we didn’t know we had. In the case of music, though, the less we expect it, the more effectively weird a song is.

A song that makes its case from the opening words and doesn’t vary its lyrical tone at all can’t really be called weird, because the element of surprise is missing. The same is true of splatter films; both examples are about as subtle as a thrown paving-stone. Likewise the weirdness that comes from societal unfamiliarity can’t really count either. Japanese gagaku music from the eleventh century certainly sounds weird to Western ears, but that’s only because of different musical DNA. And some forms of musical weirdness fade over time, as they are absorbed into the cultural mainstream. The tonal experiments of Igor Stravinsky or even Richard Strauss were considered horrifyingly odd by listeners at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, as was the explosion of sixteenth and thirty-second notes introduced into jazz by Charlie Parker in the late 1940s. But to listeners today all three musicians are perfectly within the realm of the normal.

This tendency of musical advances to be absorbed into mainstream culture is also a good reason to leave purely instrumental music outside our consideration.

Enough exclusion. What makes for good weird listening? Well, contemporary pop is full of gems that sneak up on you and give you a swift jolt. Pleasant melodies can hide strange and unexpected lyrics. I had been listening to Fleet Foxes’ eponymous album for the better part of a year before a friend suggested I listen a bit more carefully to the lyrics of “White Winter Hymnal.” I did so, and now Brueghel-Bosch mashup images leap into my mind every time I hear the song, and not just because of that album’s cover art. More to the point, the imagery still shocks despite my ongoing familiarity with the song. (Their new album, Helplessness Blues, sounds rather less like Gregorian chant on acid but still contains some pleasant blows to one’s equilibrium: check out “Battery Kinzie” and the compounded weirdness of “The Shrine/An Argument”. And “White Winter Hymnal” isn’t the only song on the earlier album worthy of consideration: give a listen to “Your Protector”.)

Randy Newman, one of the greatest American songwriters of the past fifty years, penned a disturbingly weird song with “Sail Away.” It seems all sunny in its bucolic praise of America, but the sunshine disappears like a psychotic’s smile once you realize to whom those cheerful lyrics are being sung.

The equally bucolic “Rainmaker,” by Harry Nilsson, packs a lovely dark-fantasy punch in its final verse and coda. The frothy effervescent melody of his “Daybreak” hides that its narrator is a vampire who—we learn in the last lines—will only be saved by an unlikely total eclipse.

Then we have Tom Waits: Even in his earlier works you practically have to make an effort to avoid the weird. By now, with his voice a mechanical wasteland of whisky and cigarettes and his tastes in instrumentation spinning somewhere out in the Kuiper Belt. (Think it’s weird hearing a didgeridoo in the Celtic folk of Coyote Run? Wait until you’ve heard the pump organs and marimbas that Waits adopted as far back as the eighties), Waits’ very existence constitutes a sub-genre of the weird.

There is no shortage of Waits songs that meet our criteria, so you could pretty much pick an album and let loose. I’ll draw your attention to three, however. “Poor Edward” (from the theatrical production Alice proclaims its weirdness right from the first verse and just keeps getting weirder as it progresses. “Swordfishtrombone” (from the album of the same name) spins a demented tale of a veteran who may or may not be a victim of something supernatural (or who may just be flat-out mad and no buts about it); this song reminds me, in some ways, of Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy,” and a more cheerily psychopathic couple of minutes you’re unlikely to ever experience; the kick in the final verse is definitely weird. (Another fine weird Waits tune is “’Tain’t No Sin,” from the theatrical presentation The Black Rider, but Waits didn’t write this one; it’s by Walter Donaldson, who also wrote “Makin’ Whoopee” if you can believe it.)

My favourite weird Waits song from the huge number I’ve heard—and I’ve heard scarcely a tenth of the man’s work; he’s been writing songs for more than forty years—is “Potter’s Field” (from Foreign Affairs), a long, half-sung film noir from the dark side with poetry that dazzled me when I first heard it back in my radio days thirty years ago, It continues to amaze me today whenever it pops up on my iPod. Waits seems to specialize in this sort of underbelly darkness (hear also “$29.00” from Blue Valentine) but for my money “Potter’s Field” is one of the best things in that long career.

Kate Bush is another songwriter who has embraced the weird side from the very beginning of her career. “Experiment IV” (The Whole Story), with its careful descent into Frankensteinian madness, or “Get Out of My House” (The Dreaming), inspired by Kubrick’s film of The Shining, are the obvious choices here. But listen to “Wuthering Heights” (The Kick Inside) while ignoring the title; the otherworldliness of Cathy’s need to be let in is definitely high on the weird-meter, especially when the lyrics are matched with Bush’s vampire-on-helium voice.

