Forty years ago, the song Roundabout, hit the radio airwaves like a hurricane. Most rock fans had never heard anything like
it before. Guitarist Steve Howe’s
melancholic guitar intro sounded like something Segovia might play, but the classical
style prologue was just the beginning of music that seemed space-age and
baroque all at the same time.
Roundabout,
however,
really blasted off with the introduction of Chris Squire’s phase-delayed bass,
a mesmerizing riff that seemed to double back upon itself, like a snake eating
its own tail. Squire played the bass, a
traditional back-up instrument, as if it was a lead instrument. But this was hardly the only element that
made the music in Roundabout stand
out. Drummer Bill Bruford’s exotic style
owed more to jazz than rock and his percussion was multi-layered by engineer
extraordinaire Eddie Offord to hypnotic effect.
And then there was the classically-trained Rick Wakeman contributing
florid keyboard runs on a newfangled instrument known as the synthesizer. Topping everything off was vocalist Jon Anderson,
an alto-tenor who often sounded more like a choirboy than a traditional rock singer. Anderson’s cryptic lyrics and otherworldly
vocals imbued Roundabout with a mystic dimension. Roundabout
was the first taste most listeners had of the British progressive rock
group known as Yes.
Roundabout
raised the bar in rock music. The
musicians that composed Yes were regarded by fans and critics as virtuosos, the
highest quality instrumentalists the rock genre had produced at the time. Roundabout
was infused with classical elements, but the song really rocked. Yes it seemed, were pioneers of a new
movement known as progressive rock. With
albums like Fragile, Close to the Edge,
and Tales from Topographic Oceans,
Yes were among the earliest and most successful groups to use rock instruments
to create works of an orchestral length and style.
The visionary head of Atlantic records, the late
Amhet Ertegun, once described Yes as a group that painted pictures with
sounds. This is a wonderfully
paradoxical notion, but one that captures the mysterious ability of music to
conjure up imagery and tap into the imagination. Classical composers have long harnessed the
power of music to represent natural phenomenon and emotional states, but until
Yes few rock groups had a rich enough instrumental palette to conjure up such vivid
and complex soundscapes.
Yes music is pitched to the auditory and visual imagination,
but it is also capable of tapping into the abstract and/or philosophical imagination. Schopenhauer once wrote that “Music is an
unconscious exercise in metaphysics, in which the mind does not know it is
philosophizing.” This is a rather
astounding thought. Schopenhauer
believed that music was the most authentic and immediate manifestation of the
Will, the primal life-force that underlies our phenomenal reality. In other words, Schopenhauer believed that it
is through music that the conscious subject can encounter the mysterious and
fundamental energies that underlie all existence. No wonder Schopenhauer’s spiritual student,
Nietzsche, claimed that life would be a mistake without music.
Roundabout
is music that has the potential to plug listeners into a cosmic and
philosophical state of mind. It is music
rich and enigmatic enough to reward repeated listening and serious
analysis. What exactly is a
roundabout? Anderson claims the lyrics
were inspired by a traffic roundabout he encountered on the way to the
recording studio, but a literal interpretation of such an evocative and imagistic song
need not steer us in such a pedestrian direction, if you’ll forgive the pun.
The novelist Umberto Eco once identified what he
called the “poetic effect,” which refers to a quality in texts and works of art
that allow them to continue “to generate different readings, without ever being
completely consumed.” The lyrics and
music of Roundabout exemplify the
poetic effect.
In my view, there is a lot going on in the song to
suggest that the term “roundabout” refers to a cosmic process symbolized by the
mythical Uroboros, the snake that consumes its own tail. The Uroboros, of course, is one of the most
potent images in the mythic imagination.
Artwork and jewelry depicting the Uroboros date to earliest
antiquity. Descriptions of the Uroboros
appear in the Egyptian Book of the Dead,
Plato’s philosophy, and in the Hindu Upanishads. The Uroboros was a frequently used motif in
alchemy; the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed the Uroboros symbolically
represented the psyche; and the chemist Kekule dreamt of a snake eating its own
tail shortly before discovering that the structure of the benzene molecule
resembled the Uroboros! In short, the
Uroboros is one of the most fundamental and far-reaching image/ideas in the
history of humankind.
Yes fans, of course, are familiar with the Uroboros
motif. To begin with, artist Roger Dean’s
famous Yes logo implicitly feeds into itself just as the mythical Uroboros
does. You can see this most explicitly
with Dean’s Yes logo on the inner booklet of their latest album, Fly From Here, where the Yes logo
is depicted as a snake twisting back upon itself. But the motif actually crops up a lot in Yes’
work. For instance, as philosopher Bill
Martin notes in his “Music of Yes:
Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock,” Chris Squire’s phase-delayed bass in
Roundabout seems to double back on
itself, like a snake eating it own tail.
