Hourglass by Kate Rusby
Feb. 20th, 2011 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHourglass by Kate Rusby
-This is a really, really beautiful English folk album, with great melodies, great instrumental work, and Rusby's clear, unshowy, nimble voice at the center of it.
-If you're a Decemberists' fan, it's probably a must-hear simply for great versions of "Annan Waters" and "Drowned Lovers", a pair of folk songs that were clearly among the inspirations for "The Hazards of Love", given that "Drowned Lovers" is about lovers named Will and Margaret who drown together and "Annan Waters" is about crossing the Annan Waters. I gained a lot of insight into "The Hazards of Love" from listening. Especially into the way "The Hazards of Love" constructs something literal, a fantasy story, out of metaphors.
-The album opens with a dragon-fighting song! And it's awesome. And I know I made fun of Iron Maiden for that, and Alai can rightfully call me a hypocrite or something, but... look, a dragon-fighting song! *runs away during the distraction*
I mean, I think what I was making fun of wasn't the dragon-fighting song but the dragon fighting song that took itself seriously. Everything Iron Maiden does seems to take itself overly seriously. "Sir Eglamore" is sort of about heroism but it's mostly about a comic mismatch in size and strength. And as expected in this sort of song, it has a punchline, though admittedly not a particularly good one. I love songs with punchlines. The Fullerenes' "Little Fits" is my favorite.
Also, there's another reading of "Sir Eglamore" that's probably worth looking at: That it's a metaphorical rape scene. After all, the dragon is clearly gendered as female, while Sir Eglamore spends a lot of time trying to shove his sword into her.
Out came a dragon from her den,/ That killed God knows how many men So we have established that she kills men, i.e. perhaps, she's a man eater. This dragon had a plaguey hide, /That could the sharpest steel abide, /No sword could enter through her skin, /Which vexed the knight and made her grin. No sword could enter through her skin... i.e., she's a virgin. He fetched the dragon a great good turn, /As a yawning she did fall, /he thrust his sword up, hilt and all. And in the song's moment of climax, figurative as well as literal, he thrusts his sword, his phallic object, into her, and she flees. There she lay all night and roared, \the knight was sorry for his sword.
That last line, the punchline of the conventional narrative, becomes a really interesting inversion in this interpretation of the song, because it implies some sort of revenge on the part of the maiden, I mean dragon. Has the knight been made to feel remorse for his liberties taken? Has he contracted a disease, as part of me wants to suspect from the reference to a 'plaguey hide'? What exactly does Sir Eglamore feel sorry for in regards to his sword?
Or perhaps the dragon got pregnant? Does 'lay all night and roared \ the knight was sorry for his sword' imply a labor and a remorseful father-to-be? The more I reflect, the more this seems the most compelling explanation.
-Yeah, I'm sorry for that little detour. Unexpectedly thorough. But it illustrates something more serious that I wanted to mention, which is that Rusby never changes the genders of the narrators of the folk songs she's singing. This leads to moments she refers to herself as a boy, some when she's a girl, and there is a certain amount of incongruity produced. These songs are deeply entrenched in the patriarchy, like "Rose in April" about a girl who can't marry her true love because her father forbids it. And Rusby is situating herself within the patriarchy, accepting it for what it is, and yet there's an element to which she can't help being a squeaky wheel when she sings songs not intended for her. That fascinates me, the way the act of not taking any kind of extraordinary action becomes a sort of rebellion because the system itself is so flawed.
Still, we get lines like "would make a grown man cry". This music is so deeply broken from a gender perspective that I don't think that having a female singer is enough to completely rehabilitate it.
- One thing I really found rich and interesting about this music was the sense of the immediacy of death from causes we find almost shocking today. The feeling of ordinariness surrounding a death by drowning is what drives "Annan Water", and the striking thing was that the obvious solution "And over you I'll build a bridge" is expressed as this wistful, almost impossible thing. Of course if people are drowning in a river the thing to do is to build a bridge over it. But in these folk songs that level of technology was too expensive, a luxury they were ill-able to afford. We talk so much about how medicine was responsible for the dramatically increased life-spans of people, but think about how much technology, too, has done! And think of how much our changing attitude about death, our refusal to accept it as unavoidable, has had an impact. We don't sing songs like that about drowning anymore. Instead, if someone drowns because there wasn't a bridge, we sing protest songs about how someone should goddamn well build a bridge. Fast.
-Great instrumentals here, too. It's always funny to figure out how, on a supposed 'solo album', to give credit to the other musicians, but several of these songs gave big, meaty roles to the rest of the players. So let's give credit where credit is due. The wikipedia page lists all of them.
-This is a really, really beautiful English folk album, with great melodies, great instrumental work, and Rusby's clear, unshowy, nimble voice at the center of it.
