{"id":13413,"date":"2012-05-08T10:54:21","date_gmt":"2012-05-08T14:54:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=13413"},"modified":"2012-05-08T11:29:34","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T15:29:34","slug":"please-explain-personally-scott-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/please-explain-personally-scott-walker\/","title":{"rendered":"Please Explain (Personally): Scott Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/dBMJ79ly3B4?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>Before leaving for work this morning I watched about 45 minutes of some <strong>Scott Walker<\/strong> documentary, <em>30th Century Man<\/em>. It took a lot of concentration to stick with it for as long as I did, but I was doing it for you, especially those of you who profess to like the solo recordings by Scott Walker. (You&#8217;re welcome.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve heard a few of these records over the years, and I heard selections from more recent ones in the documentary I watched this morning. Clearly his records are <em>interesting<\/em>. Clearly he seems to have influenced many of <strong>David Bowie<\/strong>&#8216;s failed attempts at being more\u00a0<em>interesting<\/em> than he already is (eg, the long boring songs off the generally interesting <em>Station to Station<\/em>). I&#8217;ll give Walker credit for being interesting and for doing his own music better than Bowie has tried to do it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m aware, on a rock criticism level, of the <em>influence<\/em> Walker&#8217;s solo recordings and, maybe more so, how his idiosyncratic career path has inspired other artists, especially shy, misfit English ones. Clearly, whether I will ever <em>enjoy<\/em> the music of Scott Walker or not, he stands for something. And that&#8217;s good; standing for something is always good. I&#8217;d read that he was &#8220;out there&#8221; as a person, but it was refreshing in the documentary&#8217;s modern-day interviews with him to see that he was an articulate, straightforward, friendly fellow. Society&#8217;s glorification of the &#8220;tortured artist&#8221; thing really grates on me. Maybe Walker&#8217;s had his struggles, but the way he tells it in this doc, he was his own man, making his own decisions with no regrets. That&#8217;s cool.<\/p>\n<p>What I&#8217;d really like to learn is what fans of the music of Scott Walker get out of listening to his records. On a personal level, how do they speak to you? I hear that voice of his and those lyrics and the 13-year-0ld malcontent in me wants to get in his face or give the guy a wedgie. The reasonable, rationale adult I am today hears the music of Scott Walker as a shockingly successful and even relatively tasteful version of whatever the hell it was <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/index.php\/rock-town-hall%E2%80%99s-saturday-night-shut-in-a-dip-into-the-%E2%80%9Cmilk%E2%80%9D-crate\/\" target=\"_blank\">Richard Harris<\/a><\/strong> was trying to do with <strong>Jimmy Webb<\/strong> in the late &#8217;60s. In one sense that&#8217;s a remarkable achievement, but nevertheless I can&#8217;t help but wonder <em>Why<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m counting on you, fans of the music of Scott Walker, to tell me how his music makes you <em>feel<\/em>, what it resonates within you, both the you of today and, if applicable, the 13-year-old you carried into the future.<\/p>\n<p>No facts, no figures, please. I may regret asking for this, but take me inside your skin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before leaving for work this morning I watched about 45 minutes of some Scott Walker documentary, 30th Century Man. It took a lot of concentration to stick with it for as long as I did, but I was doing it for you, especially those of you who profess to like the solo recordings by Scott <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/please-explain-personally-scott-walker\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[153,631,127,441,34,630],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}