1-2-3-4: all music worlds will crumble to dust
There's a moment in Dignan Porch's song Sad Shape where the singer Joe Walsh says "2, 3, 4" just ahead of a big chord change. In my opinion, it totally makes the song (check it out: at 1:32, and again at 2:18, and once again at 3:19). Standard stuff, you might say. Just a filler ahead of the stirring chord change. Yeah, maybe, but I think the count-in is itself part of the power. Two-three-four, one-two-three-four - the ultimate cliché kick-off moment within rock is also, I reckon, charged with supernatural power. Sort of ... I have no idea when it became a thing to include the count-in within a recording itself - perhaps it's always featured in more "informal" recordings, like those chat-and-play sessions that Alan Lomax did with Big Bill Broonzy and others. Or is it just that there are a lot of live recordings in existence and we've become used to hearing this because bands continue to do it on stage? Whatever, since at least the Ramones with their super-abrupt barked-out "1-2-3-4!", I think there's been a distinctly macho edge to this little bit of musical enumeration (by contrast there's a great Buzzcocks bootleg - from New York in '79? - where Pete Shelley's various "1-2-3-4s" have a deliciously "tired-camp" quality). Anyway, macho or not, I reckon the power of the count-in probably lies in the fact that it's a reminder that music is supposed to be about keeping in time, but keeping in time in a special way. Time + instruments/voices = music. When Prince in Sign O' The Times (his best song?) intones "Time" at regular, well-timed intervals in the song it definitely packs a punch. Put it all together and it has a distinctly prophetic/apocalyptic edge. In 54-46 (That's My Number), Toots Hibbert sings:
"Give it to me one time (huh)
Give it to me two times (huh-huh)
Give it to me three times (huh-huh-huh)
Give it to me four times (huh-huh-huh-huh)"
A song about doing time (in jail) after a wrongful arrest - pretty amazing that this should be one of the very first reggae songs to break out of Jamaica. A break-out song in more than one sense. Numbers, time, music ... escape. Escape from what though? Escape from the 9-5, from normality, from a dull sense of regularity? Seems to me that the regimentation of "keeping time" and counting and so on is always potentially in tension with the utopian, break-out-of-this-fucking-place impulse in some of the most powerful music. (I guess the "chaos" of improv is where this is given a measure of free rein). Is music just too powerful to ... stay in time? To break out of time, so to speak, is, if I remember correctly, what Jon Savage was referring to when he mentioned (in England's Dreaming) the mesmerising power of seeing a London punk with just "1977" daubed in giant letters on his leather jacket in ... January 1977. Yeah, probably just a fairly routine homage to the Clash, but still, it probably provided a frission of something. Some kind of minor "shock" - a small gesture toward doing the impossible and breaking free from the normal steady flow of time (the shock of the new/shock of the now). Actually, all the hype about punk - and specifically 1976 - being a sort of cultural "year zero" must, at the time, have had quite a sinister edge when you recall that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had announced their year zero policy only the year before (a holiday in Cambodia, indeed ...). In any case, despite its polemics and hyperbole, one of the ironies of the supposedly scorched-earth-like punk rock phenomenon was that it incorporated so much old stuff (Johnny Rotten's Ted gear, standard rock tropes, dozens of music refugees - mostly male - from early-70s pub rock bands etc). Basically, it wasn't anywhere near as modern as it pretended to be. By contrast, for example, when it emerged in the 1990s, jungle was very modern sounding. Let's not forget though, modernity is always shortlived however fresh it may feel at the time. In a long section dealing with modernism in Walter Benjamin's book on Baudelaire, he quotes the French novelist Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly saying that "a few years bury the mores of a society more effectively than all the dust of the volcanoes". C'est vrai! Give it a few years and we'll all be dust and where will your cool punk count-ins and your shockingly-new music be then? Nowhere. Gone. So drink up - it's later than you think. Time, gentlemen please!
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