By The Landlord
“Happiness is having a scratch for every itch.” – Ogden Nash
“Sex is a momentary itch, love never lets you go.” – Kingsley Amis
“Your skin starts itching once you buy that gimmick about something called love.” – Iggy Pop
“It shakes me, it quakes me. It makes me feel goose-pimply all over. I don't know where I am, or who I am, or what I'm doing. Don't stop, don't stop!” – Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch
It's that odd, prickly, tickly space between pleasure and pain, something all of us naily-hairy apes and other mammals can't help but experience and practice. Perhaps for personal comfort adjustment, hygiene, relief, sometimes as social interaction, sometimes in restless, physical or mental disquiet. Dogs do it, birds do it, cats do it, on themselves or to sharpen claws on posts, or with cheeks on objects to leave their scent, and for similar reasons bears or elephants go for the full-on branch-shaking back rub against the bark of trees. Meanwhile chickens scratch the ground to forage for food, prepare nests or to prepare for a satisfying dust bath.
But this week, we're reaching out across all kinds of surfaces and contexts with a multi-pronged musical backscratcher, not just on itchy flesh situations, but also the tight skin of drums, wires, guitar strings, resonant idiophones or the hollow or solid wooden bodies of stringed instruments, and of course, vinyl turntables, as this is a topic about real and metaphorical itches and scratches in lyrics, but also scratchy sounds in music.
Lyrically, you can't have a scratch without an implied itch, nor vice versa, and this could apply to all kinds of scenarios, whether that be some kind of appetite, skin disease, sexual arousal, or just the annoying irritation of your roughly spun woollen trousers or sackcloth smock.
Flea improv?
The itch-scratch axis is one of paradox and contradiction. Michel de Montaigne here describes that of a famous imprisoned Greek philosopher: "When Socrates, after being relieved of his irons, felt the relish of the itching that their weight had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to consider the close alliance between pain and pleasure.” There indeed is the rub.
While Hamlet's 'to be or not to be' speech included another rubbing restlessness, this time of indecision and inaction, in Shakespeare's depiction of the plot against Julius Caesar's absolute power corruption, Brutus criticises another co-conspirator for his naked ambition: “Let me tell you, Cassius, you yourself are much condemned to have an itching palm.”
Itchy palms do seem to imply some form of unease or guilt, but there are many other body parts that make that silent alarm call, not least in a sexual context, hinted heavily at in the tempting form of Marilyn Monroe for married neighbour Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch during a hot Manhattan summer.
The Seven Year Itch …
Yoko Ono is in the bar this week, reflecting on the very reason for that restlessness, presumably with John in mind: “Marriage is a difficult project. When seven years have passed and all your body's cells have been replaced, you're meant to experience that seven-year itch.”
But all songwriters and other artists feel a constant need to scratch the creative itch. It runs in parallel to last week's blessing and curse topic. "The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it," declares Robert Penn Warren.
Also in the house, even C.S. Lewis can’t help but make a sexual parallel when putting pen to paper: “Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.” Ooh er, Clive…
But let's also consider scratchy songs in the sonic context, one that will bring much to the playlists. And firstly that might cover the pioneering forms of hip hop and beyond via turntablist skills. Radio DJs in the 1940s occasionally made such sounds, perhaps accidentally, in the process of back-cueing the needle to the beginning of a song.
Pierre Schaeffer
Avant-garde artists and composers throughout the 20th century, from Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Fischinger and Paul Arma to Christian Marclay, musique concrète’s Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage and others experimented with all kinds of sounds, but what about scratchy techniques, including carving extra grooves into vinyl to make strange sounds and looping them?
But to create more digestible and rhythmic control with the needle on the record, most turntables wouldn't smoothly shift back and forth until in 1969, when Japanese Osaka-based engineer Shuichi Obata, working at Matsushita (now Panasonic), created the SP-10, the first beltless direct-drive turntable followed by a long line of influential Technics models, the mainstay of the scratch DJ.
Who first used the record player in this genre as rhythmic instrument? Possibly New York's Grand Wizzard Theodore, when experimenting with the Technics SL-1200, but in the early 70s, but Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and later break-beat brilliance of hip hop pioneer DJ Kool Herc.
Grandmaster Flash
But there's many other ways to create scratch sounds, especially on guitar strings, by setting tones to a thinner, more jagged sound, and using the edges of a plectrum or fingernails, or by using other objects, particularly perfected by purveyors of new wave and post-punk. An obvious example is the The Slits’ Viv Albertine.
Viv Albertine guitar sound …
Scratchy sounds could also be created by playing parts of instruments that aren't conventionally meant to be touched, such as the ends of the strings at the top of an electric guitar between the tuning pegs and the nut, or around the pickups at the bottom, by stroking the strings on the inside of a piano, or by any other avant-garde invention whereby friction and reverberant surfaces combine.
So then, where does this scratch your creative itch? What kind of music captures the equivalent of sackcloth or wire-y wool on skin but is also strangely pleasant? What is your pain-pleasure itchy axis? Please place your lyrical and sonic ideas in comments below, for consideration by the excellent EnglishOutlaw, with a deadline on Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week. Feel a tingle yet? Can you bear it?
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