A 1982 live version of Rhythm of the Heat from YouTube

By haunted, I don’t mean in the halloween sense, but in the sense of losing your self entirely to the spirits, of losing your very soul. One of the most haunting and experiential songs I know of is Peter Gabriel’s “Rhythm of the Heat” on his fourth album (also known as Security; © 1982 The David Geffen Company). The low quality live version are listening to now may not do justice to the song, but it is better than nothing. You’ll have to listen to a high quality version of the entire piece (preferably on your own in the complete dark and with the volume considerably high) to understand the full emotional effect of Gabriel’s brilliant work here.

The complete tune opens up slowly with an initial cry by Gabriel and some mysterious distorted voices. The drum beat begins to slowly build at this point, moving towards the first climactic cries of “The rhythm is around me. The rhythm has control. The rhythm is inside me. . . The rhythm has my soul!!” (© 1982 Peter Gabriel Ltd).

Now the drums are incredibly heavy but still slow, backed by a repetitive chant of “the rhythm of the heat” that evokes spirits, or is it demons. The bass and drum combination is now so intense that it brings chills. There’s a hesitation in the song as it quietens, seemingly bringing relief from the intensity. Quietly: “Smash the radio. . . smash the watch. . . smash the camera (cannot steal away the spirits). The rhythm is around me. The rhythm has control. The rhythm is inside me. The rhythm has my soul!” Following on this second wild, piercing, sustained cry, the song now breaks out into an onslaught of African style drumming (by the Ekome Dance Company) that seems to never end. You cannot escape it. The rhythm has your soul.

In some ways, the Surdo and Ghanaian drum sections in this piece indicate Gabriel’s future direction into world music, which would climax, in a way, in his soundtrack, Passion (1989) for The Last Temptation of Christ. That album is saturated with the sounds of the Middle East in particular, but also Africa. Gabriel ultimately founded a record company and studio, called Real World, devoted to promoting bands and music from around the globe, particularly from “developing” countries.

Where did this haunting song, “The Rhythm of the Heat”, come from?

Gabriel’s song is based, in large part, on psychologist C.G. Jung’s autobiographical description of a nocturnal ritual dance (the n’goma) among villagers in the Sudan (in Africa). Carl Jung (1875-1961), as you may or may not know, was an influential psychologist and student of Sigmund Freud. In the autobiographical interviews collected in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), Jung outlines his own fears of the local villagers in a particular area of the Sudan, that, to him, seemed less welcoming than those in previous African villages.

Sixty men, along with women and children, gathered together and lit fires before beginning what Jung labels “savage singing, drumming, and trumpeting” (p. 271). Jung expresses that “I did not know whether I ought to feel pleased or anxious about this mass display”, a statement which reveals a tension to which I turn below. So the uncomfortable Jung decided to join in the dancing, however hesitantly, and was somewhat comforted to notice the approval he received from the villagers for doing so.

As time passed, Jung reports, “the rhythm of the dance and the drumming accelerated” (p. 271). Here Jung begins to reveal his fears in noting that “the natives easily fall into a virtual state of possession. That was the case now. As eleven o’clock approached, their excitement began to get out of bounds. . . The dancers were being transformed into a wild horde, and I became worried about how it would end” (p. 271).

In reading these autobiographical remembrances that inspired Peter Gabriel’s song, I was struck by the tension within Jung’s own description of his experiences in the Sudan. On the one hand, his trip was ostensibly one of studying the human psyche in what he considered its more “primitive”, not-yet-conscious form, something he describes as a “primal darkness” that will only meet light with the dawning of psychological consciousness (something he believed was possessed by the psyches of Europeans). And so Jung seemingly explains away his fear of the possessive tribal dance as a fear of dying by being accidentally stabbed by the swords of the fully involved tribal members in their ecstatic, “possessed” stage. It is a down to earth fear, so he claims.

On further investigation, on the other hand, it seems that his fear may be a fear of becoming part of this collective psychological experience, a concept that he himself had developed in reference to some supposed universal human psychological makeup, and a fear of losing his soul to the possession of the tribal beat. This, I believe, is what Gabriel saw as well. For Jung concludes his story of the tribal dance with a statement of his own profound, personal experiences in Africa. For, as Jung states:

“I had undertaken my African adventure with the secret purpose of escaping from Europe and its complex problems. . . The trip revealed itself as less an investigation of primitive psychology. . . than a probing into the rather embarrassing question: What is going to happen to Jung the psychologist in the wilds of Africa? . . . It became clear to me that this study had been not so much an objective scientific project as an intensely personal one, and that any attempt to go deeper into it touched every possible sore spot in my own psychology” (p. 273).

Here, then, was the “advanced” European academic in fear of having his soul stolen by the “rhythm of the heat”, and yet unable to come to terms with his own fear and unable to analyze himself fully, let alone the supposedly “primitive” villagers.

Happy Halloween.

Peter Gabriel’s official website can be found here. Real World Records can be found here.

