Notes by Greg “DK” Kelley

DK & The Hoop Snakes: Decay

March 2023

01 Salt Marsh

When I was a kid I worked for my Dad, a chemistry and bacteriology professor at Jacksonville University.  He was an enthusiast, not to say a mad scientist.  One of those guys that used to be called in German a Schwärmer and in English a projector.  He pursued a project over a couple of decades devoted to the aquacultural production of fresh-water shrimp of the genus Macrobrachium.  We used to ride around in a boat on the St. Johns and on rare occasions even venture into the estuary, where the shrimp bred and which exuded a distinct aroma, not unpleasant but–distinct.  I was aware that this was the scent of the “primordial soup,” rich in nutrients and teeming with tiny prey, such as shrimp larvae.  Any environment enacts the cycle of decomposition and renewal, I came to understand.  When many years later my wife gave birth to our first child I detected a slight redolence of the salt marsh.  After all, amniotic fluid is basically seawater.

As I composed the lyrics to Salt Marsh, the theme emerged that although we humans love to visit natural places, we should stay away lest our big boots (or worse) damage the environment.  The lyrics consist of a list of non-human things that do not welcome our incursion.  This list-like quality makes the lyrics difficult to memorize.  (I’m probably influenced by the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan.)  Poetic composition, like other creative endeavors, requires method.  I learned the method of list-making from Wordsworth in poems like “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.”

02 Say OK

When I was in graduate school I was enthusiastic about the theories of the Frankfurt School.  One of their ideas, promulgated by the most accessible of the group, Herbert Marcuse, was that of the culture of affirmation.  Capitalism, with it’s “just do it” ethos, does not exactly incentivize social criticism.  This is especially true of mass electronic media and the constant bombardment of attention-demanding advertising.  And so in this song I imagine myself “walking across the Main Street Bridge,” the one bridge in Jacksonville that admits pedestrian traffic, while nature itself, represented by the mighty St. Johns, transforms into a video image.  Social media takes this totalization to another level, hence the regimentation of children’s dancing in a video clip.

03 Lying Crying

I must confess to taking advantage of an old person’s privilege of cantankerousness.  Or perhaps I’ve been a curmudgeon all along.  In any case, I’ve had the sensation shared by many people that since the pandemic (which I guess we’re still in?) “everything is just a little worse than it ever ever used to be.”  So I grouch about social media in Say OK and about our environmental carelessness in Salt Marsh.  As a lang-and-lit guy I perennially lament the irrepressible fact that language changes.  I particularly regret the extinction of the word farther, for example.  As I contemplated that complaint one night, I recalled my objection to the misuse of lie and lay.  (Please don’t imagine that I approve of the pedantic streak in my character.)  The confusion is intensified by the homonym pair lie/lie.  It struck me as funny that since we seldom use lie to mean recline these days, “lying on the floor” could mean “attempting to deceive while in a supine position.”  From this comes a jump-and-jive breakup song in which we hear, as usual in such pieces, only one side.  This collection of songs treats the theme of decay in various moods, ranging from celebration of the possibility of regeneration to, more commonly, mourning over the fear and pain of dissolution.

04 Acrid Putrescence

Decay in a comic tone.  The title and refrain comes from a remark of Thomas Carlyle to Alfred Tennyson decrying the atmosphere of London.  I don’t know how I hit upon the somewhat heavily metallic tone of the song, but the whole thing is parody and satire.  I think it’s cool that the tune is three-piece live-in-the-studio with only some vocal overdubbing.  My favorite couplet on the album is: “So spread the swine manure on your lawn/You too will feed the grass when you are gone.”  For the most part the lyrics of this song play the game of “how many words rhyme with putrescence?”  I had a lot of fun compiling that list and working them into sentences.  Upon hearing the first verse, my elder son quipped, “Is there going to be a flute solo?”  The ending parodies “Sgt. Pepper,” of course. 

05 In the Loop

Part 2 of Acrid Putrescence, and again, comic decadence.  In the European Decadence of the late 19th century the misogynistic image of the femme fatale was a favorite.  In this parody, La Belle Dame sans Merci is transformed into a dominatrix.  I love the idea of the earlier (and willing) victim inducting a new recruit.  I also like the theatrical dimension of fetishism, although I’m not an expert.  Lida May Tucker’s backing vocals are apocalyptic, Bee Tee Dubs.

