Chushingura

‘Chushingura’ is on Jefferson Airplane’s fourth studio album, Crown of Creation. It has no words and is only a minute and seventeen seconds long. The song is also supposed to make your skin crawl.

The work of freaking out the listener, or at least putting them off balance, starts in the proceeding song. ‘Share a Little Joke’ starts slow and for most of the song stays slow, but right at the end, after lyrics the are done, it speeds up. When music speeds up, your body can’t help it, your heart rate speeds up. When your heart rate speeds up, you can’t help it, you feel just a little rush of that flight or fight response— your lizard brain reaches up into that mammal gray matter and demands to be heard. And this is the state of mind Jefferson Airplane seems to want you in when ‘Chusingura’ begins—just a little bit primal.

The song itself starts with a high pitch. Not a whine or a bell or anything describable, just a tone. An echo rises out of the tone followed by the almost anxious tapping of drum-sticks. The tapping isn’t fast so much as hurried, like the clacking of of a woman’s heels when she thinks she is being followed late at night. Then the tone is joined by more, but they are irregular. They come and go with no rhyme and no rhythm and the echo is back, it is back and it is louder. The tapping now occasionally speeds up and you can hear the woman grabbing her skirt and running, turning, slowing down, doing it again, and again. The tapping gets louder. A few out-of-tune guitar strings are plucked one at a time and then, after a pause, a few of them all at once. The tapping gets louder. The tones all go away. And then the tapping fades.

And this is the end of the LP’s A side so now, all you should hear is first silence, and then the sound of the headshell hitting the spindle clack… clack… clack… before you get out of the chair, raise the arm, and flip the record.

Jefferson Airplane does make up for it. The next song, ‘If You Feel’, is calming and downright jovial. It has all the rhythm and all the order ‘Chushingura’ does not. Break china laughing, laughing, laughing, they sing. It’s a relief.

But is that why they did it? Did Jefferson Airplane just raise your heart rate and instill anxiety in you just so that the next feel-good tune could really land? I doubt that. For one, Crown of Creation is always circling and always anxious. The center of the album may be the height of this anxiety, but worry, concern, and fear are always around the corner. It is, after all, an album that finds peace only after nuclear oblivion.

And Jefferson Airplane is not the only psychedelic rock band to play this game. The first song on the first album by King Crimson, 21st Century Schizoid Man on In the Court of the Crimson King tells you right in the title what effect it is going for. It succeeds through lyrics shouted through static and the overwhelming, constant, but unreliable instruments. King Crimson does it again fifteen years later in a later incarnation on a pair of songs on Three of a Perfect Pair, ‘Industry’ and ‘Dig Me’. ‘Industry’ is even somewhat reminiscent of ‘Chushingura’. It also uses higher-pitched tones and an off-putting beat to place the listener in an anxious state. The next song goes even farther with the singer talking from the perspective of a car in a junkyard.

His voice is just slightly distorted so that you know he is the car and he is rotting and is decaying. There can be no doubting it.

You do not need these songs to make your skin crawl. Spin around in your room and pick something, a newspaper headline, a letter from the city, an app on your phone, the neighbors fighting through the wall; where can you turn that is not a source of fear? Even the cures are tinged by their enemy exactly because they are offered in opposition. We are told to exercise because it will calm us, to drink less because it cannot fix us, meditate because it will center us.

But psychedelic rock does not meditate. Instead it indulges: sound, emotions, genres, and stories. True rockstars can be gluttons for anything and everything. These albums are as much orgies as anything else; twisting vats of sensation and sound that explode out from the speakers. That anxiety, then, is just another aspect of the world to be indulged in—just another sensation in which to exult. “So drink deep,” says psychedelic rock. “What is there to fear in a little indulgence?”