Kieran.Stories

‘I’m stepping inside a universe designed against my own beliefs’ – Clairo

If I watch those YouTube clips, I am convinced. The Wizard of Oz and The Dark Side of the Moon are connected. They come together to form a meaningful whole. But am I convinced that Pink Floyd planned this? It would have been impossible in 1973. They wouldn’t have had the DVD! But that would make it immediately less interesting, too. It has to be a coincidence. But why is the natural reaction to learning that something is a coincidence a collective shrug? Surely, meaning can exist within a coincidence. Please excuse all the strawman arguments in a post about The Wizard of Oz.

I think the reason this is interesting at all has something to do with pre-history.

In his piece, ‘The Other Window’ (Doubting Castle, October 2023), Robin Allender describes how, as a child, he assumed that David Bowie launched his career with Labyrinth. It’s stronger than that. Bowie came from Labyrinth. ‘In the solipsistic bubble of childhood I had assumed that because this was the first time that I had heard about David Bowie then this must be the first time that anyone had heard about him.’ In the same way, I did not understand that The Wizard of Oz existed outside of my experience. It was such a core part of my interiority, how could anyone else have even seen it? I had chewed the corners of the VHS case. No one else had my video. Replacing the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz feels so uncanny because it changes something that was once as real as going to Morrisons with Mum. You interfere with the fabric of a universe that existed, in the grand scheme of things, only yesterday.

On learning that Bowie existed before and after Labyrinth, Allender writes in the same piece, ‘It’s like when you try to imagine whatever is beyond the edges of the universe; you start thinking thoughts that feel slightly beyond what the brain is capable of thinking….’ It is hard to capture that feeling of imagining beyond the universe as an adult. The world is too fixed. It often feels like this is very much it. Allender also writes about the mysteries of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, how he realised as a child that his questions were unanswerable. But this in itself was a sort of answer. With Robin’s permission, here is a long quotation from his piece.

I think the lesson here was that the feeling of something being meaningful, of having complexity, often exists aside from the actual content. Like a dream which appears to have a complicated plot that you realise is nonsensical when you wake up; the dream was just giving you the feeling of experiencing complexity. Or waking up in the middle of the night to write down a nugget of profound wisdom that has just occurred to you, only to find that it’s meaningless waffle in the morning. Perhaps there was no meaning, just the impression of meaningfulness.

Robin Allender, ‘The Other Window’, Doubting Castle, Oct 25, 2023

With that in mind, I wanted to write about the experience of watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Clairo’s 2021 album, Sling. I wasn’t interested in intention but coincidences and whether synchronicities could form a meaningful whole.

I started at 7:45am on a Saturday in March. I pressed play on Sling on the third roar of the MGM lion. I stopped the film as the Tin Man stumbled backwards, down the Yellow Brick Road, recently oiled. There are very few direct links between the lyrics in Sling and whatever is happening on screen in The Wizard of Oz, but the album’s themes of adolescent nostalgia, and frustration, speak directly to the opening twenty minutes of the film. I wondered if the whole thing would feel like an extended music video, but it cut much deeper than that. Because I knew the film so well at one point, I could almost trick myself into thinking that Sling was happening underneath the original soundtrack, that Dorothy was still singing ‘Over the Rainbow’, but ‘Amoeba’ was what she was actually thinking. It wasn’t long before Clairo felt like Dorothy’s authentic voice. Dorothy falls unconscious onto her bed during ‘Blouse’. Outside, her reality is falling apart.

In Munchkinland, Sling syncs-up with the ballet performance, and then the creepy Lollipop Guild. (What is the purpose of this guild? I’ve always wondered.) As Dorothy is given the guided tour, the music opens up, the instrumentation grows richer. The instrumental track ‘Joanie’ starts at the departure of the Wicked Witch, and ends with the first sighting of Scarecrow. After ‘Joanie’, it all started to feel a little academic, possibly because I knew the album was coming to an end. But I found the scenes in Kansas incredibly evocative. As a child, that was the boring part, the part I had to get through. Kansas is now the hypnagogic world, and Oz feels staged. At the start of the film, there was a sense of fun. I had chosen to do this in my free time. But then it became normal. I had tried to reverse engineer a sense of mystery. The mystery fizzed off, like a sugar crash.

Robin has been nice enough to exchange a few messages with me on social media. Talking to Robin is quite a strange experience. In my teenage years I was a big fan of comedian John Robins, Robin’s friend and collaborator. Astral Weeks was the first vinyl I bought, because John said it was the greatest piece of art of the 20th Century. One of my clearest memories of university is listening to John introducing ‘Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis’ by Tom Waits on a podcast. I was in tears on my train to Liverpool. (I was a laugh!)

Robin’s work means as much to me in my twenties as John Robins meant to me when I was a teenager. One of the things I like about Robin’s work is he seems to encourage the idea that even if a piece of art is artificial, it doesn’t mean it’s fake. Joyce’s Ulysses is filled with artifice, but if you connect with it, it has as much value as something purporting to be sincere. Syncing The Wizard of Oz with Clairo’s second album makes no sense. It is a super-artificial exercise, but because it was so evocative, the pairing does now make sense. But just because an exercise like this makes emotional sense, it does not mean you could explain its significance to another person. All of this is essentially meaningless, but lack of meaning could in itself be very beautiful.