Music

Eric Taylor, a relatively unknown Texas singer-songwriter revered by his more celebrated peers for his painterly lyrics and dexterous finger-style guitar playing, died on March 9 in Austin. He was 70.Susan Lindfors Taylor, his wife and musical collaborator, said the cause was liver disease.Steeped in the country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi Fred McDowell, the poetry of the Beat Generation and the Southern Gothic of Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, Mr. Taylor’s songs fused a brooding yet tender melodicism with evocative stream-of-consciousness narration, to hypnotic effect.In the song “Comanche,” from his album “Resurrect” (1998), Mr. Taylor beguilingly juxtaposes a series of seemingly unrelated declarations to form a seamless whole. In the final stanza, singing in a measured baritone while accompanying himself with filigreed acoustic guitar work, he asserts:I think there’s a place there in West MemphisThat’s just crawlin’ with the copsAnd I think that poetry and jazz are liesI think it’s wrong that all good whiskeyCosts more by the shotAnd I think you ought to hold on one more night.In a testimonial that appears on Mr. Taylor’s website, Nanci Griffith, a literary Texas singer-songwriter who was married to Mr. Taylor from 1976 to 1982, said, “If you miss an opportunity to hear Eric Taylor, you have missed a chance to hear a voice I consider the William Faulkner of songwriting.”Ms. Griffith has recorded several of Mr. Taylor’s songs, including “Ghost in the Music,” which they wrote together. Lyle Lovett has also recorded Mr. Taylor’s compositions and written with him.“I’m always the opening act when I’m around Eric,” Mr. Lovett wrote on his website. “I love his voice, and he has a great narrative quality and sense of detail.”“Your God,” a denunciation of racism and the slave trade included on the album “Scuffletown” (2001), is one of many songs in Mr. Taylor’s catalog that find him empathizing with the oppressed. In the song’s opening passage, intoning over a roiling gospel-inspired arrangement, he asks:When the boatmen stole the AfricansDid your God ride or row?When they roped them and they shackled themWas he with them in the hold?Was the ocean moon so beautifulThat it brought him to his knees?What did your God see?“I hope my music makes people uncomfortable and makes them laugh and makes them think,” Mr. Taylor said in a 2014 interview with the magazine The Southern Rambler.Besides Ms. Griffith and Mr. Lovett, a host of other distinguished songwriters, including Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, have championed Mr. Taylor’s music, which mixed elements of folk blues and jazz.Eric Taylor was born in Atlanta on Sept. 25, 1949, the youngest of Charles and Betty (Phillips) Taylor’s two sons. He had an unhappy childhood in Georgia but found solace in the guitar. His first instrument was a battered Silvertone model from Sears that he bought for $2.50 from a friend.While in high school Mr. Taylor was a member of a racially integrated band that played soul music, a pursuit for which he was punished in the bigoted household in which he grew up. He left home after that, renting a room in a boardinghouse until he finished high school.He briefly attended Georgetown University in Washington in the 1960s before dropping out of college to pursue a career in music in California, only to run out of money upon his arrival in Houston on his way west.While in Houston, Mr. Taylor worked as a dishwasher in a club called the Family Hand and, after seeing Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Van Zandt perform there on consecutive nights, decided to stay. (Mr. Clark, Carolyn Hester and the Texas songster Mance Lipscomb were also living or performing regularly in Houston at the time.)In 1977, after a decade of honing his songcraft, Mr. Taylor won the “new folk” competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. In 1981 he released his debut album, “Shameless Love,” but he did not record another album — he struggled with substance abuse for much of his life — until his second, called simply “Eric Taylor,” which appeared 14 years later. It was named album of the year at Kerrville in 1996.In addition to Ms. Lindfors Taylor, Mr. Taylor, who was married four times, is survived by a son, Nathan, and a daughter, Alexandra Taylor.Mr. Taylor released many well-received albums and toured widely, earning a reputation as an enthralling performer. He received numerous accolades in his adopted home state of Texas — and even appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and on “Late Night With David Letterman” — but his artful, passionate music, rich in Southern colloquialisms and imagery, never achieved anything remotely resembling mainstream success.“The music business and I met 30 years ago,” he observed, with characteristic directness, in a 2007 podcast. “And we’ve been running in opposite directions ever since.” More

