A Timeless Wavelength

If anyone still reads this thing, you’re probably thinking, “Ha!  Just over a week into the new year and he’s already stopped posting.  I knew it wouldn’t last.”  Well, for your information, I moved recently, and have yet to establish internet access at the new house.  My network access has been sporadic at best.  Rest assured, when I get reliable broadband access back I will make some catch-up posts to make up for this hiatus.  Plus, if I can iron out the technical difficulties, I plan on adding vinyl rips to the playlist.  Yes, some of the more interesting tracks in my collection are on that most revered of analog media, and this town has a number of options for purchasing eclectic wax.  So I’m going to start ripping from vinyl and posting my findings here.  Stay tuned.

Fishbone – Sunless Saturday

In my last post I examined Joshua Glenn’s alternate generational/decade scheme, in which each decade spans a “4″ year to a “3″ year, so that, say, “the Eighties” really ranged from 1984 to 1993 inclusive.  I preferred this to the standard way of dividing up the decades, but suggested I was uncomfortable allowing this decade to span so far into the 1990s, what with the grunge-and-flannel days being the beginning of the end in my view.  After pondering this issue further, I’ve gotten in touch with my inner computer geek and arrived at an elegant solution:  the octade.

All I do is convert the decimal years of the Gregorian calendar into base-8, or octal.  You can do the same with this handy converter. Instead of decades and centuries, this gives us eight-year “octades” and sixty-four-year larger epochs that I haven’t come up with a catchy name for yet, but should be something better than “quattuorsexagentury”.  By this reckoning, my birth year of 1976 becomes 3670, a nice round number and the start of an octade we could call the Octal Seventies, from 3670-3677 (decimal 1976-1983 inclusive.)* This scheme gives us an octade we could call the Octal Aughts, from 3700-3707 (decimal 1984-1991 inclusive).  It also makes this bright era of musical wonder the first of a new quatturo… a new octury.** The Octal Aughts begin with the debut albums of The Smiths and Run-DMC, and ends with the “metal meltdown” and the beginning of grunge rock,  gangsta rap and post-Garth Brooks country.  It is followed by the Octal Teens, which itself would be a great name for a band if it didn’t comprise some of the worst music made in my lifetime:  3710-3717 (decimal 1992-1999 inclusive).

As a definitive example of the music of the Octal Aughts, I give you “Sunless Saturday” from Fishbone’s 1991 album The Reality Of My Surroundings. The band epitomizes the anything-goes attitude of this era:  a group of black musicians who could move effortlessly between ska, metal, and other genres, they are reminders of an era when musicians were far less likely to be pigeonholed by race and genre.  The group’s sound recalls a time when instrumental virtuosity and big production values weren’t to be apologized for or swept aside in favor of atonal low-fi rumblings.  It’s hard to believe that so soon after this album was recorded, it would become nearly impossible to find a black musician who didn’t do rap or R&B, unthinkable for a rock band to sound like it wasn’t composed of a bunch of teenagers in a garage, and completely unfathomable for any mainstream band to have a horn section.

*Special note to would-be math sticklers: Yes, I started the octade on a zero instead of a one.  People who are swayed by the (quite valid) argument for starting the millennium in 2001 instead of 2000, because the Gregorian calendar started in Year 1 and therefore 2000 was the last year of the second millennium rather than the first year of the third, sometimes get a big head and go around rechristening decades as well, insisting that, say, the 1980s should start in 1981 and include 1990.  These people are wrong.  If it were common practice to refer to “the ninth decade” then yes, I suppose it would span those years.  But we don’t say that.  We say “the 1980s.”  The closer analogy in English is the word “teenager,” which consists of people from age 13 to age 19 inclusive — all the numbers that end in “-teen”.  Nobody in their right mind would argue that “teenagers” should be 14- to 20-year-olds, though I’d wager that right now someone on the Internet is doing exactly that.

**The downside of all this octal-based nomenclature, catchy though it may be, is that it reminds me of the horrible moniker the media assigned to the extremely fertile Nadya Suleman to make her sound like a Spider-Man villain.

