With the youngest member of rock nyc, Mary Magpie, taken out of school because she was sick yesterday (nothing serious) I got to thinking not about songs of comfort… she has those (though “Golden Slumbers” would be my first choice) but rather songs of illness. The hardstuff.
I wasn’t interested in the doom and gloom stuff of blankcore of your choice but attempts to deal with this stuff in a serious manner.
And i wracked by brains and I came up with with Van Morrison’s “TB Sheets” and Louis Armstrong “St. James Infirmary” (Morrison also covered this).
The latter is funeral in the extreme evoking a procession down the streets of New Orleans for the dead by the dying: “I went down to St. James Infirmary, saw my baby there, dressed down on a long white table, so sweet, so cold, so bad”. By the end of the song, Armstrong is telling thhe listener to put a $200 coin on his watch chain, so “the boys will know I died standing pat.
If the latter was a murderous nightmar, the latter is a horrorshow of so much sheer distraughtness it bothered me listening to it just right now this minute. TB was a pretty terrifying vision of the slow death of tuberculosis. It is in the middle of the morning, and “Julie’s” blood is bad and Van is waiting for her to die. A vocal performance of intense power, Morrisson is going off the deep end end. He is gasping for breath, crying, paralyzed by the enormity of Julie’s mortality. “The cool room is the fool’s room” he warns. “I can almost smell your TB Sheets on your sick bet.
The thing about listening to really disturbing music is not just to live through terrors you don’t want to live through, not just some form of empathy or catharcism, but also to highlight the condition of life through viewing it at an extreme.
I went in search of some more songs about illness and found these off The Guardian:
1 Flu Season – Kid Koala
2 Terrible Operation Blues – Big Bill Broonzy
3 Cardiac Arrest – Madness
4 Collarbone – Fujiya & Miyagi
5 She’s Lost Control – Joy Division
6 I’ve Got You Under My Skin – Neneh Cherry
7 The Drugs Don’t Work – The Verve
8 TB Sheets – Van Morrison
9 Comfortably Numb- Pink Floyd
10 Chemo Limo – Regina Spektor