Greatest Songs #8

Richard Hell and the Voidoids -- "Betrayal Takes Two" (1977, from Blank Generation)


On the surface of it, Richard Hell is exactly the kind of cat I should dislike: pretentious, self-absorbed, and nihilistic to the point of boredom. What's more, he's aware of it, and consciously chooses to live that way. Based on his interviews, he seems to genuinely admire the addled, post-Revolutionary aristocrats he's read about in such authors and Huysmans and really wants to be like them. In other words, he's the kind of person who's always proclaiming doom without offering solutions, because the doom feels right, sounds complete. In politics, I hate that, and I'm not too fond of it in art, either.

So why do I love this guy's music?

I suspect it has a lot to do with his backing band. Marc Bell, soon to be Marky Ramone, was his drummer, and his two guitarists, Bob Quine, and Ivan Julian, created some truly beautiful noise, despite the fact that you couldn't have found men who appeared to be more different (Quine looked like an adjunct poetry professor and Julian looked like Sly Stone's cousin). What was more, they crafted an album in 1977 that dared to have songs that sounded different from one another, to make their rebellion in the wierd tangents of their riffs rather than a typical expression of impotent rage. The classic example of which is "Betrayal Takes Two"

First off, the song is not a quick-off, three-chord bottle rocket; it moves at a mellow blues shuffle, unafraid of space. Hell attempts a croon, doesn't quite pull it off, gives up and howls his way to the chorus. The guitars mope prettily, until the aformentioned, at which point they turn on each other and claw and scratch like two alleycats, only to settle down again, then start it up again, etc. The structure of the song thus nicely reflects the subject of the lyrics. Observe:

The sensation of life was aroused in ourselves,
from the plot we digressed, knocked the books off the shelves,
then burned down the house, then met in a bar
with a motel attached and kissed all the scars

You'd call it emo, if you were an idiot, because the lyrics speak of pain and doomed romance, and the tune fits it. But if you were capable of drawing distinctions, you'd note that the lyrics are devoid of maudlin sentiment, that they hold these exchanges at comic distance. The song doesn't say "Hold me," but "This is how it is, ain't it a hoot?" as only someone who's been knocked up the side of the head by life enough times can say.

And yes, that kind of thinking is dangerous if it becomes an excuse for avoiding life, as many have suspected it has for M. Hell. But at some point in life we have to get over sappy romanticism and look with a jaundiced eye at the games we play. Only then can we ever hit the next lock in the Love Canal.


#9