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, the provocative British musician, writer and visual artist who pushed the limits of gender and the self, often using her own skin as her medium, has dropped her body.At least, that is how she might have described the transition. Even in death, she would not have wanted to be held to drab social norms.Genesis’s daughters, Genesse and Caresse P-Orridge, announced her death in a statement shared on Facebook by her manager, Ryan Martin. They said Genesis died at her home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on Saturday from leukemia. She was 70.Genesis led the influential British rock bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, dabbled as a dominatrix in New York, ran a soup kitchen in Kathmandu, hid out from Scotland Yard, organized a cultlike fan club that asked initiates to send in their bodily fluids, and undertook a long-running surgical project to merge identities with her wife, Jacqueline Mary Breyer, in a single nongendered being they called a “pandrogyne.”It was a full life. “We’ve not squandered it,” Genesis said in 2018, using the plural pronoun to convey that she spoke for this dual identity. “We’ve utilized it to the maximum we could.”She was born Neil Andrew Megson on Feb. 22, 1950, in Manchester, England, the second of two children of Ronald and Muriel Megson, who both worked briefly as semiprofessional actors.Sickly as an adolescent, she had what she described as a tortured passage through England’s elite public school system, never comfortable with her body and gender. When, as a teenager, she discovered the Surrealist drawings of Max Ernst, which mashed together heads of one species with bodies of another, it gave her an early taste of the liberation she would pursue for the next five decades.“I’d grown up thinking that the world was what I saw, and then I realized it wasn’t — it could be anything at all,” she told The New York Times in 2018.It was the dawn of the psychedelic 1960s, and she saw that she could create herself in a new form, as an alter ego she called Genesis P-Orridge, who became a canvas for a wide range of experiments: artistic, pharmaceutical, surgical and spiritual.After art school she formed a confrontational performance group called COUM Transmissions, which shocked the British art world with a 1976 exhibition called “Prostitution” at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. The exhibition included pornography, strippers and used tampons, and led one member of Parliament to call the group “wreckers of civilization.”The core members of COUM morphed into Throbbing Gristle, an often abrasive experimental band that coined the term “industrial music” to describe its repetitive, amelodic soundscapes.As with COUM, performances might involve nudity, self-mutilation, dead animals and Holocaust imagery; the band’s best-known single, “Zyklon B Zombie,” referred to the poison gas used in Nazi death camps. (At the time, Genesis lived with the band’s guitarist, Cosey Fanni Tutti, who later described her as domineering and abusive, an accusation Genesis denied.)Thus began a career that moved from street theater and small rock clubs to established art galleries and museums.Tim Mohr, who was helping Genesis write her autobiography, described her as “a Zelig-like character” who “connects to the Beats, was friends with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, then in the midst of the hippies with Timothy Leary.”“But she didn’t see herself squarely in any of those groups,” Mr. Mohr said in an interview. “Basically she was obsessed with not repeating things. So big changes were not daunting. She accepts that changes will cause periods of difficulty.”Genesis kept evolving. After achieving cult notoriety in Throbbing Gristle, she found a broader rock audience in the 1980s with the occultist psychedelic band Psychic TV. The group’s followers formed a cultlike network called Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, with members instructed to wear paramilitary uniforms and explore realms of magic and the occult. But in 1991, with the band and the fan club becoming too draining, Genesis relocated to Kathmandu with her first wife, Paula, and their daughters, Genesse and Caresse.In addition to her daughters, she is survived by a granddaughter.Another page turned: In her absence, the authorities raided Genesis’s home in Brighton, on the English coast, and confiscated materials that were splashed on the news as evidence of a supposed satanic cult. Though no charges were filed, the family went into voluntary exile, ultimately landing in California and the orbit of Mr. Leary, the LSD pioneer, who became a friend and influence.There, as Genesis’s first marriage unwound, she found another unlikely identity, as a single father of two girls, attending P.T.A. meetings in a silver miniskirt and thigh-high boots. “They were good meetings,” she said.On a trip to New York, she met Jacqueline Breyer, a dominatrix and nurse. Their love was so consuming that they wanted to fuse into a single entity, freed from the binary divisions of gender. After Genesis was severely injured in a fire in the California home of the music mogul Rick Rubin in April 1995, the couple moved to New York for her recovery.They shared clothes and makeup. After Genesis won a lawsuit for the injuries sustained in the fire, they had money and time to push their “pandrogyne” project further. They got matching breast implants. Lady Jaye, as she was known, got a chin implant and had surgery on her nose.“We’d go to our plastic surgeon and say, what else can we do now to look more alike?” Genesis said. Then, in 2007, Lady Jaye died of an acute heart arrhythmia. Her death left Genesis alone, one half of an art project that no longer had a second half.All along, Genesis was writing, painting, creating collages and sculptures that explored gender and sexuality. Once declared a destroyer of civilization, she found her work embraced by the fine art world, including the Tate Britain in London and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.Her quest, she felt, remained the same: to pull things apart and put them back together, questioning why they were a certain way. Holding it all together was her most inspired creation, the changing canvas that was herself.“Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art,” she said. “So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up?“We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil.” More