At first, I thought my work here would focus on film, but after one half-hearted semi-review of a 23-year-old UK crime flick*, I’ve found myself gravitating toward the subject of “funny music.” Much lighter fare. I may still complete a piece on Up in the Air, downsizing, and The Great Recession, but while that theoretically sounds like an interesting project, and one I picked out for myself, mind you, it also reminds me a lot of HOMEWORK, something I wish to avoid.
Avoiding it is harder than you might think. As much as I try to consume art, literature, and popular culture according to penchant and whim, my leisure pursuits take on a quasi-professionalized drift over time. Buffs of all stripes are familiar with this, at least in part. It’s hard to watch one Korean horror movie, read one Le Guin novel, or like only one band in a particular genre, as taste soon gives way to anxious compulsion. For many, a completist rationale presents itself as an organizing principle against the chaos of one’s own goddamn free time and justifies frivolous pursuits by lending them a scholarly cast. Before you know it, you’re writing or yell-vlogging about what you love instead of just loving it. I think of this as The Homework Mindset (THM)** and its telos is not learning something or feeling good but publishing a report of some kind. It takes anxiety over surplus time and insecurity over identity and productivity and turns those into free labor (posts) for tech companies and data aggregators. THM is the thief of free time.
All this is insidious because there is no test or final grade. You never have to turn in the homework; the shadowy professor of the subconscious who assigns all this will never answer emails or mark a word you write.
This is no way to live. So, as a curative for my own case of THM, I’ve focused on funny music, which is self-evidently frivolous, and well outside the realms of edification. I’ll never learn anything important doing this; the stakes could hardly get lower. It is, I believe, a redemptive waste.
Smoke Weed, Andre Rison!
One of my all-time favorite dumb/funny songs is “Fire Woman” by The Cult, which was released in 1989, the perfect time for this kind of bullshit. The Cult was like 60% a hair-metal band, but the lead singer had straight, dark hair and wore a cowboy hat*** with a skull-and-crossbones on it. They were something a Poison fan would listen to when feeling introspective. The Cult had a couple of hits in the late 80s and early 90s before Grunge killed the golden, whammy-barred goose, but “Fire Woman” is their enduring classic.
“Fire Woman” is a soulful heck-raiser of a tune with weirdly ecumenical appeal. On the one hand, it’s got a splashy, tacky, gushing libido**** but its circular, tweetery signature guitar riff is perfect for playing a conservative talk show back from a commercial break. I think of it, too, as the ultimate emotional primer for discussing a heated NFL quarterback controversy with a disgruntled drive-time fanbase. The song suggests somehow that talking will not suffice; only screaming will do.
And then there are the lyrics, which thanks to Ian Astbury’s adenoidal warbling, are rarely clear, especially in memory. More often than I’d care to admit, the song will come back to me in attenuated form. I’ll be vacuuming or folding laundry and the Ner-ner-NAIR-ner guitars and attendant hallucinatory associations will spill forth:
Ta, ta, ta, ta, twistin’ like a flame in a slow-ass lady
You’re drivin’ Miss Daisy
Or:
Fireeeeee (etc.),
smoke weed, Andre Rison!
Fi-uh-rrr…!
As the vacuum tugs mightily at a crusty patch of carpet.
Of course, the song also brings me back to a simpler time, when so much of the music I listened to came out of the TV. Once in a while, MTV’s musical lottery, a weird AR rotational formula just beyond the mind’s ability to chart, would spit out a punchy hard-rock hit, like “Fire Woman” or “Kickstart My Heart” in between Paula Abdul snoozers, and I’d be lit up for three-to-five minutes, thinking about buying posters or impossibly expensive CDs. This early-life conditioning, randomly alternating punishment and reward, as vast, clashing demographics tuned in to the same hopeless farrago of corporate hits, ensured that, years later, I would be weirdly passive about my musical tastes and scarcely know the difference, in some cases, between affection and ridicule.
Do I like The Cult’s “Fire Woman”? I feel like no matter what I might say in response, I would be lying. It’s a special piece of music for that reason. “Fire Woman” makes some small part of me a mystery to myself. In this way, the song is bottomless, endlessly fascinating, without being interesting.
And funny too:
My heart's a ball of burnin' flame
Oh, yes it is
Prancing like a cat on a hot tin shack
Lord, have mercy
Come on little sister
Come on and shake it*****
____________
*Which is mostly about HAIR COLOR.
**See Nick Mullen on this phenomenon, around the 30-minute mark here:
356 - Sympathy for the Joker (10/8/19) by Chapo Trap House | Free Listening on SoundCloud.
***The band was founded in West Yorkshire btw.
****A young woman in one of my undergrad lit classes told me during a smoke break that she and all the other cocktail waitresses at the restaurant where she worked loved it and saw it as a kind of closing-time anthem during which they’d count tips and do shots, etc.
*****These are the real lyrics.