World Without Tears: A Devotional

Hey y’all, I posted a year or so ago about a blog piece I wrote about Lucinda’s World Without Tears Album, and that piece has recently been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly in a different, slightly more academic form–all exciting news for me, as I am a young scholar and this comprises my first published material. I can’t think of anyone better to have written about. Hope you enjoy it.

Best,

Taylor Black
(apologies for cutting-and-pasting the not-as-attractive html version of the article, but the site won’t let me upload the PDF file for you)

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter 2011

E-ISSN: 1934-1520 Print ISSN: 0732-1562

World Without Tears:
A Devotional
Taylor Black

Coda:
I climbed all the way inside
Your tragedy
I got behind
The majesty
Of the different shapes
In every note
The endless tapes
Of every word you wrote

Preface: Twilight of the Idols

Much has already been said about the gay men and their beloved tragedy queens. From Oscar Wilde to Judy Garland to Lady Gaga’s current acid reign over the homosexuals who overpopulate her fan base, it is indeed possible, and far too easy, to cast a certain genealogy of tragedy queens who have held court in the hearts and minds of modern gay men. Rather than orchestrate or even critique the cultural impacts of these figures, whose stories and identities have already been told and retold, this essay will offer up Lucinda Williams as an overlooked tragedy country queen, carrying with her an approach to ruin that transcends the hackneyed misrecognition of camp to be creative, forceful, and, in the end, something other than just ruined.

The problem with the fixation and attachment to the archetypical tragedy queens I have laid out before you is that the interest in them that gay men have cultivated and held dear has been based on bad faith and [End Page 31] misrecognition. While my decision to draw on Wilde, Garland, and Lady Gaga may seem, to some, too subjective or general, I would like to simply point to the significant role that themes and invocations of tragedy have to play in the reception and affiliation that undergirds each of their individual constructions as iconic figures in the “homosexual imagination.” From the scandalous, failed, and even pert ways Wilde himself presented the details of his private life to the public, to Garland’s unfortunate and very well-known problems with substance abuse, to the tears that Lady Gaga conjures up and weeps for her “little monsters,” the publicity machine that has produced this particular line of tragedy queens has relied on sentimentalizing and protecting the bond made with their gay audience around a shared sense of misfortune. Tragedy operates here not only as a spectacle to behold, but also as a site of identification and affiliation necessary in the maintenance of the bond held between tragedy queens and their homosexual audience—failed women bonded to failed men.

Lucinda Williams is the subterranean, all-powerful, aural, post-tragic queen of ruin. Composing her ruin as a work of art, Lucinda’s approach to destruction and loss finds capacity in despair and invents a new form of musical expression that intensifies violence and romances ruin as a way of becoming-imperceptible. While tragedy, and indeed the term woman itself, may imply, both discursively and historically, a kind of lack, Lucinda’s ruin is about capacity—to act upon it, to sing about it, and to find glory within it. More than a transformation of a negative term into a positive one, Lucinda’s creative approach to ruin is a kind of becoming—a decomposition of loss and an invention of force within experiences we might mistakenly write off as merely tragic.

Ruin is Lucinda’s style and not just her burden. Style is a process of being and becoming yourself—a way of performing and broadcasting difference before the world that both defies and travels through familiar ways of being. Quentin Crisp, the subject of my dissertation project on style and failure, is, like Lucinda and indeed any object of my attention and affection, a counterhero in the story he has to tell about the life of the modern homosexual. Failure is a source of creativity for him in the same way that ruin and tragedy operate for Lucinda as a process of invention and artistic creation in her body of work. Style, for both Quentin and Lucinda, constitutes a sacred endeavor: of both constituting and spreading themselves unto the world by not only being, but also becoming their failures and [End Page 32] tragedies, which are able to become events and beautiful objects in and of themselves. How personality and creativity are tethered to any project of style is exactly what, in Quentin’s terms, we must lament about the ways our celebrities and our cultural icons have become historical moments and fashion trends in and of themselves: “We have lost forever our capacity for reverence. . . . Therefore do not ask why there are no Garbos, no Dietrichs. The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves” (Crisp 1984, 18).

