Moving The Needle: Scott Walker, Bish Bosch, And The 30th Century Man

Illustration by Raymond Liu; inspired by Bish Bosch by Scott Walker

Prior to the release that was to become a new Big Bang for music and fertiliser for the entire avant-garde soil, Scott Walker was already amongst the greatest artists of all time. His influence, felt amongst inferior acts (Pulp, Damon Albarn) and talented contemporaries (Brian Eno, David Bowie, Holly Herndon, The Smiths, etc.) alike, was an expanse of trickle-down effects. Beginning as a pop star, Scott Engel came out of American pop band The Walker Brothers, where he only tentatively took on the vocalist role in the latter half of his tenure. From there on, he came into his own by launching four seminal self-titled projects. But as the years went on and the fame accrued, Walker became – like many great artists – a recluse, insulating himself from the erosion of the mainstream canon to pursue higher aspirations. From the depths of this perfect backdrop for genius emerged his experimental trilogy: Tilt, The Drift, and Bish Bosch, the final of which threatened to engulf the art world in its revelation of a whole new reality, one of infinitudes piling on each other until they resemble the entire field of ambition available to God, revealing the measuring stick by which the subsequent Western tradition would have to assess itself.

Bish Bosch, Scott Walker (2012)

Before we begin, we must already plant the stake that the work feels endless, zooming in or out. It’s so granular it shines a light on the failure of our sieves to capture every meaningful particle, and its enormity in scale bursts down the dam of what we built to process grand meaning. It goes further than both ends of the scale, trumping the detail of our literary psychological minutiae while still encompassing more than the cheap aphorisms we inevitably synthesise from works of the existential vogue. Such is the teleology of the greatest (always already experimental) works which are subject to the defeat of communication by the boundaries between people, thus opening us to the weaknesses of language and all the artifice we erect. This is really also the reason for which many of the superlatives used for the greatest works of art end up framing them as similar when they are anything but, and from this we can almost derive the direct relationship between a work of art and its inability to be confined to any other description than that of every bit of sound/every line of its essence already present in it. Greatness is that, multiplied by its ability to capture a universe, which is almost the same thing, like the platonic notion of value dancing with itself in a different form. With this in mind, I say that Bish Bosch is the work of music that I think is most impossible to pin down and that it pushes the needle of art by being about art’s process towards meaning (instead of any specific creator’s), such that it ends up a logical extension of not just one, but all the universes before it. 

We look up at night and see the void, the sheer scale of the universe, and the infinitely kaleidoscopic and granular stars all at once. That’s just what happens when you see beyond the blinding light and the orbital refractions nearest to us. Bish Bosch, then, in its search for the grander search for meaning, is a series of skies rearranged in such a way that its journey towards meaning is a series of evolutions of the means through which one attains it, like the decision to cleave across writing styles in Joyce’s Ulysses (essentially the whole past as far as its reality is concerned). Or, better yet, to eschew one’s forebears in the ideal where influences are so disparate that there are no genealogical witnesses left at the stand. It’s meta-art far beyond the level that it usually operates on.

‘See He Doesn’t Bump His Head’ is the suffocation of structure: staccato from the start, pounding drums, the same line repeating for every other, fluidity and rigidity at odds in each unique one, the swan song a generality that leaves its possibility of description open to anything, yet simultaneously bogged down by its metaphysical-turned-tactile traits in music; where abstraction finds its place in the strung strings or the blown horns. The asphyxiating opener serves one end of the conflict that, when reconciled, propels one to new frontiers, setting up the realisation of value from a state of deprivation of possibility. 

‘Corps De Blah’ is Bish Bosch already acknowledging the logical leakage in its last song. The genius line that permeated all the lyrics is undercut by something as simply visceral as a fart, then another louder, wetter one. All the references here are the expression of the last song’s idea of precision and specificity taken to their maximum; the esoteric nature of the language is now a failure, altogether not as important as the silly images evoked or the farts underscoring it all. ‘Sterzing’, ‘Mahout’, ‘Sachem’, ‘Yonical’ (of the vagina), ‘Sagamore’... The verbiage finds little purchase. Even as we escape the cultural canon we build firmly with the bricks of consensus. And as the structures for meaning become more recognisable, so too does the music swerve to meet it at an orchestral climax, and for the first time the in-universe stand-in for the entire album’s artist (aforementioned layers into meaning where meaning shows up in the compilation of means like in Moby-Dick) appears. The quote below can be found on a Quietus interview of Scott Walker:

“I knew I’d be playing with language more than I had on any of the previous albums [...] we know what 'bish bosh' means here in this country—it means 'job done' or 'sorted'. In urban slang 'bish' also means 'bitch' [...] then I wrote 'Bosch' like the artist [Hieronymous Bosch]. I was then thinking in terms of this giant universal female artist. And this idea continued to play through the record in certain spots.”