Aimee Mann – Satellite

I think it’s a sign that my academic life has too far intruded into my everyday consciousness when, upon hearing the first line of this song (”Let’s assume you were right…”), this is what I imagined:

Even scarier is that I’ve already anticipated possible criticisms.

Henrietta Collins and the Wifebeating Childhaters – Drive-By Shooting

Fresh from his long stint as the frontman for Black Flag, Henry Rollins kicked off his solo career with the album Hot Animal Machine. Soon afterward, this new solo project itself spawned a side project. . . of sorts:  Henry and the band who were not yet known as the Rollins Band adopted female monikers and released the album Drive-By Shooting under the deliberately provocative name Henrietta Collins and the Wifebeating Childhaters.

The album sounds pretty much like what you’d expect from a group with that name:  a lot of over-the-top, cartoonish violence.  Listening to this album makes you appreciate the fact that, contrary to all expectations, Henry Rollins has actually mellowed out and matured a great deal over the years.  His recent work has certainly produced nothing to match this exchange from “Hey Henrietta”:  “Why’d the chicken cross the road?  ‘Cause I SHOT him!  Yeah!”  This isn’t the guy who goes on the spoken-word tours and has his own show on the Independent Film Channel;  this was the young, rambunctious Henry who was shipped off to military school and pumped full of Ritalin to make him sit still.  Parts of the album venture well past the bounds of good taste (the aforementioned “Hey Henrietta” makes light of raping a policewoman, for example), but this track, a jaunty little surf tune about gang violence,  is just irreverent enough to work as satire.

Quintron – Place Unknown

New Orleans’ Mr. Quintron is an interestingly eccentric musician as well as a classic Maker.  He performs on a homemade keyboard made out of parts salvaged from a Hammond Organ and a Fender Rhodes, all stuffed into a case shaped like the front of a 1920s-era automobile, complete with working headlights.  His music has a sort of retro-weird feel to it:  Quintron’s organ stylings recall the exotica and “space-age bachelor pad” recordings of the ’50s and ’60s, and remind us that not all Hammond organists were trying to sound like black Gospel musicians.

But it’s his incessant tinkering that really makes Mr. Quintron special.  Aside from his car-organ, and a few oddities like a saliva-controlled synthesizer, Mr. Quintron is probably best known as the inventor of the Drum Buddy.  This is an analog drum machine that looks like a prop from a sci-fi B-movie.  It consists of a light bulb surrounded by a rotating cylinder, around which are several photocells.  Special paper wraps for the cylinder are made with strategically placed holes, and when a hole passes under a photocell the light hits it, producing a weird and thoroughly un-drum-like sound.  The speed of the cylinder can be manually controlled, and the performer can even stop the cylinder by hand and “scratch” it back and forth, DJ-style.  It’s like a hip-hop Rhythmicon.

This track, “Place Unknown,” from the album Are You Ready for an Organ Solo?, got some radio play when I was in Baton Rouge.  I like it because it gives shout-outs to my home town, as well as a number of other places I’ve lived.

Cowboy Junkies – Run For Your Life

The Beatles’ Rubber Soul provided a segue between the Fab Four’s early teenage pop period and their Indian-influenced quasi-psychedelic phase, and this musical turning point is paid perfect tribute by the multi-artist cover album This Bird Has Flown. Its closing track, “Run For Your Life,” performed by the Cowboy Junkies, is a wonderful example of how recontextualizing can work wonders for a song.

The original version of this song may be one of the more dissapointing works in the Beatles’ catalog.  It’s essentially an ode to domestic violence:  the narrator sings that he “would rather see you dead, little girl / than to be with another man,” then proceeds to explain how jealous he is and how he fully intends to carry out his death threats.  The lyrics alone would make this song deplorable enough, but the fact that they’re sung by the utterly non-threatening John Lennon over the Beatles’ jangly pop music makes it sound as silly as Vanilla Ice’s gangsta posturing.

The Cowboy Junkies’ cover is immeasurably better.  The music is slower and much more ominous, and lead vocalist Margo Timmins is as menacing as John was harmless. It sounds like the Angelo Badalamente soundtrack to a David Lynch film noir, and when you hear her sing “run for your life if you can, little boy” you know that, at the very least, someone’s going to wind up missing an ear.