30th Century Man

July 9, 2:06 PMChicago Poetry ExaminerVittorio Carli

One of the few artists that straddles the line between poetry and lyrics is Scott Walker. Here is a review I wrote of the new film about him which is playing tonight at the Gene Siskel Center (near State and Lake)

Some critics have praised his songwriting  and have compared him to Yeats. Joyce or Becket. Others reviewers have attacked them as pretentious and overly abstract. if you read this you will see what my position is (God Save the Queen and Love live the Revolution.)

"Scott Walker: 30th Century Man" is a scintillating film that sets the bar high for the whole music documentary genre. The major reason that I only gave the film three and a half stars instead of four is that the beginning of the film (along with Walker’s early music) is routine and undistinguished. But the film gets more interesting and ambitious as Walker's music evolves, and it ends on a high note.

The film is playing at the Gene Siskel Center on Thursday, July 9 at 8:30 pm, and it was also released this week on DVD .The DVD includes 17 extra minutes of interview footage which many critics believe should have remained in the film.

Let me start out by saying that I was never a Scott Walker fan; in fact I had never even heard of him. But I became a convert after seeing this film. 

The film includes many interviews with music figures that knew him and/or  admired his work including the Scottish pop singer, Lulu, (she claims that she had a crush  on him),  members of Radiohead,  Johnny Marr (of the Smiths and Modest Mouse),  Alison Goldfrapp, Sting, Julian Cope, and even David Bowie, who executive produced the film.

As a youngster Walker was a typical teen rebel. He was kicked out of school and decided to hit the road like Neil Cassady in "On the Road." He later helped form the Phil Specter influenced Walker Brothers, and he went solo a few years later. Some of his early solo recordings were very influenced by Jacques Brel (Walker thought he was the best living songwriter), and he even did a cover of Brel’s “Jackie.” He had a string of infectious pop hits that were often adorned with orchestral flourishes

Although Walker was American born, he found his greatest success in England where he had a number of number one hits. In 1967, he was almost as popular as the Beatles there. Then he released an ambitious album titled “Scott 4,” under his birth name (Noel Scott Engel) but it flopped. Some people consider it his best record today, but at the time it was seen as old fashioned. Rock fans thought that progressive rock had rendered him irrelevant, but his work sounds fresher today than anything by Yes, Jethro Tull or Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

Walker did not regain his momentum in the '70s, and he put out a series of half hearted, poor selling attempts to get closer to the mainstream.  

After a long break, he ended up reinventing himself, and emerged as a kind of pop/ avant-garde genius with “Climate of Hunter (1984)”.  This recording and its follow-ups provoked strong praise from some critics. One commenter said that he made the first 21rst century record, and another said that Walker occupied the space between tonal and ambient music.

Walker’s last two albums (“Tilt” and "The Drift”) were released a decade apart and they include some of the most mesmerizing soundscapes since Moby's "Play," and the film's best part is when it explores his later music and his unusual working methods  (One musician claimed that Walker would not even let him know what the other musicians were going to play in advance.)

Walker's later music fulfills at least one of Paul Schrader's criteria for inclusion in the canon (he was talking about films but some of the same criteria can be applied to music) because it has strangeness. I don't mean strangeness  in an everyday sense of the word, but  I am following Harold Bloom's definition meaning  the type of originality that can never be totally assimilated (such as Lynch’s or Cocteau’s films.).

Like David Lynch, Walker is a polarizing figure, and people tend to either like him or hate him. Some well known music critics have aggressively attacked his work.  For instance, in the newest edition of  "The New Rolling Stone Album Record Guide,"  Douglass Wolk wrote that his recording "Tilt" is  "overwhelmingly dark and ambitious, but it's hard to get past Walker's vibrato -soaked baritone, which comes off like a Berlin-era David Bowie in an 8-foot-deep vat of margarine."

The film would have more balanced and entertaining if it had included more negative criticism of his work. But overall this exemplary film is almost as alluring and haunting as Walker's music, and it is an ideal introduction to the eccentric,  mystifying, and inventive artist.