A Timeless Wavelength

Fishbone – Sunless Saturday

In my last post I examined Joshua Glenn’s alternate generational/decade scheme, in which each decade spans a “4″ year to a “3″ year, so that, say, “the Eighties” really ranged from 1984 to 1993 inclusive.  I preferred this to the standard way of dividing up the decades, but suggested I was uncomfortable allowing this decade to span so far into the 1990s, what with the grunge-and-flannel days being the beginning of the end in my view.  After pondering this issue further, I’ve gotten in touch with my inner computer geek and arrived at an elegant solution:  the octade.

All I do is convert the decimal years of the Gregorian calendar into base-8, or octal.  You can do the same with this handy converter. Instead of decades and centuries, this gives us eight-year “octades” and sixty-four-year larger epochs that I haven’t come up with a catchy name for yet, but should be something better than “quattuorsexagentury”.  By this reckoning, my birth year of 1976 becomes 3670, a nice round number and the start of an octade we could call the Octal Seventies, from 3670-3677 (decimal 1976-1983 inclusive.)* This scheme gives us an octade we could call the Octal Aughts, from 3700-3707 (decimal 1984-1991 inclusive).  It also makes this bright era of musical wonder the first of a new quatturo… a new octury.** The Octal Aughts begin with the debut albums of The Smiths and Run-DMC, and ends with the “metal meltdown” and the beginning of grunge rock,  gangsta rap and post-Garth Brooks country.  It is followed by the Octal Teens, which itself would be a great name for a band if it didn’t comprise some of the worst music made in my lifetime:  3710-3717 (decimal 1992-1999 inclusive).

As a definitive example of the music of the Octal Aughts, I give you “Sunless Saturday” from Fishbone’s 1991 album The Reality Of My Surroundings. The band epitomizes the anything-goes attitude of this era:  a group of black musicians who could move effortlessly between ska, metal, and other genres, they are reminders of an era when musicians were far less likely to be pigeonholed by race and genre.  The group’s sound recalls a time when instrumental virtuosity and big production values weren’t to be apologized for or swept aside in favor of atonal low-fi rumblings.  It’s hard to believe that so soon after this album was recorded, it would become nearly impossible to find a black musician who didn’t do rap or R&B, unthinkable for a rock band to sound like it wasn’t composed of a bunch of teenagers in a garage, and completely unfathomable for any mainstream band to have a horn section.

*Special note to would-be math sticklers: Yes, I started the octade on a zero instead of a one.  People who are swayed by the (quite valid) argument for starting the millennium in 2001 instead of 2000, because the Gregorian calendar started in Year 1 and therefore 2000 was the last year of the second millennium rather than the first year of the third, sometimes get a big head and go around rechristening decades as well, insisting that, say, the 1980s should start in 1981 and include 1990.  These people are wrong.  If it were common practice to refer to “the ninth decade” then yes, I suppose it would span those years.  But we don’t say that.  We say “the 1980s.”  The closer analogy in English is the word “teenager,” which consists of people from age 13 to age 19 inclusive — all the numbers that end in “-teen”.  Nobody in their right mind would argue that “teenagers” should be 14- to 20-year-olds, though I’d wager that right now someone on the Internet is doing exactly that.

**The downside of all this octal-based nomenclature, catchy though it may be, is that it reminds me of the horrible moniker the media assigned to the extremely fertile Nadya Suleman to make her sound like a Spider-Man villain.

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.

Guns N’ Roses – Street of Dreams

Well, I’ve had a long hiatus from the blog.  The last four months have been a very trying time for me, and I simply didn’t feel motivated to post anything.  I was giving serious thought to discontinuing this blog, and maybe doing something else entirely.  I did manage to put a few more videos of songs up on YouTube. I even gave thought to making that my main creative outlet, and maybe starting a “vlog.”  Then I realized that “vlog” is perhaps the ugliest neologism of the Internet age, and decided to go back to this “blog” instead.

So to celebrate my return to blogging, I give you this offering from another act who’ve taken an extended creative hiatus.  “Street of Dreams” is from Chinese Democracy, the very long-awaited, semi-mythical comeback album from Guns N’ Roses, a band that now pretty much consists of Axl Rose and whomever he can persuade to share a studio with him for a day or so.  For an album that had to survive a decade of personnel changes, temper tantrums, and all manner of setbacks, it’s actually really good.  It’s nowhere on par with the  group’s definitive double album Use Your Illusion I & II, but it does feature some pretty good songs.  “Street of Dreams” (formerly titled “The Blues”) is probably my favorite on the album, because it demonstrates that Axl Rose is at his best when he’s not trying to be heavy metal and just lets his inner ’70s singer-songwriter shine.

Six months after the release of Chinese Democracy, video game developer 3D Realms announced that the development team for Duke Nukem Forever had been let go, thus effectively quashing all hopes that the video game industry’s most famous unfinished product would ever see the light of day.  It can’t have been comforting for that development team to realize that they’re less organized and productive than Axl Rose.