Shaun Ryder, the visionary neo-Zaumist
Ollie Ledwith
On first sight of Happy Mondays’ singer Shaun Ryder on stage, one would be forgiven for confusing him for either a drug addict or drug dealer, both of which would incidentally be factually accurate observations. However, beneath this exterior of narcosis resides the mind of perhaps Britain’s greatest poet of the 20th century, who single-handedly imported avant-garde poetics from 1910s Russia and reimagined them in an English context. Now a published author, with Faber and Faber releasing a book of the musician’s greatest lyrics in 2019, at last his unconventional talent has received its justified recognition.
Ryder himself states, ‘Half the time I was more concerned with how the words were sounding than with what they actually meant,’ and in this seemingly insignificant, throwaway comment, Ryder aligns himself with Zaumism. Born in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, the movement attempted to transcend the traditional bounds of the meaning of language, allowing the sounds themselves to interact, independent of their conventional context. Whilst there is no conclusive evidence that Ryder did in fact read Zaumist or Cubo-Futurist work, I would like to think that at some point in the mid 1980s he accessed poems by Khlebnikov, or perhaps read the Futurist opera ‘Victory Over the Sun’.
The influence of such works certainly permeates the pages of ‘Wrote For Luck’, Ryder’s lyric book, perhaps most emphatically in the song of the same name. With its minimalist instrumental contribution paying homage to the acid house rave scene, the music video naturally features Legend, a club in Manchester, packed to the rafters with MDMA-fuelled Mancunians, with Ryder in their midst, claiming, ‘I don’t read, I just guess / There’s more on one side but it’s getting less.’ Whilst superficially these lyrics may not appear to convey much, if one allows them to break free from the confines of meaning, sonically they merge perfectly with the instrumental and visual elements of the song to create a monolithic wall of ecstasy, in every sense of the word.
Nonetheless, if one were to dig deeper at the conventional context of these lyrics, putting aside Ryder’s aspirations of a transcendental language, a myriad of valid interpretations become apparent. One such interpretation might be a multi-layered rejection of anti-intellectualism which is superficially presented as an anti-intellectual attack; whilst he claims to guess rather than read, Ryder may actually have spent many of his formative years imbibing the world’s richest forms of literary culture, the highlights of which subsequently appear in his work. Therefore, Ryder sings this line with his tongue firmly in his cheek, in turn emphasising the influence that poetic precedent has had on his work. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as a pre-emptive rejection of the academic over-analysis of his lyrics à la John Lennon’s ‘I am the Walrus’, and thus by claiming not to read but guess, Ryder attempts to subvert the inevitable analyses of scholars by taking the thought out of his creative process. The debate over the meaning of these lines will rage on until the flickering candle of humanity is at last quenched, not least because of the inability of Ryder himself to resolve it; his memory of these years of his life has been almost entirely erased due to substance abuse, leaving his lyrics intact, but the artistic intentions behind them lost forever.
Consider Khlebnikov’s deconstruction of the Russian word for laughter, ‘смех’, in his poem ‘Заклятие смехом’ (Incantation by Laughter); here a number of neologisms arise whilst the poet toys with the word, including ‘рассмейтесь’, ‘смехачи’, ‘усмеяльно’ and ‘смеянствуют’. Does a similar process not occur in the Happy Mondays single ‘God’s Cop’? Ryder takes apart the phrase ‘God made it easy on me’, distorting it until it reads ‘God rains Es down on me’, and then modifying it once again to ‘God lays his Es down on me’. Here Ryder doesn’t form his own neologisms, but rather coins an entire phrase and thus eclipses Khlebnikov in the process, as he deconstructs the common phrase of ‘God made it easy on me’, and injects it with a heavy dose of the Manchester rave scene of the late 1980s.
Bastions of the unorthodox and the avant-garde often lurk in areas in which one would least expect to find them, and certainly the discography of the Happy Mondays is one such fabled location. In the official publishing of his lyrics, Shaun Ryder has finally received the credit he has deserved for decades, and the British poetic tradition, born with Shakespeare and boasting greats such as John Milton and William Wordsworth, now at last seems secure once more, at least for another generation.