Sing Hello

 

 

I.

 

I've mentioned before on this blog how the word hello has long held a privileged place in my personal vocabulary: click here.  

 

It's disappointing, therefore, that the majority of songs that have the word hello in their title or lyrics make one wish to stop up one's ears like Odysseus, so as to never hear them again. And this includes some really well-known songs by much loved artists. 

 

For example: 

 

'Hello, Dolly!', by Louis Armstrong (1964) ...

 

'Hello, Goodbye', by The Beatles (1967) ...

'Hello, I Love You', by The Doors (1968) ...

 

'Hello', by Lionel Richie (1984) ... 

 

'Hello', by Adele (2015) ... 

 

In fact, the more I come to think about it, there is really only one great song containing the word hello - and that is Gary Glitter's smash hit single 'Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again' [1]. 

 

 

II.

 

1973 was a golden year for British pop music - particularly for the genre known as glam rock - and whilst I loved Sweet, Slade, and Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter was my beautiful obsession at this time [2]. 

 

'Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again' - written by Glitter and genius record producer Mike Leander - was much loved not only by teeny-boppers, but by football supporters up and down the country. O what fun we had singing along to this ridiculously catchy song!    

 

Of course, that was then and this is now ... And Glitter's songs are today no longer played on the radio or sung on the terraces and his performances on Top of the Pops no longer shown - we all know why ... [3]

 

Without getting into the whole can we separate art from the artist debate [4], I think that's a shame. And ultimately mistaken. I suppose, push comes to shove, I remain of the Wildean view that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral pop record.     

    

 

Notes

 

[1] Gary Glitter, 'Hello! Hello! I'm Back Again', single release from the album Touch Me (Bell Records, 1973): click here to play. 

      Having said that this is the only great song with hello in the title and/or lyrics, I must obviously also mention Soft Cell's 'Say Hello, Wave Goodbye' (Some Bizzare, 1982): click here. And I have to give a nod to 'Public Image' (Virgin, 1978), the debut single by Public Image Ltd., which opens with Rotten repeating the word hello six times: click here.

 

[2] See the post 'Notes on a Glam-Punk Childhood' (24 July 2018): click here. 

 

[3] Glitter's career ended after he was imprisoned for downloading child pornography in 1999, and was subsequently convicted of child sexual abuse and attempted rape, in 2006 and 2015, respectively. The fact remains, however, that he is one of the UK's most successful performers, selling over 20 million records, including numerous hit singles (three of which reached number one in the charts). To deny him his place in the pantheon of pop is simply to whitewash our own cultural history. 

 

[4] It's not that this debate isn't philosophically interesting - involving as it does questions concerning ethics and aesthetics - it's just too big and wide-ranging to address here. What I would say is that whilst it's clear that bad people can make good art, it's less certain whether the morally virtuous can produce anything other than mediocre work (at best).      

 

  

As for Lawrence ... He's a Moral Conservative

 

 

Perhaps one of the most surprising - and, for some, disappointing - things that D. H. Lawrence ever wrote is found in the Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922):

 

"On the whole, our important moral standards are, in my opinion, quite sound [...] In its essential character, our present morality seems to me to offer no very serious obstacle to our living: our moral standards need brightening up a little, not shattering." [1]

 

Tell that to the followers of Nietzsche, for example, who call for a revaluation of all values ...! Indeed, this might almost be read as an explicit rejection of Zarathustra, who famously advocates the breaking of law tables [2]. 

Of course, as digital pilgrim James Walker reminds us, Lawrence was a mass of contradictions - elsewhere in his work he explicitly rejects the idea of standards of any kind - and so maybe we shouldn't take what he says in Fantasia too seriously after all ...? [3]

 

It could be, for example, that Lawrence was simply being contrary in the face of one critic who suggests that he seeks a "'revision of moral standards such as will remove artificial bars to the escape of each person from the isolation which is his most intolerable hardship'" [4]. 

 

That would explain why - again to one's bemusement - Lawrence even challenges the idea that isolation is an intolerable form of hardship for the individual. And yet, it's precisely such solitary confinement - leading ultimately to self-enclosure or solipsism - that Lawrence elsewhere rages against:

 

"For it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his true relation to other men, and to women, that we can give him an opportunity to be himself. So long as men are inwardly dominated by their own isolation [...] nothing is possible but insanity more or less pronounced. Men must get back into touch." [5]

 

If it isn't his contrary nature that explains this surprising defence of the present moral order, then, I suppose, we might just have to consider the possibility that Lawrence was fundamentally more conventional and conservative than many of his readers like to believe [6]; thus his support for traditional marriage, capital punishment, and the censorship of pornography. 

 

And thus his contempt for those writers and artists who wore jazz underwear and didn't subscribe to his central teaching that the "essential function of art is moral." [7]  

 

Notes

 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60.  

[2] The line I'm thinking of is found in Zarathustra's Prologue (9) and is translated by Adrian Del Caro as: "'Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker - but he is the creative one.'" 

      See the Cambridge University Press edition of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. The line quoted is on p. 14.   

 

[3] See the related post to this one - As for Lawrence ... A Reply to James Walker - click here.

 

[4] L. L. Buermyer, writing in the New York Evening Post Literary Review (16 July 1921), quoted by Lawrence in Fantasia, p. 60. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of The Social Basis of Consciousness, by Trigant Burrow', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 336. 

      It's worth noting that whilst Lawrence says there's no need to shatter moral standards, he does argue here for the shattering of the ideal of a standardised (or normalised) humanity. 

 

[6] This might help explain why Lawrence is increasingly popular in conservative (and even neo-reactionary) circles; see for example Micah Mattix, 'Reconsidering D. H. Lawrence', The American Conservative, (9 Oct 2020): click here.  

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whitman', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 155. 

      See also the essay 'Art and Morality' in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 161- 168, which opens: "It is part of the common clap-trap, that 'art is immoral.'" In this short text, Lawrence expresses his loathing for those artists whose only aim was to épater les bourgeoisie.