These post-feudal fashion freaks – almost exclusively male and openly gay – were feared and despised. In an uncanny premonition of what was to happen on the streets of Britain nearly three hundred years later, one artist of the period disparagingly labelled them ‘punks’. Much like the punk rockers of the 1970s they found their few allies among the working classes, delighting in their flashy clothes as a joyous riposte to shogunate tyranny. And it was here also, among the peasants, that they earned their name. One derived from the word ‘kabuki’, meaning to deviate; to bend; to be different; to be strange.
Kabukimono. The deviators. Or, more accurately, the strange ones.
Sometime around 1604 – the year Kepler observed a supernova in the Milky Way with his naked eye (to date still the most recent explosion of stardust in our galaxy) – a young female priestess already under the influence of her kabukimono lover began dancing and singing on the dry bed of the Kamo River. Her name was Okuni, a former temple maiden who, as was common, had been sent out into the streets to busk for funds. Yet her act was unlike anything the country’s peasants had previously seen. An oscillating sexual enigma between male and female, Okuni mixed erotica with religion, women’s make-up with men’s hats and trousers, dancing with prayer; singing of eastern Shintoism while around her neck swung chains of western crosses. A seventeenth-century Japanese Madonna.
Starved of theatre – an elite pleasure then taking the sombre, stylised form of Noh drama, reserved for the samurai alone – the peasants were beguiled by Okuni’s antics, and demanded more. In response she formed her own female dance troupe, and with it the seed of a new kabukimono people’s theatre. The audience christened it onna kabuki – women’s strangeness – eventually clipped back to the short, simpler kabuki.
Forced to set up theatres in designated red-light areas beside sake houses and brothels, kabuki attracted a similar roughneck clientele. In its earliest form it was less like staged drama than cabaret. Female singers and dancers, many also working prostitutes, followed Okuni’s lead, mixing shamanistic ritual with geisha burlesque; teasing their male audiences with exotic furs and fabrics or sensuously inhaling on suggestively curly pipes. The crackling sexual tension typically erupted in riots, becoming so widespread that by 1629 the shogunate intervened, banning kabuki as a ‘national disturbance’. Or at least onna kabuki as performed by women.
It didn’t stop the titillating parade of temptresses. If anything, kabuki sex and violence got worse. Now an all-male domain, female roles were given to specially trained teenage boys named wakashu; carefully schooled adolescent gender-benders whose impact upon the crowd’s libido was even more volcanic. Bisexuality was rife in feudal Japanese society, even among the samurai who visited kabuki theatres disguised as peasants where they’d end up brawling over their favourite boys’ favours; whole theatres were destroyed by lust-induced rampages between warring fans. It was only a matter of time before the corrupting thighs and slender shoulders of the wakashu boys were also banned by the shogunate.
The theatres stayed in business though the term ‘kabuki’, now tarred with too much controversy, was temporarily dropped for the ambiguous ‘mimed theatrical show’. At the end of the century it made its slow, cautious return, still in the hands of male companies who now cultivated a new wave of adult female impersonators, onnagata.
These coquettish cross-dressers weren’t part-time drag queens but occupational transvestites who took method acting to its 24/7 extreme, behaving as women off stage and on. Their dedication not only suspended the sexual illusion for male audiences but won them female admirers who copied their fashions; women dressing after men dressing as women. Fiercely loyal fan clubs were formed for the most popular onnagata, their rules ejecting any member caught paying to see a rival star; the most devout apostles even changed their name to that of their idol. On stage the onnagata drove audiences just as insane as the wakashu before them. Theatres hummed and hawed with men rocking and groaning, stabbing themselves in the leg to ease their desire, or exploding in screams of ‘God! I’ll die!’ Respectable samurai were driven to bankruptcy, selling their swords to buy actors gifts and trinkets, while Buddhist monks risked prison by stealing temple treasures to woo their favourites. None of which could pass for very long unnoticed by the shogunate before more restrictions were applied.
