Biomorph: Experiments in Simultaneous Biography: Scott Walker (1943- and 1967-)

Scott Walker

Scott Walker

Scott Walker is a singer, avant-garde composer and Governor of Wisconsin.

He is best known for his over-orchestrated music and an under-orchestrated American presidential campaign. He has been feted by such artists as David Bowie, Nick Cave and Radiohead for his musical versatility and Ted Nugent for his stance on gun control.

By the time Scott Walker was born in Colorado Springs in 1967, he’d formed the Walker Brothers, moved to England, had several top forty hits and released his first solo album. His most famous song, The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, can be seen as an early attempt to explain his enmity to solar energy.

An earlier birth in 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, enabled Walker to combine schooling in Wisconsin with interpreting the songs of Jacques Brel in England. Becoming an Eagle Scout in the States didn’t stop him from hosting a British TV series and reforming The Walker Brothers. He released the groundbreaking solo LP Climate of Hunter before graduating from Delavan-Darien High School, in 1986. It was during the recording of this album that he began to dabble with electronic undercurrents and dissonance, moving towards an experimental style of composition that would more fully evolve on later works.

Fallow years of recording output allowed Walker to concentrate on student politics at Marquette University, Milwaukee. He practiced not becoming president by failing in a bid to head the student executive in 1998, despite allegedly launching his campaign a week earlier than permitted. Walker dropped out of university two years later.

Walker then combined being a recluse with running for public office. He was Milwaukee County Executive from 2002 to 2010. During this time he gained increasing renown for a potent mix of political conservatism and avant-garde musicianship, having released the uncompromising albums Tilt (1995) and The Drift (2006). These records were a fusion of baritone crooning with industrial metal played on a bewildering assortment of instruments and objects. Imagine Michael Bublé performing karaoke to Nine Inch Nails. Surprisingly, pounding his fists into a pig carcass to produce staccato beats resulted in no jibes concerning pork-barrelling, apart from this one. Walker was elected Governor of Wisconsin on his 43rd birthday (just two months before his 68th birthday). In the same year, a popular TV show called its shambling, inhuman zombies “walkers.”

Walker’s aversion to staunching creativity extends to a passion for prohibiting contraception. He has passed bills to de-fund planned parenthood and to require women seeking abortions to be shown an ultra-sound image of their unborn foetus. Walker has opposed environmental programs and pushed funding cuts for clean energy. He favoured a wall-of-sound approach to his early hits and a wall-of-concrete approach to border protection. Inevitably, working in the fields of politics and music confused Walker. While discussing fiscal policy, he promised corporations a “sizable sax break.”

In July 2015, Walker nominated as a Republican candidate for the 2016 presidential election. He was regarded as a frontrunner with more convincing hair than Donald Trump and deeper battle-scars than Marco Rubio. In a break with tradition, he also had policies. His interest in unconventional instrumentation resulted in his advisors forbidding him from composing his own campaign song. He’d planned a piece in which the percussion consisted of the disappointed sighs of minimum-wage earners opening their pay checks. The melody was to be tapped out on a series of differently tuned purity rings, interrupted by samples of teenagers professing vows of chastity.

The campaign floundered when Walker performed poorly in debates. It finally collapsed in September 2015 due to low polling, lack of finance and because Walker had forgotten he’d become a British citizen in 1970.