Ok, so you have a female artist whose electroclash-y half-rap sing-songs ignited the blogosphere in the mid-00′s; she jets around amongst several continents that she calls home; and after being on the verge of breaking out of the underground, she flamed out a few years ago to have a child, re-group, and now has a new album coming out this month that has leaked early. No, we aren’t talking about UFFIE– whose Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans founds its way onto the blogosphere well in advance of its mid-June release date– but M.I.A., whose new album Maya (we refuse to follow the meme of referring to it as /\/\/\Y/\) hits June 29th but has finally leaked in its entirety.
The verdict? Well, the pop hits that prop the album up could convincingly sell the record to a mainstream audience, but were said audience to ingest the album whole, they would probably find vast stretches between where the plot gets lost amidst more… experimental dance music. Again, still not talking about the new Uffie album, which that entire sentence is also true of! Which I suppose echoes the sentiments of Diplo, Maya’s sometime-producer and somewhat bitter ex, who tweeted last week “just listened to mastr of the MIA album.. WOW.. my 3 trax are slammin! dunno bout the rest”. Yikes! (He also recently posted what looked like a link to a leak of the album– we were not previously familiar with the concept of a Bieber-roll!)
Well, we wouldn’t go that far– but if you were expecting this to be M.I.A.’s move to the mainstream– well, it isn’t, really, even if tracks like “XXXO”, with it’s buoyant pop step, might make you think otherwise. “Tell Me Why” finds Maya actually attempting (and sort of succeeding at) singing, “Meds and Feds” is a scuz-rocker that kinds of sounds like XTRMNTR-era Primal Scream if you quint really hard, and closer “Space” is a gorgeous piece of floating ephemera. But the album is definitely front-loaded with bounce, until the beat-jacking overload is derailed by the 6-1/2 minute “Teqkilla”, a somewhat meandering piece that mixes avant jazz, video game noises, and pitch-shifted mumbling. It’s a cool track that indicates to anyone listening that M.I.A. is, at heart, an exploratory artist who has a natural tendency to reject any suggestions that she should tighten up her game to appease a broader “market”. In a sense, though, the key moment on the album comes early, during the chorus to “XXXO”– as Maya sings “You want me to be somebody who I’m really not”.
So today Richard Lloyd, who along with Tom Verlaine formed perhaps the most formidable two-guitar attack of the 70′s in the band Television, circulated an e-mail via his publicist looking to form a new band:
I am looking for some heavy metal band members to form a band and record a record at my studio — one or two guitars, bass, drums and vocalist. Must be willing to wear makeup and act outlandishly. Concept and songs are already partially written. If you are in the New York area, and this applies — send me a private message.
Richard Lloyd lloyd206@aol.com
Now, it may seem almost sad for someone as legendary as Lloyd resorts to a PR version of a Craigslist ad looking for new bandmates– but perhaps he’s just trying to move in different circles after his somewhat disastrous 2007 tour, in support of a new album that he described modestly as “a perfect record” at the time. So now he’s trying to go metal, eh? Sounds like it could work, his git-slinging in both TV and Rocket from the Tombs has always proved that he has the chops– but does he have what it takes to hold it together with a hired-gun metal mob? Only if he gets the right crew; here are some suggestions:
GUITAR: I can think of one metal guitarist who has allowed himself to act more outlandishly than any other metal guitarist period, and that would be Varg Vikernes a/k/a Burzum. This will work out perfectly, as long as this gig doesn’t interfere with any tour in support of Burzum’s new album Belus– oh, and as long as Lloyd doesn’t meet the fate of Burzum’s last collaborator, Euronymous. Oh, and might want to steer the tour away from any churches.
OTHER GUITAR: Easy: Chris Holmes from WASP. I get the feeling that if Lloyd ever saw this scene from Decline 2, he’d be able to relate:
BASS: Oh, he should totally try to get the dude from Gauchos. Is there better metal bass playing than this?:
This video is a few years old, so I’m imaging that this kid is now old enough to do the tour without a parental waiver.
DRUMS: If Lloyd gets the Gauchos bassist, he could do far worse than to get Sara here. Any drummer who can rock out “YYZ” should be more than technical enough– I’m sure she could absolutely crush any sesh dude that Richard could find.
VOCALS: Good thing he didn’t state an age range, or it would have invalidated the natural choice of vocalist for this supergroup: Saruman himself, Christopher Lee, whose recent half-metal/half-History-Channel-re-enactment album Charlemagne needs to be heard to be believed:
Was it really only a year and a half ago that MTV cancelled TRL? It seems like a lifetime since that fateful final episode, a whimper that had critics all over sounding the death-knell for the music video. Looks like reports of the video-as-art-form’s demise were greatly exaggerated, since 2010 is shaping up to be the year that music videos matter again.
Now that they’ve been freed from their indentured servitude — promotional clips doled out (and of course censored) by the hip gatekeepers of MTV — today’s music videos can appear out of nowhere, without fanfare, and run longer than a commercial break. This week marked the release of M.I.A.’s long-form diatribe “Born Free” — a gratuitously violent and nasty piece of cinema that, by my count, is the fourth important work of music film to have hit our monitors in the last few months.
Maybe it’s because today’s artists have learned their lessons from video stars of the past: that if you have a grand enough vision, and you are willing to risk scorn and ridicule in the pursuit of spreading your particular gospel, you can still put out a visual statement that will have everyone gabbing at the virtual watercooler for at least a few days of furious tweeting.