The crux of kabuki’s moral disorder seemed to be hair. Nothing agitated a randy late-seventeenth-century Japanese male quite like long forelocks. The shogunate decided that the threshold of ‘too sexy’ lay at half an inch, making regular inspections of theatres to ensure this wasn’t breached. With mandatory shaved heads and blunt forelocks, the actors were likened to ‘cats with their ears cut off’. Wigs were also banned. As a last resort the onnagata took to wearing purple-coloured headscarves. This the shogunate allowed, unprepared for the fetisishtic connotations the purple headscarf would quickly assume among kabuki-goers. Bald cats from Japan shrouded in purple silk, these weird, wonderful gender-defying shemales were now considered sexier than ever.
KABUKI CONTINUED TO evolve much the same way, surviving all attempts to muffle, neuter or impair its sensual allure and visual extravagance. By the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan finally re-established links with the West after nearly two hundred years of wilful isolation, it was still the most popular entertainment of the masses. The free improvisations of its origins may have been replaced by its own set of dramatic conventions and performance codes but its inborn spirit of fantasy, glamour and spectacle remained intact. Men buried in heavy make-up, faces sinking beneath masks of jagged red and blue lines. Garish costumes with padded shoulders and flowing sleeves. The painted onnagata tugging the tightrope between the sexes. Graceful mime and grand gesture. And an audience who worshipped these players as supermen, if not gods from another world.
THREE
ROCK ’n’ ROLL
BY THE LATE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY the slowly multiplying cells of the Starman twinkled across the planet like randomly scattered sequins on an otherwise bare bauble, sparkling in disconnected astronomers’ dreams and kabuki silks but lacking any means to stitch together. Nor could they until the invigorating power of music was exploded in all its spastic ecstasy. Music which didn’t merely please the ear and pivot the ankle, but engorged the heart and molested the senses. Music which plunged a white hot harpoon into the listener’s forehead, a blissful agony conjuring answers to the greatest mysteries of our existence which couldn’t otherwise be expressed in words. For the pulse of Ziggy Stardust to start throbbing the world needed to invent rock ’n’ roll. The world needed Ludwig van Beethoven.
All jumps, all jives, all beats, all bumps, all grooves, all grinds, all whams, all bams, all wops, all bops begin with Beethoven. Without him Elvis could never have wandered down Lonely Street nor Lou Reed to the corner of Lexington, one-two-five. Alex the droog would never have slooshied with visions of birds of rarest-spun metal like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship. And there’d be no robot fanfare bubbling above wild, expectant teenage screams to introduce, in the flesh, Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.
It may have taken Japanese kabuki to erect the Starman’s stage, but it was Beethoven alone who ripped open its curtains. The early-twentieth-century science writer J. W. N. Sullivan summed up his music as possessing ‘alien despair’ and ‘a remote and frozen anguish wailing over implacable destiny … like a memory from some ancient and starless night of the soul.’ Beethoven himself agreed his melodies came to him unsummoned from another plane. ‘I could seize them with my hands,’ he’s supposed to have said. ‘Out in the open air, in the woods while walking, in the silence of the nights.’
As his first biographer put it, Ludwig was ‘a boy from an ideal world tossed upon the earth’, crashing in the German city of Bonn in 1770. His unpleasant alcoholic father practically lassoed him to a piano as soon as he could crawl, shoving him into his first public concert at the age of seven. A child prodigy, he was distant and moody, with small but piercing e
yes, and tawny skin so coarsely pock-marked he was given the nickname ‘the Spaniard’. On the cusp of his adolescent dream of studying music in Vienna (according to several sketchy accounts, as a pupil of Mozart) he was recalled to Bonn by his mother’s death. With his dad too drunk to hold the family together, Ludwig had no choice but to remain there as head of the household. Four years of despair and frustration crept by before he was mercifully hauled back to Vienna as a pupil of the ageing ‘father of the symphony’, Joseph Haydn. The unspoken understanding was that when Beethoven finally came to publish his own music, in keeping with the etiquette of the day he would show due gratitude to his master and sign himself ‘pupil of Haydn’. Except Beethoven bowed to nobody. ‘Haydn taught me nothing,’ he’d brag, adding he deliberately avoided listening to all other composers so as not to taint his own raw genius.
