No relation to Biz Markie, unfortunately

So disturbing. The song's called "Diary of an Unborn Child", from an album with the tragically hopeful title "Volume 1". The mp3 is provided by show and tell music, a rather amazing outsider music resource I found through kittyspit.

Kittyspit, incidentally, is outstanding. To think I never would have found out about it without hitting that top right "next blog>>" button a few times. And "Lil' Markie" would never have been able to sing me his horrible song.

How to wrestle with this unbelievable exercise in creepiness? Here: what it most of all calls to my mind is a two-sentence bit from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that's been kicking around my head for the past couple of weeks, since I finally got around to reading the book. Here it is:

"Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause."

That last bit stumped me when I read it, and it still sort of stumps me now. The "secret cause" of what? "Diary of an Unborn Child", in a most general sense, is a song about a death. Joseph Campbell, writing about Joyce's aesthetic sense as expressed in this quote, says that the secret cause of death is destiny: "...your own life course is the secret cause of your death... The accident that you die this way instead of in a different time and a different place is a fulfillment of your destiny.” (Thou Art That, edited by Eugene Kennedy, Novato, California, New World Library, 2001, pp 34, 35)

So. When the tragedy of "Diary of an Unborn Child" is assumed to be the termination of a fetus, the secret cause of this tragedy is therefore the course of the fetus's life. All through the song, Lil' Markie is carefully noting his physical development inside the womb. The tragedy of the abortion, announced with a fairly gastrointestinal key change, brings the listener's already queasy aesthetic sensibility to a fever pitch: "Today, my mother killed me". The listener is now encouraged to make a choice between pity and terror; to identify with the sufferer, or with his destiny.

But then Lil' Markie starts to sing.

This awful, awful voice breaks into song, to consider remorsefully and with gut-churningly inappropriate bathos, his "tragic" destiny. The melody is ludicrous, the lyrics ("I wonder what I would have grown up to be? I guess I'll never know, cause Mommy, you killed me") are grossly sentimental, icky, insincere. The song, which so far has been nothing but an extremely bad idea, a sort of musical nerve disorder, is now vaulted into a rarefied plateau: it is an instance of sonic terrorism.

Lil' Markie's omniscient little narrator has strapped this casiotone monstrosity around his waist like a bomb. The issue that is really at stake here is not the tragedy of abortion. It is the meanspirited ugliness of bad art. This song does not describe a tragedy so much as it is one.

So the choice that Joyce gives us - identify with the human sufferer or with the secret cause, pity or terror - is, in the face of "Diary of an Unborn Child", really as follows. The most facile choice of sufferer in this instance would seem to be the listener - you and me, bub. But there's something false about identifying with yourself as victim. That's one reason why we are moved to laugh.

In fact, the true sufferer is Lil' Markie. His bathetic unwholesomeness as a songwriter is a crippling social disease. His gift is to be irretrievably unfortunate. The ridiculousness of his song divides him from his message. Can we pity Lil' Markie? Some may choose to, but there's a malodorous intent at work in this song that keeps me, personally, from making that choice. I am forced to choose identification with the real secret cause: the basic, human inadequateness experienced by everyone who falls between Li'l Markie and James Joyce in the spectrum of ability to craft our emotions into art. Our own mush-mouthedness, limited vocabulary, stunted palette, whatever.

It's such terror as this song engenders that finally moves us, and makes us able to even enjoy it. Man, I wanna watch Eraserhead again.