EXHIBIT A:Lady Gaga feat. Beyonce, “Telephone”
Arguably the first grand video statement of the year was Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video with Beyonce — at this point, anyone who had anything to say about Gaga’s gratuitous violence, mayhem, fashion and, er, product placement has already said their peace and then some. Servers were crashed as fans and casual computer users alike flocked to see what the hubbub was about, and a brief internet meme was created out of the concept of smoking sunglasses. But the surprising thing turned out to be that this video was not going to be the hands-down video event of the year — as shocking as Gaga tried to be, the most outrageous was still yet to come.
EXHIBIT B:Erykah Badu, “Window Seat”
A few weeks ago, noted oddball soul belter Erykah Badu unveiled her “Window Seat” video. If Gaga/Beyonce’s Jonas Akerlund-directed spectacle was a gleeful romp through homicidal lunacy, Badu’s video was notable for its opposing tone, a piece of shrieking agitprop. As the Dallas native strolls naked through Dealey Plaza, a gunshot sound forces her to the ground at the end, the purple CGI blood emanating from her body forming the word “groupthink”. The video was filmed in one take with no permits pulled in front of crowds of unsuspecting witnesses, a guerilla filming move that resulted in a disorderly conduct charge being slapped on the singer. But the $500 fine was, certainly, a pittance compared to the phenomenal free press the video gave to Badu. She later commented that “my performance art has been grossly misinterpreted by many,” a telling line in that it correctly places the video not in the lexicon of video greats like “White Wedding” and “You Might Think”, but rather amongst the company of the more avant-garde wing of cutting edge performance artists. The video really reminded me of the work of Andrea Fraser, in particular her piece “Official Welcome”, where she slowly disrobes in the midst of an art awards ceremony. Standing naked before a shocked audience, she closes with the statement “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in a work of art.” Perhaps Badu felt a similar sentiment as she began to sense the misunderstanding in the reception to her thinkpiece?
EXHIBIT C: M.I.A., “Born Free”
If Badu’s video seemed ponderous and self-important, it seems light and airy compared to the NSFW downerfest that is the video for “Born Free”. The creation of director Romain Gravas, the clip really only makes sense upon a second viewing, when it becomes clear that what we are watching has more in common with the dark sarcasm of Children of Men or “The Twilight Zone” than, say, the searing political film-making of Gravas’ father, the legendary Greek rabblerouser known as Costa-Gravas. Costa-Gravas made an indelible mark on the world of political film-making with the 1969 true crime assassination thriller Z, a film that investigates the dark netherworld where truth dissipates and political callousness trumps all other human senses. It would be easy to run a straight line between a film like Z and the jarring political sensibility of the “Born Free” clip– except that “Born Free”, unlike Z, does not take place in the real world, and is instead a parable of racial intolerance and fascism with all the subtlety of classic Sterling-era sci-fi. That isn’t to say that the video lacks a gutteral punch, because it most definitely does; more importantly, it is instantly debatable, and will probably be dividing its viewers on opposing sides from now until, say, the next polarizing event video hits the interwebs.
EXHIBIT Z: Insane Clown Posse, “Miracles”
That said, I still don’t think that “Born Free” will ever generate the pure zeitgeist-tapping shitstorm that met the viral arrival earlier this month of Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles” video. There really was no inbetween on “Miracles”: you either thought that it was a brilliant game-changer for the normally violence-bathed ICP, or you were a seemingly sensible person who thought that the video was the worst thing ever in the history of things. In many ways, the song and video seem to have been designed to work as a taunt to the non-Juggalo universe, a cuddly and doe-eyed paean to wonder and magic that seems in complete opposition to everything ICP Nation stands for. Lyrics like “Music is magic/pure and clean/you can feel it and hear it/but it can’t be seen” make it difficult to ascertain the seriousness of the Juggalo charm offensive here — is this tune a smarmy attempt at playing fake nice a la A.C.’s Picnic of Love album — or is this yet another side of the ICP universe that outsiders will never understand, along with the Tolkein-esque mythology behind the duo’s braindead-seeming exterior? The truth is that it’s both, and neither — it’s probably just as much of a sincere statement of conservative naivete as it is a “fuck you” to critics and non-fans worldwide. Either way, though, the far-reach of this clip means that even non-Juggalos everywhere spent weeks parsing the intent of lines like “Magic everywhere in this bitch” — and you can bet that the masked duo are laughing all the way to the virtual bank.
The first salvo from the M.I.A. camp has finally emerged: after a blimp over Coachella proclaimed the imminent arrival of her as-yet-untitled album (due out on June 29th), we now have a released track which may or may not show up on said album. If you were expecting a dance-tastic mish-mash of world music styles and hiccup-y rap hooks, then you are… going to be completely thrown by the low-tech scuzz bomb that is “Born Free”. Some are attempting to contribute the track’s gritty fuzz to the album’s alleged production contribution from out-of-nowhere mega-rockers Sleigh Bells (a recent signee to M.I.A.’s label imprint N.E.E.T.), and some have made note of the “Born Free”‘ writing credits being shared with Suicide’s Martin Rev and Alan Vega: Did they even listen to the track? Are they familiar with a song called “Ghost Rider” that the track samples heavily for it’s main hook? I’m going to guess that Mya had about as much personal interaction with Messrs. Rev and Vega as Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock did with Lyn Collins when they made “It Takes Two”.
