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  • And Everything within Reach:Scott Walker’s The Drift (A Listener’s Companion)
  • Timothy J. Deines (bio)

The Scott Walker legend remains at once disseminated and obscure. The growing number of pop bios and record reviews converge around the increasingly stale narrative of Walker's "life," his rise and fall, his recovery [from alcoholism], "rediscovery," etc. The Walker industry (a funny notion, though this is what we now see) has become all-too-predictable in its reliance on conservative biographical methodologies and facile periodizations in the service of a kind of perfunctory hagiography. It has reached the point where even Walker's detractors, when you can find them, enfold their discourse within the boy child's myth. One ironic effect is that recording industrial technique—production, distribution, exchange, consumption—continues to fail the art of an artist who supposedly went underground 30 years ago in a gesture of refusal of such technique. After all, the records still "don't sell." One wonders when we'll ever hear Scott Walker.

The following notes—ten readings of the ten tracks on Walker's latest record, The Drift (2006)—appeal not so much to Scott the avant-garde crooner as Scott the theorist of relation. These notes represent provisional arguments that grow [End Page 139] out of a long engagement with Scott's text, sonic, and graphic. I have decided to concentrate on this single album and risk the gesture of treating it as a unity. The reason for this is not due to a fan's preference for The Drift over Tilt, say, or Scott 4, or out of a desire to return criticism to the territory of the well-wrought urn. The Drift, I've decided, is not even my "favorite" Scott record, though I'm nearly persuaded that it is his most important. Scott's performance on The Drift is essentially critical, and The Drift is a terrifying record. Thus, it flirts with a certain timeliness, a certain madness, a certain responsibility towards what remains to come. That more or less accounts for my interest in it.

1. "Cossacks Are"

"Cossacks are / charging in // Charging into / fields of / white roses"1

There is nothing one can do to stop the other from coming.

We already know Scott Walker, or some version of him: the one who, in the late 1960s, foregrounded an overpowering vocal/lyrical cocktail of Jacques Brel and bel canto against a Spectorian symphonic wall over a span of four albums; the one who, with the revamped Walker Brothers on 1978's Nite Flights, conjured a handful of Berlin-era Bowie-inspired compositions, thus surviving, in an odd way, the challenge of punk; the one whose "triumphant" reemergence in 1984 with the avant-rock Climate of Hunter ignited a slow burn of second coming which, first, achieved the white-hotness of Tilt in 1995, and then, arch-frigidity in 2006 with The Drift. These last two efforts—more "concrete" and sonically artificial than anything previously attempted, though completely unlike each other—are two of the most important records of the last two decades. The Drift may be the first important rock record of the twenty-first century.

But it all may be for naught, quite literally, and this is where Walker worship ends. If Jeremy Reed is right in saying that "since the massive hits scored by the Walker Brothers in the mid-sixties, Scott Walker has set about deconstructing the image of himself as commercially successful pop star," there is still no sense of what this "deconstruction" gives us to think about all [End Page 140] that is not Scott Walker the subject (1998, 10). I would suppose that "Walker himself" is least of all interested in the deconstruction of Scott Walker, as if one could ever know. Which is not to say that the art is not deconstructive. To the contrary, it profoundly works to that effect, and on several levels. But, again, it is all for naught, which is to say that it is for nothing itself, for refusal as art object and experience. If Warhol is the philosopher of the twentieth century on the problem of fame, as someone recently said, then Walker...

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