You (The Game Part II) (Patreon)

CW: some discussion of child sexual abuse. Readers who found “Another Day” triggering are welcome to skip the blog this week and wait for “All We Ever Look For” next week, when we finally return to Never for Ever.

You (The Game Part II)

This Roy Harper piece has to start by addressing the “Another Day” essay, which was my most contentious blog post by far. That essay attracted the ire of a fair number of Roy Harper fans for taking seriously the accusations of sexual abuse against Harper, and was variously described as “libelous” and “sanctimonious.” Personally, I think the essay was successful, and one of my best to date. I believe the majority of sexual assault allegations are true and that a culture of skepticism about victims is a toxic monoculture that doesn’t deserve to continue existing. The fact that Harper’s victims had their trauma dismissed when Harper was cleared in court is equally troubling — lots of predators fail to be convicted for their crimes. Two women have risked their safety and privacy by coming forward to tell the public what he did to them. Yes, they were anonymous, but a newspaper with basic competence can discover the identity of an anonymous tipper in a day. Accusing Harper, a famous musician who’s worked with Pink Floyd and Kate Bush, of abuse was a courageous decision because these women made it at great personal risk and figured putting Harper’s crimes out in the open was more important than their own safety. If the moral purity of your favorite musicians matters more to you than the trauma of survivors, read another goddamn Kate Bush blog. Maybe you’d prefer the one whose admin has a racial slur in their username.

This is just the kind of blog Dreams of Orgonon is. It’s an angry and political blog on which I’ll hold public figures accountable for the harm they’ve done. If that’s sanctimonious… well, it’s not, because the idea that sexual violence is bad is only a controversial idea among people who listen to lots of Roy Harper or Jimmy Page, then I’m happy to be a sanctimonious and unpleasant bitch. The story of Kate Bush is a story with some unpleasant bigotry and violence along the way, some of which is addressed head-on by Bush, and some of which are about an Islamophobe who’s been twice accused of historical sexual abuse. If I have to grit my teeth through parts of this blog, at least I’m going to tell the truth while I do it.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that artists who collaborated with Roy Harper in 1980 are culpable. Harper’s abuse was revealed to the public in 2013, and there’s no evidence of third parties having knowledge of it prior to then. Certainly Kate Bush has remained blissfully silent on the matter (part of me wishes she’d removed Harper’s B.V. on “Breathing” like she removed Rolf Harris’ vocal on Aerial, but that she didn’t says as much about the prominence of the two singers’ contributions as to Harris’ greater notoriety), as has David Gilmour. To discuss their older work with Harper is not to pass judgement on them, but to merely provide a complete picture that addresses all three artists’ bodies of work as well as Harper’s predation.

And to be clear, Harper’s music has artistic merit. A couple months ago, I made it clear that “Another Day” is a good song. Harper’s songwriting has distinctive flavors of the rustic and literate, two apparently conflicting modes he synthesizes well. Flat Baroque and Berserk, the album which birthed “Another Day”, is a solid folk rock LP. His next LP to crossover with Kate Bush, however, isn’t on the same level. 1980’s The Unknown Soldier lacks the refreshing crispness of Harper’s earlier album. It has its moments, but for the most part it’s a serviceable helping of the morass of 1980’s soft rock albums by post-peak rock stars (there’s a reason more people remember David Bowie’s Scary Monsters than Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass).

One of The Unknown Soldier’s greater efforts is “You (The Game Part II),” a song that’s largely noteworthy for guest-roster of David Gilmour and Kate Bush. Let’s talk about Gilmour first, since we haven’t heard about him in a while. Since we last heard from him, Gilmour had recorded arguably the biggest consecutive set of four LPs with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals, and The Wall, major albums in Britain and massive smash hits in America (Animals, the least-selling of the bunch, sold 4 million American units). He was straightforwardly in the category of the world’s premiere guitarists while being known as part of a unit rather than a famous face in his own rite. Gilmour’s eponymous debut LP, recorded at Nice’s Super Bear Studios shortly before Kate Bush arrived there, performed solidly both domestically and abroad, but it was a decidedly minor effort on his part. The guitarist was as big as rock musicians got, but he was still able to quietly slip into other artists’ projects.