Aanyway… I’d imagine that anyone who was a fan of M.I.A. back when tracks like “Galang” and “Bucky Done Gone” were blowing up will probably be listening to this to see if she is going to go for the pop jugular after the somewhat unexpected success of “Paper Planes”, the belatedly ubiquitous main jam from Mya’s otherwise relatively oddball 2007 lp Kala. The verdict? Well, if you aren’t a fan of M.I.A. at this point, this probably isn’t going to be the track to convert you– but if you can handle her unique voice and phrasing, her gift for dramatic reading and sing-song-y rhyming and wordplay is still in full effect. ”I don’t need to talk about money/Cuz I got it/And I don’t wanna talk about hoochies/Cuz I been it” is perhaps an indication that this time around she might be addressing some new and different concerns, but it’s kind of hard to tell from this teaser. Indeed, the word is that this track isn’t necessarily indicative of what the album will sound like at all, and for all we know it may not even wind up on the album– kind of like when the track “Hit That” leaked in advance of Kala in the summer of ’07; what would have been one of the best tracks on that album is now nothing but an untagged mp3 floating in the ether of the interwebs. But that’s part of why we love M.I.A.– her unpredictability and flair for drama is something the world of music culture desperately needs.
1. The Horrors, “Scarlet Fields” (from Primary Colours)
2. Lady Gaga, “Dance In The Dark” (from The Fame Monster)
3. Julian Casablancas, “Glass” (from Phrazes of the Young)
4. Crippled Black Phoenix, “Rise Up and Fight” (from 200 Tons of Bad Luck)
5. Fuck Buttons, “The Lisbon Maru” (from Tarot Sport)
6. Municipal Waste, “Wolves Of Chernobyl” (from Massive Aggressive)
7. Pissed Jeans, “False Jesii Part 2″ (from King Of Jeans)
8. Lightning Bolt, “Sound Guardians” (from Earthly Delights)
9. Shakira, “Loba” (from She Wolf)
10. Spinnerette, “All Babes Are Wolves” (from Spinnerette)
2009 was a year that saw so many musical areas blossoming like never before, after years of retrenchment. This year, the metal was metal-y-er, the pop was poppier, the noise-duos were noise-duo-y-er, and the shoegaze/mope-goth was more shoegaze/mope-goth-y. “See yourself/your image in the eyes of someone else” goes the pre-chorus of The Horrors’ “Scarlet Fields”. I’m guessing that the band took their own advice, as their new long-player Primary Colours found them remaking themselves from 3rd-tier splatter-garage into an actual second coming of MBV. As we all spent 2009 attempting to sort out the real from the imaginary and idealized in our culture’s looking glass, our music continued to replicate the sound of the shards of the mirror hitting the floor. - Daniel Brockman
If you are reading this and thinking “Who is Pylon?” and “Who is Randy Bewley?”, then you can count yourself in a large majority of rock music fans; for better or worse, the legacy of Athens, GA stalwarts Pylon is forever overshadowed by the twin titans of R.E.M. and The B-52′s, two contemporaries who most definitely did not follow Pylon’s general ethos of quitting while they were ahead. As it is, there is scant information about Pylon: until last year’s CD re-issue of their seminal 1980 album Gyrate (released on James Murphy’s DFA imprint), none of their music was in print, and the band members were only marginally involved in music, with the occasional reunion gig that rarely made it outside of their native Georgia.
Pylon’s particular brand of stripped-down dance-rock often gets tagged as “minimalist“, which in my opinion does them a grave disservice; mostly because their joyously and almost naïvely exuberant mayhem is devoid of the dour and mirthless formalism often insinuated with the m-word. Okay, sure, they were all art students when they formed in 1978 at the University of Georgia, and none of them knew how to play their instruments, and their musical compositions were often filled with certain notions of intentionally limiting structure. But none of their art-school constrictions could contain the boundless enthusiasm that was at the heart of their music, a perfect synthesis of four young people catching on to punk culture in such a distant and removed manner that it couldn’t help but work its way out in the most idiosynchratic way possible. The three instrumentalists (Bewley, drummer Curtis Crowe, and bassist Michael Lachowski), upon forming the band, were initially going to forego a vocalist entirely and just use instructional recordings they found lying around as vocal accompaniment. That is, until they stumbled upon Vanessa Briscoe, a doe-eyed ingenue whose complete lack of musical know-how somehow made her the absolute perfect fit, her voice shifting effortlessly from satanic howl to compliant coo to angelic whisper in a way that a more career-focused rock chick would never allow. Pylon often get thrown on the heap with other early 80′s “angular” bands (like Gang Of Four, Wire, Mission Of Burma, etc.) of their day, but their sound was truly unique and powerful.
