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.

Pearl Jam – Unemployable

It’s strange how the passage of time can change how you perceive things.  Back in the early 1990s when the Seattle scene first gained nationwide attention, there was some sort of rivalry between Nirvana, with their primitive fuzz-pedal sound, and Pearl Jam, with a more polished studio sound.  It was made out to be like punk rock versus ’70s arena rock, Fenders versus Gibsons, keepin’ it real versus just an act.

Though I enjoyed the music of both bands, I was firmly on the side of Nirvana in this little feud.  It didn’t help that Pearl Jam were always damaging their credibility by going out of their way to seem “underground”:  after winning several MTV Video Music Awards the band stopped making videos, after their feud with Ticketmaster it became harder to attend their concerts, and at one time they (perhaps jokingly) insinuated they were going to start releasing albums on vinyl only.  I was sure that any day they were going to live up to Todd Snider’s parody and “be the only band that wouldn’t play a note”.  Nirvana, on the other hand, were The For-Real Deal.  You could tell because when Kurt Cobain went on the cover of corporate magazine Rolling Stone he wore a T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck”.  How alternative! And of course, that whole suicide thing.  I mean, top that, Eddie Vedder.  The best you ever did was unwittingly become the focus of an Internet rumor that you had died of a heroin overdose.

Years passed, and Nirvana’s music did not age well.  Their songs are all pretty simple and formulaic, just fuzzed-out taco riffs and a loud-soft-loud dynamic even they admitted was just ripping off the Pixies.  Cobain’s lyrics are rather trite, and riddled with half-successful attempts at wordplay (“afterbirth of a nation”?).  His voice isn’t the easiest to listen to, either.  Plus Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana success with the Foo Fighters shows that Cobain wasn’t the real creative talent in that band.  Just about the only artifact of Nirvana’s brief career that still stands out is their appearance on MTV Unplugged, when they toned down their troglodyte grunge sound, added cello and accordion, and made what actually sounded like music.

Meanwhile, Pearl Jam released a series of albums nobody bought, and had thoroughly dropped off my radar until 2006, when, for reasons I still don’t understand, I bought an issue of that infamous corporate magazine Rolling Stone that featured Eddie Vedder on the cover.  The gist of the article was that Vedder wasn’t nearly as much of a tool as he had been in the ’90s, and that their new album was actually pretty good.  So I bought a copy, and to my surprise, Rolling Stone was right.  The album consists of several really tight, riff-based songs that play up the same strengths we saw back on their first two albums.  “Unemployable,” a song about the plight of the blue-collar worker, has one of the catchiest riffs of the band’s career, and quickly became one of my favorites.  Plus the lyrics make way more sense than “Scentless Apprentice”.

10,000 Maniacs – What’s The Matter Here

Suzanne Vega – Luka

For all we stereotype the era’s music as a bunch of empty, feel-good party rock, the 1980s were by no means short on rock stars attempting to give their music a social conscience.  It was the era of Live Aid and “We Are the World,” of U2 singing about violence in Belfast and Phil Collins lamenting the plight of the homeless.  And who can forget Michael Jackson in his weird Napoleonic disco band director outfit, shaking hands with Ronald Reagan as he receives an award for helping to keep our children safe (from drugs, anyway)?

But perhaps the most bizarre example of the socially conscious rock trend came in 1987, when Susanne Vega released Solitude Standing, and 10,000 Maniacs released In My Tribe. What’s wierd about this is that both albums prominently featured upbeat, happy-sounding songs about child abuse, songs which would go on to become among the artists’ most recognizable singles.

“Luka” very effectively communicates the tragedy of growing up in an abusive home:  it is told in the first person by the abused child, who tries to apologize or make excuses for his bruises.  It focuses less on the physical trauma of abuse and more on the deep psychological scars that would cause the abused child to believe his sad fate is his own fault.  And it does so without being preachy; the song lets Luka speak for himself.

By contrast, “What’s the Matter Here?” is more self-righteous and far less effective.  It’s actually less about child abuse and more about what Natalie Merchant thinks about child abuse.  The song is told from the perspective of someone else observing the abuse, saying “I’m tired of the excuses everybody uses” and “I don’t approve of what you did to your own flesh and blood.”  It’s as if she’s giving a lecture to the perpetrator of the abuse, except in reality she does no such thing:  the last refrain of the chorus states “But I don’t dare say, ‘What’s the matter here?’”  In other words, Natalie saw some brute smacking his kids around, but she didn’t have the courage to stand up to him, so in her passive-aggressive way she goes off to the studio and records a song about how angry she is about child abuse, knowing full well that the abusive father will probably never hear it.  Meanwhile, those of us who do hear the song are treated to a lecture for something we didn’t do.

I don’t know whether either artist ever did anything more concrete to help abused children, or whether either song inspired anyone to change their ways.  I do know that at least the Susanne Vega song has a ring of sincerity to it.  And they’re both pretty catchy.

Fish Karma – The Customer Is Always Right

No phrase strikes terror in the hearts of the retail worker more than “The customer is always right.”  That phrase even inspired the name of the premier blog for trading horror stories about customers.  It inspires a sense of consumer entitlement that boggles the imagination, justifying the belief that one can have one’s every whim granted by the sales staff simply because one might potentially spend an unspecified amount of money.  And it’s a ridiculous rule on the face of it:  if a customer demanded that the store pay him to haul off a truckload of merchandise, he’d be wrong, wouldn’t he?

Far more disturbing to me than the mere existence of this phrase is the fact that everyone seems to think it has the force of law, or at the very least company policy, yet few can tell you where they heard this fact.  It’s just one of those things everyone knows, like they know you get a 4.0 if your college roommate commits suicide.

Well, thanks to an advanced technology called Wikipedia, I have learned two things:  First, SEAN IS TEH GHEY LOL, and second, the origins of this phrase are unclear, but it is believed to have been popularized by Harry Selfridge as a slogan for his department stores.  It apparently never even had the force of company policy, let alone law.  Yet whenever a customer wants some ridiculous service to be performed free of charge, or wants to exchange an item that was purchased back in the Gilded Age when the receipt clearly states the thirty-day return policy, they always drag out this phrase as if it proves the retail employee has no choice but to comply.

Somehow this reminds me of the incident last year in which a man was stripped of nearly everything he owned because someone posted a fake craigslist ad claiming the guy was giving away all his stuff for free.  When he arrived at home and demanded that everyone stop taking his stuff, the scavengers produced a printout of the craigslist ad as proof.  The unfortunate homeowner was shocked:  “They honestly thought that because it appeared on the Internet it was true.”  In both these cases people believe they are entitled to an absurd degree of accommodation on the basis of a statement whose origins and authority they know nothing about.

If I were still teaching critical thinking (which I’m really glad I’m not), I’d use these as examples of the argument from improper authority.  (Or maybe an altogether new fallacy:  the argument from unknown authority.)  But since I’m not, I’ll just post this song by Fish Karma that expresses the woes of the retail employee much more succinctly.

The Pogues – Thousands Are Sailing

I’ve always found it curious that in a country as diverse as the United States of America, we have exactly one holiday devoted to an ethnic group, and that group is the Irish.  Sure, there’s Black History Month, but it hardly qualifies as a celebration.  Kwanzaa?  A made-up holiday barely forty years old.  Only about twelve people ever actually celebrated Kwanzaa, and ten of them were white.  Jewish holidays are primarily religious observances, ignored by non-Jews and secular Jews alike.  Some cities with large Italian populations celebrate St. Joseph’s Day with altars full of free food, but the general population pays it little attention.  And how often do you see buttons that say “KISS ME I’M” with an ethnic group other than Irish?

Come to think of it, it’s a little odd that St. Patrick’s day has gone from a religious feast to a generic Irish Day.  Saint Patrick was actually a Welsh-born citizen of the Roman Empire who spent his life trying to civilize the barbarian Hibernians (though he was not the one who first brought Christianity to the island, as is popularly claimed).  It’s not a distinct Irish identity, but the attempt to make the Irish more like everybody else in the Christian West, that this holiday really celebrates.

Be that as it may, the Irish never did fully assimilate, and still manage to preserve a unique cultural identity (if not their original language, religion, or political structure).  And the thing that made this possible, ironically, was a mass movement out of British-occupied Ireland.  The same diaspora effect that allowed Jews, Parsees and Roma to preserve their cultures far from their occupied homelands also helped the Irish establish their cultural enclaves in North America and elsewhere.  Here the Pogues tell the story of famine, exile, and survival in “Thousands Are Sailing.”

Matisyahu – Jerusalem

Picture it:  A Hasidic Jew who performs roots reggae with a distinctively Zionist spin.  It sounds like an outtake from a Mel Brooks movie, and so when I first heard of Matisyahu I, like most people, assumed it was some sort of joke.  But it turns out he’s quite sincere.  Matthew Paul Miller adopted the Hebrew name Matisyahu (an earlier version of “Matthias,” itself an earlier version of “Matthew”) when he discovered the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement, and learned that minority religious movements could make for some pretty interesting music when he discovered Rastafarian hardcore act Bad Brains.

