A Timeless Wavelength

The Dead Milkmen – Stuart

The Dead Milkmen have a few songs that are mostly a bizarre spoken word piece over music, but “Stuart” is easily the best.  It’s got everything:  trailer parks, carnival death, and a bizarre conspiracy theory about what the queers are doing to our soil.  But one of my favorite parts is the reference to an animal called a “burrow owl,” which everyone but that Johnny Worster kid knows lives in a hole in the ground.

After years of having heard this song, I found out that the Dead Milkmen didn’t make up the burrowing owl.  It’s a real animal, and not only that, it’s native to parts of Florida where I once lived.  It’s even the mascot for Florida Atlantic University, which I’m sure does nothing to engender team spirit from anyone who’s heard this song.  There have even been lawsuits when condo developers bought some land only to find it was protected burrow owl habitat, so they can’t build anything on it, and they can’t grow anything on it.

This was almost as exciting as finding out there’s a bitchin’ Camaro that you really could drive up from the Bahamas.  Maybe you can learn things from Dead Milkmen songs after all.  Nevertheless I probably still shouldn’t try smoking banana peels or drinking bleach.

They Might Be Giants – I Heard a Sound (from Fingertips)

Sometimes when I sit down to write a blog entry I already have an idea of what song I want to write about.  Other times, I make use of my music player’s “random mix” function to help me find something.  Pulling up random songs from one’s collection is now such a natural thing to do that we forget this was revolutionary technology as recently as 1992.

This track is the shortest track (tied with “Who’s Knocking on the Wall?”) from the “Fingertips” medley on They Might Be Giants’ Apollo 18 album.  The medley was said to be inspired by those late-night infomercials for CDs like Super Hits of the ’70s, where the list of songs scrolls by and we get to hear a couple of seconds of each one in succession.  They Might Be Giants decided just to make one song composed of a bunch of these brief snippets, with many different styles, instruments, and singers featured.

What was especially interesting was that, instead of putting the medley on the CD as one long track, they recorded each snippet as a separate track.  The liner notes proclaim that “The indexing of this disc is designed to complement the Shuffle Mode of modern CD players”.  I guess the idea was that if you played the disc in Shuffle Mode, you’d hear a couple of long songs with one of these little song snippets in between them.

But it’s the “modern CD players” part that gets me.  First of all, in 1992, were there really any CD players that weren’t modern?  The format was barely ten years old at the time!  And then there’s the implication that randomness was some revolutionary new technology that TMBG were the first to take advantage of.  But the fact is, it was revolutionary.  For the first time since audio recordings began, it was possible to listen to songs in an order not pre-determined by either the artist or the listener.  (Or was it?  I vaguely remember my parents had an 8-track player when I was a kid that had a “random track” function, although it’s possible it was just broken.)

The truly revolutionary nature of this feature didn’t become apparent until the introduction of the iPod and similar digital music players, when it became possible to shuffle songs from one’s entire music collection.  I can remember driving around listening to my randomly shuffled music (not on an iPod– those things cost money!– but on a Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 running XMMS) and thinking the effect was rather like listening to a really, really good radio station.  There’s no substitute for surprise, and one of the joys of radio is suddenly hearing a song you’ve never heard before, or haven’t heard in so long you’ve forgotten it, or really wanted to hear without even knowing it.  It’s no coincidence that after the sudden popularity of the iPod shuffle, some radio stations changed their format to include more free-form playlists that mixed up songs from many different genres and decades.

So, here’s to They Might Be Giants:  aleatory pioneers!

Frank Zappa – Jewish Princess

Here’s a riddle for you:  are “offensive” and “funny” mutually exclusive categories?

Sure, lots of people tell racist, sexist, or just generally disgusting jokes that they personally find funny, at the expense of some other group who find the same jokes offensive.  Most of the time the offended reaction of the target group is a deliberate consequense of the joke, part of what makes the teller think it’s so funny.  These are usually the same types of people who think it’s hilarious when something painful or humiliating happens to someone else.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.  I mean, can the same thing be both offensive and funny to the same person?