The attachment to cultural icons of any sort, but especially relating to gay tragedy queens, suffers from a kind of attachment and emotional interest that is filtered through the audience members’ identification with their queens of catastrophe. Just as the idea of God, or of nature, becomes generic and loses force when reduced to metaphor, the tears that we shed for and with our celebrities result from a banal and glib form of attachment. We have lost our ability to revere and, as a result, to even be able to comprehend the wonderful and wicked forces that make their way into and unto the world: “There is no way back to Eden; we have eaten the bitter apple of equality to the very core, dragging the gods down to our own mean level. From now on, our lives will consist of a relentless, exhausting pursuit of pleasure instead of the quest for the Holy Grail of Happiness. Our talk will be of money and sex—never of power or of beauty” (Crisp 1984, 18).

As a project of style and as an creation in and of itself, my reading will offer and attempt to broadcast both the sound and the impact of Lucinda’s personal ruin in the form of a countermemory, as a descent into the world of destruction that applies and brings forth her power and her glory. Rather than attempting to redeploy tragedy as a term of critique or analysis, this essay will make its way into Lucinda’s World Without Tears album in order to offer up ruin and tragedy in her work as something more than a theme or a metaphor, but as a force she performs and somehow embodies in her very strange singing of her songs. Ruin is a force in Lucinda’s work that not only can be understood, but also can be felt; indeed, the grain of her voice seems both to present and to embody her experiences in the world. As a process of creativity and invention, Lucinda’s ruin is about capacity rather than lack. The impact of her voice and the presence she brings forth in this record of her work constitute, to be certain, something strange and unsettled to behold. I intend this essay, both performative and liturgical, to be one that itself invents and allows for a new, more awe-inspiring [End Page 33] understanding of Lucinda as the tragedy queen whose tragedy and ruin have mobility and carry with them the kind of creative force that we must behold, revere, and witness just as it is.

Descending into Lucinda’s World Without Tears: On Method and Obedience

My manner of discussing Lucinda is, as you may already be well aware, evangelical in tone; in terms of how my piece operates as academic writing, I should mention the underlying and subterranean influence of Deleuzian models of becoming in my work and guiding my presentation of Lucinda’s body of work. Becoming is, in this case, always a molecular process—a passing through and abstraction of familiar modes and ways of being that always, if they remain on course, appear more and more imperceptibly and strangely. Lucinda cultivates a form of worldly detachment that presents itself as totally unique, even if her manner of appearance on her records seems on the surface to be stony, impersonal, and completely affected. Lucinda’s style is always in excess—in excess of the limitations of tragedy as well as beyond the pale of musical genre.

My depiction of Lucinda as an iconoclast has everything to do with the ways her inventive approach to ruin travels through, but ultimately overcomes and troubles, the familiar territory of sadness and loss that her songs deal with on a literal level. My understanding of discombobulation as a form of capacity emerges from and is inspired by Jasbir Puar’s very lively and significant explication of this theme in her essay “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Risk—of psychic injury or even physical destruction—is not, in Puar’s terms, a destabilizing force in the world, but rather an opportunity for change and a capacity for openness in the world. This, as she terms it, convivial approach to danger and to ruin can and should be understood as the vehicle through which creative possibilities and affective intensities become possible (Puar 2009). Lucinda’s ruin is, in this way, a flirtation with the world as well as her method of overcoming its limitations. Rather than be destroyed, Lucinda sings to conquer, to trace a line of flight away from tragedy toward glory.

The language of becoming is, however, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “made not to be believed but to be obeyed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 84); [End Page 34] in order for this essay to work and for the impact of Lucinda’s inventiveness to come through, then, its readers will have to suspend the doubts and habits that critical reading practices enforce and simply listen to the sound of Lucinda’s voice and become part of the ruin brought forth by her voice. The language Lucinda’s songs partake in are provocations, they give orders; the life, as Deleuze and Guattari articulate so well, given by this kind of movement and the impact of her becoming-intense “does not speak; it listens and waits” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 84). As a body of work, World Without Tears exceeds and escapes the limitations of the tragic and superimposes upon them a new, intensifying performance of ruin that may seem strange to her, but that commands wonder and obedience in its listeners, who in witnessing Lucinda’s glory, become part of her becoming-intense by opening themselves up to her re-creations of ruin. So listen, open up, and wait.