“Wuthering Heights” brings the whole sub-genre of Mad Love songs to mind, a cavalcade of the strange that goes back to the “dead teenager” songs of the early sixties and probably beyond. I can’t think of a more bizarre manifestation of love than the bubblegum invitation to cannibalism that is the sprightly jangle of “Hungarian Love Song” by The Jazz Butcher :

I’ll be your breakfast

I’ll be your dinner

You won’t get hungry

You won’t get thinner

Don’t take offense now

Don’t think me rude

But if you need me

I’ll be your food

A completely different sort of creepiness is engendered by Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession,” or “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. In both cases the dangerous strangeness of the lyrics is compounded by the inexplicable fact that so many people seem to think that these are songs suitable to play to a loved one. A love song from a stalker is not the sort of thing to play to your new spouse at the wedding, people.

Although some may feel “I’m Not in Love,” by 10cc is a weird love song, I would disagree. (It is one of the best-produced pop songs of all time, however.) Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, who wrote that song, recorded more suitably weird songs in their post-10cc career: “Under Your Thumb” is a classic ghost-story song, for instance. My favorite weird tune of theirs, though, is “An Englishman in New York” (not to be confused with Sting’s more gentle song of the same name). I can’t begin to describe the oddness of the Manhattan being sung about here; all I can say is, get on board and fasten your seat belts.

Devoted collectors of paraphernalia out walking the rock

Battle and bitch for the ultimate kitsch of a crucifix clock

Two miniature Romans, running on rails

Appear every hour and bang in the nails

I’ve got to have it, Christ, I gotta be the first on our block

And if you find a crucifix clock, I’d love to have it for my office...

There are probably hundreds or even thousands of other pop songs that fit into the weird straitjacket, but in our remaining space, we should acknowledge the debt that musical weirdness owes to the past. And not just the recent past, either, though Robert Johnson wrote some impressively weird blues songs in the 1930s, most of which have been covered by modern musicians (“Crossroads” by Cream and “Me and the Devil Blues” by Eric Clapton); the nineteenth-century folk and field song “In the Pines” was covered by Nirvana during that band’s 1993 “Unplugged” appearance on MTV.

The cornerstone of all popular weird music, though, is the folk music of the British Isles, as written down in the late nineteenth century by the indefatigable Francis James Child. There are 305 songs in Child’s collection, and at least a tenth of those are supernatural in content.

And most of these have been recorded within my memory. There was an electric folk revival in the UK in the late sixties and early seventies, and bands such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and their various spin-offs seem to have left no Child behind. The coverage continues today, with contemporary groups like Coyote Run and Great Big Sea helping themselves to the mother lode.

Most of the Child ballads are fairly obvious in their weirdness. “The Two Magicians” is an escape song, with one of the magicians shape-shifting to get away from the other, who counters with an appropriate shift of his (or her) own. What makes some versions of this more interesting than others is the nature of the chase: somehow it’s more impressive when the blacksmith is chasing the maiden than it is when the master magician is chasing his apprentice. For a (much) darker version of this song, check out “Oh Coal Black Smith” by Current 93; my own preference is for the deceptively cheerful version by Steeleye Span.

Speaking of the Span (my favourite group of any folk revival), their “Allison Gross” is close to being a perfect example of the weirdness of the Child Ballads. It starts off simply, both lyrically and in terms of its arrangement, and the music becomes more raucous and intense as the lyrics turn into the dark side of the Beauty and the Beast legend.

“Tam Lin” has similar themes of transformation caused by a supernatural creature (the Queen of Faerie in this case). If you want a more raucous, modern-Celtic version of the song, look for the version by Coyote Run (from Between Wick and Flame); if your preference is to the more ethereal, listen to Mediaeval Baebes (from Mirabilis). Or listen to both and keep reminding yourself that it’s the same song.

Two songs inspired this article. The first, “White Winter Hymnal,” I’ve already discussed. The second is a Child Ballad and so the mother, in a sense, of the first. I know it as “The Cruel Sister,” though Child called it “The Twa Sisters” and it has several other names besides. The first version I ever heard (and hence the best, because that’s how our minds work) is by Pentangle, from their 1970 album of the same name. The album may have been a flop, but this performance of “Cruel Sister” isn’t. Jacqui McShee’s voice is crystal-clear but sounds almost numb in her deadpan telling of this tale of murder and supernatural revenge, and the addition of a sitar adds a hint of disturbance or disconnect to what is otherwise a fairly straightforward (at least for this band) folk-style rendition of the song.

What makes “The Cruel Sister” the perfect example of the weird in music, though, is the device by which the murdered sister obtains her revenge. That the woman’s body itself becomes the instrument—in a literal sense—of her killer’s undoing is creepy and marvelous and wondrous in the best sense of that word.

My senses have been assaulted delightfully during the writing of this piece, and I trust that this sampling, limited as it is, will provide you with sufficient inspiration to assemble your own collection of the weird. What I’ve listed here will at least make an entertaining mix-tape or shuffle list for anyone with an interest in the subject. As a matter of fact, I’ve been assembling just such a shuffle playlist in the writing of this article. I’m not quite finished yet, though. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve some more shopping to do.

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Michael Skeet is an award-winning Canadian writer and broadcaster who began writing for radio before finishing college. In addition to extensive publishing credits as a film and music critic, he writes short sf/f/h and is a two-time winner of Canada’s Aurora Award for excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy.