Neil Young – Cortez the Killer

Rock music has long been a voice for social change, but socially conscious musicians don’t usually hire fact checkers.  “Cortez the Killer,” Neil Young’s epic critique of colonialism, demonstrates the downside of this deficiency.  If all you had to go on was this song, you’d come away with an undeservedly favorable picture of the Aztec empire.

Don’t get me wrong — it’s a great song, one of my favorites in Young’s lengthy catalogue.  And the basic message isn’t a bad one. The Aztecs certainly didn’t deserve their fate at the hands of los conquistadores. But that’s no reason to paint them as a Utopian society where “hate was just a legend, and war was never known” until the Spanish showed up.  In fact, the Aztecs and their various neighbors had been in an almost constant state of warfare for nearly a century by the time Cortés arrived.  The song makes only a brief mention of ritual sacrifice, without specifying that it was human sacrifice, or indicating the sheer scale of the practice.  To hear Neil Young tell it, you’d think the Spanish had invaded Smurf Village.  The whole thing reads like something that would have been written by a high school student — which, quite possibly, it was:  the young Young is said to have penned the lyrics during a high school history class.

If this rumor is true, it gives me a whole new respect for this song, and for Neil Young.  Everybody with any creative ambition at all wrote some terrible poetry in high school, and most of us would be horrified at the thought of any of that teenage doggerel gaining a wider audience.  But Neil Young took this adolescent verse, with all its flaws, and turned it into a truly moving song beloved by millions.  It’s a perfect example of Brian Eno’s observation that artistic beauty often comes from garbage.

Jellyfish – That Is Why

This semester I’m taking a course on the philosophical problem of vagueness — the idea that many of the entities we refer to in everyday language lack sharp definitions or boundaries.  There is no definite point at which “red” becomes “orange” or “short” becomes “tall,” yet most of the time we have no trouble applying these terms.  This is problematic for the methodology of analytic philosophy, which thrives on precise definitions.

One area where the problem of vague boundaries is particularly thorny is in the pop-sociological practice of assigning people to “generations” based on their birth years.  Intuitively, people of certain age ranges have a lot in common based on shared life experiences:  those who were between the ages of, say, seventeen to twenty-five at the bombing of Pearl Harbor were affected by the event in radically different ways from those who were in their late fifties, or those who wouldn’t be born for another ten years.  Those who were teenagers in 1964 enjoyed music and movies quite foreign to the teenagers of 1998.  Yet drawing generational boundaries is notoriously difficult to do.  The popular media like to refer to “the Greatest Generation,” “the Lost Generation,” “the Baby Boomers,” “Generation X,” and all sorts of other crazy categories, with extremely imprecise and often conflicting dates demarcating them.

Neil Howe and William Strauss attempted a robust theory of generations in their 1991 book Generations:  The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069. They posited a cycle in which four generational “archetypes” are repeated over and over again (though we apparently skipped a generation around the time of the Civil War).  The whole thing is very Jungian, and more than a little reminiscent of astrology:  give someone a description of a generation with the dates and identifying cultural references edited out, and probably everyone will think it applies to them.

Joshua Glenn has proposed an alternate scheme for dividing up the generations, and I find it more realistic, and far more entertaining, than Strauss and Howe’s.  (I do have some gripes:  Born in 1976, I should fit squarely within the “Net Generation,” yet I identify far more with the slightly older “PC Generation.”  I certainly would like to think I’m more similar to Chuck Klosterman than to Perez Hilton.)  Of particular interest to me is the fact that he posits ten-year generations, and takes issue with the notion that “decades” as popularly construed should always be divided by calendar years ending in zero.  Instead, he goes for the 3-4 boundary:  the “Sixties” were 1964-1973, the “Seventies” from 1974-1983, and so forth.

