What The Fuck, Now, MacBeth?

LIZZIE fans know there’s bits of Aeschylus and Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the book and lyrics. I think the Shakespeare is probably most concentrated in the song “What the Fuck, Now, Lizzie?” the lyrics of which take lines and images from MacBeth. All that blood, and a collaborative murder in which one partner goes rogue — it’s hard to resist.

Every song in LIZZIE came together differently, but several songs started with Tim bringing an idea to me along with a page or two of associative thoughts and images and, in the case of What the Fuck?, lines from MacBeth. My first draft had all the verses set to the same melody and chord structure, then Alan revised the “Foolish thought to say a sorry sight” verse and the final verse. (I didn’t set out to give you a peek behind the co-writing curtain, but there you have it.)

Watching the new Joel Cohen film The Tragedy of MacBeth last night reminded me that the song originally had a first verse that went:

The thane of fife had a wife where is she now?
Lying on the rug with her face in a puddle.
Now I gotta clean this up and I don’t know how
Blood on my hands and the house in a muddle.

(What’s great about working with collaborators whose judgment you trust is, among many things, there’s someone around to say, “Mm, maybe we can do without that first verse?”)

Storm Large and Carrie Manolakos, from LIZZIE the Studio Album.

We added What the Fuck? kind of late in the process. Emma had disappeared halfway through the first act thinking she and Lizzie had a plan to poison Mrs. Borden. She returns in the second act to find both Mr. and Mrs. hacked to death with an axe. It didn’t make sense that she wouldn’t have a big reaction. Emma has an outsize reaction to pretty much everything. Also, Emma has less stage time than the other three women so we wanted to give her another headbanger to balance it out.

Anyway, watch the new MacBeth film. It’s dark and scary and visually beautiful. If you know LIZZIE well, it’ll be fun to hear the borrowed lines in their original context. The stark expressionist cinematography and production design put me in mind of Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I learned about in college and have watched several times because of my fixation on Antonin Artaud, who is in the film. Artaud’s theoretical writing about theater blew my 18-year-old artist mind. I reread him every decade or so. His ideas are still a touchstone for me — I live by that notion in Theater of Cruelty that an artist’s task is to assault the audience, not like beat them up but assault them aesthetically, assault their senses. Attack their sensibilities.

Early on, we were told that the song What the Fuck? was too much, too many fucks, you can’t do that, the audience will not tolerate it, you can’t just scream “what the fuck?!” over and over and over, and I was like, but that’s the point. We took some of the fucks out and it totally deflated the song. It was just so obviously a giant pulled punch at the top of the second act. It made me cringe every time. When we recorded the album, we put the fucks back and there they stay.

Short clip from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. If you get a chance, watch the whole thing.

The video quality doesn’t do justice to the film but here’s a clip of Artaud.