Plastic Palace People, Scott Walker, from Scott 2, 1968
Scott Walker's early music is a strange blend: it takes the form of an easy-listening, 60s, lounge crooner but its content deals with death, disillusionment, and inauthenticity in a highly literate way. By the time of his second album (1968) he is already beginning to deconstruct this lounge act; you need only compare Montague Terrace (In Blue), from his debut Scott with Plastic Palace People: both are ostensibly about day dream and fantasy; while in the former the orchestra amplifies the sentimentality and provides an expansive, dreamy, spaciousness within which its subjects can be willfully naively romantic, in the latter, the orchestra serves to disorient us, making dizzying loops, hemming us in its circling - the effect of the squealing strings in the chorus is one of claustrophobia, and indeed, their sour, flat and cloying tone serve to deflate the romanticism of the now self-deluded subjects of the song.
The most remarkable moment in the song is the stark transition from the verse - about Billy floating above the town - to the chorus - about the emptiness of the denizens of the plastic palace. While the former is a wistfully dreamy (and tragic) narrative, the latter takes on the self-assurance (due to the entry of the bass and horns as well as the less breathy vocals) of the shimmering lounge act, which now feels as smug and insincere as the plastic people themselves, until it finally breaks down: the instruments anarchistic, Walker's voice frightened and reverberated: "Like gods they bark replies." A horrifying notion. Then back to Billy.
Beyond the various complex emotions the strange instrumental composition evokes, the lyrics themselves challenge us: asking us at first to take them literally (in particular in the narrative about Billy) but then abandoning us to increasingly obscure referents ("She steals her cards tomorrow" "buzzing eyes" "submarine air") as well as syntactic disturbances (Not till I've seen the sky's not lit up//In tears, child try and understand). This intensification of abstraction will characterize the rest of Walkers's musical career - listen, for example, to Farmer in the City, off of 1995's Tilt, or, well, anything off 2005's The Drift. By this point the menace hinted at by the crooning balladeer Walker has become fully manifested. Most notable about Scott's later work is his complete disregard for familiar vocal melodies - he doesn't even sound like he's singing anymore - or, rather, his singing seems to mimic the actual melodic intonations of speech, and, in particular, the speech of suffering. His vision is pretty uncompromising, even if you don't really want to listen.
Silver Trembling Hands, The Flaming Lips, from Embryonic, 2009
The immediate similarity between Silver Trembling Hands and Plastic Palace People is the use of a big, sweeping, lounge act sound for the chorus, which stands as a rather abrupt break from the verses. This similarity is more than just in the instrumental composition - these 'self-assured' choruses both serve to underline the theme of escapism - to the plastic palace, to getting high. And like the Walker, the Flaming Lips' track suggest menacing forces from which one flees: the blindfold, the secret society, the jaguar (which reminds me of the Leopard Dante encounters in the dark woods prior to his descent into the Inferno), night, fight: tomorrow. It suggests a duel, a fight to the death. But it is just suggestive - what exactly "The" fear is is left shrouded - and this adds to the sense of menace, it allows us to imagine the worst, at least until we too are swept away with the organs and horns and bells and harp of the chorus. But the driving, pursuing rhythm of the verse returns, and we feel, once again, hunted, as prey to something - the fear is certainly animalistic: this is enforced not just by the jaguars and "the animals and trees and insects" of the second verse, but by the simian "oooh - oooooh" and the cries that open the song, and indeed persist throughout. "Is it wrong not to believe//nature makes us all compete?" This simple musing refers us to the fact that there just isn't enough matter for all the would be life forms. That the individual survives by assimilating the living world around it.
Another remarkable feature of the song is the repetition of this "She" - the very anonymity of which gives her a universal symbolic power, and also repeats the technique of suggesting while shrouding, thus heightening the song's suspense. Finally, I want to point out the breathless transition with which "daggers", presumably part of the pre-chorus, is tacked on to the end of the last line of the verse, another technique that adds to the urgency and violence of this song. It tempts us to flee with its chorus, from what we know comes tomorrow - fight, and, inevitably, night.
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