The coexistence of all these great ideas under the same signifier is like referring to the same sky while each of them differs infinitely because of one’s perspective, or maybe even the universe one is native to. Which, unsurprisingly, in his mention of the stars Altair, Vega, Drogba, and Deneb in this song, and his talk of blasting “the sheet of jewels from horizon to horizon” in the last, is another idea that Scott Walker already thought of and implemented, which will continue down the runtime of the album. As a matter of fact, the album’s halfway-mark-climax has to do with the creation myth for a dwarf star.

‘Phrasing’ is the logical conclusion of the last song carried further still. Now everything is subjugated to experience. The physicality and fleshiness here override all; it’s mindless in a way only someone with a very complete one could make so visceral – now, instead of the farts, our entourage is protein moons and protein skies, the Klan and Khrushchev. Everything is drawn out, wailing, prolonging the artificial length that pain inflicts visceral now. Instead of time. But it doesn’t last, and it can't – the artistic thesis statement of a universe which transcends this one entirely is upcoming.

‘SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)' is the dwarf star around which all other particulars of the album revolve. It’s the entire dynamic between the artist and the infertile environment through which he cuts against the grain. It’s the realisation of the failure of canonisations and algorithms to recognise meaning and genius and the exploitation of this understanding. Zercon the jester ascends a pole to the heavens to attain transcendent meaning and ends up inoculating himself from the sea of meaninglessness below. From atop his pole, he shouts insults and endures the paranoia that the powers endeavour to lure him off, framing his own venture towards harmony as a fight against the world’s inherent dispositions. His act of greasing the pole behind him leaves less possibility for escape as the potentialities condense and leave this his sole calling. It’s the moment Walker’s ego is destroyed in the confessions of his character as he charts his own withdrawal from the conventions of the world of commodity and performance to forge ever higher. And of course, as Zercon’s words are all really Scott Walker’s, it intuitively translates his escape from canons and recognitions of the real world, having been one of the most enormously influential musicians to ever seep through the cracks. The insults slung belong to both, who shout into the same void. The incumbent silences are the black holes that backdrop everything else with the context of what we would be without art – without exaggeration, it would be an oneness towards death where our inability to see into a plane beyond ours would actually expose us to the type of physical nihilism where one can say, "The universe is infinitely large; comparatively, we are nothing.”

Especially on that canvas, the songwriting is so deliberate and surgical the song would surpass many works of genius even as written text; the specificity of it evokes both the terrifying narrowing of resources open to himself/Zercon and the realisation on their parts that the greatest ascension now possible has to do with ridding oneself of an audience, like taking The Residents’ project in the 1970s and bringing it to completion, making this the point of no return in the album as well as for its character. Multiple levels of reality enfolded into each other. The structures of Bish Bosch’s first half await their disappearance into the apocalypse of the second. Zercon’s aforementioned silences are a prelude to this void, and the mentions of the past (BAR! BAR! BAR! And the chanting of Roman numerals) are the last instances of history from which the great artist emerges but ultimately uses as a footstool to heights unrecognisable and unjustifiable. There are snippets of harmonious guitar in the fragments of our stubborn creation stories; they are lost as promptly as the alliterations on the opener (‘See You Don’t Bump His Head’) are thrown into the void. Zercon, perched at a height unattainable by the heat below, freezes to death and becomes a dwarf star, having climbed higher than anyone else, a reminder of the mortality from which Walker will suffer the same spiritual fate, but whose art will continue climbing like a hypothetical infinite jester, succeeding where Zercon failed. 

‘Epizootics!’ Is the jubilation after one has really accepted the burden of creation without consequence, where all the burden itself is exclusively hanging over the one in the act – like the moment of relaxation when one consciously and fully reaches one’s hands down into the mud, having abandoned all concern with cleanliness, and the only things left to feel are a vague coolness and mushy comfortability. It’s a solitary heaven of sorts, maybe the highest of possible states. Yet Scott Walker deigns to go further.

‘Dimple’ is a void. The first line, which is about November in July, is deliberately and self-sufficiently nonsensical: it’s wrong by nature and maybe wrong against nature. What Walker attains here is the complete nihilism that ends up beckoning the artist back into the particulars of his reality and tempts him to yearn for the overturning of the wasteland he’s achieved. In the music one hears the far-off echoey yelling, the calls of sirens. The feelings felt in history before abandoning it strike the desire to reenact the contract. Walker can live with the greatness of his songwriting and innovations of punched-pork bass; he can remember the camera flashes. Nothing here evokes meaning in anything other than the art-exclusive, most abstract of planes. It’s the most beautiful and selfless thing possible, and even then, it remains a hint towards another potential. The only escape is the death towards which we live.