So began his punk rock odyssey through the salons and concert halls of the Austrian Habsburg Empire: young Ludwig Rotten, stomping along Stephansplatz, hair falling messily out from under his wig, clothes grubby and ill-matching, his scowling Spaniard face and his crude yokel accent which had raised many a powder-puffed Duchess’s eyebrow. Yet in spite of being such a bad tempered scruff that the police once mistook him for a tramp, Viennese society welcomed him as a pianist of godlike proportions.
When encouraged to take part in virtuoso play-offs with rival musicians, Beethoven demolished them all. He relished displaying dextrous one-handed feats that his so-called ‘mortal enemies’ were biologically unable to mimic with less than two. If he didn’t crush his opponents musically, he out-psyched them mentally. Challengers could pummel their clavichords for five minutes in a sweat of concentration only to be punctured by Ludwig’s stony-faced yawn: ‘So, when are you going to start?’ At his most obstreperous, goaded by one countess into playing for sport, he begrudgingly took his place at the piano only to slam his forearms upon the keys in a tuneless din. ‘That, madam,’ he announced, standing up to leave, ‘is my piece for the evening.’
Music was the one love of Beethoven’s life, though he didn’t have a lot of choice. Despite countless unrequited infatuations, he’d never marry. One singer he proposed to laughed him off as ‘too ugly and half mad’. His later landlords and neighbours would have agreed. If Beethoven decided he needed more light he’d start knocking holes in the brickwork to create makeshift windows. In the summer months he’d keep cool by pouring buckets of water over his head, the water seeping through the floorboards soaking the tenants below. Among the most vivid reports of knocking uninvited chez Beethoven is having the door answered by a grimacing ogre in goat-hair jacket and trousers, pads of stained yellowing cotton wool poking out of his ears, and the drying crusts of shaving foam spattering his face; the visitor deducing that he must have half-prepared shaving that morning only to forget while he spent the rest of the day consumed by composing.
Beethoven spat and raged at the outside world, but with good reason. At the age of 27 the worst tragedy he could have ever conceived befell him. A sick joke from God, which would have monumental impact not merely on Beethoven’s life and music but on the life and language of all music to come.
OVER A HUNDRED years before Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix, the first casualty of the fabled 27 Club was Beethoven’s hearing. He’d been keeping its steady deterioration a secret for years, privately suffering all sorts of humiliating quack treatments: pouring oils in his ears, stewing in cold baths, and once spending two days with his arms encased in poisonous bark from a shrub so toxic that in extreme cases it could induce a coma. All in vain. The cause of his gradual deafness is still a mystery – early suggestions of syphilis have since been ruled out – as is the original diagnosis, thanks to the doctor who upon his dying wishes destroyed all medical records. Whatever the reason, there was to be no cure in early-nineteenth-century Europe.
In the year 1802, still only aged 31, the partially deaf Beethoven suffered an epiphany of angst while resting in Heiligenstadt, a hamlet just outside Vienna. He compiled his emotions in a letter addressed to his brothers, the notorious ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’. Part rock ’n’ roll suicide note, part vow of spiritual defiance, he openly acknowledged his incurable deafness and its devastating psychological effect. ‘I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness,’ he wrote. ‘I would have put an end to my life – only art it was that withheld me … it seemed impossible to leave the world until I produced all that I felt called upon to produce. And so I endured this wretched existence.’
Prior to Beethoven, all composers, Mozart included, were resigned to the fact that their work was purely for the entertainment of their patrons. Conveying emotion and mood were never their objective: only a desire to create nice, occasionally clever, but always pleasing tunes. Isolated from the rest of the world by ever encroaching deafness, music became Beethoven’s sole means of expression. In his first major piece after returning from Heiligenstadt, his Third Symphony, he drew a line in the sand between the functional crowd-pleasers of his youth and a new epoch in sound and meaning. Nicknamed the ‘Eroica’ (‘Heroic’) Symphony and originally inspired by Napoleon, its eponymous hero was really Beethoven himself, the gut-galloping orchestration articulating the courage and passion of a handicapped composer coming to terms with his fate: the triumph of art over illness. With the Eroica, Beethoven cracked the code. Music had only been about music until Beethoven showed the world music was about life itself, turning his own joy, sorrow, elation and agony into giant, glorious sound.