This makes a lot of sense to me:  The music of the early 1960s was a lot more like what we’d call “Fifties music” than the psychedelia and protest music that would come later in the decade.  There’s an old saying that “most of the Sixties happened in the Seventies,” meaning that things like widespread protests against the Vietnam war, the Kent State shootings, and Watergate didn’t happen until after 1970.  It also explains why, when people are supposed to spend their lives nostalgic for the culture of their teens and young adult years, I’ve always felt like the 1990s were the most depressing and culturally barren era in living memory.  It turns out the decade where I really feel at home is the Eighties:  not the 1980s, but the period from 1984-1993.  (I might even be tempted to shave a couple of years off of this, since it seems like things started going downhill the first time someone in the media uttered the phrase “grunge rock.”)

The Eighties (at least the pre-grunge part of them) are something of a lost decade:  When people say “’80s music,” they generally mean early 1980′s stuff like Devo or Bananarama, or Michael Jackson and Madonna.  When they say “the early 90s,” they mean slackers, grunge, goatees, flannel, and really bad movies.  It’s easy to forget that the tail end of the 1980s and the pre-”Smells Like Teen Spirit” 1990s were one of the most creative periods in popular music.  It’s when indie- and college-rock mainstays like Sonic Youth, The Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. released some of their most memorable works, and N.W.A. and Public Enemy were forcing critics to take rap music seriously.  Even mainstream music was more fun:  the much-ridiculed “hair metal” bands had more genuine enthusiasm and musicianship than the flannel-clad slackers who replaced them, and without any of the pretentious hipster irony.  (Uncomfortable truth:  Alice In Chains were a hair-metal band, boys and girls.  They just had the extremely good fortune to be a hair-metal band from Seattle at just the right time to survive a grunge rebranding when all the other hair bands were dying off.  They were like the Archaeopteryx of hair-metal dinosaurs.)

So for the next few days I’d like to examine the music of the Eighties (as opposed to the 1980s) and revisit some forgotten gems of this neglected decade.  I’ll start with a song that was an MTV staple for a while in 1990 or so, but few people I talk to seem to remember it:  “That Is Why,” by Jellyfish.  They were a Supertramp-esque band formed from the ashes of Beatnik Beach, and their keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. later became one half of The Moog Cookbook.  They were also one of the few bands whose drummer was the lead vocalist, and to my knowledge the only such band whose drummer-vocalist looks like a hippie version of Sawyer from Lost. Enjoy.

Tori Amos – Winter

I’ve lived in lots of different places, but never anyplace where it snowed regularly.  The best I could hope for was a light dusting every two or three years.  Whenever that would happen, I made a tradition of listening to Tori Amos’ 1992 Winter EP in its entirety.  Having spent the past three and a half years or so living in Florida, I haven’t had the opportunity to practice this little tradition in some time.

This Sunday, a freak winter storm blanketed Athens-Clarke County with snow.  Unfortunately, it also downed power lines and blew out transformers, and, living out in the boonies as I do, I was without power for about a day and a half.  This left me unable to practice either my snow day tradition or my blogging.  Power now restored, I share this charming little tradition with you.

Talking Heads – (Nothing But) Flowers

Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” may have earned from Tom Lehrer the title of “most sanctimonious song ever written,” but if there were a separate division for the environmental movement, surely Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” would be high in the running.  It contains the memorable refrain “They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot,” and warns farmers to “put away your DDT /  I don’t care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees.”  Of course, Joni Mitchell’s status as a successful recording artist depends on the very industrial society she criticizes, and her extreme fortune to be born in a First World country gives her the luxury of railing against one of the more effective means of fighting malaria.  In the end, people who bemoan the effects of technological progress often stand to lose the most from its curtailment.

So if paradise was destroyed to build a parking lot, what is left when the parking lot is destroyed?  (Nothing but) flowers, of course.  Here the Talking Heads provide a counter to Mitchell’s “get back to the garden” self-righteousness by exploring what such a return would actually entail.  Through means that are never made explicit, the world of the song’s narrator has been abruptly transformed from an industrial society to a bucolic paradise.  His response?  “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower.”

Most of the lyrics bemoan the loss of the conveniences of modern life:  microwaves, cars, Pizza Huts.  But the second verse recalls a vision in which the narrator, as an “angry young man,” used to pretend to be a billboard that “fell in love with the beautiful highway.”  We’re used to hearing nature romanticized and contrasted with soulless technology, but here it is the manmade which is romanticized while nature threatens it.