As a musician who was happy to work with lesser-known artists, Gilmour comfortably settled into the position of second-in-command on Harper’s team. Playing guitar on most of the album’s tracks and co-writing half of them, Gilmour provided a sturdy rock hand to push Harper’s folk instincts towards the radio-esque. It was a collaboration that worked well for them, and they’d worked together before: Harper’s lead vocal on “Have a Cigar” being the most famous example of their creative union, with a previous Gilmour appearance on a Harper album manifesting on HQ’s “The Game (Parts 1-5)”. The titling of this song and “You” suggests that “You” is a sequel to this other Gilmour-featuring track. “The Game” is a sprawling and astonishingly long track, clocking in nearly 14 minutes with its rant against fruitless artistic attempts to subvert authoritarianism (“while propaganda spreads the same old theme/you is me and we can change the game, bullshit”). “The Game” is adversarial, not just holding civilization accountable for its failures but punishing it with prog rock’s length and propensity for songs with multiple chapters.

“You” is a slow, Mellotron-addled postscript to “The Game,” with Gilmour’s slow arpeggios underlining Harper’s epistle to the accused. The song is largely anaphoristic, with Kate Bush listing descriptions of someone in a premonitory yet almost nonchalant tone of voice: “you, my daring time traveler/you, love dwelling discoverer.” Harper’s plaintive vocal in the second verse is almost confessional as the singer seems to thank those present for partaking in his crimes, as he thanks “you, my deep secret accomplices/you, who endure my injustices” (with the use of “endure” rather than “endures” suggesting a host of accomplices). It’s as if Harper has had time to gestate over five years, preparing a statement for those who abetted him in “The Game.”

The statement is of course made in a chorus with a booming David Gilmour guitar solo. As anyone who’s heard “Comfortably Numb” knows, Gilmour is a paragon of soaring and melodramatic guitar solos constructed to lay stadiums low. He can design far-reaching soundscapes, but his bombast is especially well-suited to elation. Harper and Bush’s duetted vocal is just the icing on top of the track as they journey out of the stasis they spent the first two verses in (“to new dimensions in the zoo/helpless lovers follow you/ONLY YOU”). A seemingly paranoid song, its obsessiveness is belied by the bombast Gilmour brings to the track, which makes “You” work. 

The second verse is more possessive, with bits like “you, always gently in front of me/you, you’re so deep inside of me” suggesting a need to subsume everything in Harper’s path. He becomes something like a rock face with an eldritch hand reaching out for company, a creature who’s always been there and is now starved for companionship. 

“You” is a compelling case for the retainment of Harper’s canon. It certainly demonstrates that he’s a talented and skilled songwriter. I’ve never suggested that anyone is an immoral person for enjoying a Roy Harper song — such a statement would be actually moralistic and artistically false. But enjoyment of his work must be tempered with the predatory reality of the man. The truth is that he’s made good art and done toxic, unforgiveable things on a human level. Deciding if the latter renders the former worthless is down to the individual. As someone who admires the right-leaning writing of H. P. Lovecraft, Dorothy Day, and Luigi Russolo, I say it isn’t, but I can’t say I’m particularly comfortable listening to Harper’s work. I knew him as a predator before I started listening to his music. He’s not even in a boat with The Smiths, whose music I discovered and loved in my mid-teens while learning at the same time Morrissey was a racist bastard, and thus immunizing myself to that fact. Harper hasn’t benefited from that separation in my mind. It’s not that he deserves it as such — predators should be societally expelled. But as far as music goes, my respect for Roy Harper’s skill is tempered by the fact that behind his work looms a dark and hateful figure.