The most aggravating thing about Pylon is the manner in which they quit whilst being ahead: on the verge of a national tour opening for U2, the band just kind of disintegrated with a shrug. The official word from the band, the line that they have repeated to anyone who has inquired since their demise, is that “we stopped when the band had ceased being fun”. Which is frustrating until you consider that the “fun” that they as a band cherished was indeed so integral to their sound, and to a listener’s enjoyment of the band. Of course, one consequence of the timing of their split-up is that they will never have the legacy of their contemporaries; which is why some of their best music remains out of print, like what is arguably their greatest song, “Crazy” (from 1983′s Chomp LP). Like pretty much anyone whose musical coming-of-age occurred post-1985, I heard of Pylon through R.E.M.’s cover of “Crazy” off of the Dead Letter Office rarities comp; upon a first listen to D.L.O., I pegged “Crazy” as my new favorite R.E.M. song until I read the liner notes (R.E.M.’s penchant for recording covers of obscure bands rivals Metallica, and it’s safe to say that Pylon would have benifited greatly had they reunited to jam onstage to “Crazy” along with R.E.M. the way that, say, Diamond Head was able to run through “Am I Evil” with Metallica).
A close listen to “Crazy” reveals not only what an amazingly prescient band Pylon was, but also what a remarkably ahead-of-his-time guitarist Bewley was. Neat and clean when his contemporaries were messy and incoherent, his playing on “Crazy” mixes wistful mirror-ball prom slow dance somberness with clipped crisp chords, and the net effect is somehow both thousand-yard-stare serious and life-affirmingly gorgeous. There used to be a video one could find on the web of the original Pylon, pre-reunions, playing their final show in December of 1983. When they broke into “Crazy”, it was honestly one of the most awesome rock and roll moments I have ever seen: Lachowski and Bewley criss-cross the stage in dancing oblivion, while Vanessa, in between stanzas, twirls in a circle in her floral dress, as if nothing in the world is more meaningful and profound than dancing around with her friends on this stage playing the single greatest song the world has ever known. It’s shocking that a band this on the money would be on the verge of giving up because the band was “no longer fun”, but they definitely went out on a high note.
Pylon taught fellow Athen-ites R.E.M. how to rock in an art-school way while still staying true to their Southern roots, but a vocalist like Michael Stipe was always too mannered and affected, and Peter Buck was too much of a record store geek in his six-string pilfering. Pylon were affectless and feckless, and you can listen to their music over and over and never get a clue as to where they are getting it all from. There really weren’t any forebearers to Pylon’s music, only future imitators. Bewley’s role is crucial in the post-punk landscape: few guitarists of his time eschewed the stylistic trappings of the lead guitarist as shrewdly as Bewley. There really is never a moment on a Pylon track where he just cuts loose– every second of every song, the bass and guitar are playing an intricate cat and mouse game where economy is king and labor is divided equally. The true democracy of the band’s sound is one that is a rarity in rock music then and now: maybe in the utilitarian growl of The Jesus Lizard; perhaps in the all-the-parts-clicking-together musical thrift of The Strokes. But ultimately, the music of Pylon exists on its own little branch of rock n’ roll’s family tree– the band are more well-known by the people who they associated with, or were covered by, than who are their actual musical brethren.
No discussion of Pylon is complete without bemoaning how the band never got their due, and one is supposed to either a) see this as evidence that awesomeness in and of itself is never rewarded, and/or b) that the band are exemplars of a certain indie ideal for never having cashed in and gone for the brass ring. Personally I have no opinion on the matter other than I wish that I could have seen them in their prime, and I wish that all of their music was still in print. That said, it’s worth noting that the band’s more low-key reunion phase lasted considerably longer than its initial run from 1979-83; upon re-forming in 1989, they toured with R.E.M. and The B-52′s, they put out a new album (1990′s way under-rated and oft-maligned Chain, on Sky Records)… and then promptly broke up again, only to re-form in fits and starts a few times in the ensuing two decades. The most recent stretch, from 2004 to the present, was instigated by Bewley, and resulted in a few shows here and there (frustratingly, none reached Boston!). A quick Youtube search will show that the band still had it during these reunions, although gone are the days when they were on the cusp of opening up a big stadium tour. Still, Bewley’s untimely demise is made all the more sad when you consider that the band has been more active lately than they had been in decades.
In any case, in the words of Lackwoski in his e-mail to the Pylon faithful announcing Bewley’s passing: “We love Randy“. Rest in peace, and may your music live on.
Last week I interviewed a woman named Katy Perry. In late June her single “I Kissed A Girl” was the #1 song in the country, I think: I mean, there are now so many different charts and whatnot, who knows what the real #1 is. Plus, I never saw the cassingle for the song anywhere, so I couldn’t tell you what physical presence the song has. I do know that in prepping for my interview and doing some research, I realized that a lot of people on the internet think that she is satan incarnate, which I can almost understand (although she was super nice and I think her new record rules).
A review I found of her new album on allmusic.com ended with the following kiss-off: “She sinks to crass, craven depths that turn One of the Boys into a grotesque emblem of all the wretched excesses of this decade.” Whoa! Personally, if I was managing an early-20′s female pop singer, I would encourage her to do things to further represent the “wretched excesses of this decade”, if only because doing so usually means that you’ve hit a cultural zeitgeist vein and that would, I assume, mean $$$$, right?
A day after interviewing Ms. Perry I was at a drive-in theater in Central New York’s Leatherstocking Region, in line for popcorn behind a gaggle of 12-15 year old girls, when one of their cell phones rang: and guess what the ringtone was?