In a strange way, this makes more sense.  There has been a recent surge of interest in post-human scenarios:  books like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, and television programs like the History Channel’s Life After People, paint scenarios in which a planet suddenly devoid of human technology reverts to wilderness.  It would apparently take an astonishingly short time — a fraction of the time humans have been around — for all trace of us to vanish from the earth.  Plastic may last for five hundred years, but that’s nothing to a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old planet.  Whenever humans “destroy” nature, nature has a way of coming back.  It’s humans that have a limited shelf life.  So maybe there should be more songs and poems lamenting the fleeting nature of honky tonks, Dairy Queens and 7-11s.  The flowers aren’t going anywhere.

Liz Phair – Stratford-on-Guy

Imagine if the Beatles had skipped the teenage pop phase of their career entirely, and debuted instead with their groundbreaking album Revolver. Imagine further that very few people bought this album, because it was just too revolutionary and challenging for them.  Straining your imagination to the breaking point, suppose that the band Oasis traveled through some kind of temporal anomaly and wound up in the 1960s and released their sophomore album of Beatles ripoffs, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, immediately after the commercial failure of Revolver, only to have it sell squidillions of copies.  If you’ve got any imagination left, picture the Beatles concluding that making music their way just wasn’t working, and spending the rest of their career in relative obscurity, churning out formulaic pop songs that fail either to inspire or to sell.

That, minus the time-traveling Britpop band, is more or less what happened to Liz Phair.  In 1993 she released her amazing debut album Exile in Guyville. Allegedly patterned (vaguely) after the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, this collection of songs consists of catchy, raw indie pop with daring lyrics that chronicle Phair’s experiences as one of the few female artists in the male-dominated Chicago music scene of the early 1990s.  Songs like “Fuck and Run” and “Flower” were particularly shocking in their frank language, and dared to suggest that there was more to women’s sexuality than simply being the objects of male pursuit.

Then, in 1995, a screeching Canadian harpy named Alanis Morisette, fresh from a successful career having green slime dumped on her head, released an album of victimist whining interspersed with tales of her sexual exploits with the goofy guy from Full House. It was as far from Exile in Guyville as “Wonderwall” was from “A Day in the Life,” but it was just what the record-consuming public wanted.  Morisette became a star, while Phair stayed semi-obscure and spent the rest of her career making less and less challenging music, eventually turning into some sort of bad Mandy Moore parody.

When you’ve heard bubblegum pap like “Why Can’t I” it can be mind-boggling to go back and listen to a track like “Stratford-on-Guy” and remember just how good her first album was.  If I may stretch the Beatles analogy even further, I like to believe that the real Liz Phair was killed in a car accident shortly after recording Guyville, and the artist currently using her name is no more than the winner of a Liz Phair lookalike contest.  Listen to this track backwards and tell me if you don’t hear the words “turn me on, dead girl”.  It’s true!

David Bowie – Lady Stardust

I’m not really going to talk about this track today.  It’s a cut from Bowie’s famous concept album The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and it’s an ode to the gender-bending glam rock scene Bowie helped create.  But you knew all that.  What I’m going to talk about is the theory of oneiric Darwinism.

I do a lot of reading in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, and it has often struck me that most armchair attempts at explaining how the mind work tacitly assume that the waking mind is the “real” mind.  Dreams, if they are addressed at all, are treated as an abberation, an altered state of consciousness.  I, on the other hand, think another hypothesis is worthy of serious consideration:  that the dream state is the normal state of mind, and that our alert, focused waking state is an artificial state that can only be maintained through effort.

I say this because I’ve noticed a curious thing about the period between waking and dreaming.  I’m still conscious, still capable of distinguishing my inner thoughts from my outer sensations.  But it gets more and more difficult to pin down thoughts, to reason from premise to conclusion, to remember a certain point and come back to it later.  Thought becomes pure free association, with no self-censorship.  Eventually one reaches the state where there is no longer the precious Cartesian distinction between thoughts produced by me and sensations from something external to me, and we call this state dreaming.