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So I requested and received a review copy of Stephen Catanzarite’s Achtung Baby: Meditations on Love in the Shadow of the Fall (New York: Continuum, 2007). This book is part of a larger series of album-focussed books known as 33 1/3. You can read more about this series on the 33 1/3 blog here. Catanzarite approaches the album track by track, delving into the human relations and religious themes he sees reflected in the music. As he proceeds, he creates fictional narratives, stories about human relationships, that he sees as reflecting a message communicated to him from the tracks on U2′s album. His central argument is that Achtung Baby is a many-faceted reflection on the condition of “fallen” humanity (fallen in the Adam and Eve sense).

I have mixed reactions to this book. On the one hand, this is a well-written piece and there are some insightful observations regarding the lyrical and musical aspects of this experimental album by U2. There are times when Catanzarite describes the musicality and instrumentation of Achtung Baby in an eloquent (if somewhat overstated) way:

“The melodies throughout are simply stunning — and stunningly simple — but cast against, around, and on top of complex arrangements overflowing with guttural howls, jarring chimes, trashy beats, and sheets of decadent noise. The guitar riffs, masterfully rendered and brilliantly layered, and also regularly and deliciously off-kilter. The bass lines are solid but frayed, made all the more engaging by their Anglified funkiness. The beats are straightforward and harsh here, tasteful and restrained there. . . And then there are the voices. The passion and elegance, beauty and grace, desperation and longing, lust and regret, truth and confusion communicated in each and every note vocalized on Achtung Baby prove two important things about music. First, no instrument is more potent or versatile than the human voice. Second, you don’t always have to sing on key to make music of enduring beauty and relevance” (p. 5).

The strengths of the book lie in its lively writing style and in Catanzarite’s ability to offer some interesting insights like these. The final chapter of the book also delves into more of what I would have expected from a book of this type, as Catanzarite discusses the cultural context and influence of the album. More of this cultural analysis, rather than (or at least alongside of) theological reflection, would have strengthened the book, in my view.

There are times when Catanzarite’s own admittedly impressionistic take on Achtung Baby rings true to me (and potentially other listeners), as when he describes “One” as “a love song that reaches beyond romance, a kind of post-modern blues ballad that rises swiftly and powerfully above the banal” (p. 18). He then goes on to a very intriguing and, to me at least, accurate description of the “sonic elements” of this track which match with this overall theme that he identifies.

In some cases, Catanzarite’s tendency to think of religious themes actually does work. In particular, he is on solid ground (and not floating around in heaven somewhere) in identifying religious themes when he explores “Until the End of the World”. After all, this song is, expressly, Judas’ perspective on Jesus’ whole obsession (in Judas view) with the coming end — lighten up, Jesus! It is certainly not far-fetched when we hear Catanzarite stating that the “fuming riff of a panoramic guitar reveals the landscape of damnation” (p. 30) now faced by Judas as he reflects back on what he has done. And in some of the performances of this tune at concerts, Bono (as Judas) takes on the role of Satan himself in the final battle between good (Edge representing God with a sword-like guitar) and evil. Ancient combat myth meets rock and roll.

However, it is the very narrow and specific manner of interpreting Achtung Baby within a religious context that I find, well, restrictive and limiting. I do agree that art is about the viewer’s or listener’s take on things, and that what one person sees or feels, another will not. Nonetheless, this book can be too focussed on one person’s religious take on the album (and less so on the album itself), which makes it hard to identify with it if you do not hold its religious perspectives or presuppositions (namely Christian and, more specifically, modern Catholic). (Particularly problematic for me, for example, were Catanzarite’s a-matter-of-fact statements regarding gender and the “mystery of womanhood”, which reflect a particular modern, though traditional, Catholic perspective on the supposed inherent differences between the sexes). The concept of the entire book is that Achtung Baby represents U2′s (or at least Catanzarite’s) take on the fallen condition of humankind, and Catanzarite frequently quotes from religious writers, including recent popes.

It should be stated that Catanzarite does not do this theologizing by subterfuge. Rather, he opens the work by stating that he will approach things from a religious (Catholic) perspective, and, as he states explicitly, “I have superimposed my own particular narrative over the songs on Achtung Baby” (p.96). This focus on a particular mode of religious interpretation together with the accompanying novelistic tendencies sometimes left me behind and I found it hard to identify with Catanzarite’s take on the album. It’s not that I believe there is a true meaning that everyone must find in Achtung Baby, but there are ways of describing our own individual takes that may be less specific or self-contained, and more in touch with the variety of other takes that are possible in listening to an album like U2′s Achtung Baby. There’s more than religion in Achtung Baby, baby.

UPDATE: Over on the @U2 site, there is another review of the book, as well as an interview with Catanzarite.

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The times they are a changin’ endin’: Bob Dylan’s apocalypse

Satanic conspiracies of the 1970s and 1980s (dealing with the supposed and real cases of back-masking)

“Me and the Devil Blues”: Robert Johnson and the crossroads

Pink Floyd, Pompeii, and the Mysteries of Dionysos