I suppose a grumpier dude than myself would probably at this point go on a tirade lamenting the inevitability of the ringtone as the ultimate format of musical product in the future– but really, is there anything more tiresome than endless discussion of musical formats? What I find funnier is that I almost stepped in to say “Hey, I talked to that woman that sings your ringtone yesterday, imagine that!”– but it occurred to me that besides the obvious letch factor that would be involved in such a move, I would imagine that the girls would probably be pretty non-plussed anyway: who cares? Does anyone really want to know who sings that song, or what she’s like, or what her musical ambitions are, etc? Do people really care about that sort of thing any more? I’m generalizing here, but still.
In talking to Ms. Perry, I asked her about her cover of The Outfield’s “Your Love” (which appears as “Use Your Love” on her UR So Gay EP which preceded the actual album). My asking about this song was kind of a trap, in that I had seen a few interviews where she discussed why she covered the song: sure enough, I got a pretty canned answer that was almost word-for-word the same as this one here:
I like the part where her label told her that she had to do a cover, and I really like that she is blunt and honest enough to just tell us that her label told her that she had to do a cover. And that she just wanted to do a song with some kind of mass appeal. Her cover of “Your Love” is pretty awesome, she definitely makes it her own, and I can see why she left it off the album: since she considers herself a songwriter first, putting this song on the album proper would pretty much torpedo the record, since its awesomeness smokes the rest of the rekkid.
I’m sure an essay could be written about how her 80′s recidivism here is in line with that decade’s echoing of the “wretched excesses of this decade”, but a decade ain’t nothin’ but a number, right.
Is it just me, or has the classic rock color guard been going into over-drive with the Top100 All-time500Greatest Guitar SongsRiffsLists ofAwesomeBob DylanAwesomeness moves lately? Don’t get me wrong, I loved I’m Not There as much as the next guy who came of cultural age in the post-1984 classic-rock-is-everything rockist landscape,but I mean, come on. I can’t be the only one who senses a certain desperation at work here: The Man can roll out all the Scorcese-directed Stones/Dylan bullshit they want in order to mythify the 60′s, but good luck getting people to continue buying the re-re-re-re-remastered catalog of these old vets, esp. in the internet age. And especially when Web 2.0 means that blog after blog after blog rolls out, pulling the blindfold off the classic-rock-addled newb.
I mean, seriously: do you have any idea how much awesome shit came out in the 60′s and 70′s alone? And on major labels? And in, say, Japan? Somehow while we were forced to watch the 40 bazillionth media genuflection towards The Beatles and Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin (all awesome, don’t get me wrong), due was never given to a whole world of insanely incredible music that was, say, made on major labels during the 60′s and 70′s but has never made it onto classic rock’s15-song-a-day playlist. Or to put it another way: why is it that I’ve never heard Dark of Sir Lord Baltimore on ZLX, but I hear this 10 times a day?
Aaanyway, the point here is that if you go to google, type in a genre of music you are interested in, and follow it with “blog” and “download”, or something like that, and surrender a few hours of your life, you will soon realize a) that there are more incredible albums made in decades past than you ever had any clue, and that b) you can very easily *shhh* listen to them for free, if you want to and you are open-minded enough. For myself, that meant not only finding out a shitload about so-called “world music” (which prior to the web I only knew as “Peter Gabriel music”), but also continually mining for 60′s and 70′s prog/psych/proto-stoner records.
And what I found was that, in a perfect world, my childhood obsession with Led Zeppelin should have led me to unearthing Flower Travellin’ Band’s Satori, or Elias Hulk’s Unchained, or Buffalo’s Volcanic Rock. I dunno: it seemed in the 80′s and early 90′s that, Velvet Undergound aside (for some reason they were the one “obscure” act that one was allowed to know about), a typical music geek was supposed to burrow downward into the Dylan discography instead of sideways to find more and more awesomeness. And that inevitably led to side projects of famous classic rock bands (see: Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, that sort of shit), or bands that were composed of associates of famous classic rock artists (see: you know, Gram Parsons, that sort of thing). Again, all well and good, except that it would have been nice to know that if I liked Black Sabbath, I might have liked Lucifer’s Friend and Necromandus.
Well, luckily for the budding music dorks of tomorrow’s today, none of this is true anymore. So my misspent youth caring about the Traveling Wilburys won’t be repeated by today’s more intelligent children, who can so easily get into the real deal stuff. Why wasn’t there someone there when I was younger to tell me “Look, I know that ‘The Loco-motion’ gets old really quickly, but trust us when we tell you that ‘Sin’s A Good Man’s Brother’ from Closer To Home proves that Grand Fund Railroad were one of the most righteous rock bands of all time”?
Anyway, to put this in terms that fit with the Rolling Stone hegemony, here’s what I would consider the Top Eleven Albums Of Righteous 70′s Rock I Discovered Within The Last Couple Of Years On The Internet That Proved To Me That I Knew/Know Absolutely Nothing About Music:
I’ve said about all I have to say about this album here, but seriously: maybe the greatest rock album of all time.
2. Buffalo: Volcanic Rock (1973)
In college I had a cd promo single by the Screaming Trees that contained a hidden track (typical 90′s alterna-CD-move in retrospect) that a 12-minute long jam that sounded like it was probably called “Freedom”. What I didn’t know until recently was that it was a cover by 70′s Australian rock gods Buffalo. What I further didn’t know was that the album that it comes from rules hard front to back, and that instead of wasting my youth listening to, I dunno, whatever CSN album “Southern Cross” is on, you know, the one with the incongruous space aliens on the cover, I should have been rocking out hard to this. Also, “I’m a Skirt Lifter, Not a Shirt Raiser” from their next album, 1974′s Only Want You For Your Body, is as awesome a song as it is a song title.
