THE FALL (ENG)

TOTALLY SMITH ( US )

June 4, 1976, Manchester. The damp haze in the Lesser Free Trade Hall tastes of cigarettes and beer. Margaret Thatcher already hangs in the pallid air of the crumbling empire. The Sex Pistols play loud, aggressive, and angry. Perhaps 30 or 40 people watch the epoch-making gig, including Morrissey, Bernard Sumner, Mick Hucknall (Simply Red!), Howard Devoto... and Mark E. Smith. He leaves the concert hooked. With amphetamines in his blood and a cigarette in his mouth, he realizes he has to start a band!

Smith has already made a living as a temporary dock worker in the port of Manchester. He works at the post office and customs in an office under flickering neon lights in a bureaucratic nightmare full of forms, blunt pencils, and broken coffee machines. In the evenings, he attends literature courses at the local adult education center. Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Phillip K.Dick, H.P.Lovekraft, and other literary border crossers serve the pale, self-taught literature junkie with side parting a shadowy framework of ideas, which he continues to tinker with in smoky pubs.

Smith is too clever for punk, too weird for pop, and too stubborn for anything else. Back in his gray everyday life, he persuades a few chance acquaintances to do “something like the Beatles” and founds THE FALL.

The band's name comes from Albert Camus' novel of the same name, a monologue by the failed Parisian star lawyer “Clamence” about guilt, hypocrisy, and moral decay. In an Amsterdam bar, he talks himself into trouble with an endless monologue. His ambivalent thoughts circle in rhetorical idleness, without any solution in sight or even any meaning emerging – sometimes as a confession and ironic admission of guilt, sometimes as a dazzling self-accusation, which he immediately extends to a universal accusation against everyone else. Camus does not give his protagonist a fixed moral authority – all that remains is his own fragile voice in the absurd struggle for meaning in a world that offers none!

John Peel, legendary BBC DJ with a flair for breaking new ground, becomes the band's key promoter. In 1978, he brings THE FALL out of the smoky Manchester pubs and into the studio for their first “Peel Session.” Raw, weird, with literary references, they played over 20 sessions in their band career, more than any other band! Smith later said of Peel: “He understood us. He didn't bother us.”

THE FALL are not a collective, but rather an M.E.S. dictatorship with a hot seat. Grumpy maniac Mark E.Smith dismisses 66 band members in the band`s 42 year history – by note, answering machine, or simply by ignoring them. THE FALL are the “Game of Thrones” of the music scene. Few survive for long. Bassist Steve Hanley later recalls: “At some point, I lost track of who was in the band.” For almost two decades, from 1979 to 1998, he remains the stoic rhythmic anchor of the band, unwavering and unshakeable, while Smith spins the personnel carousel.

Mark E.Smith: “And if it were just me and your grandmother on the bongos, it would still be THE FALL!” He is the only constant member of the band, a chain-smoking, whisky-soaked punk literate with the charm of a pub bouncer and the brain of an Oxford lecturer. His lyrics are cryptic, biting, erratic, sometimes about UFOs, sometimes about British bureaucracy, often about something only he understands.

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“New Face in Hell” (1980): With his nervous spoken vocals, Mark E.Smith draws the intellectual post-punk community into the uncertain terrain of Philip K.Dick. Smith's fragmented thoughts seem to come from Dick's rainy cosmos, in which “Blade Runner” hunts down human-like replicants with implanted memories. Reality becomes entangled in a web of surveillance, mistrust, fear, and deception:

“Wireless enthusiast intercepts government secret radio band and uncovers secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions / Aghast goes next door to his neighbor, secretly excited, as aforementioned was a hunter whom radio enthusiast wanted friendship and favor of . A new face in hell, Nearly a new face in hell!

A muscular, thick-skinned, slit-eyed neighbor is at the table poisoned just thirty seconds before by parties who knew of wireless operator's forthcoming revelation A new face in hell!

A prickly line of sweat covers enthusiast's forehead as the realization hits him that the same government him and his now dead neighbor voted for and backed and talked of on cream porches have tricked him into their war against the people who enthusiast and dead hunter would have wished torture on. A servant of government walks in and arrests wireless fan in kitchen for murder of his neighbor. A new face in hell!