Furthermore, Roundabout is a
song that explicitly comes full circle: the ending recapitulates the same
acoustic guitar motif that song began with.
What is the philosophical significance of the
Uroboros motif? To begin with, The
Uroboros motif seems to represent a central truth about the cosmos: namely, that life feeds off itself. The Uroboros devours itself, but in doing so
it nourishes itself. The Uroboros slays
itself, but it is reborn in the process.
All mortal beings perish, but their lives feed the process of life. The
wheel of life spins eternally. Yes
actually explored this theme in an early song called Survival, but motif is developed with much greater poetic
sophistication in Roundabout.
There is an even deeper way of looking at the
Uroboros motif. Scientists tell us that
our Universe began with the Big Bang.
Prior to the Big Bang, time and space presumably did not yet exist. There was only nothingness. How can something (the universe) come out of
nothingness? The ancient Greeks believed
nothing could come out of nothing. The
idea that the universe arose out of nothingness sounds like a paradox, if not a
contradiction, but perhaps we can resolve this paradox by thinking in terms of
no-thing-ness (i.e., no things). At the Big Bang, all that existed was what
scientists have called a quantum singularity.
Out of this uniform and entirely undifferentiated state (no-thing-ness)
the entire cosmos was born.
Following the Big Bang, matter was formed. As the universe cooled, sub-atomic particles
began to form molecules. Later,
molecules arranged themselves into inorganic compounds. Still later, simple self-replicating
organisms such as bacteria emerged. After
this, single-celled organisms came onto the scene. Soon, multi-cellular organism evolved. Today, a highly complex multi-celled organism
known as homo sapiens is able to
trace the evolutionary path of a universe that has given birth to self-aware
creatures capable of investigating their own evolutionary path and
origins. In other words, the path from
the Big Bang to consciousness investigating the Big Bang is very much like the
snake that twists back to bite its own tail.
As Anderson sings:
I’ll
be the Roundabout
The
words will make you out and out.
The Princeton physicist John Wheeler would have
appreciated this point of view. Wheeler
advocated something called the Anthropic Principle. In its strongest from, the Anthropic
Principle holds that sentient creatures are necessary for the universe to fully
exist. After all, as Wheeler puts it,
“what good would the universe be if no one existed to observer it? Wheeler’s outlook is shaped by the strange
implications of quantum mechanics; particularly the notion that subatomic
“particles” can exist in an indefinite state, until they are observed. In other words, consciousness may be
necessary to collapse the wave function of quantum level particles. That is, Wheeler believed that the
relationship between the quantum realm and consciousness was, in his own words,
like “a smoky dragon biting its tail.”
The Anthropic Principle is hard for many scientists
to digest because it puts consciousness back at the center of creation. If the Anthropic Principle is correct, then
the emergence of sentient creatures is not just some fluke in an entirely
random process of evolution. Instead,
the potential for sentience has been woven into the fabric of the universe all
along; that is, sentience is something the universe aims at, even if the route
it takes to get there is undetermined and even random.
The Uroboros and the Anthropic Principle would
appear to imply a teleological view of nature.
That is, the Universe aims at something; most plausibly
self-understanding. That is, the Universe
has evolved creatures capable of representing to cosmos to itself. As Schelling put it, “we are the eyes and
ears of the universe.” If this view is
correct, then consciousness is not a fluke, but an inextricable thread woven
into the fabric of the universe.
Anderson echoes this view; in his solo DVD, A Tour of the Universe, Anderson insists that the purpose of life
is to seek out the source of our creation.
This is a mystical outlook, no doubt, but it is a view that is in accord
with many mystically inclined philosophers such as Pythagoras, Plato, and
Schelling, to name a few.
The song Roundabout
is a musical journey that travels full circle.
In the end, Roundabout revisits and recapitulates the acoustic guitar motif
the song began with. Musically, the
song seems capture the same theme expressed in T.S. Eliot’s famous lines:
We shall not cease from our exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Roundabout is music that takes
listeners on a journey. The song raised
the bar in rock music by demonstrating that rock musicians could aspire to
create serious music with an orchestral impact.
In particular, Yes’ exceptional ability to paint pictures with sound and
create a rich sonic landscape listeners can explore and ponder is on full
display here. But Roundabout is not just a musical tour de force; it is also song
that kindles the philosophical imagination.
This is not to say that Yes deliberately set out to express
philosophical ideas. Rather, as Schopenhauer
noted, music can be an unconscious exercise in metaphysics. Roundabout is not jut symphonic rock, it
metaphysics set to music.