As a possible example, I offer the Frank Zappa classic “Jewish Princess.”  This song has got to be the single most ruthless stereotype of Jewish-American women in all of popular culture.  The titular princess has “a garlic aroma / that could level Tacoma”; she “weasels and lies,” “don’t know shit about cooking / and is arrogant looking,” and possesses a number of other attributes I won’t even dignify by repeating.  The song is vulgar, demeaning, and seemingly without redeeming qualities.

And yet, when I first heard this song, I couldn’t stop laughing.  Somehow this song manages to be so over-the-top that it loses all its power to offend.  Ordinary racist jokes offend because the joke-teller usually believes in the stereotypes he’s helping to perpetuate, and only someone who believes in them could find them funny.  But where “Jewish Princess” succeeds is in setting up a stereotype of Jewish women that is so utterly divorced from reality we have to laugh at the very thought that it could be taken seriously.  It’s as if we’re not laughing at the victim of stereotyping, but rather at the type of person who could possibly mistake that stereotype for truth.

Most of the time, people who get away with offensive stereotypes do so because they are a member of the stereotyped class (as with Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle) or claim to be (as with Ned “Carlos Mencia” Holness and Larry the Upper-Class Midwesterner Pretending to be a Redneck Cable Guy).  Zappa’s case is interesting in that he’s not Jewish, yet gets away with Jewish stereotypes.  It occurs to me that I’ve never actually heard a Jewish person’s reaction to this song, and I’d be interested in hearing whether they found it offensive, funny, or both.

Fish Karma – God Is a Groovy Guy

In general, I’m excited about the fact that music distribution is more and more being thought of as the exchange of information, rather than of physical media.  The fact that any artist can upload a bunch of MP3s to the Web and get instant worldwide distribution without having to become an indentured servant of the recording industry can only be a good thing for musicians.  And there’s little evidence to support the recording industry’s fearmongering about how filesharing will bankrupt artists (most of whom see very little profit from their record sales anyway).  Major online retailers like Amazon, emusic, and even Apple’s iTunes store now realize that there is quite a lot of money to be made selling non-DRM-crippled music, and consumers have unprecedented access to a world of recorded music they never would have found if they had to depend on brick-and-mortar record stores.

That being said, there’s one relic of the old record industry model that I will miss — the bargain bin.  In the old days, record stores would order CDs and cassettes in advance, based on what they thought would sell.  Mostly these were from artists who had already proved popular, but every once in a while they would take a chance on unknowns.  If these sat on the shelf long enough, they were drastically marked down and moved to the bargain bin to make room on the shelves for less financially risky albums.  I used to love going through the bargain bin and getting five cassettes for a dollar from artists I’d never heard of, albums I never would have bought at full price.  Sure, now there are all kinds of Web-based services like Last.FM and MP3 blogs (hello!) to help people discover new music, but there’s something immensely gratifying about finding something wonderful in a big box of stuff nobody else wanted.  It’s like dumpster diving without the smell.

Perhaps my all-time favorite bargain bin find was the album Teddy In the Sky With Magnets by an enigmatic artist known only as Fish Karma.  It consists of a bunch of hilarious folky songs, most featuring only guitar and vocals, about everything from Methodists to zombie dogs to swap meets.  It’s reminiscent in some ways of Mojo Nixon, with whom Fish Karma sometimes collaborated.  (The record store where I got this tape did not, in fact, have any Mojo Nixon, which, as the Dead Milkmen astutely observed, indicates that the store could have used some fixin’.)

The artist himself proved difficult to track down.  Sometime in the mid-’90s I managed to make email contact with a musician who had worked with Fish Karma, who provided me with the latter’s email address.  I had one brief exchange with him, in which I proposed creating a Fish Karma website, but I never heard back from him.  Thanks to the magic of Wikipedia, I have since learned that he’s a former University of Arizona student named Terry Owen.  This track, a lament about divine judgement, is one of the funnier tracks on Teddy In the Sky With Magnets.