How does it work?  Well, reggae is usually (if somewhat incorrectly) identified with the Rastafarian movement, and the Rastafarians use a lot of terminology lifted from the Old Testament.  They see their original nation as Ethiopia, and their savior as that nation’s former emperor Haile Selassie.  (Ethiopia’s emperors have traditionally worn the title “Lion of Judah” and are believed to descend from King Solomon.)  In Rasta lingo Ethiopia is “Zion” from which they were expelled and exiled in “Babylon” (white society).  This is convenient for an Orthodox Jew who wants to do reggae music, because he doesn’t even have to change any of the lyrics.

A Tribe Called Quest – Skypager

There’s a scene in Almost Famous where Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres describes a marvel of 1970s technology:  a “MoJo,” an early fax machine that could transmit at a blistering “18 minutes per page”.  It’s a stock joke frequently found in movies that are set in the past:  just look how enthused people were about this technology that we now consider stale and primitive!  Not like us, with our [insert technology that will look absolutely primitive in five years]!

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear “Skypager” by A Tribe Called Quest were written in 2008 as a parody of early-’90s technology.  It’s just hard to recall, in these days of Bluetooth-enabled Internet-equipped cell phones, that people were once impressed by a little box that beeped and (if you had the deluxe model) displayed one or two lines of text.

Pfife tells us that “conceptually a pager is so complex / ’cause I be standin by the phone ready to flex”.  For the kids:  a “phone” used to be this big object you had to plug into a wall and couldn’t fit in your pocket.  Almost every public place had a “pay phone” bolted to the wall that you could use if you put in a “quarter,” which before the economic collapse was still considered “money”.  You’d send a message to a Skypager by dialing from one of these phones and typing on the primitive keypad, and then the person’s pager would go off and they’d read your message and stop whatever they were doing and go find another pay phone and call you back.  I guess, conceptually, that is pretty complex.  So why did people do that?  Well, the Pfife tells us that “the ‘S’ in ‘Skypager’ really stands for ‘sex’”.  Apparently in the days before high-speed streaming Internet porn you had to page somebody and have them actually show up in person to perform sex acts.  Quaint!

Pfife must have been popular, because his Duracell batteries only lasted him for three weeks.  I’m not sure about the memory capacity on a Skypager, though:  at the end of the song Q-Tip’s “shit is overflowing” because “they won’t allow another page”.   I guess all those 8-letter messages add up after a while.

I wonder if there’s a nerdcore song somewhere reminiscing about the dialup BBS?

The Pixies – Theme From Narc

Music isn’t simply listened to; it can also be put to use, and sometimes new uses for music dictate new types of music.  The need to keep marching troops in sync gave rise to marching band music, with its distinctive 2/4 meter.  The need for cheap, reliable tools for long-distance communication gave rise to bugle and post-horn calls, with their notes limited to the harmonic series playable on valveless instruments.  Gospel music can trace its origins in part to songs sung by laborers in the field, and sailors once worked to the rhythm of sea shantys.

In our own time, the development of the home computer, and in particular the video game, gave rise to another distinctive form of music.  Nowadays, when games can handle CD-quality sound, it is not uncommon for them to be accompanied by popular songs from established musicians.  But in the pre-Playstation days of the 1980s and 1990s, video game music had to contend with a number of constraints.  The memory in early game systems was limited, and so most game music consisted of a few measures repeated ad infinitum. The 8-bit sound chips couldn’t synthesize realistic instrument sounds or human voices, and so the songs had to be instrumental numbers that sounded OK on square and triangle waves.  Usually only two to four voices were possible at once — if that.  So video games had to be very stripped-down and simplified, yet engaging enough not to get too annoying when endlessly repeated.  Add to that the fact that most early video game music was composed by computer programmers rather than professional composers or musicians, and you have the makings of a decidedly wierd genre of music.

Lately there’s been a strange sort of nostalgia for this minimalist game music, with entire bands devoted to performing covers of classics first heard on Ataris and Nintendos.  Even established artists have dabbled in the genre.  Here indie superstars the Pixies cover the theme from the late-’80s DEA propaganda shooter NARC.  Musically it’s roughly in the same vein as the surf-rock that forms the basis for the Pixies’ sound, but with shades of Japanese glam-metal thrown in.  Its alien chord progression and utter refusal to follow a verse-chorus-verse structure provided an interesting challenge for the band.  And somehow, even though they’re using real, live instruments, the Pixies manage to retain some of that classic 8-bit sound.

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.