-If you're a Decemberists' fan, it's probably a must-hear simply for great versions of "Annan Waters" and "Drowned Lovers", a pair of folk songs that were clearly among the inspirations for "The Hazards of Love", given that "Drowned Lovers" is about lovers named Will and Margaret who drown together and "Annan Waters" is about crossing the Annan Waters. I gained a lot of insight into "The Hazards of Love" from listening. Especially into the way "The Hazards of Love" constructs something literal, a fantasy story, out of metaphors.
-The album opens with a dragon-fighting song! And it's awesome. And I know I made fun of Iron Maiden for that, and Alai can rightfully call me a hypocrite or something, but... look, a dragon-fighting song! *runs away during the distraction*
I mean, I think what I was making fun of wasn't the dragon-fighting song but the dragon fighting song that took itself seriously. Everything Iron Maiden does seems to take itself overly seriously. "Sir Eglamore" is sort of about heroism but it's mostly about a comic mismatch in size and strength. And as expected in this sort of song, it has a punchline, though admittedly not a particularly good one. I love songs with punchlines. The Fullerenes' "Little Fits" is my favorite.
Also, there's another reading of "Sir Eglamore" that's probably worth looking at: That it's a metaphorical rape scene. After all, the dragon is clearly gendered as female, while Sir Eglamore spends a lot of time trying to shove his sword into her.
Out came a dragon from her den,/ That killed God knows how many men So we have established that she kills men, i.e. perhaps, she's a man eater. This dragon had a plaguey hide, /That could the sharpest steel abide, /No sword could enter through her skin, /Which vexed the knight and made her grin. No sword could enter through her skin... i.e., she's a virgin. He fetched the dragon a great good turn, /As a yawning she did fall, /he thrust his sword up, hilt and all. And in the song's moment of climax, figurative as well as literal, he thrusts his sword, his phallic object, into her, and she flees. There she lay all night and roared, \the knight was sorry for his sword.
That last line, the punchline of the conventional narrative, becomes a really interesting inversion in this interpretation of the song, because it implies some sort of revenge on the part of the maiden, I mean dragon. Has the knight been made to feel remorse for his liberties taken? Has he contracted a disease, as part of me wants to suspect from the reference to a 'plaguey hide'? What exactly does Sir Eglamore feel sorry for in regards to his sword?
Or perhaps the dragon got pregnant? Does 'lay all night and roared \ the knight was sorry for his sword' imply a labor and a remorseful father-to-be? The more I reflect, the more this seems the most compelling explanation.
-Yeah, I'm sorry for that little detour. Unexpectedly thorough. But it illustrates something more serious that I wanted to mention, which is that Rusby never changes the genders of the narrators of the folk songs she's singing. This leads to moments she refers to herself as a boy, some when she's a girl, and there is a certain amount of incongruity produced. These songs are deeply entrenched in the patriarchy, like "Rose in April" about a girl who can't marry her true love because her father forbids it. And Rusby is situating herself within the patriarchy, accepting it for what it is, and yet there's an element to which she can't help being a squeaky wheel when she sings songs not intended for her. That fascinates me, the way the act of not taking any kind of extraordinary action becomes a sort of rebellion because the system itself is so flawed.
Still, we get lines like "would make a grown man cry". This music is so deeply broken from a gender perspective that I don't think that having a female singer is enough to completely rehabilitate it.
- One thing I really found rich and interesting about this music was the sense of the immediacy of death from causes we find almost shocking today. The feeling of ordinariness surrounding a death by drowning is what drives "Annan Water", and the striking thing was that the obvious solution "And over you I'll build a bridge" is expressed as this wistful, almost impossible thing. Of course if people are drowning in a river the thing to do is to build a bridge over it. But in these folk songs that level of technology was too expensive, a luxury they were ill-able to afford. We talk so much about how medicine was responsible for the dramatically increased life-spans of people, but think about how much technology, too, has done! And think of how much our changing attitude about death, our refusal to accept it as unavoidable, has had an impact. We don't sing songs like that about drowning anymore. Instead, if someone drowns because there wasn't a bridge, we sing protest songs about how someone should goddamn well build a bridge. Fast.
-Great instrumentals here, too. It's always funny to figure out how, on a supposed 'solo album', to give credit to the other musicians, but several of these songs gave big, meaty roles to the rest of the players. So let's give credit where credit is due. The wikipedia page lists all of them.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 04:32 am (UTC)NEXT YEAR IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY THAT YOU COME TO BOSKONE
IT IS A SCIFI LITERATURE CON
YOU WOULD LOVE IT
YOU COULD ALSO TELL ME WHAT TO BUY IN THE HUCKSTER'S ROOM
it's also small and easy to handle
and rad
so rad
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 09:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-22 02:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-22 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-02 11:41 pm (UTC)