To listen to Lucinda’s World Without Tears is to make a kind of terrestrial descent into a world made up of only her voice, her presence; to partake in and become immediately overwhelmed with the sound of her sadness, the vibratory force of her wonderful wickedness. My deployments of Deleuzian frameworks of becoming as well as the ways in which I have learned to think of artistic creation as a line of flight rather than a mere mode of expression is, in very large part, thanks to my encounters with Elizabeth Grosz, both as a student and, now, an avid reader of her work. More than introducing me to Deleuze, Grosz has affected my work by providing for me ways of thinking of art as a becoming, a movement toward imperceptibility. Lucinda’s work, as I will present it, abides by what Grosz refers to as “the first gesture of art,” which, as she says “requires a body’s separation from the earth, from nature, from its world” (Grosz 2008, 10). Lucinda’s music descends into the underworld of expression in order to overcome its limits; ruin is, in this way and to borrow terms from Grosz’s work on art, Lucinda’s mode of deploying music as invention, as something that not only stands on its own but also reframes the world itself.1

In terms of genre, World Without Tears occupies and traces lines of flight away from certain musical traditions that may seem, on the surface, to be familiar. Like Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton, and all the other queens who came before her, Lucinda, in her immediate model of musical expression and of artistic composition, borrows from country music a taste for melancholy and melodrama, an approach that, like those [End Page 35] of the country queens, she feels and sounds right at home in. As Lucinda adds her heavy influences in the talking-blues style of songwriting (“Righteously,” “Sweet Side”) that gets filtered through more contemporary rock standards that seem right out of the archives of the Rolling Stones (“Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings”) or even ZZ Top (“Atonement”), her approach to and delivery of her works of tragedy and despair take on an electrified, feral tone that sets her apart even from the great honky-tonk angels and tragic country queens who laid the ground for her material to emerge in the world. As with any country song, sadness and loss compose the land that Lucinda’s music walks upon; the repetitions and stutters that she brings forth from the American talking-blues traditions multiply the sensation and the power of her performance and of her presence that World Without Tears records and has offered us as listeners. Sadness and tragedy are the world that her record emerges out of; her voice is the rain that falls upon it, her ruin the thunder and the lightning that terrorizes and discombobulates it.

Ruin is, of course, not the same as tragedy. Whether emerging out of a psychoanalytic tradition or common parlance, “tragedy” is a term that one applies to a figure whose future, or rather whose eventual downfall, is imminent, is predicted. The icons of tragedy whom I have laid before you provide for us a perfect trajectory of how this term has made its way through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: first, in the case of Wilde, as a cause; then, for Garland, as a physical and spectacularized form of personal destruction; then, in the case of Lady Gaga, as a matter and technique of her publicity. Ruin is, unlike tragedy, a state of being and a style; it is not a way of describing or characterizing Lucinda’s status as a celebrity, but a source, a force, and the motor that generates artistic invention. Standing outside the tradition set forth by these icons of tragedy comes Lucinda Williams, an iconoclast of ruin, the great blues sorceress of our time.

We cannot speak of Lucinda in terms of her personal life and of her body of work separately, we can only experience and listen to the ways in which she records and makes music out of the overwhelming presence of loss and destruction her songs sing of. World Without Tears asks its listeners what life would be like without loss; how creativity and change might occur without an inventive and open relationship to despair. What appears in the lives of icons of tragedy as a story to tell or a spectacle to see is, for [End Page 36] Lucinda, a song to sing and a force to behold. Her ontology of ruin is a romance, a song, chaos, and an artistic force her listeners must hear and accept. If we lived in a world without tears / how would hearts know when to stop? / How would broken find the bone?

Misery Loves Company: Our Descent Begins . . .

We are entering dangerous territory, or, rather, I should say I am entering into a project that’s about my absolute favorite album done by my absolute favorite artist. Why is this dangerous? Well, as most of my previous “academic” work has been conventionally analytical, I haven’t spent much time or intellectual energy lingering on the things in my life that I love. I will shamefully admit that for a long while, my interpretation of doing scholarly work has been about making arguments about things or situating myself into theoretical discussions that have been raging on in one form or another for-probably-ever. In this state of blissful recalcitrance, I found it easiest to make my arguments and my very defended claims about things I felt a certain detachment from; the idea of responding to and writing about something I love so religiously as music and a figure I identify with so wholly might lead me into embarrassing, confessional territory.

