The Old Man's Back Again
Scott Walker's Baroque Pop and the Uncanny Returns of Evil Empires
Prague Spring ended in summer. On August 21, 1968, a phalanx of Soviet tanks rolled through Wenceslas Square, Prague’s bustling main thoroughfare, in a dramatic show of force designed to bring the Spring’s period of democratization throughout Czechoslovakia to its knees. The reformist Alexander Dubček, a Slovak statesman, had been elected on January 5 of that year to the position of First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and until the invasion in August, Dubček oversaw Prague Spring’s popular cultural and economic liberalization under the aegis of what he famously called “socialism with a human face.”
The photos of the Soviet invasion, of which there are no shortage, are gripping, stark, and, I want to say, volcanic—as if in capturing political tumult they are bearing witness to searing, seismic ruptures in the earth itself. In one photo, a clean cut, middle-class looking man in a tie and dark trench coat, carrying a leather briefcase, has paused in the middle of the square, his mouth slightly agape as the tanks creep past. He is literally stopped in his tracks. Their monstrous presence has shattered the quiet patter of his day.
A year later, the brooding, avant-garde crooner Scott Walker released his fifth solo album of baroque pop, the mystical and poetic Scott 4, and on it, a song whose full title is The Old Man’s Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime).
Here are the first two verses, with chorus.
I' seen a hand, I' seen a vision
It was reaching through the clouds to risk a dream
The shadow crossed the sky
And it crushed it to the ground, just like a beast
[Chorus]
The old man's back again
The old man's back again
[Verse 2]
I seen a woman standing in the snow
She was silent as she watched them take her man
Teardrops burned her cheeks
For she'd thought she'd heard the shadow had left this land
[Chorus]
The old man's back again
The old man's back again
Walker captures history in miniature, building a tableau of characters from soldiers to passersby who are all equally stunned by their dread—stunned by the return of the oppressive Stalinist regime.
I have listened to this song maybe fifty times since the US election. Even now, around me it seems to hang in the air, waiting to be heard. Trump’s victory. The old man’s back again. The dread in those words. The uncanniness of the return.
Like the Czechs who lined the streets of Prague that day, like the characters in Walker’s song, we still struggle to grasp just how the old man is here again, his shadow over the land. How can the old man be back? He is old, and we have beaten him. History moves forward, because time only moves forward, isn’t that right? The old man coming back is fucking up our whole understanding of time. Remember MLK’s belief, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice? Well the arc just got a little longer. If the arc is still there at all.
Alternate theory: maybe the seemingly permanent anti-establishment fixation of the US electorate ensures that moving forward we’ll constantly pendulum swing with great violence every four years from one side of the political equation to the other. Maybe uncanny returns are the new normal.
Maybe the old man can come back, but bitches can too.
The song ends, as several on Scott 4 do, with Walker scatting—wordless jazzy syllables up and down the melodic scale. My wife and I joke about the strange tension on Scott 4 between lyrical subject matter and the jazzy inflections, joking that the effect is something like Scott singing “The soldier had his legs blown off, and now he’s a ragged shell of his former self with nothing to live for….doobeedoobeedo oh yeeahhhhh”
Here the content is pushing against the idiom. In Walker’s later, denser works, he often gives up the cozy melodic cocktail lounge trapping altogether, pursuing expressions of darkness without a safety net. The Old Man’s scatting and lush orchestration, at odds with the song’s grim story, play out all sorts of tensions. What if pop music spoke the truth? What if it held up a mirror to horror, to cataclysm, but was still catchy? What if you could dance to the end of the world?