The revelation of ideals in ‘Dimple’ leaves the work, which has begun to take on its own dimensions without really being constrained by the narrator, stranded. The contradictions of God that are magnified in ‘Tar’ are obviously the contradictions of the world, which are subsequently the contradictions of our failure to classify it, which are inevitably those of the song, the runoff of the artist, inside whom there exists another entire world. It’s a process that continues ad infinitum, like the notion that we’re a pocket universe. The tar of contradiction spreads like wildfire, losing no oxygen along the way.

‘Pilgrim’ is ironically the last stop where, in the odyssey of all creativity Scott Walker could actualise throughout the length of his career, active destruction becomes relevant. Accelerating entropy makes so much sense that it’s the last way of slowing it down, consciously speaking. It’s now more relevant than death or passivity, contradiction or idealism. This is a terminus one can arrive at without regard to the direction in which one digs. Straight down to the centre of the universal sphere. The redundancies of context, violence, rooms of mice, the number of ears and toes and eyes; they give way to...

‘The Day The “Conducator” Died (A Xmas Song)’. A bit of background: this closer is about the killing by firing squad of a Dictator – the song is built as a questionnaire whose refrain is “nobody waited for fire”, referring to the firing signal that was beaten to the chase by the executioners. The title’s “Conducator” is a word from ‘conductor’ and ‘dictator' spliced together so that death’s inhibition of the dictator’s life project, the suppression of potential, coexists with its opposite, whereas the effect of death on the artist is to ascend his work ever further in the plane of possibility. Like Bish Bosch coming across centuries to mean a job done and a Dutch old master and a universal mother, evoking dynamics within singular words that prove we deal in universes. The dynamic here is the Artist's diametric opposition to the dictator, one treading the ideal and one fearing it above all. The song’s lyrical structure is that of a questionnaire, unburdening Walker from self-identification while simultaneously quivering the dartboard of truth, preying upon the insecurities of the fascist who wants to know, can’t know whether people love him or whether they’re brainwashed or whether they’re neither and only present as such. Such is the failure of that brand of pragmatism: that the Dictator's death ends his entire project and wipes clean his detainment of life, whereas for the Artist, death is the ultimate ascension. The items of the questionnaire coupled with the refrain...

And nobody waited for fire

Nobody waited for fire

Nobody waited for fire 

...Communicate a final withdrawal from the categorical by means of death, the guardian saint empowering all potential but also appearing without a forecast for those seeking to engulf the world in ego. The song is, of course, about what one’s noticed and absorbed about oneself while giving equal attention to the notion that one hasn’t at all, a precarious balance between the perspective of the world one takes within the refrain as opposed to the one endemic to the perspective of the subject being asked the questions, where eventually...

When you turn in your sleep 

Will you roll across the path

When you turn in your sleep 

Will you roll?

...The questions are asked from beyond the grave, and the possibility of an answer is never entertained. The song ends informed by the traditions of the past embedded deep in the consciousness of the unprecedentedly new, whose potential for creation or destruction is actualised only by more context. It only knows that it doesn't even know what it wants to be – about the fascist or the artist. Only the person answering the questions can determine that much, and this realisation already determines the latter’s victory.

The return is to the observation of mad dogs swarming at the groin of the mother creator, and we recall Walker’s universal female artist, the Bish Bosch of this story. This is death being for a God no more ceremonious than it is for us. Christmas bells begin to chime, and now, having flown infinitely far from the starting point and being brought back within the context of the present where all its ramifications can never be told in their entirety, there is nothing left to contend with but the truths we already knew were coming, the unsureness of the number of times Scott Walker will repeat his refrain on the eternal surprise and infinite nullification of death, our foreknowledge of its arrival and our inability to gird against its impact, and when, similarly, the shots will ring out and the music will rise from the rust of its creator’s shackles while still being his/her only timeless legacy. In our time only the Artist could contain the 30th-century man’s potential. In any century, only the Artist could be the one already aeons ahead. The logic which attests to this is our highest expression. It’s an exhaust which leaves reality behind. Everything chases the comet’s tail. Bish Bosch. Pinching the ends of possibility on either side of magnitude and detail. The lone star after all else falls away. 

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Edited by Lara Walsh, Editor in Chief

& Mahak Naddafi, Music Co-Editor