3. X: Aspirations (1978)
The rest of the stuff on this list is somewhat, how shall I say this, “hippie music”. Not this record. And no, this isn’t the band fronted by Exene Cervenka featuring Howdy Doody on guitar; this is a band from Australia, and they released this masterpiece whilst that other (arguably inferior) X was getting all the headlines in the Northern Hemisphere. Two things that rule here: 1) the first ten seconds of the first song, “Suck Suck”, wherein you have a rhythm section that makes the Jesus Lizard sound like slackers led by a guitarist who makes Andy Gill sound like a well-mannered session dude, and 2) penultimate tune “Waiting”, a dirge time-bomb with a mid-tune scream that, IMHO, beats “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” for best rock scream ever. Seriously, where was this album all my life. Proof that punk hegemony is just as crusty and lame as classic rock hegemony: how many times do we need to hear a rundown of how great the Ramones and Blondie were, while records like this and The Wipers’ Youth Of America are left out of print and unloved?
4. Groundhogs: Thank Christ For The Bomb (1970)
One of the most truly anarchic rock albums I’ve ever heard: although rooted in some kind of blues/folk idiom, when this thing runs off the rails it makes “out” bands like Hawkwind sound tame by comparison. The title track is one of the most frizzling anti-war anthems ever.
5. Left End: Spoiled Rotten (1974)
Mid-70′s Cleveland yobs who awkwardly straddle a line between hard rock theatricality and what-would-become-punk ferocity. If you like this you’d probably like Sir Lord Baltimore, and that sort of thing. They are absolutely ridiculous but so nasty and awesome. Album opener “Bad Talking Lady” is just retarded, in the best possible way.
6. Cargo: Cargo (1972)
This record is all instrumental, sort of prog-meets-jazz-y, and made by Dutch people. Oof, sounds awesome, right? But it is! Seriously, this is an amazingly smoking album, just some incredible guitar workouts that never veer into cheese. It’s closer to Curtis Mayfield than it is to, say, Weather Report, if that makes any sense.
7. Elias Hulk: Unchained (1970)
So many of these bands/albums I find myself describing as “retarded”, is that a musical turn-off? I dunno, I don’t find any of this stuff any more lunkheaded than “The Lemon Song”, you know? Right? Anyway, this record is fucking retarded, in the best way. Drum solos. Riffs on top of riffs. Ugly British dudes back then must have felt like they were on top of the world or something. This sounds like if the dancer from Happy Mondays went back in time and cloned himself and formed a metal band in 1970, or something like that.
9. Dark: Round The Edges (1972)
Okay, I’m fudging a little here, since this one I didn’t discover through a blog recently, but through a friend that found this on cd years ago. It blew my mind then, because it was so incredibly great, and so weird, with such incredible guitar work, and I had never ever ever heard of it. And all I could think was “There must be ten hundred zillion records out there like this, but they just aren’t on cd or anything”. And I was right. But seriously, “Maypole” on this is the fucking jam. Who names their band “Dark”? So fucking genius.
9. Luv Machine: Luv Machine (1971)
Imagine if a band today could play something even a zillionth as insane as “Witches Wand”, from this album? The rest of this record has its dated moments, but holy shit when this band hits it. The guitar playing is so weird and rumbling and inept-yet-slaughtering.
10. The Nazgûl: The Nazgûl (1976)
In the days of my youth I thought that Robert Plant knew how to make an effective LOTR allusion; of course, it hadn’t occured to me then that 15-minute doom/gloom/dread ambient epics by a band called The Nazgûl was about a zillion times scarier and more awesomer. Listen to this record on headphones in the dark, if you dare…
11. Elektriktus: Electronic Mind Waves (1976)
One spends so much of one’s 20′s looking for music as mind-frying as possible (well, “one” does if “one” is “me”)– if only “one” had been able to find this record earlier on. Track 3, “Power Hallucination”, is pretty much the pinnacle of music-as-nightmarish-entrances-to-hell. No drugs necessary. The mystery of this band is somewhat diminished when you find out it’s just some Italian guy from the 70′s, I had an image of ten or twenty dudes in cloaks recording this in a chapel whilt wearing wire-rim glasses and slowly stroking their fu manchu beards. Oh wait that’s Tangerine Dream except they are only three dudes.
P.S.:
I intended this piece as a post-script of my sidebar on this Boris article, where I listed some indispensible Japanese rock albums of the past 40 years or so. I had to leave a lot of awesomeness off, of course–especially from the 70′s, where there is a literally limitless batch of awesome records: the most painful cuts I had to make were definitely:
Watching Iron Maiden last week, I was struck by something that might seem like an odd thought: “Wow, people seem to really love Iron Maiden!” This might seem like kind of a duh, but when you consider how thoroughly this audience knew every word and every lick of these songs, and when you consider that Iron Maiden shirt-wearing had saturated a good 80% of the audience market, you begin to get a grip on the sheer adulation this band gets from its audience.