The dead cannot contradict. Sometimes the living cannot. A new face in hell!”

—

Franz Kafka joins Dick as a spiritual mentor when bureaucracy and alienation drift through the lyrics like leaden wisps of fog.

“Leave the Capitol” (1981)

…“I laughed at the great God Pan / I didnae, I didnae, I didnae” (..Sketch of Kafkaesque guilt without action, premature justification without accusation )

“Leave the Capitol / Exit the Roman shell.” (…Leave the inscrutable, Roman - decadent? - power center of the administrative apparatus )

“Pan resides in Welsh green masquerades / On Welsh cat caravans” (…Mythology suddenly encounters the British countryside, the sublime abruptly tips over into the absurd )

“But Monty hides behind curtains.” (...Perhaps a dig at Monty Python! British surreal humor, which can also act as an entertaining sedative, is not to be trusted either! )

“Grey blackish cream / All the paintings you recall / All the side stepped cars / All the brutish laughs / From the flat and the wild dog downstairs.” (...Culture as a hazy memory - apparent order on the sidelines - anonymous tribunal that is never tangible but always palpable - animalistic sounds from the basement )

Smith layers culture, narrow-mindedness, menace, and scorn into a Kafkaesque nightmare panorama of everyday life.

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In 1982, a ray of light shines into the gloomy “post-punk barracks”: Brix, then still Laura Salenger, meets Smith after a FALL gig in Chicago. She is fascinated by his intelligence and dark charisma. M.E.S. also shows feelings. California, lip gloss, and pop match Manchester, cigarette butts, and nihilism. She can barely play the guitar, but learns quickly and with determination. In 1983, the two marry. Brix joins THE FALL and changes the band's look and sound with pop influences, a little glitter, and catchy riffs. For a few years, from 1984 to 1989, THE FALL become almost accessible, almost danceable, almost groovy!

Mark E. Smith remains true to himself, however: mostly grumpy, sometimes brilliant, and always on the same path to somewhere else. In 1989, Brix has enough. She leaves him and begins a brief affair with Nigel Kennedy, the obnoxiously excitable “classical punk” discovered by Yehudi Menuhin. Smith reacts hurtfully with increased alcohol consumption and aggression. From 1994 to 1996, she returns to the band...

THE FALL featuring Brix - “Powder Keg” - 1996 - from the LP “The Light User Syndrome”

Later, Brix calls him “the smartest and most terrible person I've ever loved.” He later calls her “a good guitarist.”

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“I love H.P.Lovecraft... I've been a fan since I was about 17,” says Mark E.Smith in 2013, somewhere between two pints of beer. For him, H.P.Lovecraft is the dark key witness to his worldview and probably the most abysmal and disturbing source of his inspiration:

Lovecraft's short story “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) begins like a police report from another dimension: After the death of his uncle, a professor stumbles upon the traces of a secret cult that worships an ancient, sleeping deity- “Cthulhu”, a being from a space that no human mind can enter. In the story, which unfolds like a puzzle made up of diary entries, police reports, and dreams, humans exist in an indifferent universe that cares equally little about life and death. “Cthulhu” is not just an ancient deity, a sleeping monster with tentacles on the sea floor, but rather a monstrous “face” of the incomprehensible, the alien, which cannot be understood or defeated. The real horror, however, lies in the “Outside”, the zone beyond human knowledge, where reason and categories disintegrate. “Cthulhu” is only a messenger, a symptom of this alien cosmos.

In biblical metaphysics, with its moral horizon, knowledge leads to original sin. In the Garden of Eden there are two special trees, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. After Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, God expells them out of the garden so that they would not eat from the tree of life and attain immortality in addition to godlike knowledge! From now on, humans must distinguish between good and evil, feel shame and guilt, and are aware of their mortality. But at least humans are left with the prospect of redemption, a glimmer of hope that the divine order will not abandon them completely despite their guilt.

Lovecraft's cosmos, on the other hand, with no morality, comfort, or redemption, knows no higher goal. Transcendence manifests itself here as an inscrutable, bottomless strangeness. The fear of it, coupled with knowledge without any protection, is the essence of Lovecraft's horror. In his merciless universe, knowledge does not lead to sin, coupled with the hope of forgiveness and redemption, but directly to madness!

