A Timeless Wavelength

Vic Chesnutt – Band Camp

What is it about band camp that fires the American cultural imagination?  Where did we get the idea that this bivouac of musical pedagogy was a secret hotbed of debauchery?  And why did I encounter absolutely none of it when I went to band camp?

To this day I still haven’t seen the classic lowbrow comedy movie American Pie. I say it was “classic” in the sense that the siege of Guernica was a classic Blitzkrieg: the first in a long line of very unpleasant experiences.  I guess those movies serve their purpose, in that thirteen-year-old boys have to have someplace to learn the vocabulary they’ll need when they’re bragging to their friends about all the sex they haven’t had.  But even though I haven’t seen the movie, and am in no rush to do so, I couldn’t help but hear people reference Alyson Hannigan’s notorious “One time, at band camp. . .” line.  I won’t finish the line, and most of you have probably heard it anyway; if you haven’t, let’s just say she described something that sounded both uncomfortable and unsanitary.  If it ever happened to anyone while I was at band camp, I remain blissfully ignorant of it.

Then we have this litte — ha!  I almost called it a “chestnut”! — by Vic Chesnutt.  It tells a story involving band camp, vodka, and sanitary products that the writers of American Pie are probably slapping themselves for not thinking of first.  (Actually, now that I listen to the song again, it seems the incident in question didn’t actually occur at band camp, but since band camp is mentioned in the song we’ll include it in the “band camp as devil’s playground” canon.)  I should probably say the song is NSFW, but who listens to MP3 blogs at work?

I hate to be the one to disillusion fans of the American Pie franchise (assuming any of them read this blog, which further assumes any of them read) but band camp isn’t like that.  In my own personal experience, band camp involved standing in the hot sun for hours on end marching to two bars of music at a time back and forth between two little flags stuck on a football field, after which we returned to the dorms far too tired and dehydrated even to ponder any hijinks.  If band camp is some den of iniquity, Parris Island must be Caligula’s palace.

DJ Sucks (featuring Susanne Vega) – Tom’s Diner (Criminally Vulgar remix)

Here’s a little number that’s been taking up space on my hard drive for about five years now.  DJ Sucks is none other than yours truly, and this track was the first substantial thing I produced with Apple’s GarageBand software.  I had been dabbling in electronic music production since the late 1980s, when I first encountered the dangerous combination of a Commodore Amiga 2000 and a Yamaha TG55 synthesizer.  From there I moved on to painstakingly splicing and resampling audio clips with the shareware GoldWave application, which is sort of the modern equivalent of those early experimental electronic compositions that were made by literally cutting and pasting bits of tape together.  (Incidentally, there’s a record at Wuxtry’s that has one of these experimental tape compositions on it, and maybe some day I’ll actually get around to buying it and reviewing it here.)

So I’ve done a lot of fiddling with some pretty low-grade hardware and software.  GarageBand may be no Logic or ProTools, but it was an order of magnitude more professional than anything I’d used before.  It was certainly more than I deserved, because the first thing I did was slap together some built-in clips and put one of the more famous a capella tracks of the ’80s over it.  It’s kind of Depeche Mode meets the Smiths meets the least original idea for a remix ever, but I’m still proud of it.

The Balfa Brothers – La Danse de Mardi Gras

I almost forgot to acknowledge the only Catholic holiday even the heathens still celebrate.  Here’s a little pre-lenten Balfa Brothers!  Laissez les bontemps rouler!

The Flaming Lips – Knives Out

Two modern bands that seem to inspire almost cult-like devotion are Radiohead and the Flaming Lips, so when one of them covers the other’s song, it’s worth noting.  The Flaming Lips’ cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out” (from the latter’s 2001 album Amnesiac) is one of those covers that manages to be far better than the original.

The Radiohead song emerged out of a difficult period for the band when Thom Yorke’s career-crippling writer’s block intersected with the band’s desire to start dabbling in electronic music.  (For rock bands that have been around more than ten years, this is the quintessential “jump the shark” moment, the musical equivalent of having Ted McGinley guest-star on your sitcom.)  The two albums Kid A and Amnesiac (generally considered two halves of one double album) end up being a sort of audio knockwurst, cobbled together from discarded bits of other songs that weren’t big enough or tasty enough to become songs in their own right.  “Knives out” was the exception, a song that actually sounded like a song instead of a malfunctioning drum machine with whining dubbed over it.

The Flaming Lips take this standout song and make it even better, basing their version around a slow piano progression that wonderfully complements Steven Drozd’s thick distorted drumbeats.  While the Radiohead version has a polished, overproduced feel to it, the Lips’ version evokes a small, crowded club where a band you’ve never heard of plays cover songs in the corner.  It’s comfortably familiar, a welcome antidote to the strangeness of the Kid A era.

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.