Psychoanalyst Mark J. Blechner developed the theory that this free association period is a vital component of thought.  During the dream state, our mind goes through a period of rapid change, creating all kinds of new ideas and images.  The best of these ideas are (hopefully) retained upon waking, and go on to contribute to our everyday mental life.  He calls this theory “oneiric Darwinism,” in an analogy with Darwinian natural selection.

Of course, he’s not the first to note the productive role dreams can play in waking life.  Thomas Edison noted that many of his best ideas came to him in the state between waking and dreaming, only to be forgotten once he awoke.  He took to sleeping in an armchair with a ball in his hand, held over a metal pie plate.  Once he drifted into deep sleep, he would let go of the ball, which would hit the pie plate and wake him up so that he could record any great ideas that had come to him.

I can personally attest to the creative power of the pre-dream state.  One night, just before I drifted off to sleep, I imagined I was watching Tom Waits perform in some nightclub.  Only he wasn’t doing his own songs.  Instead, he was doing covers of songs by David Bowie (remember Bowie?  This is a blog entry about Bowie.)  Actually, it was probably just this one song.  But I was struck by how well it worked.  As you listen to this song, imagine the backup band is a jazz combo, perhaps with a few guys banging on pipes and water bottles in the background.  Now, instead of David Bowie’s voice, imagine the throaty growl of Tom Waits.  Oh, and you should probably slow the tempo down a bit for the full effect.

Now, doesn’t that sound better?  Wouldn’t the world be a better place if Tom Waits actually recorded a cover of “Lady Stardust?”  Tom, if by some slim coincidence you read this blog:  I have a birthday coming up next month.  Please?  For me?

Wall of Voodoo – Factory

One-hit wonders are an interesting social phenomenon.  Collectively, we love them:  pick up any Greatest Hits of the [decade] CD, and the majority of tracks will probably be from artists who are only known for one song.  Yet we don’t love any of these artists enough to keep them in the pop charts by buying their albums.  Is it because they only managed to make one good song?  Or just that we’re easily distracted?

Of special interest to me are the artists who have long, brilliant careers and loyal fans, but only managed one or two hits.  Warren Zevon was one of the greatest singer-songwriters of the 1970s, yet he’s only known for “Werewolves of London.”  Aimee Mann found greater commercial success with ‘Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry” than with any of her vastly superior solo work.  And then there’s Wall of Voodoo, known to afficionados of ’80s New Wave as the band who did “Mexican Radio.”  While that song is undeniably catchy (and how many top 40 songs rhyme “Tijuana” with “barbecued iguana”?), the rest of the album Call of the West is worth a listen as well.

The band’s sound is something like a New Wave soundtrack to a spaghetti Western:  the typical synths and drum machines of mid-’80s pop compete with twangy reverbed guitar and wailing harmonica, and singer Stan Ridgeway’s voice sounds like an early (and better) prototype of Les Claypool.  Though they’re famous for a lighthearted novelty song, their songs can be pretty dark and disturbing.  “Factory” is a perfect example, falling into a literary subgenre that could be called “industrial gothic.”  It tells of the isolation and boredom of a lifelong assembly-line worker, with references to accidental mutilation, phantom limb syndrome, and domestic violence thrown in.  Perhaps it’s easy to see why listeners who bought the album expecting more songs like “Mexican Radio” didn’t become fans, but those who appreciate dark humor will probably enjoy it.

Incredible Bongo Band – In a Gadda Da Vida

When I wrote about the Beastie Boys’ “Lookin’ Down the Barrel of a Gun,” I mentioned that the song’s bongo breakbeat was sampled from an ensemble known as the Incredible Bongo Band.  I’ve since managed to acquire the band’s album Bongo Rock, and it’s an interesting musical experience indeed.

I have something of a soft spot for the flip side of the early rock ‘n’ roll era:  the lounge, exotica, space-age bachelor pad, and other precursors to Muzak that coexisted uneasily with the acid rock and psychedelia of the Woodstock generation.  Though you’d hardly know this from the self-congratulating baby boomer retrospectives on VH1 or PBS, this stuff was actually far more popular than anything Jimi Hendrix or Jefferson Airplane did.  What’s more, the freaks and hippies weren’t as culturally isolated as you might think from these thirtysomethings with their tuxedos and martinis.

