My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. I just wrapped up posting his 50 Best Albums. But I figured I’d keep “Music Monday” going with more of the stuff Bren wrote about music.
This is part of Brendan’s lengthy series of essays on Scott Walker, which I’ll be posting for the foreseeable future, one every Monday.
A Murder In Ostia
In Ostia, Italy on November 2, 1975, a seventeen-year-old hustler named Giuseppe Pelosi climbed into a car owned by Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the time, Pasolini was one of the most celebrated radical filmmakers in the world, certainly the premier director in Italy. Pelosi ran over Pasolini. Then he ran over him again. Then he ran over him again.
Roughly twenty years later, Scott Walker released the harrowing album Tilt.
It was his first album in eleven years. His last had been Climate of Hunter, released in 1984, a slick strange pop collection of macabre funk laid over sensuous bass lines and even stranger melody.
Tilt would make Climate of Hunter seem like a Hall & Oates record.
The first song on Tilt is called “Farmer In The City (Remembering Pasolini)”. Walker takes a translation of a poem by Pasolini and modifies it, layering it over an orchestral composition that can only be described as bleak. I don’t know what he was trying to say about Pasolini, I don’t know what the hell he is talking about in this song. At several points he seems to be an auctioneer and a bidder at the same time…”I’ll give you 21/21/21/Do I hear 21/21/21″. A further couplet states that he “can’t go buy a man in this shirt”, either referring to actual slavery or to purchasing the services of a male prostitute.
Again, I have no idea what Walker is talking about here. All I know is that by including Pasolini in the title, by referencing the name of the town where he was brutally murdered, and by invoking the specter of human trafficking of one degree or another, you are placed in the uncomfortable position of being a denier, of having a truth-teller grab you by the back of your neck, forcibly keep you from turning away from what you most desperately wish to avoid, and having them snarl at you, “Look. Do not turn away.”
But all the while, their voice is hypnotic. The bed of music that cradles it is epic and lush. No matter how many times I hear it, I am unprepared. I cannot take it in.
Nothing is mentioned in the song of what the young hustler felt as the wheels crushed the life out of the body of a great artist. No attempt is made to link the lyrical content of the song to the occurrences that led up to such a horrific end. Walker doesn’t try to feel the pounding in the chest of the murderer shifting the car into reverse to increase the damage to the corpse. Shifting it back into forward, heart pounding with what? Exhilaration? Regret? Triumph? Relief?
The song might not even be about that occurrence. Walker isn’t saying. He makes a bunch of sounds in a recording studio and forces us to say it for him.
— Brendan O’Malley
this is the one that hooked me and this is the one I come back to most. I can’t name the emotions it evokes in me but I do know I can’t feel them without listening to this. It is the most beautiful and gentle of his experiments with space in sound and something dawns in the strings at the crescendo — but it’s on a sequence of regret, or mourning (“and I used to be a citizen”; those four lines are like a shot to the heart). I love how you approach its mystery in this. Thank you!
am so loving your responses to these posts, Jessie. I’m getting a Scott Walker education for sure. I’m almost afraid to do a deep dive because ….. I might never come out?
But I am learning a lot!