A lot was made of how no one liked their last tour, where they played their new album in its entirety. Although there was groaning from metal hipsters and ironists, though, at the show last year from my seats all I could sense was that everyone else around me had really done their homework: everyone there seemed to know every word and air-guitar riff from the new album. As an aside, at an Iron Maiden show a few years ago, I witnessed a sight that I will definitely take to my grave: in front of me for most of the show were two teenage boys air-guitaring along to every moment; and in the middle of one song, I swear I witnessed one of the boys correct the other one’s air-guitaring, as in “No, it doesn’t go like this, it goes like this.” Genius.
Anyway, my theory on Maiden is that they took the molten confusion of 60’s and 70’s rock culture and made a Disneyland attraction/ride out of it, with a degree of opera-derived camp that wasn’t far off from the then-ongoing Ice Capades craze and presaged the 90’s and 00’s Broadway musical trend. They also aren’t far off from the intents of the original Disneyland: pillage folklore and myth and create a technically masterful piece out of each one. The same way that a kid in the 70’s probably knew of Snow White and Pinocchio through the Disney animated films, a metal fan in the 80’s probably was more aware of “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner”, “The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner”, and Winston Churchill’s infamous “We shall go on to the end” speech from Iron Maiden’s records than from their sources.
Maiden of course come from a pre-Internet world where knowledge of arcane tales was cool, and it was ultimately the same world where Dungeons & Dragons could flourish unironically. It’s hard to remember a time where Area 51 and Roswell was not common knowledge, and instead of wikipedia’ing “Alexander The Great” you might have to go to a library and look something up in an encyclopedia, which is pretty much what it sounds like they did when writing said tune.
Metal and indeed rock in general has always plundered history and culture for source material, but in some ways the brazen way in which Maiden appropriated/pillaged was just in line with the burgeoning culture of “metal” from its origins on. We all know about Zep’s swipes from Lord of the Rings (not to mention Rush’s subsequent swipes from the same) and the way that Sabbath’s very name is from the 1963 Boris Karloff/Mario Bava horror flick (imagine how pretentious metal would have become if the Sabs had named themselves after the film’s original Italian title, I tre volti della paura) – but it’s arguable that neither of these bands had their sights set on the cohesive branding that a band like Maiden would later put together. Although the Sabs did pull the hat trick of same-song-name/band-name/album-name on their debut (which Maiden would of course pull themselves), Satanism and black masses was surprisingly not necessarily an ongoing lyrical preoccupation for the band, and in the end they are essential celebrated for being a great rock/metal band.
If the genesis theory of metal begins with the holy trinity of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and (always in third) Deep Purple, then it’s pretty understood that the second coming involves the Beatles/Stones dialectic of Maiden and Priest. And while Judas Priest were arguably campier, more flamboyant, and more aggressively “metal”, Iron Maiden have always stood for ideals that will forever define what metal is for generations of kids: large themes, grand scales, and straight-up fantasy.
You see, the rock crit line has always been that metal is part of a long line of androgynous sashayers drawing from such disparate sources as David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Mick Jagger, etc: and indeed, you could pick a few points on the graph and show a straight line from, say, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Freddie Mercury to Ian Anderson’s cod-piece to Rob Halford to pretty much any emo-metaller nowadays—however, this emphasis on androgyny only works if you think that metallers are all about creating confusion and exploring society’s grey areas and dark themes, which works fine until you attempt to fit Iron Maiden in the equation, and then it all falls to shit. Why? Because Maiden are the wholesome and unconfused literalists in a sea of metal fatigue and ephemeral metaphor-peddlers.
Black Sabbath’s most enduring hit is a song called “Paranoid”. It was famously written quickly, lyrics and music, and as such it doesn’t entirely make a whole lot of sense. The word “paranoid” is never used in the song, and indeed it could have probably been called any number of other names and worked just as well. It isn’t a meditation on the concept of paranoia or anything, it’s a confused and emotional tune of heartbreak and emotional numbness; it’s lead guitar break is so fuzzed-out and jarring that it has always sounded, to me, like when you are trying to talk in a dream and can’t quite make the words out. Ultimately, the underlying theme of the majority of Black Sabbath tunes is “frustration”.
This is no longer true by the time you get to Maiden and Priest. Priest worked hard at being self-consciously “metal”, with lyrics and imagery that attempt to unite its teen fanbase in a leather-clad army of teen rebels. Priest’s mascot is a creature called The Metallion: never mentioned in song but adorning the cover of “Defenders of the Faith” as an art deco demon, he is part of the overall attempt by Priest to create metal myths with intimidating creatures meant to represent the power of their teen following. Songs like “United” especially lay bare the band’s naked thirst for fomenting teen rebellion.
Priest’s main weapon of coercion is sexual predation: if you didn’t know Halford was gay during Priest’s heyday, you would at least have known, by a cursory perusal of their tuneage, that the guy was as sexually aggressive as Freddie Mercury before him. It’s just a fine line between the aggressive camp of Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down” and Priest’s PMRC-targeted tune “Eat Me Alive”. “I’m going to force you at gunpoint!”