With all that out of the way, I promise not to defend myself or my feelings anymore throughout this work, which is really more like a religious devotional than any kind of academic prose I can imagine. I’m sure I will contradict myself here and there, and my love of Lucinda and tragedy may confound or even fatigue my reader, but I do hope you will at least appreciate my earnestness and the purity of whatever feelings I express here. But why? And shouldn’t I be ashamed of such a disgusting display? Isn’t all of this self-loathing instead of self-loving? Or am I just being ironic? One very easy way to get out these pointed, if obvious, slew of accusations and doubts about my so-called love for misery and the truly miserable would be to revert to some kind of psychoanalytic explanation about being from the Bible Belt South and having internalized and maybe even romanticized all of the most terrible components of the melodramatic fire-and-brimstone culture I was brought up in; or worse, I could simply lean on my identity as a homosexual man and cite some well-known, meaningless tropes about queerness and tragedy as a way of placating you and letting me and my work off the hook as “camp.” [End Page 37]

Her Wonderful Wickedness
(Listen to) “Righteously”

Think this through
I laid it down for you every time
Respect me I give you what’s mine
You’re entirely way too fine

In all kinds of rather obvious ways, my decision to undertake this Lucinda record is a mistake. First of all, it’s not her most beloved body of work; Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, from 1998, is the one album that critics and journalists love to love. With its cinematic, narrative songs that weave their ways in and out of moldy, humid corners of the Delta region of the American South, Car Wheels combines just the right amount of folksy realness with meticulously highbrow literariness to please the kinds of critics who felt invested in roots music but isolated from the explosion of decidedly middling, middlebrow pop music coming out of Nashville. Here you had something as conceptual and sophomorically intellectual as a Bob Dylan or Neil Young album falling from the heavy, weary lips of a woman who had not only conceived of, but actually lived, the very southern stories she sang about, all delivered in her thick, muggy southern drawl. Even more exciting for journalists and critics alike was the gossip surrounding and the drama that weighed down the production of the album; with this album taking over four years, three different incantations, three different producers, and countless victims employed along the way, once Car Wheels finally came out, Lucinda had managed to gain a reputation for herself as a bitchy, histrionic perfectionist—and (the mostly male) world of rock criticism and journalism still, to this day, can’t seem to publish anything without using that “perfectionist” word, just like no one had ever said it or thought it before they regurgitated it. Leave it to them.

Arms around my waist
You get a taste of how good this can be
Be the man you ought to tenderly
Stand up for me [End Page 38]

You see, or as you already assume or expect, our Ms. Williams is a bit hard to take. For one, she is a perfectionist, and, leaving all gendered epithets aside, doesn’t hide her emotions very well. While most of her fans and critics are men, their relationship is totally different, and what they see and hear in Lucinda varies completely. For the detached rock critic, weighed down by his or her strange mix of irony and corporate professionalism, Lucinda’s story is sort of a joke on her, something to talk about ad nauseam.

When you run your hand
All up and run it back down my leg
Get excited and bite my neck
Get me all worked up like that

You don’t have to prove
Your manhood to me constantly
I know you’re the man can’t you see
I love you Righteously

The song “Righteously” that is blaring in my ears while I write this is an anthem to power and glory through abjection. In some ways related to Tammy Wynette’s epic song of total, devastating, and, in the end, failed devotion to her man, Lucinda’s song is, in some ways, a promise of hers to the man she’s got in her life. However, it’s also a wicked line of flight away from the sentiments expressed in “Stand by Your Man”; beyond and behind her coy promises of righteous love is the real power of this song, which actually, magically stimulates, entices, and interpellates her man’s devotion. In the eyes of the middle-aged white men I see at her shows, however, there is a spark and there is a look of abject devotion on their faces that lets me know they get it: they don’t look down on Lucinda, they look up at her, and while the sad and sorrowful definitely fall out of her whenever she opens her mouth to sing, it is her fierce, flirtatious, and wicked delivery and composure that transform her tragedies into an elixir that draws her devotees in and brings them down to their grateful knees.

Arms around my waist
You get a taste of how good this can be
Be the man you ought to tenderly
Stand up for me [End Page 39]

Approaching Lucinda, Our Beautiful Loser
(Listen to) “Sweet Side”

So you don’t always show your sweet side . . .

Just this side of strange in comparison with the other men at Lucinda’s concerts, I will admit that the main reason I enjoy myself at her shows, though, is mitigated through my sense as well as my perception of her anxiety that is normally—almost ritually—played out each evening she performs in a certain chronology. When she finally makes her way on stage (always very belatedly, in my notable experience), she brings with her an unsettling sort of presence. Lucinda’s affect and disposition is weighed down by a stony, stoic, silent stage fright for the first third of the set, as she moves her way through a handful of amazingly slow, overwrought, plodding, pitiful old songs (the kind anyone else would tell you not to perform in concert, much less for the first part of the damn set!) all the while deflecting the gaze of the audience and dissociating her from the stage she is performing on.

