"All truly meaningful music is a swan-song."

--Friedrich Nietzsche

"Admirers do not count. One must have utterly overwhelmed at least one soul."

--Jean Cocteau

It's ironic, and not in an amusing Seinfeldian way, that Michael

Gira

has

paid the price for actually being all those rock 'n' roll hero-

type

things that others have only intermittently embodied before moving

on to

commercial corporate whoredom. The Iggy Pops, the Lou Reeds,

the

David

Bowies of this world, those formerly brave explorers of the lower

depths,

have all in varying degrees sold out the Muse and cashed in, and

now

largely

trade on those great things they did when they weren't making

much

money.

For example, in a "Best Albums of All Time" poll, how many people

would

choose Bowie's Let's Dance over Low, Reed's

New Sensations over Berlin, Pop's Naughty Little

Doggie

over Raw Power? Let's not kid ourselves, as many of us

are

wont to do in this age of complicitous capitalist critiques where the

game is

so often called "I'm not to blame;" there is an inverse,

antagonistic

relationship between filthy lucre and the soul of art, between

successful capitalism and quality. It's the dilemma that killed Kurt

Cobain,

and thinking about it makes many of us very uncomfortable, so we

tend to

sweep the issue under the rug whenever possible. Why not go

and

listen to

some "alternative" corporate rock and forget about it? Where's that

Beck CD?

Which brings us back to the Swans. Now that it's over, and Gira

has

killed off the band he fought for over 15 years to keep afloat, all the

while

making very little in the way of both compromises and money, it's

never been

more apparent how much he was needed, how very valuable he

was in

the context

of an increasingly shallow, vapid popular culture. For if Gira and

Swans

have "failed" in the sense that they didn't sell in droves and end up

hanging

with the cultural glitterati, this "failure" is far more important in

the

great scheme of things than the "success," or commercial

validation,

of Reed

by Honda, Pop and William Burroughs by Nike, Bowie Bonds, and

so on.

"The

aesthetics of failure are alone durable," writes Jean Cocteau. "He

who

does not understand failure is lost ... If one has not understood this

secret, this aesthetic, this ethic of failure, one has understood

nothing,

and fame is empty." Somewhere along the career route there's a

crossroads -- perhaps the one where Robert Johnson sold his soul

to

the Devil -- and Gira took the less trodden path, waving goodbye

to

his artistic

forebears with a grim resoluteness tinged with the foreknowledge

of the

hardships to come.

The paradox of the Swans' story is thus the fact of their

"unpopularity"

in a mass sense while still operating within the realm of "popular

culture."

By choosing to remain true to his evolving vision, Gira has joined

the

ranks

of what poet Gary Snyder calls "The Great Subculture," that line of

outsider

artists in the West that stretches from Diogenes (who masturbated

in the

marketplace) to the Marquis De Sade to Rimbaud to Henry Miller

to

Swans,

those whose influence is still only beginning to be felt and may not

come

to fruition for another century or more. To choose to "fail," to

remain outside the great money/success death game, is a

paradoxical form of

victory when practised as a discipline by these artists -- a

discipline that

Gira and company adhered to for a decade-and-a-half. Swans' art

is

a form of

mysticism as inverse exaltation, a de-powering process

where, as

philosopher Michel Foucault puts it, the sacred outsiders find

"salvation in

and by their very exclusion ... they are saved by the hand that is

not

stretched out." In other words, Swans prove through example the

existential

adage: Save Yourself.

Swans Are Dead thus functions as a neo-mystical

millennial

document,

an article of faith and sacrifice by its creators offered up for the

few who

refuse to trade humankind's most precious commodity -- the soul --

for the numbed

half-life of money-grubbing on the corporate treadmill as practiced

by those

doomed to wake up too late to find out that they've wasted their

lives. The

fact that this truly awesome, epic work of art will undoubtedly fail

to turn up on many critics' facile "Top Ten" lists this year only

confirms

the magnitude of Swans' monumental failure, a failure which

damns

all of

those enslaved fashion victims who would purport to call

themselves critics

while going ga-ga over the new Madonna album.

An impeccable-sounding live document of the band's final two

tours

in 1995

and 1997, SAD encapsulates the Swans entire career, with

one

of the

highlights being a gripping reinterpretation of what Gira deems

one

of the

band's finest moments, "I Crawled," from 1984's Young God

EP,

this

time with his long-time musical and personal cohort Jarboe

replacing him on

vocals, adding a perverse twist to the lines "You're my father / I

obey you /

come into my room / put your hands on my throat." "Now ride!"

Jarboe commands

repeatedly in a truly frightening, demonic Exorcist croak,

reversing the victim/victimizer equation as the band pulverizes the

song into its final oblivion. Tracks like "Final Sac" and "The

Sound"

from

1995 suggest a fantasy merger between Leonard Cohen and

prime-

era Pink Floyd,

while Gira's thunderous "I See Them All Lined Up" is what heavy

metal

should have sounded like by 1998.

"Feel Happiness" is a lengthy epic which evolves through a series

of

themes ranging from crushing Wagnerian hard rock to truly

transcendent

chiming balladry in which Gira delivers his most unguarded,

emotionally

potent vocal ever, perhaps addressing the band's detractors over

the

years

with the lines "I'm truly sorry / for what I never did / But I forgive

you

too / for your indifference." The kinetic playing of the world's

greatest

drummer (post-Bonham), Phil Puleo of the late and lamented NYC

band Cop Shoot

Cop, intensifies all of the 1997 tour material, especially "Low Life

Form,"

which achieves a synthesis of the most intense moments of CSC

and

Swans, as

bone-quakingly intense a proposition as one might imagine.

Finally,

the

staggering epic "Blood Promise," the final cut from the 1997 tour, is

the

sound of Swans passing over into the realm of myth, where they

will

wait to

lovingly corrupt another willing initiate into the hazy unter-

realm of

The Great Subculture.

De Sade, in fact, gleefully dreamed of creating a book whose

intensity

would be sufficient to corrupt others long after its author's physical

demise, leading them away from mainstream society and its

stultifying,

life-denying conventions. While the Divine Marquis may not have

anticipated

digital technology, I'm sure he would have heartily approved of the

siren song

called Swans Are Dead, a Dionysian death-letter that

paradoxically

teems with life, and forever calls to those inclined to hear it with a

pungent invitation to join those who live and create on the

margins.

These

beautiful failures shall endure.