Album liner notes: LADY JANE GREY’S WHOLESOME RITUAL (by Death and The Poetess)
https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lady-jane-greys-wholesome-ritual
A note from jojo:
Why would a 21st Century New Englander be interested in Tudor Humour?
Why is a Bu-Jewitch hippy worrying about the martyrs of Tudor monarchs, titling songs tentatively “Rage Against The Counter-Reformation?” I enjoyed a lot of tv/films/books as escapism during the last five years of socio-political dystopia/sexist culture. Now I realize immersing myself in European and British history was a strange convex mirror to study my feelings about the present. What’s to like (besides some fashion/accessories) when it was a truly dark time to be a woman? One would be under profound constraints even as a consort or queen - thanks to The Great Chain of Being (+super-patriarchy). I was/am after some root source for cultural angst, and I chased it in my “difficult women of history,” “unruly Tudor mes-dames” fixation.
After one has exhausted period drama series, movies, and documentaries (and acknowledge that Michael Hirst has had his hooks in you since childhood; Elizabeth 1998 film before The Tudors, Vikings series) …then books/audiobooks become refuge. I’ve been listening to American Prof. Robert Bucholz’s “A History of England from The Tudors to The Stuarts.” He explains that in studying 1485-1714: “we will be explaining an awful lot about the next two and a half centuries, and indeed about the world in which you and I live…"
“It’s a relevant story because it is in this period that England became a world power and established its American colonies, thus becoming our mother country… The culture of early modern England is our root culture. And many of our laws, institutions, traditions and customs can be traced back to this time and place.”
.It’s not just feeling empathy for the commoners, martyrs, the cast-aside mistresses and wives of Henry VIII. Or hearing ancient gossip even in your dreams from becoming too familiar with the details of the scandals, intrigues and horrors of Tudor court life through the first hand accounts and letters. While one hasn’t been groomed to be a monarch/pawn in a risky will-alteration coup like Lady Jane Grey, being a xennial fed The Cult of Productivity feels relevant. It’s a wild time being pressured into hustling and side-hustling (our art-selves) and constantly producing/sharing as part of post-capitalism au present.
Even if we feel ease and joy in making art we are expected to be a one-person-entrepreneur about it. It would be a tragedy (if but a drop like Lady Jane Grey’s) to forget the personhood and souls run ragged in the process of chasing someone else’s idea of success or purpose. It is often at great peril to oneself. The songs shocked me after recording as they sound so much like they could be an autobiography of shirking this mentality to remember the joys of reading, arting to survive. So, what is LJG’s wholesome ritual? Autodidacticism, perhaps? (Blood Ceremony was taken anyway! And Lady Jane Grey Sabbath was the right vibe, but not quite right.)
It’s a far more macabre than romantic special interest, ultimately. Courtly love games and idle talk was (in part) used in Anne Boleyn’s trial that lead to her execution for Treason. The masque of chivalric love and the ease of the executioner’s block (solution). Our “first great modern society” has left a dark ambivalent thorny rose badge impression in our psyche. A knight can wear your favor, a will can be altered by an apostrophe and ‘s,’ and a pyre can be lit as easily as a love letter burnt.
I enjoyed escapism in the spiritually deeply familiar whilst able to pretend it was far and away, and then arting about it from every angle. Inevitably one finds they are looking in a convex mirror. To see how we got here, to see a karmic predicament you do not envy in the victims and the perpetrators. The macabre is stronger than the romantic/light-hearted in this story, but if you’re goth? That’s romantic to you already. As Walter Alice Sickert says, “The world is ending, let’s die art.”
-jojo Lazar
https://deathandthepoetess.bandcamp.com/album/lady-jane-greys-wholesome-ritual
Album Genres: Elizabethan Creepers, Crust Courtier, The Cure +The Tudors = The Royal Remedy, Xennials’ ‘Food Courtly Love’ songs, Screamo Medieval, Heretic Rock by Blasphemous Punks.
PS: Extended bibliography with fav authors/films coming next. Part 2 of the essay inevitable, no doubt.
March, 2020
Death and The Poetess record for RPM Challenge