“While plucking feathers from a swan song, shit might pretzel Christ’s intestines” intones Scott Walker with operatic fervour on the opening track of his final 2012 album Bish Bosch. It surprises even myself that this sprawling and utterly strange avant tract of absurdity grotesquery, ugliness, beauty, horror was my introduction to Scott Walker, but in truth a section of it may have been the first material I ever heard of his. It is only after stumbling like a blinking stranger into the terrifying chasms of this album that I really took sight of his astonishing career trajectory, the uncompromising leap into the weird he undertook at the tail-end of the 70s and maintained for the rest of his life. By that point, the damage was done, Scott Walker had rewired my perception of what music could be.
So it was with some sadness I read this morning that he had passed away, considering really in light of that how important his music really was to me, the sheer cliffs of sound and violent lyrical contortions of Bish Bosch, as well as the majestic terror of Drift, staying with me like little else I’d heard and really percolating through all the music I loved thereafter. In a more general sense Walker is important because he stands in contrast that could barely be starker against the trajectory of most stars of his generation, collapsing into a tragic capitulation to mediocrity in the latter years of their lives, simply falling into reiteration and pastiche of their former selves.
Instead, the music Walker produced was in any sense of the imagination a hundred times more adventurous and alien than anything being produced by people less than half his age. Listening back to his material, out of chronological order, it strikes me also how his uncompromising tendencies, to produce what he wanted the wishes of the record companies be damned, can be seen as far back as records like Scott 3, and especially in Scott 4, not only in his choices of song topics but in the overt influence he takes from Morricone on the latter album, breaking with the explicit crooner stable and moving firmly into his own lane, an album of masterfully executed string arrangements and atmospheric and affecting song progressions where he sings about, among other things, Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Stalin.
This kind of confident breaking with form is something we need more of now than ever, and I cannot think of a better example than Scott Walker of someone who resolutely refused to submit to the injunction to be harmless, safe, homely, especially towards those who we enter into a dusty old hall of statues where they are to be endlessly ogled as elder statespeople of rock and pop and never disturbed. Scott Walker, from a background of 60s pop crooning, moved ever away from this mythologizing influence, the staid, calcified remnants of something exciting, culture become museum artifact. Scott Walker’s mysterious alien presence, where fame is concerned, was a kind of anti-mythology; musically he occupied a place of constant, wrenching uncertainty, where, ultimately the profoundly beautiful meets the nonsensical and the visceral where an utterly absurd line could lurch out of an atmospheric majesty. It is somewhere in this place where we all reside, and in that Walker really hit close to the bone of experience through the medium of phantasmatic weirdness.Indeed for a man who appeared often like a phantasm, appearing every now and then followed by a blast of bafflement and exhileration in equal measure, his presence will be deeply missed.
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