999,938: Scott Walker - Next

Jacques Brel was one of the most renowned performers and songwriters of the Parisian cabaret scene. Not widely known among English-speaking audiences (there’s an obvious language barrier), Brel had a cutting sense of irony that can easily be lost in translation from the original French language and cultural setting. What’s more, Brel was noted for broaching topics that few other writers would touch, with masculine swagger and graphic honesty. All of this can make English translations of Brel songs a jarringly bizarre listening experience. Appropriately, few rock careers have been as jarringly bizarre as that of Scott Walker, Brel’s most prolific English-language interpreter. Walker became a teen idol in Britain in 1966 with the Walker Brothers, none of whose members were actually related, British, or named Walker (Scott’s real last name was Engel). His sobbing baritone was perfect for melodramatic heartbreak ballads, but upon going solo, Walker pursued a much different aesthetic modeled in part on Brel’s work. His own writing was filled with weirdly evocative imagery, sharing Brel’s obsessions with death and the seedier side of life, and it was all wrapped in grandiose orchestrations that often crossed the line into bombast. “Next” (an English translation of Brel’s “Au suivant”) appears on Walker’s second solo album, which actually topped the charts in Britain. It’s a first-person tale of a still-young soldier who loses his virginity in an army-sponsored mobile whorehouse during the war. The song opens with the narrator “naked as sin, an army towel covering my belly.” Naked body follows naked body in and out of the brothel truck, with the efficiency of an industrial assembly line. While the narrator laments his loss of innocence in such a cold fashion, one of his most vivid memories is “the queer lieutenant who slapped our asses”; Walker’s rendition follows with a lisping imitation of said character chanting “Next…you’re next…” (remember, this man was a teen idol just two years previous). The narrator swears on his first case of gonorrhea (which he evidently contracted here) that this voice haunts him, associating it with the smells of whiskey, mud, and corpses. (Apparently nothing makes the horror of war worse than the voice of a homosexual.) Though the now-jaded narrator claims in hindsight that the whole experience “wasn’t so tragic,” it colors his view of new lovers who all seem to be whispering “next…” His dreams are haunted by images of standing “in endless naked lines/Of the following and the followed,” and in the last verse he decides to one day “cut his legs off and burn myself alive” in order to get out of line. By this point, we’re clearly dealing with a metaphor about individuality, though after all we’ve just witnessed, I’ll be fucked if I can figure out exactly what it all represents. Adding to the disorientation, there is nothing in the American pop tradition to reconcile the song’s subject matter with the orchestral musical backdrop. It’s impossible to convey the alien quality of Walker singing Brel’s English translations; even after they’ve been experienced over and over and over again, they never quite lose that sheer “wtf?” factor.

Next - Scott Walker