Scandal in The Wind?

»Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife for the first time in your life.«
– Bill Callahan alias Smog

It’s amazing how easy it is to go wrong in matters of musical body disposal! A sampler came out recently on the Berlin label Get Physical under the title Final Song #1, a compilation of thirteen pieces of music, all selected by famous musicians and DJs on the basis of »records I would like to have played at my funeral«. The British production duo Coldcut didn't google around for long and chose something as close at hand as the unsubtle An Ending, a really pallid pastoral-ambient piece from Brian Eno, who, God knows, would have had better funeral tunes in his roster. (Dead Finks Don't Talk). But the choice made by most of the DJs – Laurent Garnier wants Radiohead, DJ Hell the Stranglers – was not much gutsier, only Ricardo Villalobos was big enough to look past his own margin of coolness and nominate a stormy »canzion« by the Chilean political folklorist Inti Illimani. A worthy summary: if death, as Elias Canetti said, is »a scandal«, then we have to protest against it. Resistance to the grave and beyond – at least that way the unacceptability of one’s own »no-longer-existence« is raised by futile defiance to the level of the exalted ridiculous.

Ridiculous in any case is the rave for rankings in pop music, this bureaucratic passion for best-lists and top something-or-other which only occur to small boys (of any age). Now, I am not often to be found at exhibition openings, but I really can’t imagine that the art crowd there has ever been interested – talking theoretically, because it would be too expensive in reality – in what one would most like to take as a burial object into one’s own grave. An Adaptive by Franz West? Perhaps Duchamp's urinal, in case one happens to feel a post-mortal urge to urinate? Or would I not prefer a shaft blasted by Hans Schabus leading into the neighbouring grave? As you can see, as a »Pop-wastl« obsessed with lists I go poaching even in non-Pop hunting grounds when it’s a matter of my funeral escort. What noble material should cover my cadaver? A dress suit by Helmut Lang? That would be a real loss. Rather a turquoise Miami Vice jacket so that the world doesn’t have to look at it again? Not even a dog should be buried with so little dignity! It will have to be light casual wear, I suppose, if my loved ones don’t sew me naked into a sack and drop me in the Danube.

Me And My Ass Pony do not in fact waste our thoughts on our own burial and potential funeral soundtracks – by that time we won’t be able to listen to such stuff – but rather we concentrate on the sound design for the moment of death itself (Amen). Unless a merciful coma seizes me, I am hoping that in the semi-conscious state of my passing I will still have enough of my marbles left to be able to force my greedy potential heirs to play my »all-time death-accompanying smash hits«. And for this list of personally collected field recordings from all the continents even the famous director-general of lists, Nick Hornby, can pack his bags. Just hear what cool stuff I’m going to use to terrorise my relatives back in this world and catapult me into the beyond – with the volume turned up to 10, of course:

- Field recording of a herd of howler monkeys from Borneo – a timeless document of uncontrollable bad behaviour and merciless l’art-pour-l’art noise
- My priceless sound archive »finaler flati« – as a painful reminder that it will soon have farted itself out
- A sound document of the annual conference of »Friends of the Transverse Flute« – even Hell cannot be more fearful
- Recordings, amplified a million times, of corpse bacteria working in shifts – a gigantic chorus of workers in the service of the Tabula Rasa
- The bitter sobbing of a northern gannet at the end of the mating season – just for the self-deception of believing that someone is mourning for me, even if it is only a sexually frustrated northern gannet
- Excerpts from speeches of demagogues, populists and other rabble-rousers together with the applauding bleats of the crowd – only in the hope that this will make it easier to say farewell to a world of uneducable arseholes; and finally
- Hey Jude, the most annoying Beatles song ever, which, on top of that, behaves as if it were a wonderful finale. This high-spirited bullshit should at least make withdrawal a bit moister and more slippery. Remember how nicely the Sparks sang: »And you're the only girl I ever met who hates ›Hey Jude‹, maybe that's the reason that I'm so in love with you«.

The divine Sparks: that’s it! Their collected works should be the Last Trump at my burial. Just be sure that none of you leaves before the last chord!

FRITZ OSTERMAYER is a radio-maker, musician and fortune-hunter.