year of the cow

lately i've been thinking of the cover to thelonious monk's "underground". it shows a barn, a studio made up to look like a barn. monk is at a piano, dressed up like a member of the french resistance. in the background of the shot we see a flag with a swastika, a nazi official tied up (dead?) in the corner, maps tacked to the walls. a live cow, an armed woman in stylish scarf and fatigues, the graffito "vive la france!". food is piled up on a table in the foreground, along with bottles, glasses, pistols, grenades. it's a meticulously set up photo, invitingly warm, full of detail. both the composition and theatricality seem to be indicating freedom, celebration, relief. but monk himself doesn't look relieved - staring out warily at the viewer, isolated and alert. playing piano with a machinegun under his arm. he looks like he's planted there, waiting things out, waiting for something to happen - something bad, something good. is the war over? or is he too far underground to tell, to worry about anyone who might hear him play?

(gil mckean's liner notes seem to apologize for a cover he calls a trifle bizarre - the barn is explained as being in fact monk's own manhattan apartment, filled with mementos of a fictional life in the resistance, including stuffed and mounted "honkie kraut". it's like the move into the contemporary is trying to resolve what feels uncertain, contradictory, in the photograph, but if anything it makes it seem more tangled.)

john berg's art direction for the cover won a grammy; the jam had a song about going underground that became a #1 single. there's a kind of pose maybe intrinsic to how the idea comes up in art. how far underground can you be if you're able to talk about it - to risk drawing attention to yourself? in 2025 hard not to think about the lives for whom any form of visibility comes with a chance of imprisonment or death. so what else does it mean? the harshest statement in going underground is "the public wants what the public gets" - what makes the line sting is the possibility it's not being sarcastic. the year before the song came out is when the conservatives swept into power in the UK on quite a large margin - this after everything we might call radicalising or liberatory in punk. what if the public really did want what they got? as a pop band, a band defined by some sense of speaking to or for that public, what would this mean?

we're still quite a ways removed from populations denied the possibility of public existence. so maybe in art 'underground' just means a shiver - of premonition, that it could happen to you, of memory, the things you can never afford to forget. necessarily privileged, the domain of those who can still afford to speak and have something to lose. but registering in miniature some felt change in the relationship to public life itself. not necessarily a dramatic change, more like, a cooling - the sizing up, costing out of possibilities that might once have seemed inherent to the world. a narrowed sense of what to expect from other people, from yourself. you grow to assume the chill in the air, you no longer remember what it was to walk outside without a coat.

part of the attraction to me of art that gets called experimental is in a refusal of these terms. to be brash and noisy, to make leaps that aren't explained in the assumption that someone out there will get it regardless, to refuse the kind of costing in which we might say each new idea must be paid for with the dutiful recycling of three received ones. to make it new, be absolutely modern - whatever that means, now that the modern can feel like the feudal with an app store paint job. i can't disagree with people claiming this kind of art in particular is, to use the hated phrase, "what we need right now": insisting on possibility and pleasure against the horizon of austerity, against almost a decade of sustained reaction. but. i also find that's not the art i'm making, that it has not been, for a while. that at some point i climbed into genre fiction, into narrative, like a mole burying itself in the dirt, and i'm still there. whatever it is i believe or find good it's like i see through a veil. and what art has become to me somehow is building endless, winding tunnels, underground.

there's pleasure on the album cover, food and drink, but the scene is too closed for us to imagine friends or comrades could enter to enjoy them (the machinegun lady in the background is so posed and still she might as well be as dead as the nazi official). there's a picture of de gaulle, but the de gaulle of the resistance years instead of whatever it is he represented by 1968. it's a directly political picture, bluntly stressing a connection between style and politics... but also it's not, there's no politics at all, because politics implies other people - perhaps what we have instead is an afterimage of politics, politics as familiar texture, shorn of hope or expectation.

and nobody else can get inside the image. he's looking out as if daring you to try, or warning you not to. pleasure is alive, but of who that pleasure's for, or what it means, nothing can be assumed. he's playing for the cow.