The weight of drama of his tunes was so intense it created apocryphal romantic myths which have whistled through the ages. In the opening of his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven unveiled the most famous riff in the history of Western music: ‘Der-der-der DERRR!’ The legend is he intended this to sound like the hand of death rapping his knuckles on the door. Another has it his equally famous ‘Moonlight Sonata’ was written for a blind girl so as to describe the eerie tranquillity of a moonlit night. Yet the sonata only earned its popular nickname after Beethoven’s death. These fables nevertheless cement Beethoven’s genius in the ears of his listeners. It doesn’t matter whether Beethoven himself wanted his ‘Piano Sonata No.14 In C Sharp Minor’ to sound like moonlight. Its sad, starry gloom resonates in our ears anyway, just as the start of the Fifth remains a musical machine-gun of stuttering terror.
The world cursed Beethoven to become, as he put it, ‘the unhappiest of God’s creatures’. But in the intoxicating power of his psychological sound paintings, he ensured his immortality.
OF ALL BEETHOVEN’S greatest hits, none frothed with more cosmic bliss than the one Ziggy Stardust would rightly choose as his live entrance music. It was a tune, or rather an idea, which had preoccupied the composer since his desperate youth in Bonn. Its genesis was a German poem written in 1785 celebrating the ideals of freedom and universal brotherhood by Friederich Schiller, ‘An Die Freude’, or ‘Ode To Joy’. Its subject matter may have seemed strangely at odds with Beethoven’s surface misanthropy, a euphoric hymn to freedom, universal brotherhood and the glory of God: ‘Seek him above the starry vault, for he must dwell above the stars.’ Yet the poem entranced Beethoven throughout his adult life, forever experimenting with rough drafts and works-in-progress, attempting to put Schiller’s words to music.
Only in his last decade – as a sick man in his fifties, haunted by money worries, completely deaf and more mentally remote than ever – did he solve the problem. In 1822 he received an offer from the newly formed London Philharmonic Society. Huge fans of Beethoven, they’d been trying to coax him to visit England for years and were now willing to pay fifty pounds if he agreed to write them a brand new symphony. He accepted, needing the money, but in a last hurrah of creative brilliance used it as an opportunity to nail the Schiller idea.
Two years later, his Ninth Symphony was finished. Beethoven’s monster. The longest symphony anyone had ever written: stretching over an hour, it broke with all orchestral tradition by adding a choir into its epic last m
ovement. And within that movement was the tune Ziggy picked. The tune which, in the words of the late Beatle-loving classical critic William Mann, ‘Beethoven must have intended to rock the world.’
The world first rocked to the Ninth in Vienna on 7 May 1824. Its debut was painfully underprepared. In rehearsals one of the main vocal soloists fell ill, spending a night vomiting fifteen times in succession after drinking some dodgy wine; ironically, a gift to Beethoven which he’d passed on in all innocence. The orchestra and choir complained about the score’s superhuman demands, another soloist famously telling him to his face he was ‘a tyrant over all vocal organs’. Come the day of the show Beethoven couldn’t be bothered to hire a standard black tailcoat, so took to the podium in bright green. He spent the entire concert deaf to reality, lost in his own head music. After the final crescendo he continued conducting thin air, eyes shut, baton quivering, oblivious to the thundering applause behind him until one of the vocal soloists turned him round to see the reaction. Beethoven basked in five standing ovations. The Viennese claps seemed to type out the oozing disbelief of a contemporary German reviewer. His verdict on the Ninth: ‘The colossal products of the son of the gods, who has just brought the holy, life-giving flame directly from heaven.’