06 Losing My Voice

Inspired by the “Dejection” ode of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  That poem begins with “the dull sobbing draft, that moans and rakes Upon the strings of” a wind-harp placed in the window frame.  My remake begins with a blown speaker, shaking and rattling in “the back seat of my car.”  It’s the beautiful paradox of the poem about an inability to write a poem, the song about an inability to sing.  Now, Bob Dylan seems exempt from the feelings of guilt and poor self-esteem that have afflicted Coleridge and me.  He also never had vocal problems that I’m aware of, or if he did, he blew through them with characteristic self-assurance. And since the song is my attempt to imitate a Great Master (Coleridge), I thought it would be cool to arrange it like a Dylan song performed by one of his imitators, of which there were many, but none more devoted than the Byrds.  In the event, I think it came out more like Crosby, Stills, and Nash.  Which is not the worst thing, especially Nash.

07 Torna (Falling)

There’s this great old Sicilian song, Torna a Surriento, which I believe is out of copyright.  I’ve converted it from ¾ time to 4/4, and made some other changes in a attempt to do a surf adaptation of “classical” music a la the Ventures’ “Stranger in Paradise,” itself an adaptation of “The Polovtsian Dances” of Borodin.  The lyrics derive in part from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”:  “I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath.”  The second part, Falling, is a tune of my own composition.  (I call Torna my own composition too, but it’s obviously an adaptation/parody.)  I like to make private jokes in word play to myself.  We Americans sometimes suppose that the nursery rhyme speaks of London Bridge in the plural: London bridges falling down.

08 Make It, Dirty

One of the cultural efflorescences (I could have used that word in Acrid Putrescence!) of the second half of the 19th century was Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  As a late flowering of Romanticism–that manner never dies!–these poets and painters took as their motto, “Truth to Nature.”  Now, how Arthurian Knights or Ophelia floating downstream exemplify truth to nature, I don’t know.  So since I was a kid, my motto has been Truth to Imagination.  I think this is pretty much what practitioners of the arts do: an idea comes to one from who-knows-where, and you let that inspiration guide the development of the piece.

In the 20th century, Ezra Pound, Modernist and traitorous (capital-F) Fascist, created the motto Make It New.  Total nonsense, totally in keeping with the mental defect that Pound claimed after World War II, which spared him punishment for his crimes against humanity.  I’ve always been impressed that when we invent something, we do not create ex nihilo, but assemble (something) out of already existing parts.  (Coleridge would call this the exercise of only the secondary (i.e., materially contingent) imagination.)  So my motto is Make It Dirty.  I demonstrate this principle by decomposing “Hey Jude”: “take a good old song and f— it up.”  I emended this lyric (some would say bowdlerized it) because decomposing–breaking down or up–is not merely breaking or attacking.  Indeed, we only bother decomposing that which is good or at least has some good in it.  As the bugs in Breaking It Up sing, “returning all the good stuff to the ground,” where it will nourish new–or rather cyclical–life.  You know, “feed the grass.”

Something good that I broke away from the Modernists was their systematic, permutational method, not unrelated to list-making.  So the chorus of Make It, Dirty enacts a permutation of E, D, and A chords.  The superfluous comma in the title comes from the Rolling Stones: “Paint It, Black.”

09 Not Just Any

In a universe parallel to that wherein DK resides, I’m a schoolteacher.  Over the years, many of my students have been persons for whom English is a second language.  And I’m no ESL teacher–I don’t know how those worthy practitioners do it.  It’s super hard to teach something that is second nature.  One of the difficult features of English, apparently, is our use of articles, a, an, and the.  I can’t explain when to use one, when the other, and when none at all.  And it strikes me that narrative, at least when it doesn’t commence with exposition, uses the definite article as if we already know which falcon cannot hear which falconer or which dish ran away with which spoon.  Not Just Any exposes this mechanism: “The dish, not just any dish, ran away with the special spoon.”  The exhaustive/permutational method is also in play here.  Half of each verse is English language instruction, “The Cat and the Fiddle” or the phonics of -at words (“The cat, not just any cat, sat upon the special mat”).  The second half of each verse is a lament for things falling apart, breaking up, or otherwise decaying, for example: “My love, not just any love, ran away with the special guy.”

