The artist as magician. Anyone that has been reading my blog for awhile, knows that the intersection of art and magic, and their interchangeability is something that I'm intensely interested in. Today I'm going to discuss it using my favorite current artist B. Dolan as my example, since a lot of the language and techniques he uses accurately invoke more than a few popular rituals of the shaman. And plus he has an album that's out today, it's disgustingly ill. It's like horror-core apocalyptic spoken word Ragnarök grinding. Basically right in the wheel house for me and a lot of the people probably reading this blog.
Anywho. You can get his music here. You can also listen to the whole "Failure" album in it's entirety, and listen to exactly what I'm talking about here.
The thing I'd like to open up with first is his poem Skycycle Blues. Skycycle blues is a spoken word performance about Evel Knievel the daredevil. What's interesting about this piece is that when it was performed, for the longest time, Dolan would dress up in a Evel jumpsuit and helmet and start priming the crowd. Bringing the crowd into a frenzy, before making a jump on a bike over some small school buses. This would be coupled with the actual piece, which is an invokatory piece. What's fascinating is the act of costuming, and masking here, takes on a transformative effect on Dolan. His facial expressions change. His body language is different, and on certain nights he is Evel Knievel. And there's this electricity, that supercedes the reality of the moment. He's jumping over small school buses, but the energy that act generates is tremendous, and it feeds into the rest of the piece.
What's fascinating even moreso than that, is how in the middle of the piece, Dolan uses Knievel as a tool to invoke and deal with Death. In a way, Knievel is used in the same way that one might use a Vodoun crossroads god to speak with someone from beyond that reality.
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" So this is what you call a fucking one shot deal:
This helmet,
is to protect me from my own momentum
This costume
is to protect YOU from the realness of what is happening here!
I am calling on DEATH
and she comes growling and snapping into the arena
and opens her jaws up wide on both sides of my landing ramp!
Gasoline!
Throttle!
My heart is a spark plug!
My heart is pumping 100% Fuck You!
Thumbs up!
Open her up!
Let the arrow fly and
Tear into the fabric of an instant! "
To some extent Dolan allows himself to be taken over(mounted) by the Daredevil god Knievel. Because who better to invoke when trying to evoke death and pass along a request? Who is more brave in the face of death, than a daredevil?
The piece concludes:
"he deserves mercy, death.
mercy..."
Which when you take into the context that Dolan is in the guise of Knievel, asking for mercy for Knievel(who died recently) is also in some ways asking for a favor from death towards his own ends.
The last thing I'll say on Skycycle blues is this. On the EP record that you can buy, the Live Evel EP, on the back of it it recounts how Dolan became inspired to write the Knievel poem. It describes an experience he had in his car where his radio went out, and just like Phillip K. Dick's pink laser, a laser enters Dolan, and on the heals of that laser is the voice of Knievel coming in over the speaker. The story skips ahead some time and says "when I came to, I had spent a year onstage as Evel Knievel. At the end of that time, I wrote "The Skycycle Blues"."
There are other even stronger magical metaphors sprinkled throughout the album for the discerning listener. This is just the one that was the keyhole for me. But I mean, what's the significance of this? You'll actually find these kind of metaphors in performance art a LOT. And I guess that's really what I'm trying to play with here. Actors, spoken word poets, musicians, rappers--they are all magicians/shamans. And the best of them can and will put you under their spell.
This gets into some of what Alan Moore was talking about. In terms of the role of the artist. As with marketers, we are talking about people of high magical skill. People that can take others minds to places that they wouldn't go on their own. They can be the gateway to higher enlightenments and realizations of self.
Or they dumb you down. They can put you to sleep. They can dull the senses. And they can hasten our devolution. With all of the new things that we have, the old metaphors are the most primal. They are the ones most connected with the roots of our evolution. They are the ones closest to our inner most consciousness. And art, because it IS magic, is a way to communicate with these consciousnesses.
I don't know what I'm totally rambling on to. But it's something akin to, the role of the shaman in the community was to offer a way for the community to bridge gaps between the spiritual and the corporeal, and in doing so allow the community to know about itself and it's history in a much more real and fulfilling way. By connecting into that powerful communal back consciousness, the decisions for the future of the community can be enlightened and enjoyed. So I'm saying, listen to the music. Listen in between the music. And uh....I dunno. Buy B. Dolan's album. There's some great references to Divine Horsemen in there for you to find. As well as some great breakdowns for how magic intrinsically works. If you wanted to, you could take this album and teach yourself a magical system that will work, and will take your brain to new crazier places.
You can put yourself out into a dark forest, invoke old gods till your drunk and delirious, and watching them hover at the edge of your own perception, ask them favors, ask them for wisdom, ask them for something, because right now, people are asking in your stead constantly, the party is jumping off.
The Failure is the club banger jump off for 2008.
www.SFRstore.com
www.myspace.com/bernarddolan
www.bdolan.net
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