The Cult Of The Sun King
“L’État c’est Moi.”
“Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours.”
Louis XIV of France.
All eyes that saw of Montreal perform, in the Stiff Kitten, were moistened and dilated by the glare of Mr. Barnes’ disco buttocks. In a pair of pin-striped dandy pants, where squeezable cheeks should be, he had, instead, a set of large, black insect eyes that glittered with a thousand hexagonal subsections. Presumably a sticky, pink proboscis dropped down one trouser leg, meeting dark Chelsea boots towards the ground. That night, he topped it off, if only briefly, with an emerald green bolero and ruff worthy of the Dane, donning, at the end, the laurels of Apollo. I would not dare to tell you that costuming is central to the show.
But, of all the outfits worn throughout their recent tour, of which, it seems, there are quite many, one conveys succinctly something at the heart of of Montreal. Add to the disco pants, a cape of rabbit’s fur, dressed around the neck with lace and stuffed cardinals at the shoulders and wrap around the crotch a hefty belt and cod-piece. This marvellous creation comes from Mr. James Kessler of A Fine Tooth (http://afinetooth.com/), clothier and tailor to a spatter of alternative luminaries, including Mr. Banhart and OK Go.
Taking as its inspiration Louis XIV (that is how the phrase always goes, but, in reality, the king came first, then the inspiration and then the outfit last of all)… taking as its inspiration Louis XIV, Mssrs Barnes and Kessler designed the clothes around Prince as much as the king: “The costumes are pretty much directly inspired by the Sun King. We started with gay masculine (last time was tijuana streetwalker), and now it was Louis XIV, which I termed ‘Lewdie XIV,’ because it includes his sexual tumult.”
The two most recent of Montreal records (Hissing Fauna… & Skeletal Lamping) revolve around a character called Georgie Fruit, a black, transsexual soul singer, which suggests an interest in internal friction (in many senses, I’ve no doubt) on Mr. Barnes’ part. The confliction of sex and sexuality are most apparent in the codpiece worn about the trousers: the audacious silver sac-sack draws attention to and emphasises the piece of cod that one usually conceals, while the buckles at the waist and the metallic sheen are reminiscent of a chastity belt, at once bound and begging.
Mr. Barnes is not the only rock musician to take Le Roi Soleil as a stylish reference point, although the Beatles meant a different Sun King and it was some other Louis on Highway 61. Mr. Stewart portrays the monarch in all his regal regalia, indulgently bored by a performance, in the video for There Must Be An Angel. It may well end with a lascivious wink, but the importance of Mr. Stewart’s interpretation lies somewhere else: it shows the composer/arranger watching rather than putting on the production. While the divine Ms. Lennox sings (divinely, in this instance), he slouches in a throne, even drifting off, as if he had nothing to do with the song at all. Like Louis The King himself, he is cleverly hiding effort behind style and disguising work as play; for, although the Sun King’s court was known for its frivolity and gay garishness, he was seldom there, using, instead, the garden parties and the celebrations as diversions for his subjects, while he plotted successful wars and diplomatic interventions. Any rock stars knows that their ingenious effort must appear effortless.
This is why Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV, is an archetypal figure for the rock musician, because he is a site of contradiction. In the way he ran his court and how he ran his country, he symbolised, at once, the formal and familiar, brute force and caprice, the classical and baroque, the sacred and profane. Biographers are not even agreed over the origin of his nickname: the Sun King. Orbus Solis Gallici was inscribed on a coin to commemorate his birth: Thus rises the Sun of France. But did they mean the Son of G-d or Apollo, the son of Zeus? The age’s love of antiquity and the nation’s love of G-d could well mean both.
The rock star is half messiah and half pagan god; he will either save you or deprave you. Although, the bishop stripped bare, in the of Montreal show, revealing a half-goat deity, implies on which side Mr. Barnes sits. Yet, even within the pagan imagery, there is contention: is Louis, the benefactor of the arts, the high god Apollo with his laurels or is he, in his glib giddiness, Dionysus? On one side, there is the mind and contemplated creation, on the other, mindless indulgence and throbbing organs of generation. This is the conflict which Mr. Nietzsche saw in all art, if not all men, and Louis XIV embodies it. He was head of the country’s church and leader of its atavistic revelry – Catholicism and debauchery – Mr. Barnes’ well-stuffed cardinals.
It is this split that allows both the bare-bottomed sleeves of grit rockers Louis XIV (http://www.roots-and-branches.com/Louis%20XIV.jpg) and the spiritual love of There Must Be An Angel. It is this mass of contradictions, also, that makes the king the perfect guise for the lover in Bow Wow Wow’s Louis Quatorze, but I would be a fool to try and list its many great ambiguities here. Although, why the band are dressed partly as M. Napoleon and partly T.E. Lawrence, I cannot be sure.
In Ms. Karie’s dreamy single, Le Roi Soleil (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQbfbXBUN1I), she finds herself as confused by the king as does Ms. Lwin of Bow Wow Wow. She is a revolutionary, who is seduced by the monarch’s power and his charm and, in the video, his racing car. It is this capacity for divided emotions and multiple ideas that makes Louis XIV a perfect icon that rock stars can adopt. In him, the people of France saw the mystique and reality of power manifest in one person, a symbol bigger than the man, meaning many more things than he intended to mean, if he meant to mean anything at all. The rock star, too, creates their own aesthetic landscape, in which they can be seen or understood as many things: L’Etat, c’est ils!
May I bring you up to date?
We are living in the 20th century, not the 18th.
May I bring you up to date, sir?
We are not alive at all!This isn’t Napoleon, this isn’t Bonaparte, this isn’t fate
This isn’t Josephine, she’s still in the tent
This isn’t the Holy Mother on the balcony of Judas
This is Louis, Louis the Sun King
We are no longer, most of us, living in the 20th century, but the point of the Wolfgang Press lyric is still a good one: Louis Quatorze is a figure that goes on and on, where others die or lose their meaning. He is a figure to be detected in 80s new wave sensibilities and, thus, in 70s glam and camp and, so, in 50s pomade hair-dos, piled up high like powdered wigs. He is there in Mr. Liberace and Sir Elton John, as much as he is present in Mr. Bowie and Mr. Prince. Regardless of brocade French cuffs and lacy gorgets, an aspect of the Sun King is distinguished wherever a drape of glitzy finery secretes the deepest inner workings or where the king sacrifices himself to work, so that his subjects may play.
