This first appeared on Splice Today.
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“Some say love is a burning thing/that it makes a fiery ring,” Matthew Houk warbles at the beginning of his latest single, “Song for Zula.” His voice catches and the music surges and shimmers as he earnestly confides, “But I know love as a fading thing/just as fickle as a feather in a stream.”
Houk is, of course, referencing the classic Johnny Cash track “Ring of Fire.” That song is a straight ahead, hit-radio ode to the painfulness of passion — performed with Cash’s trademark trundling beat, it delivers its simple message in two minutes and a half, and then gets out. Houk, on the other hand, offers a six-minute tour de force of searingly honest vacillation — a towering work of genius rising up from Cash’s simple blueprint.
Or at least I think that’s what I’m supposed to get out of “Song for Zula”. A less charitable reading might instead see the track as a bloated, shapeless, default-hippie self-mythologizing mess.
In ostentatiously complicating Cash, Houk can perhaps be seen as offering an alternative to Cash’s baritone working-man plain-speaking masculinity. For Cash, love is fire; for Houk, it’s one thing and then another; he is a sensitive new age guy, and his feelings cannot be contained in your three minute song. The end result, though, is not so much to suggest that Houk is deep as to suggest that “sensitive new age guy” is just a euphemism for “narcissistic windbag.” The droning, fourth-drawer Neil Young imitation backing plods on as Houk praises his own sterling, uncontainable romanticism. ” My feet are gold. My heart is white/And we race out on the desert plains all night.” There’s something about a cage, something about how he’s a killer, something about being free and not being free and it’s all transcendent and lyrical. What is more romantic than to see the romantic admit that his romantic heart is afraid of romance?
In contrast, Cash’s “Ring of Fire” doesn’t come off as romantic at all. Instead, it’s stolidly hokey. The famous Mexican horn flourish makes it sound less like he’s falling into a ring of fire than like he’s unaccountably wandered into a bullfight. His phrasing, always rugged at the best of times, sounds particularly tongue-tied here. The first word, “Love,” is almost off-key; the repeated, “ring of fire/ring of fire/ring of fire” at the fade is so weirdly clunky it sounds like the record is skipping.
The only part of the Cash record that comes across as even vaguely professional is the backing by the Carter Family sisters — June, Anita, and Helen. Their mountain harmonies are mixed low…but not low enough to erase their incongruity.
That incongruity, though, is actually kind of appropriate. “Ring of Fire” was written by June Carter about the experience of falling in love with Johnny Cash — which, as she said on more than one occasion, was a scary thing to do, what with the massive pill addiction and the out of control rockstar antics.
The lyrics may sound simple, then, but the circumstances give them a complicated, and even perverse, double meaning. Cash is singing a song about falling in love with himself; he’s ventriloquizing his soon-to-be-wife talking about him, even as that soon to be wife sings in the background a song that, for most listeners, reads as being about Johnny Cash falling in love with her. Identity and gender stumble clumsily against each other, and/or melt seamlessly into one another — love is, in several senses, not being able to tell the difference. “The taste of love is sweet,” Cash intones, but whose love? Which love? Part of the sweetness, perhaps, is that awkwardness — the simple rush of falling down, down, down, and not being sure who is falling towards who.
In “Song for Zula”, on the other hand, there isn’t really any other who to stumble against. Maybe that’s why the Youtube promo image for the song shows some random woman with her face blurred out and her breasts almost spilling out of her jacket sitting on a hotel bed while another women with her face obscured lies beside her and some ill-shaven alterna-bro laughs heartily in the foreground. The would-be expansive, would-be introspective balladeering is, it turns out, just a soundtrack for banal soft-core. For Houk, the problem with “Ring of Fire” is not so much the metaphor as the topic. Sensitive geniuses don’t fall in love, apparently — at least not with other people.
So by quoting Johnny Cash, Matthew Houk challenged him to a coolness contest and lost, and because his song quotes Cash it must be judged not for the pop song it is but for its failure to be “a six-minute tour de force of searing honest vacillation, a towering work of genius rising up from Cash’s simple blueprint,” which is what you’re supposed to get out of it, although I don’t know who told you that, and for Houk’s failure to be as cool as Johnny Cash, although few recording artists are, and most of them aren’t asked to be?
(This comment first appeared at Splice Today!)
You are the only one who wants to bother to comment on this essay, on whatever platform!
It seems you won’t bother to answer my question though. I realize I phrased it very poorly. I can clarify if you wish. In fact, I will even if you don’t wish:
When did Houk say he was as cool as Cash?
Why does he need to be?
Who told you his song was supposed to be a searing…towering…whatever, rather than just a pop song?
Oh; sorry. Thought they were rhetorical.
1. He compares himself to Cash when he makes those lines central to the song.
2. If you make Johnny Cash central to your song,and your song is a piece of shit, then I am going to make fun of you.
3. I listened to the song and reached my conclusions. That’s what critics or listeners do. If you have a different interpretation, go ahead and talk about it. You think he’s trying to be Beyonce rather than Johnny Cash or Neil Young? I don’t see it, but you’re welcome to try to convince me.
Those fucking “Mexican horns” wreck Ring of Fire for me, along with the dumb celestial chorus. But Cash= real deal, for sure. Still, without being the sort of folknik purist who thinks electric guitars are the sawn of Satan, I recoil from over-orchestration in country music.
Looking at you, there, Houk.
But I think you’re off chastising him for being a Cash parasite. Come on, love as a burning fire is probably the oldest cliché in lyric poetry.
And it’s perfectly legitimate for artists to challenge the tropes of other artists. Consider a high example, Shakespeare’s sonnet:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
If ol’Will can, then Houk can.
Mind you, that doesn’t stop the song from being crap.
Regarding 1, in the lines you cite he quotes a song made famous by Johnny Cash but I don’t see him comparing himself to Johnny Cash.
Regarding 2, I understand you making fun of him for writing a bad song, but making fun of him for not being Johnny Cash I don’t quite get (which is why I am so foolishly engaging you).
Regarding 3, is there no chance he is trying to be himself? If he were actually trying to be Johnny Cash, I think he’d be doing a lot of things differently.
He’s referencing other performers, which is what art does.
I mean, of course he’s presenting himself as a romantic individualist. But that’s a stance with a pedigree, too.
And not sure why it’s foolish to engage with me? Of course, you should stop if you’d like, but this doesn’t seem like a particularly antagonistic conversation as these things go.
“He’s referencing other performers, which is what art does.”
This I agree with, as far as it goes. I do not agree, however, that referincing another performer is the same as declaring onself cooler than that performer.
It doesn’t have to. In this case he’s disagreeing with the original song, and presenting himself (I argue) as more sensitive and thoughtful than the original.
I don’t see the evidence that that stuff is in the song and not just in your head.
…and I think you’re being willfully blind. But we can agree to disagree.
Willfully blind? Why would you say that?
You say I’m seeing things that aren’t there; I say you refuse to see things that are fairly obvious.
Though, like I said, no reason we can’t disagree amicably.
I thought we *were* disagreeing amicably.
I did not say you are seeing things that aren’t there. I said I see no evidence that the things you see are there. You have not presented any. I guess you don’t think you need to since the things you see are so self-evident that the only way one wouldn’t see them is to do so on purpose. I don’t know what reason I would have to do that.
To country-fried indierockers like Matthew Houk, Johnny Cash is nothing less than a god. The idea that Houk is presenting himself as superior to Johnny fucking Cash is absurd to me. If he were doing that, and being as obvious about it as you say he is, I don’t think his fans would take kindly to it.