You run yourself ragged tryin’ to be strong
You feel bad when you done nothin’ wrong
Love got all confused with anger and pride
So much abuse on such a little child
Someone you trusted told you to shut up
Now there’s a pain in your gut that you can’t get rid of

After this, thanks to nerves and/or whatever liquor she’s got in her cup up there on stage (she says she drinks Grand Marnier to coat her throat, so there’s at least that . . . ), our once sheepish heroine warms up a bit, maintaining her anxieties and displeasures about her surroundings. Peppering—or, if you’re not into such tenuous forms of spectatorship, cluttering—her performance with false starts and vulgar outbursts, Lucinda has come out of her shell a bit (the last example that comes to mind is her, very seriously and angrily, stopping midsong to say, “Who do I have to fuck to get a fucking fan up here? It’s fucking hot!” and other times I’ve heard her scold people for talking during her set, asking them if they’d like to “fucking do it” themselves)—finally opening herself up to the crowd, only to turn, venomously and breathtakingly, against them. [End Page 40]

You were screamed at and kicked over and over
Now you always feel sick and you can’t keep a lover
You get defensive at every turn
You’re overly sensitive and overly concerned
Few precious memories no lullabies
Hollowed out centuries of lies

A Lucinda Williams concert then, and finally, comes to an end in a flurry of hard-rocking, loud songs that are as frayed at the edges, but orgasmically so. By the time you’re ready to leave, Lucinda has certainly done what a good showman is supposed to do, which is give you your money’s worth by keeping you on the edge of your seat and the tips of your toes. The angst and constant fear of total disaster that guides both Lucinda and her audience through the evening come full circle by the final bows, as she drags out the blaring, cathartic portion of the evening until everyone is drunk and damn well spent. Bill Buford, in his—confused, rather patronizing—depiction of Lucinda published in the New Yorker not long after the release of Car Wheels summed up one of her shows in this way: “It’s still possible to see a live show in which she gets a little carried away—and she always seems to be on the verge of getting a little carried away—and hear almost the entire oeuvre, as was the case about eighteen months ago at New York’s Irving Plaza, when Williams’s encores went on longer than the act, and the audience emerged, after nearly two and a half hours, thoroughly spent, not only by the duration of the program but also by the unforgiving rawness of the songs” (Buford 2000, 51).

What I cannot grasp here, and indeed what I intend to turn on its head, is this very expected, boring depiction of Lucinda as merely a crazy bitch who happens to have written some amazing songs—that being a fan of hers or even being in her presence is a thoroughly harrowing thing for someone to be put through—is the lack of empathy that Mr. Buford carries in his self-confessed appreciation of Lucinda’s music. And, of course, he’s not the only person or journalist to put Lucinda and her concert performances in such a glib light (incidentally, a Time Out New York blurb that hinted at possible train wrecks and meltdowns at one of her concerts was the cause of a night of drama and bitching from Lucinda, who did not get over or stop mentioning it for the entire evening); perhaps this condescending sketch of Lucinda-the-crazy-person is their backhanded, [End Page 41] backward way of complimenting the strength of her music, which they appreciate and understand through very staid tropes of the beautiful loser: the outsider/tortured artist whose brilliance shines in spite and at the expense of themselves (think: Townes Van Zandt, Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday, Tammy Wynette, and on and on). You see, for these folks, Lucinda and her music alike are only fascinating because she’s a train wreck; all descriptions of her, in turn, quickly become cautionary tales.

You’re tough as steel and you keep your chin up
You don’t ever feel like you’re good enough

Well, as I’ve said and will say again and again, this tale about our Miss Williams will not be a cautionary, ironic, or detached one. In order to love her music, you’ve got to appreciate the angst, romance in the disaster, and wallow along with her as she moves through her songs and makes them work. True listening is an act of faith on the part of the listener—and when the image of the singer-songwriter is just as present in the song as the notes and the lyrics that guide them through, a determined empathy and, dare I say, a religious affection are both completely necessary.

I’ll stick by you baby through thick and thin
No matter what kind of shape you’re in

Cause I’ve seen your sweet side . . .

