A Timeless Wavelength

The Future – 4jg

Before Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh formed The Human League and started writing songs for Swiffer commercials, they were known as The Future, and wrote Kraftwerk-inspired songs that helped usher in the era of synth pop.  One of these early songs was “4jg,” an instrumental ode to dystopian science fiction writer J. G. Ballard.  Ware and Marsh were not the only Ballard fans in the burgeoning synth and industrial movements; it seems everyone from Daniel Miller to Gary Numan were influenced by Ballard’s disturbing fiction.

I’ve recently begun making my way through a collection of Ballard’s short stories, and it’s like reading a season of The Twilight Zone. So far I’ve read stories about genetically engineered singing plants, people becoming stuck in time loops, and a mega-city so vast and dense its inhabitants don’t believe anything outside the city exists.  And I’ve barely scratched the surface.  I haven’t even gotten to his famous novel Crash, about a world where automobile accidents have become the latest form of sexual fetish.  But so far I’m fairly impressed by what I’ve read, and anxious to read more.

Devo – Speed Racer

With my interest in computer-generated synth music newly rekindled, it was natural that I’d revisit the godfathers of ’80s New Wave synth-pop:  DEVO.

There’s been a recent spike in the popularity of a genre known as “nerdcore,” which combines elements of rap, metal, and punk with lyrics about Star Wars and programming the Commodore 64.  I guess it started as an ironic joke:  let’s take a bunch of musical styles that are normally associated with aggressive posturing, and turn them into the voice of the guys who were always getting shoved into lockers in high school.  It’s a variant on the old “isn’t it funny when lame white guys try to rap?” trope.

Devo weren’t like that.  To paraphrase the fictionalized Lester Bangs from Almost Famous:  they were pasty nerds who had the courage to be pasty nerds, which made them poetic.  With the opening track on their album New Traditionalists, they declared that they were “through being cool,” and they showed that nerds didn’t have to pretend to be tough.  They wore thick glasses and ridiculous hats they called “energy domes”.  They reveled in (and helped define) the ’80s synthesizer sound,  reveling in the simple sequencer rhythms that earlier artists would have derided for “lacking soul”.  They were members of, and evangelists for, the Church of the SubGenius,  a religion based around the age-old nerd fantasy of getting revenge on all the cool people and “normals”.  And they guest-starred on ’80s nerd sitcom Square Pegs.

This track, from their 1982 album Oh, No!  It’s DEVO!, is a beautifully surreal example of the band’s style.  Each verse introduces some character with a different funny voice (“I’m Speed Racer and I drive real fast,” “I’m a big pirate and I like to steal”), and I can’t help but think the idea for this song came from watching little kids play with mismatched toys.  You can just picture the little tykes, sitting on the floor in their miniature energy dome hats, with a Speed Racer action figure, a LEGO pirate, a barbie doll, and a game of Operation!, doing silly voices for this diverse cast of characters.  This track also shows, incidentally, that DEVO were in on the very nerdy “Talk like a pirate” meme a good twenty years before everyone else.