Imagine (suggested Friedrich Nietzsche) that a demon suddenly said to you: “You will have to live your life, exactly the same, again and again.” Would you gnash your teeth and curse him? Or have you ever experienced a tremendous moment that would make it all worthwhile, even to live through again the point when you realised quite how crashingly disappointing The Second Coming was, so that you would praise him as a god?
Judging by this week’s suggestions, the majority of musicians fall into the first category: most songs about reversing are suffused with regret and the wish to return to the past in order to change it. The Cardigans want to erase and rewind, Toni Braxton wants someone to unbreak her heart, Richard Butler wants to undo everything, from every bed he made to every step he’s ever taken, and Frightened Rabbit are walking backwards, not for Christmas but because there’s nowhere else to go but back to her, again. Of course it’s all an impossible fantasy, and the singer knows it; we realise the mistake we made only when it’s too late to take it back or throw the gears into reverse.
The idea of a life lived backwards, rather than simply rewound, inspires a more creative response; as writers like Kurt Vonnegut (and, like him or loathe him, Martin Amis) have explored, decisions take on a different value and moral weight when the flow of events is backwards rather than forwards. Thursday explicitly reference Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow, while Marine and Maximo Park offer rather different musical takes on the idea of “life in reverse”.
We are fated to live our lives in one direction, either caught up in the constant uncertainty of the moment or, like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, staring at the past and the endless catastophe piling up in front of him as an irresistible storm drives him into the future. Things flowing in an unexpected direction are a portent of disaster, like the Mississippi running backwards in Tom Russell’s apocalyptic lament.
I’m of an age where backwards music means hidden satanic messages or Freddie Mercury singing that he likes to smoke marijuana (allegedly), but there are plenty of less apocryphal examples. The Artful Dodger pays tribute, as Magicman explained, to the vital role played in classic hip hop by the technique of disrupting the usual clockwise rotation of a record, while Kevin Ayers uses backwards vocals to sinister, unsettling effect.
Now let’s begin with the backwards and forwards abstractions of Four Tet’s Reversing.
The playlist
Toni Braxton, Unbreak My Heart
Richard Butler, Good Days, Bad Days
Frightened Rabbit, My Backwards Walk
Maximo Park, My Life in Reverse
Tom Russell, Mississippi River Runnin’ Backwards - Not on YouTube; is on Spotify, Tom Russell – Mississippi River Runnin’ Backwards
Artful Dodger feat. Craig David, Re Rewind