(Listen to) “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings”

Photographic dialogues
Beneath your skin
Pornographic episodes
Screaming sin

In my very slow, indulgent process of thinking and feeling my way through this record—and indeed in my outline for this very essay—my intention was to go through it song by song and in direct chronological order—until last night. Driving around the empty, rain-soaked streets of Chinatown at three in the morning following an unproductive stint in New York University’s Bobst Library, I indulged this rare moment of desolate isolation that I’d normally have to embark on a long road trip out of the [End Page 42] busy and cluttered atmosphere of the Northeast by putting World Without Tears on and turning up the sound. With my car’s poor little CD player accidentally set to random, the album began in an unusually loud and ragged way; instead of hearing the sweet, sad vibrato of her song “Fruits of My Labor” that normally eases you into Lucinda’s magnificent, horrible old world, I found myself being shouted at by the feral, screeching sound of the guitar that makes up the introduction to her very staggering anthem “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings.”

Shattered nerves
Itchy Skin
Dirty words
And heroin

Lucinda is not one to be outdone by her band, however, and the shocks and reverberations that ensue past the musical interlude are all Lucinda. This song is all about vibrato—a kind of dance or clash between the lead guitar, which drips and shakes its notes out of itself, and Lucinda’s voice, which quivers and howls its way out of her worn old throat. Unlike “Fruits of My Labor,” however, “Real Live Bleeding Fingers” frightens and calls its listeners to attention rather than easing them into submission and awestruck fear with something that sounds deceptively beautiful and tender.

You’ve got a sense of humor
You’re a mystery
I heard a rumor
You’re making history

To get back to my story, though: as I drove through the streets of New York, wary of my aloneness yet comforted by it too, I almost turned the song to something a little softer; considering the remoteness of the atmosphere and the weariness of my disposition, I figured I really ought to play one of her long ballads and let it swallow both me and the humid, empty night up with its drippy lap steel interludes and plodding turns of phrases. However, as to not upset fate or disrespect my dear Lucinda, I dutifully remained inside the space of “Real Live Bleeding Fingers,” a song—as I’ve heard her say—about seeing lover after lover and relationship and relationship [End Page 43] fall victim to “heroin blurs,” but also, oddly enough, about the solo work of Paul Westerberg. As the song began to finish its march over my nerves as well as the sonic space of an unsuspecting Canal Street, the last verse shouted at me and told me exactly what I should say and think about my love not only of the music but also of the misery, of the disaster.

The coda listed at the beginning of this piece constitutes the emotional and spiritual arch of my affection for Lucinda’s music. But to understand my true appreciation for her music it is necessary to think through my identification—nay, my devotion—for her. You see, to really listen to music you have to not only engage with and open yourself up to the performer/composer, but you have to have faith in him or her. This faith certainly takes time and is not something you can donate to every song you put yourself and your senses through, but this kind of pure listening experience not only is about enjoyment and pop pleasure, but also is a kind of labor. In order to love Lucinda, you have to cultivate your belief in her. As she has proclaimed from on high, this process of belief and adoration means you’ve gotta climb all the way inside her tragedy, and then get yourself right behind her majesty.
Glory, Glory / We’ve Killed the Beast!
(Listen to) “Atonement”

Come on, Come on, Come on
Kill the rats in the gutter

I do realize that it’s very gay for me to refer to the object of my affection and musical appreciation as a “queen,” and you should know, if you haven’t already or always assumed, that I do in fact suffer from a debilitating case of homosexuality—however, I’d like to work through and around this very staid, overdetermined notion of the tragic gay man and his love for his tragic diva queens, if only so that I may return to the term without all its heavy metaphorical baggage. While the gay tragedy queen stumbles and cries, Lucinda descends and overcomes. No tears can be shed for Lucinda, who begs attention and awe in place of sympathy and attachment.

Shake the clammy hand
Repeat the 23rd psalm [End Page 44]
Make you understand
Where it was you went wrong

After all, there are, I will deign to argue, different types of these bruised, yet majestic, icons of queer femininity and different sets of gay male subjects that inhabit their mighty kingdoms. The most obvious and significant example of the gay icon is, of course, Judy Garland—not so much because of her performance in The Wizard of Oz, which actually represented the more populist American image of her, but because of the tragedies and the public performances of addiction and some sort of psychosis that attract many homo queens under her withering wings.