In 1972, producer Michael Viner assembled a cadre of studio musicians (including, by some accounts, a now-bandless Ringo Starr) to record a collection of kitschy instrumental music in which brass instruments and bongos featured more prominently than guitars and drum kits.  Alongside more traditional lounge fair, they recorded covers of rock hits by Jerry Lordan, the Rolling Stones, and this little hymn by a certain I. Ron Butterfly.

The music reminds me of the soundtracks to those 1970s NBC Mystery Movie shows like McCloud and Banacek, in which the heroes were in their forties and young people were ruthlessly stereotyped as unwashed, drug-addled campus-terrorizing Communists.  They were Silent Generation shows for a Silent Generation audience, but the scenes devoted to miscreant youth needed a rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack.  So they got the same old Hollywood studio musicians and arrangers to do the job, and apparently having never heard actual rock music was not considered a handicap.  I’ve heard this lounge-tinged faux-rock described as sounding “like a Mariachi band trying to play the blues”.  Stab brass, feverish bongo beats, and of course, wakka-chikka-wakka guitar.  It was beautiful in its completely and utterly missing the point.

Klark Kent – Away From Home

As The Onion brilliantly pointed out, Sting used to be kind of cool.  Back before he started churning out lite-rock pap, he fronted The Police, one of the greatest bands of the post-punk/New Wave era.  But while he was a great singer and songwriter, he could also be controlling, and unwilling to acknowledge the creative contributions of the other members of his group.  Drummer Stewart Copeland was probably the single greatest musician of the bunch, but he was rarely given free reign to exercise his songwriting skills.  (In fact, the only Copeland-credited Police song I can think of is “Miss Gradenko” from their farewell album Synchronicity.)

When he felt artistically confined, Copeland did what many second-banana artists do:  he formed a solo project.  Not only that, he created a completely new alter-ego in the form of Klark Kent, whose biographies variously described him as an eccentric Welshmen, an Indian Sufi mystic, and a humble computer programmer.  His songs are a lot more lighthearted, clever, and humorous than those he recorded with The Police, and the instrumentation is more reminiscent of the synth-heavy pop of the early ’80s.  I can’t help but wonder what his songs might have sounded like had Sting allowed them to be used in The Police instead.

This track, “Away From Home,” could be the ultimate anthem of the young adult moving out of his parents’ home for the first time.  It celebrates both the joys (“I don’t have to clean my room!”) and sorrows (“My weekly pay won’t even dent”) of that momentous occasion over a catchy pop rhythm that sounds miles away from Sting & Co.  I just hope that I and every online lyrics site misheard the line “I entertain my rancid date.”  Do I even want to know what this means?

Billy Bob Thornton – Orange County Suicide

Every screen actor who’s wanted to try his hand at music has found himself inadvertently standing in the repugnant shadow of William Shatner, whose weird half-talking rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” has become our culture’s archetype of unsuccessful moonlighting.  People love to see a celebrity crash and burn, and nowhere is the opportunity to do so more abundant than when someone who’s known in one field attempts to break into a completely different one.  It doesn’t help that so many actors can’t sing, either.

That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by Hobo, Billy Bob Thornton’s debut foray into the music world.  Thornton has described the album’s musical style as “hillbilly Pink Floyd,” but that doesn’t do justice to the sound, a sort of funhouse mirror reflection of what’s generally called “Americana” or “alt-country.”  It plays like the soundtrack to a lost Cohen Brothers movie that’s somewhere between Raising Arizona and No Country for Old Men.

I especially liked the song “Orange County Suicide,” about a woman Thornton saw trying to slit her wrists with a blunt wooden matchstick.  When I first heard the song I was immediately reminded of Warren Zevon, and it turns out this is no coincidence:  Thornton himself had approached Zevon to help him write the song, but was turned down and went with Zevon collaborator Jorge Calderon instead.  The result echoes Zevon’s trademark technique of dealing with sombre topics in a witty, playful manner.