It’s clear that Halford, closeted at the time, was trying to test the bounds of what he could get away with without giving the game away, and his hypersexuality in the band lent them their individuality and force. The opposite is true of Maiden: their tunes are completely devoid of any sexual content at all (unless you count a song about Jack The Ripper as sexual). Instead, Iron Maiden systematically work through coherent themes, and attempt to turn those themes into exciting showpieces. This approach worked to limited means with first singer Paul Di’Anno on their first two albums; although Di’Anno had a powerful presence that worked within the milieu of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that Maiden ostensibly came out of, his limited range meant that he could never take the songs to the stratospheric heights of Maiden’s 70’s heroes, bands with banshee shriekers like Zep, Deep Purple, UFO, Uriah Heep, etc.
(As an aside, I’d like to offer a quick defense of the rock band Uriah Heep. Sometimes people don’t realize that in order for the rock behemoths of today to exist, many others had to fall by the wayside to make the current ascendancy possible. This is especially true for a band like Heep, whose supernatural lyrical preoccupations, impossibly tight arrangements, blazing fretwork, extended themes, and glass-shattering approach to vocal histrionics not only laid a straight-up blueprint for Iron Maiden, but for metal itself. Laugh all you want, but the Heep delivered.)
Anyway, once Maiden had Dickinson, they finally had everything in place to take “satanic” metal mainstream: compare “Number of the Beast”, from Dickinson’s first LP with the band, to, say, the self-titled Sabbath tune, and you can see Maiden’s genius: whilst Sab’s tune is a dirgey testament to self-flagellation and eternal damnation, with a lone tri-note theme encapsulating seven centuries of banned music into a singular ode to one man’s shame and torment, Maiden’s tune is pure voyeurism: the protagonist witnesses the sights and sounds of a black mass. “6! 6! 6! / The number of the beast! / Sacrifice is going on tonight!”
In song after song, Maiden created self-contained worlds that act as adaptations of themes. “Flight of Icarus”, “The Prisoner” (after the 60′s British TV show), “Transylvania”, “Quest For Fire”, “To Tame A Land” (a ditty about Frank Herbert’s Dune), “The Phantom Of The Opera”, etc are straight-forward stories being told, with no real metaphor or hidden meaning at all. “Number Of The Beast” isn’t an investigation of evil, or a metaphor for the modern day’s banality of cruelty, or any of those things: it is a straightforward account of a black mass.
This is unusual for the world of the pop song, where everything is buried within symbolism and hidden meanings; but it is not unusual for the world of musicals and opera, which is really aesthetically where Maiden are coming from. From where I was sitting last week, Maiden’s pageantry of themes and settings is like nothing so much as when one enters the hallowed halls of Disneyland, and sees this:
Rock, and metal in particular, is about harnessing the power of rock, and presenting that power in as big a way as possible. In a post-Disney world, where spectacle, imagery, symbolism stripped of context, and the history of the world and its mythology can be reshaped and represented at will, is there really anyone better at harnessing this power than Iron Maiden? It doesn’t seem like it. Bands before Maiden attempted to harness this kind of power of imagery, but they all tended to get lost amidst their own personalities and emotions: whether it was Jim Morrission attempting confusing crowd manipulation, or Led Zeppelin sending conflicting messages of power, authority and fey sensuality, rock titans pre-Maiden tended to miss the untapped market of straight-forward arena-filling adaptation-rock. Think of “Run To The Hills” as similar to Disney’s “Pocahantas”: it presents the European/Native American interface from both sides equally (only the Maiden song has a lot more bloodshed and a lot fewer cute animals).
If you go outside of the US/UK rock market, you will start noticing that the only visible indication that rock culture exists at all are the constant flurry of Maiden t-shirts. Like the ending of Spinal Tap, smart money for post-baby boomer rockers is on exporting to the world at large, something that Maiden has always done exceedingly well. Last week’s show was introduced with a video of Maiden piloting a jet to what appeared to be Rio for a series of mammoth concerts that made the Mansfield gig look like a weeknight at the Abbey by comparison.
The set proper, pre-encores, closed with “Iron Maiden”, a kind-of clunky punkish number from their debut that still, to me, sounds like their baby steps in attempting to write the kind of epic historical pieces that they would later become famous for. “Oh well, whatever” is a pretty half-assed line to begin the chorus of a signature song of a band, and the final line of “Iron maiden can’t be bought/Iron maiden can’t be sought” doesn’t make much sense whether you are talking about the band or its eponymous “medieval” torture device* But perhaps it only sounds out of place when played at the end of a set by a band of Maiden’s calibre 30-some-odd years into their career.
* Kind of like the band Anthrax, most metal fans probably didn’t know what an “iron maiden” was when they first placed Maiden at the forefront of the N.W.O.B.H.M.– but by the first Bill and Ted’s movie, the saturation of the meaning of the name was pretty much complete in metal culture. Oddly enough, some research into the history of the “iron maiden” as a medieval torture device reveals that it is actually the result of a bizarre hoax. From wikipedia here:
Historians have ascertained that Johann Philipp Siebenkees created the history of [the iron maiden] as a hoax in 1793. According to Siebenkees’ colportage, it was first used on August 14, 1515, to execute a coin forger. The Nuremberg iron maiden was actually built in the late 18th century as a probable misinterpretation of a medieval Schandmantel” (“cloak of shame”), which was made of wood and tin but without spikes. Accounts of the iron maiden cannot be found from any period older than 1793, although most other medieval torture devices were extensively catalogued.”
Meaning, I suppose, that the power of the imagery was enough that the thing didn’t need to actually be used in order to represent the horrors of the Dark Ages to those in the 19th century and beyond. Bogus!