“Blindness” (2005) rolls in with a slow, relentless groove – a hypnotic, dark machine, murmuring fragmented phrases of disorientation and menace. Is Smith setting “cosmic horror” to music here, or just British bureaucracy? Probably both. In Smith's work, Cthulhu's oceans and Kafkaesque office corridors are only a line of text apart...!

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Epilogue - The Tentacles of Thought

H.P.Lovecraft published exclusively short stories, mainly in pulp magazines such as “Weird Tales”. Born into a wealthy but psychologically troubled family, his life took a precarious course. With his horror stories, he was barely able to make ends meet during his lifetime. It is only posthumously that he is discovered by writers, filmmakers, musicians, and even philosophers, becoming a cult author. His “Cthulhu Mythos” establishes the genre of “Cosmic Horror”. Lovecraft's influence on literature and philosophy has unfolded to an astonishing extent to this day:

Michel Houellebecq portrays Lovecraft in his 1991 essay “Against the World, Against Life”, even before he becomes famous for his novels. He stylizes him as a radical opponent of all metaphysical hope and humanism. For Houellebecq, a disciple of darkness, Lovecraft becomes the intellectual foundation of his later work: a diagnosis of a world without consolation, without metaphysical escape routes, without moral authority, without religion or philosophy that could cushion the horror. Houellebecq transfers Lovecraft's occult cosmic horror into the prose of a present in which people are crushed between instinct, technology, and meaninglessness.

In the 1990s, Nick Land is head of the “Cybernetic Culture Research Unit,” a philosophical laboratory for “theory raves and thinking on amphetamines” at the University of Warwick, England. H.P.Lovecraft provides the occult undercurrent for Land's apocalyptic philo-fantasies: The inscrutable “Outside”, which causes madness in Lovecraft, becomes a force field in Land's work, a motor that works against the human order. “Cthulhu” appears as a cipher for unleashed markets, technologies, and an intelligence that has taken on a life of its own, no longer human but mechanical. Land focuses on radical acceleration (accelerationism): capital and technology should be pushed so far that the human order collapses and an inhuman intelligence takes over—the “technocapital singularity”. Land's texts from the CCRU years are less systematic than excessive: poetic-apocalyptic DJ-Sets from Deleuze, cyberpunk, machine rhythms, and paranoid mythology. Land flirts with the “Outside” and hurls his gloomy slogan: “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future”.

The end of the 1990s: too much speed, too much philosophical overdrive. The philosophical enterprise in Warwick collapses, as does Land. After his burnout, he reappears in China in 2004, teaching in Shanghai from 2006 onwards, technocratic, authoritarian, anti-humanistic, now sober, on track with chineese ideologie.

In 2012, Land returns with the essay “The Dark Enlightenment”. The techno-apocalyptic furor of the CCRU now becomes political theory: he describes democracy as an “entropic process” that paralyzes innovation and efficiency and slides toward egalitarianism and weakness through the “cathedral” system.

Curtis Yarvin, alias Mencius Moldbug, launches his polemic against democracy in 2007 in his blog “Unqualified Reservations” and sketches out a vision of a “CEO state”, run like a company. He uses the buzzword “Cathedral” to describe the informal power network of media, universities, and bureaucracies of “liberal ideology,” a network that he believes must be dismantled. Silicon Valley strategist Peter Thiel seamlessly picks up on this in an essay in 2010: “Freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.”

From 2013 onwards, the paths of Yarvin and power practitioner Thiel visibly cross: at tech conferences, in think tanks, through the Thiel Fellows program. Thiel picks up on the philosophical set pieces of Land and Yarvin – and goes further. He recognizes the next, ultimate monopoly in the fusion of politics, religion, and technology. His “app of the absolute” has a Christian-metaphysical undertone. In his Silicon Valley guise, Thiel strives for a secularized theology for the chosen few, combined with a totalitarian model of rule in which order, faith, and algorithms become one.

“Cthulhu” wanders – from esotericism to politics, from myth to marketplace. And Mark E. Smith? – A noise – dead and alive...