Groovy Times in the Land of the Dead

Well, I was a little slow off the mark in writing about Material’s “Seven Souls” in the Sopranos season premiere – Said the Gramophone has the track up already, and they in turn point to this post on The Face Knife about The Sopranos. But I’ll throw the thing up here anyway.

• Material (featuring William Burroughs), “Seven Souls”

This says more about my own biases & expectations than anything else, but I was totally thrown by the use of this song. It was brilliantly done, with the bassline percolating up through William Burroughs’ speechifying & up through the visual montage at the same time (really well edited, I thought – fading the song out for that snatch of dream conversation between Carmela & Adriana and then bringing it back up again was a stroke of genius), but it was that speechifying that threw me, the spoken-word bit. I realize the words (which consist of Burroughs outlining his take on the Egyptian theory of seven souls – The Face Knife has the full text) & the music combine, um, holistically to form the song, just as they do in any other song, but the fact that in this case those words were spoken (& possibly the fact that in this case they were spoken by a writer, not a bandmember or a singer) seemed to give them more weight, at least for me. When they used that great Afrika Bambaataa track in the season opener a couple years ago, I never found myself trying to parse what exactly David Chase et al were trying to communicate by choosing a song that had the particular lyrics that one did; same goes for just about any other song they’ve used (and they’ve used plenty of good ones) – I always just figure that apart from maybe a chorus line here & there, the lyrics correlate to the narrative only incidentally or coincidentally. But Burroughs had me wondering just how mystical Chase was going to get this season– were we going to see the seven souls theory further dramatized via the usual power struggles & family squabbles?

Now, though, I’m thinking it was specious to immediately assume that “Seven Souls” was a special case. After all, that Afrika Bambaataa song, “World Destruction,” alludes to Nostradamus, just as one of the wiseguys did in the very same episode, I seem to recall, and the Lydon-spat line “the human race is becoming a disgrace” does seem a little like one of the defining premises of David Chase’s worldview, at least as expressed in The Sopranos. So now I’m thinking that if I didn’t look for connections before (that Johnny Thunders song, “You Can’t Throw Your Arms Around a Memory” – what was happening when they played that one?), it’s just because of my own admitted tendency to devalue the importance of lyrics in rock & roll songs in general.

Haven’t seen the second Sopranos of the season yet, but from what I hear they’re getting pretty mystical indeed.

More on music, words, narrative, etc., to come in the future, I think.