They Might Be Giants – Careful What You Pack

The other day I saw Coraline 3D, the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s classic children’s story about a girl who crawls through a hidden doorway to discover the perfect family she never knew she had.  I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, and while some have criticized it for taking liberty with some elements of the book, overall it did an excellent job of preserving the book’s balance between fairytale fantasy and creepy nightmare world.

In the scene where Coraline first meets her “other father,” who demonstrates a magical piano that plays him, I couldn’t help but notice his voice sounded suspiciously like John Linnell from They Might Be Giants.  It turns out that this song was only one of several songs the band wrote and performed for the movie.  However, as the project progressed it became clear that the movie wouldn’t work as a musical, and so all but this song were left out of the final product.  One of the deleted songs, “Careful What You Pack,” did make it onto the band’s 2007 album The Else, and the rest are slated to be released separately in the future.

While I understand the decision to make the movie less music-oriented, I can definitely see how this song would have worked.  We’re used to thinking of They Might Be Giants as a happy, family-friendly band who have contributed music to Tiny Toons Adventures, Malcolm in the Middle, and Homestar Runner. But there’s always been an unsettling side to the band as well, and Coraline would have given them ample opportunity to express it.  This song perfectly captures the “down the rabbit hole” aspect of Coraline’s journey, combining a sense of adventure with an equal share of foreboding.  “She thinks she’s smart, she’s just curious” could have been the tagline for the film.

Queensrÿche – Breaking the Silence

I’ve written before about a scientific attempt to create the world’s most unpopular song. Well, it occurs to me that if you applied a similar methodology to the task of making the world’s most unpopular album, you’d probably come pretty close to Queensrÿche’s 1988 album Operation:  Mindcrime. It’s a concept album by a progressive metal band with a weird, umlaut-laden name who embody the more egregious flaws of Iron Maiden, Rush, and Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd.  An album that weaves a complicated tale of brainwashing, revolutionary politics, assassination, drug addiction, rape, and murder, and features radio drama-style sound clips and gratuitous use of a full orchestra and operatic choir.  And I’m not even doing it justice.

Sure, it’s cheesy and bombastic and reflects the worst excesses of the decade in which it was made.  That’s why I love it.  Because, deep down, don’t we really miss the time when rock stars were still rock stars, wore tight leather pants, played bitchin’ guitar riffs and sang way up high?  And to think, at the time, Queensrÿche were billed as the “thinking man’s heavy metal band”, the socially conscious, politically aware alternative to bands like Ratt and Quiet Riot.  But they still rocked!  You don’t get bands like that anymore.  Bono would never write a metal concept album about third-world debt relief, and we wouldn’t buy it if he did.  Yeah, he does wear leather pants, but he looks like somebody’s dorky dad who’s just put on a rock star costume for a fancy dress party.  And there’s no way the Edge could get riffs like these to come out of that delay pedal that plays guitar for him.

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!

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!

The Decemberists – Los Angeles, I’m Yours

Hating on L.A. seems to be the favorite pastime of everyone who lives there.  From Bill Hicks to Henry Rollins to Bad Religion to Tool, musicians and comedians never miss an opportunity to tell us how miserable the place is, and how they’re all too good for it despite the fact that they somehow feel the need to live there in order to further their careers.  The whole city, we’re constantly told, is nothing but a bunch of phony people with plastic surgery who all want to be movie stars but will probably just end their lives as crack-addicted prostitutes in a vomit-filled alleyway if they’re not killed in a drive-by shooting first.

This picture of L.A. has become such a cliché that it almost becomes a recommendation:  if all these people who hate L.A. so much can’t think of anything original to say about it, maybe Los Angeles wasn’t the problem. Maybe the only thing wrong with L.A. is all the people who think they’re too good for it.

Whether L.A. is really that bad, or whether it’s all in the eye of the beholder, it’s refreshing to hear an original take on the subject.  The Decemberists’ “Los Angeles, I’m yours” doesn’t shy away from criticisms of L.A., but at least it contains some of the most beautifully poetic potshots at that city I’ve heard to date:  the city is “an ocean’s garbled vomit on the shore,” a “ditch of iniquity and tears”.

Yet for all the complaining, each verse ends with the line “Los Angeles, I’m yours.”  One could dismiss this as irony, but I don’t think such an otherwise beautiful song needs to resort to hipster sarcasm.  The line could also mean “I’m yours” in a more sinister sense:  I’m caught in your clutches and can’t get away.  This is probably one intended meaning.  But I don’t think the straightforward interpretation should be dismissed.  People who hate L.A. just spout the same lame garbage about celebrities and crime.  You have to love the city to care enough about it to come up with lines like “Its streets and boulevards, orphans and oligarchs, it hears a plaintive melody.”  The City of Angels may have left you “wretched, retching on all fours,” but you wouldn’t want to live anyplace else.