“If I Should Fall from Grace with God”: The Joycean Punk of the Pogues
2020; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.2020.0013
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
Resumo“If I Should Fall from Grace with God”: The Joycean Punk of the Pogues Kevin Farrell (bio) In 1988, James Joyce unofficially joined the Pogues. That January, If I Should Fall from Grace with God, the band’s third album, appeared in record stores across the United States and Canada, its North American cover displaying nine men wearing identical outfits and assuming identical poses. Joyce is seated fourth from the left, right next to lead singer Shane MacGowan; closer inspection reveals that the band members’ faces are overlaid upon a photograph of the author, playfully suggesting that not only is Joyce a Pogue, but the Pogues are themselves a Joycean band. According to Len Platt, the cover “implicates[s] the great literary iconoclast with [the band’s] own ground-breaking celebration/subversion of ‘Irish’ kitsch.”1 “The Pogues have identified a kindred spirit,” writes Kieran Keohane, one who shares their “ambivalences about identity and Irishness” and their “affirmation of other aspects of Irish ‘community’ . . . getting wasted, getting laid, dealing with an uncertain present and an unpredictable future on the basis of a confused past.”2 For Keohane, the cover serves as an act of reclamation, with the Pogues taking Joyce back from the academy and presenting him as “a guy who felt more or less like we do, sixty years ago.”3 If so, the reclamation may have begun even before the band’s first gig. Before they were the Pogues, the band called itself Pogue Mahone, a playful—and Joycean—attempt to slip Irish language vulgarity past the BBC censors. And while póg mo thóin is a familiar-enough phrase, accordionist James Fearnley would later ascribe the origins of this name to Ulysses. In Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues, Fearnley’s Joycean-titled autobiography, he recounts band-mate Spider Stacy christening the band while quoting from Joyce: “‘Pogue Mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!’ Spider said. ‘It’s from Ulysses. It means kiss my arse. Pogue Mahone!’”4 [End Page 150] The BBC eventually caught on, and the band changed its name, but the newly christened Pogues would later imagine “storm[ing] the BBC” on “Trans-metropolitan,” the opening track of their debut album, Red Roses for Me.5 More a drunken ode to London than an overt response to British censorship, “Trans-metropolitan” nonetheless punctuates its carousal “with a KMRIA,” an acronym for “Kiss My Royal Irish Arse,” familiar to readers of Ulysses from its appearance in the “Aeolus” episode.6 Such moments suggest the band felt a genuine affinity for Joyce and his works, an artistic kinship between themselves and the novelist. The Pogues were hardly the first musical act to express affinity for Joyce; indeed, the author and his works have featured in a variety of popular songs from some rather diverse sources. In most cases, these musicians—Kate Bush, Syd Barrett, and Jefferson Airplane, among others—celebrate the experimental nature of Joyce’s work. According to Vincent Cheng, such popular music versions of Joyce are, on the whole, representations of what he calls “the ‘conscious Joyce’—that is, what Joyce means, if anything at all, in mass culture.”7 Cheng describes this version of Joyce in a series of “mostly negative” adjectives: “obscure, obscene, esoteric, formidable, weird, degenerate, insane”; however, we might note that to avant-garde and experimental musicians, such descriptors make Joyce a convenient and appropriate role model.8 While Cheng’s study is admittedly speculative, the notion of a conscious Joyce is useful to understanding not only musical appropriations of Joyce but also critical appropriations of the author in pop music writing. References to Joyce abound in Pogues criticism, with the novelist’s name typically serving as shorthand for a brand of literary Irish drunkenness or drunken Irish intellect: Robert Gordon, in his review of Hell’s Ditch for Spin magazine, declares that “if James Joyce assembled a pub chorus from atop a barstool, it would be the Pogues,” while Nicholas Kulish of the New York Times asserts that “to steep yourself in the Pogues requires you to read James Joyce.”9 Such rhetoric likely overstates...
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