ANITALAFEIANE – the initials A.L. – Without sky, sun or flood / And without vanity.
I have written a kind-of-elegy for Anita Lane.
I had just started to write a post about a leading female character in TMAC, Ana Lafei, when Anita Lane died. I didn’t intend to write about Anita Lane. I just got pissed-off at the lame cliches in her obituaries. So she has taken over this post.
In summary, my elegy states:
- Anita Lane travels through TMAC (as maybe she travelled with her talent) like a continuous low-frequency soundtrack / like sub-station hum.
- Anita Lane was a great lyric poet like Shelley.
- This type of artist only needs to produce a handful of samples to qualify for greatness. Their ‘modest dividend’ is enough.
- Her EP, “Dirty Sings” presents a full Aesthetic Ontology in just 4 songs (see Alfred N. Whitehead). There is extensive analysis.
- I compare her work to Millais’ “Ophelia” of which I wrote: “she was fearful of the stream’s light meter. For it dragged her down inexorably, to a dark God, to drown with no air above in totality. Without sky, sun or flood. And without vanity” (TMAC, 149).
- Of her later works, BLUME and SUBTERRANEAN WORLD with Blixa Bargeld made genuine advances on what I call the adjacency-method originated by Lee Hazelwood for his duets with Nancy Sinatra. By that, I mean Hazelwood used two singers in succession: (1) making a direct statement of fact, then (2) offering a sharp metaphorical turn (like a reverie). This is NOT a ‘call-and-response’ style like in the Blues or, say, “The Ship Song” by the Bad Seeds. Rather, it should be termed CALL-AND-TROPE.
- Her co-work with Nick Cave, “A Dead Song,” by the Birthday Party collapses the restrictive verse-chorus structure of popular music into a downwards rush of images across a logical sequence of arch styles and categories. It covers all TEN necessary elements of great art in just 2 minutes 16 seconds.
“VALE Initials A.L.”