Blinded by glittery diamonds
Resting on crooked fingers
Shaded eyes they are the ones
Who’ll lead you to your deliverance

Believe it or not, I do not belong to the club of tragedy queens who bask in the undertow of Miss Garland and do not find much pleasure in witnessing the breakdowns, pill and gin ravages, and onstage failures that mark her late—and arguably, as a result, her entire—career. Unfortunately for these queens, they get failure all wrong. Why worship a woman’s destruction to the point of allowing it to kill her off? Garland literally came to embody and fall victim to the poisonous forces in her life when, even at the iconic Carnegie Hall stage in her career, her entire body had filled up with fluid and decayed right in front of the teary eyes of her audience. What a pity.

I do understand, mind you, that all these cultural metaphors I am employing and working through consciously also work to insult me, which is, of course, of even greater importance and concern. You see, terms—like “failure,” “queen,” and “tragedy”—are sources of creative and indeed affective inspiration and fidelity for both me and my academic work, but because they are so commonly understood as jokes on and about gay men and their tastes, I can’t seem to employ them explicitly with a straight face. You see, originary and constitutive as they are, as queer metaphors, they have been denuded of any emotional capacity or even discursive flexibility. They are so gay, so sad, and, in the end, so thoroughly understood and explained by the world that they work to constantly explain and insult us [End Page 45] until we, like poor Miss Garland, find ourselves face down in our party dresses in piles of our own filth.

Dry Your Tears

The tragedy queen’s pitiful reign is over, but only if we really want it to be. The joke’s only on us if we let it be. The camp, glib relationship Garland’s tragedy queens approach her with is, on the one hand, tricky because it is sympathetic. In other words, they love to witness Judy’s tumbles and stumbles from afar, and the highest form of emotional labor that’s required beyond this sort of ironic spectatorship is sympathy: who would want that? Even more terrible is the sad fact that these sad old homos don’t even know that to real people, it is precisely this taste for tragedy that tells them everything they need to know about the emotional state of all homosexual men in the world: sad.

Let me give you something good to eat
Bite down hard ’til it sticks between your teeth

I do hope I haven’t confused you, dear reader. I realize that just before this castigation of tragedy queens I spent pages and pages flirting with disaster and ruin and hinting that I might lay out a road map for turning failure and tragedy into forms of amusement and pleasure. So, you may be asking yourself, what’s the difference between Judy Garland’s tragedy queens and me, a homosexual who has already—and repeatedly—confessed his unquestioned and potentially problematic identification with and love for Lucinda? After all, I am drawn to her, in large part, because of a strong desire on my part to bear witness to the many losses as well as partake and indulge myself in the great sadness with which she hones and performs her songs. It is necessary to empathize with Lucinda in order to appreciate her, to, as I have explained, cultivate your faith in her and all the beautiful tragedies that come along.

It’s time to come on ( . . . come on, come on . . . ) under Lucinda’s wing. As you see in the lyrics I have chopped up and laid down for you throughout this section and also—if you follow orders correctly—hear, “Atonement” is a song that is composed of and composes religious decrees. More than just a topical, satirical take on evangelical forms of invocation and manipulation, this is, like “Real Live Bleeding Fingers,” another one [End Page 46] of those songs that will break you down and turn you out, if you’re willing. Indeed, as it marches on and on and over its audience, this very bossy, aggressive, jarring song constitutes Lucinda’s great march to victory. More than that, though, it’s also a kind of blessing, or rather, an invitation to any of us who would like to follow her into her kingdom. Indeed, just like Lucinda, the song is hard to take, too much—but if you resist the urge to turn the song down or tune her out, you might get the wonderful experience of having her swallow you up. Remain in this lovely, debilitating sonic state, under the dizzying influence of the unrepentant sound of Lucinda’s frightening hoots and hollers that keep moving and moving, and you will have received your blessing and will then find yourself falling, like withering flowers, at her feet.

(Listen to) “Fruits of My Labor: The Beginning and the End”

Baby, see how I been livin’

You know, even though, like any good homosexual, I loved The Wizard of Oz growing up, I always hated poor old pie-faced Dorothy. To this day, I cannot forgive her totally unrealistic and style-less decision to forgo a chance to reign over the whole plush kingdom of Oz at the end of the film and return to her drab, colorless existence back home in Kansas (even typing those words feels too banal for my own good). But what really sealed the deal for me as a young man was that she threw a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West: the only truly wonderful and powerful character in that film, and indeed the object of my affection and impersonation as a young thing (until my practice of dressing in a hat and cape and flying around my family’s home on a broomstick was wisely—yet too belatedly—called off around age eight). My adolescent love for this character, who had immediately caused fear and confusion in me, has influenced my tastes as well as provided the ontological structure of my affective fidelity today. I like sadness, failure, and tragedy only out of a love for wickedness—in other words, I like that these terms that unsettle and unnerve nearly everyone else on the planet might be a way of living fabulously, egregiously, and fiercely.