10 Word Talking

“Truth to Imagination” no doubt exposes me as a Romantic, epicurean and decadent.  But I am also a stoical (Neo)Classicist.  I believe in Keats’s “negative capability,” the power of remaining in doubt and uncertainty, the better to open the doors of perception.  But I also believe in the imitation of the Great Masters, many of whose names I have dropped hitherto.  Now, anybody who claims, as I do, to perform or enjoy rock music must begin with a genuflection to the blues.  One of the glories of African American culture, which has been the cultural bastion of the world for well over a century, is the supplementation of a distinctive and towering musical manner with words that express, in James Baldwin’s words (in “Sonny’s Blues”), “how we suffer, how we are delighted, and how we may triumph.”  The world stands in awe of the joyful confidence of Bessie Smith, Muhammad Ali, Muddy Waters, Beyoncé, and . . . too many to count, much less list.  Before the revolution that these myriads effected, and still today in more reactionary quarters, Western culture might have dismissed proud utterances like theirs as the petty vice of braggadocio.

The prejudice of Western, instrumental culture to against language itself is reflected in the proverb, “Actions speak louder than words.”  My remit in Word talking was merely to reverse that priority.  Hence, words have the power of breaking up and breaking down palaces and empires.

11 Decay

We have a problem.  When we contemplate the past, even in its “Monuments of unageing intellect” (Yeats), we see that those who lived before us were human, all-too human, as we are.  Consequently, our enjoyment of even the greatest achievements will be vitiated by the fallibility of their creators, which their creations inevitably betray.  Racism and misogyny were never okay.  It is a depressing fact that even people of good will emerge from the attitudes characteristic of their place and time.  None of us are causa sui.  And the good will even of creative people is often stunted.  Thus, W. B. Yeats, who was buddies with Ezra Pound, wrote some good and indeed inspiring lines in poems contaminated with hateful inclination.  A couple of lines from one such poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” could serve as the epigraph of Decay: “All things fall and are built again And those that build them again are gay.”  But these lines reflect an evenhandedness that is typical of neither of Yeats nor of Decay.  We tend to emphasize only the “downturning side.”  Hence the line, famous to the point of cliche, cribbed from “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart the center cannot hold.”  Yeats was lamenting the decline of a suppositious aristocracy.  Funny how anti-democratic the Modernists were. I try to put Decline in its cyclical context. For without it, “the sweetest blushing flower never springs.” I admit, however, that the emphasis is not on the spring, but on the fall.

On the other hand, the principle of individuation–cherished in democratic societies–is grossly exaggerated in modern times.  On the third hand, death, which befalls individuals, is not a pleasant prospect when you’re the individual who’s dying.  Hence the one-sided, funereal tone of much of the album.  (The note of regeneration does sound, but it’s close to a compensatory gesture.)  The Yeatsian and Keatsian (“all beauty fades”) motifs are pretty plain, but I do want to acknowledge the source of one of the more pleasing moments in the song Decay.  Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” deserves a quotation: “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”  I’d like to talk about the Holy Grail of guitar tones and the exquisite talent of vocal tone (my daughter), but the current document consists of “notes” not “essays.”

12 Head Explode

Another song in which I have expurgated, this time at Rick the drummer’s suggestion, the f-word.  The original lyrics aptly expressed a feeling–of anger–but I have come to agree with Rick that individual expression does not justify abusive language.  (I hope I’m accurately representing Rick’s position.)  More to the point, “Truth to Imagination” can’t possibly end up with one note.  So I think the new lyrics express more complex, if negative, feelings than just anger.  And I think “bums my head” is more truthful in my case than “pisses me off.”  And street racing really bums my head, as do superfluous systemic mandates. The new refrain emphasizes self-control against violent outburst.

“Truth(fulness)” causes me considerable ambivalence.  I can’t be a phony.  But I am well aware that the portion of the truth that I tell is one-sided (or at best lopsided) and hence deficient and, frankly, a bad attitude, a bad example.  Note how often in this album the words everything, everywhere, and everybody occur.  I think this is the symptom that the cognitive behaviorists would proscribe as “globalizing.”
 

13 Breaking It Up

The album ends–or nearly ends!–on a cheerful note, which Bill and Ted might endorse as “most triumphant,” though it’s more Motown than Metal.  The album opens with regeneration, the “invertebrates breeding,” albeit amid “the smell of decomposing,” which humans find repellent.  It closes (or nearly so!) with decomposition as reconstitution.  The invertebrates, together with their allies the fungi (depicted on the album art), “put the wine back in your loving loving cup.”

14 Any Eye

The album really ends on a note of global despair.  That’s all. I’m all alone, me and my Hammond. But, you know, the rest of the band is still there, and you, Dear Listener. Thank you.