Postcards from Pop Music #1

“Goodnight Irene,” Pere Ubu, Worlds in Collision

On “Goodnight Irene,” David Thomas’ voice is equal parts wistful and threatening. He sings from the outside, looking in on worlds he cannot reach but would do anything to touch and hold. In this song, he demonstrates that he understands nostalgia is no different from neuralgia: a condition that inflicts pain upon the sufferer.  When Thomas howls in the song’s bridge, ‘Goodnight Irene / I’ll see you in my dreams’, he infuses the borrowed lyric with a sinister sense of longing. You can feel his frustration, the quiet desperation to cling to something that’s already fading away.

Musically, the song resembles Frankenstein’s monster, strange and different styles sewn together into a whole that somehow works and lives. “Goodnight Irene” opens with a riff out of an espionage thriller’s theme song, before settling into a driving rhythm over which Thomas whisper-sings verses about the various self-destructive personas he’s held: a carnival rain king, a king bee, the king of Mars. With the chorus comes yet another stylistic shift, as Thomas plays the arena rock star, wailing a confession; he owns his complicity in his own destruction: ‘It’s my calling / and I’m falling / driven by the will of the wind / I know it / and I know it.’ 

Thus far I’ve been treating “Goodnight Irene” as if it’s a narrative, but here again the song resembles nothing so much as a patchwork monster: the parts are easily recognized but the whole is something altogether alien. Snatches of older songs – Irene has wandered in from an old Leadbelly number and the King Bee is presumably the same insect that buzzes about Slim Harpo’s catalogue – rub shoulders with references that seem familiar but escape precise identification – does the carnival rain king come from Bellow’s novel; does the king of Mars stand in for Ziggy Stardust?

“Goodnight Irene” is a snapshot of everything I love about the second Ubu, the avant-pop band who played from 1987 to 1993: despite the unexpected juxtaposition of styles, the song sounds like the logical conclusion of the all the popular music that came before it; and despite the lyrics strong claim that the song stands in a long pop tradition, “Goodnight Irene” still sounds like an pop music artifact from another planet, simultaneously very familiar and utterly out of this world.