Lavender, lotus blossoms too
Water the dirt, flowers last for you [End Page 47]
Baby
sweet
baby

My desire to become, like the witch, someone who frightened others and lived in an isolated, yet vast universe that was all hers is one way in which I overcame my own alienation as a very homosexual, strangely gendered kid in a fiercely monotone, Southern Baptist culture. With the witch as my guide, I then saw a way of moving around the debilitating effects of this isolation and loneliness that would have otherwise caused in me various personality disorders, realizing there was a more magical way to be the outcast—that if considered and maintained correctly, inborn deficiencies and insistent social and personal handicaps could actually be the source of power.

Tangerines and persimmons
And sugarcane
Grapes and honeydew melons
Enough fit for a queen
Lemon trees don’t make a sound
‘Til branches bend and fruit falls to the ground

So what’s there to say about my lifelong penchant for the absurd, the wicked, and the truly tragic that can animate the rest of this little devotional to Lucinda? And what’s really so much more astonishing and unique about her and her whole suitcase of sadness and failure that she carries along with her? Well, it’s that she cultivates and mitigates her own tragedies and weaves them into her persona in ways that are more awesome than what Dorothy could ever accomplish or than what those actually tragic, detached tragedy queens might ever imagine. Indeed, that very religious and powerful word “awe-some” has become so commonplace and misused that, like tragedy and failure, it has lost its capacity to really mean or do anything at all; it has become a dead word.

I been tryin’ to enjoy all the fruits of my labor
I been cryin’ for you, boy, but truth is my savior [End Page 48]

But how can we imbue these terms with even more power than they may have ever had? How can you stimulate and recodify terms and descriptors that are supposed to handicap and explain you away? Thankfully, the kind of sorcery that is required to respond to this dilemma is my—and Lucinda’s—specialty. As I have explained, Lucinda’s power over her personal failures is maintained through the hold she is able to have over her audience, whose total faith and devotion is absolutely a requirement. Before this was possible, however, she needed a system of recasting tragedy into song, image, and style, and thankfully, Lucinda—witch that she is—has been able to do just this. Through her flirtatiously evil version of this process, she has made a career of recasting and rephrasing her haggardness and sorrow into something that makes music and creates devoted followers.

Baby, sweet baby, if it’s all the same
Take the glory any day over the fame
Baby, sweet baby

For Lucinda, failure is not simply about failing, but also about creativity and possibility. Likewise, tragedy is not something to lament, but something to wallow around in—a process of becoming-fabulous as well as a form of presentation that allows you to take hold over other people. She is truly awe-some in all the ways we have forgotten God ever was: beautiful, alarming, imposing, magnificent, horrible, overwhelming, beautiful, and wonderful. Through her, the word is alive once again.
Taylor Black

Taylor Black is a fourth-year PhD student in the American studies program at Rutgers University. His dissertation project, “His Wonderful Wickedness: Quentin Crisp and the Art of Professional Failure,” presents style-as-ontology: as a way of being and become yourself on purpose. Outside his academic endeavors, Mr. Black’s writing can be found on Junebug Versus Hurricane, a music blog maintained alongside and in partnership with Elena Glasberg. He also moderates, with Tom Léger, the new social media site PrettyQueer.com.

Note

1. On the subject of creative possibility and critical depth, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Frances Bartkowski, Elena Glasberg, and Karen Tongson, all [End Page 49] figures in my life who mix instruction with friendship and inspiration with guidance so very well—who allow me to be.

Works Cited
Buford, Bill. 2000. “Delta Nights: A Singer’s Love Affair with Loss.” New Yorker, June 5, 50-65.
Crisp, Quentin. 1984. How to Go to the Movies. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.
Puar, Jasbir. 2009. “Prognosis Time: Toward a Geopolitics of Affect, Debility, and Capacity.” Women and Performance 19(2): 161-72. [End Page 50]