Four minutes and five seconds: So what’s going on in “Paris 1919”? A Pitchfork review of the 2006 reissue suggested the whole John Cale album is a loose concept record about the post-World War I settlement. This idea doesn’t quite sit right with me, even though an inter-war Weimar vibe tickled many 70s European songwriters (and Cabaret had come out on film the year before, to enormous acclaim.) Certainly though this title track must relate to the 1919 peace conferences - if it relates to anything - or at least be set in amongst them.
You can hear it as a song by someone - a diplomat, a functionary, a secretary - caught up in these events. Which must have been honestly extraordinary - we naturally view the activities of 1919 with bitter hindsight because the attempt to come together and end war forever was a hideous failure. But to have been part of a delegation making that attempt, without the knowledge or suspicion of what was to come! To be occupied with affairs of high politics, global politics for the first time, in a city less than a day from the annihilated mudscapes of the former Western Front, while all around delegates from Japan, America, Arabia, British and French colonies mingled, argued and flirted…
Cale’s prissy, jittery, thrillingly hopeful music catches all this, both the excitement of the time and the mockery of history’s judgement on it. And he wraps it all up inside what’s surely a love song (that surge of chorus feels like a love song), though perhaps a love song to a ghost.
What would your 4’05” track be?
This is one of my favorite songs ever; that I once called it, even in the middle of a lot of point-missing and low-information voting, the sixth-greatest song of the 1970s is something I’m still quite proud of.
The album as a whole feels to me less like a concept album about the end of the Great War than a rather hodgepodge collection of twentieth-century Penguins on a spartan, elegantly designed bookshelf. There are explicit references to Dylan Thomas, the Spanish Civil War (which brings in both Hemingway and Orwell), and García Lorca, and my general impression is of a work situated halfway between the dense rigor of modernism and the reference-heavy play of postmodernism, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien kissing — only Welsh instead of Irish. (But I knew my literary history long before I knew my music history; and this is one of the few albums that triggers those sorts of associations in my mind.)
The sound of the song carries over those experiments made by British pop bands in the 60s (“Eleanor Rigby” and “Lady Jane” come to mind most prominently) in which classical or chamber orchestration was applied to pop forms so that you get the energy of rock without the instrumentation; a certain weightlessness and atemporality results. Cale was, of course, trained in modernist music, so his orchestration sounds more like highly-colored twentieth-century chamber music than baroque or neoclassical, and there’s even a tug of minimalism in the repeated cello line which Tom hears as jittery but I hear as insistent, a way of establishing bpm without a kickdrum.
The more I listen to it and think about it, the more sure I am that Paris 1919 is one of the greatest albums ever made. It’s certainly more interesting and holds up better than Sgt. Pepper’s or Who’s Next or whatever other canonical 60s/70s album I once loved but can’t listen to any more.
