Georgia Blah: Jason Isbell’s Cynical Tribute by Jack Christian

            Jason Isbell, former frontman of the Drive By Truckers, who for the last few years has been in the habit of crooning ballads as if he made singer-songwriter his Eagle Scout project, has a new album, Georgia Blue, that consists of covers of Peach State songs meant not as a tribute to the sadness enshrouding all the land, but to Georgia for electing Democrats in 2020. If anything, this development, specifically the notion of Isbell flattening a buffet of soulful singers—from Otis Redding to Michael Stipe—into his nasal tenor has helped me articulate why I don’t truck with Jason Isbell. This is something that even my close acquaintances are sometimes surprised to learn, assuming as they do that I, a disaffected Southerner, known to enjoy country and rock music, and perpetually startled by the twang of my own voice, probably keep Isbell in heavy rotation. And so I tell them: My aversion is all-encompassing, beginning with the “a” that seems absconded from his surname, and ending where his vocal intonation makes me want to drive my CR-V straight through the wall of an upscale, Greater Atlanta biscuit shop that is really just a Cracker Barrel with yuppie trim. But, Georgia Blue makes articulable what I previously could not: Isbell is the Joe Biden of alt country, and, insofar as Biden has never tried to sing to me, his project is more heart-wrecking than Biden’s. With Georgia Blue, Isbell rises from a musician I’ve always found vaguely annoying to a symbol of the hollowness of the current American political moment.

            I make this claim at a time when Isbell is receiving some nice press, including this profile in the New Yorker, for little more than being an Alabaman who acknowledges Covid-19 exists and who thinks it prudent to avoid contracting it. In his interview with Paul Elie, he comes across as affable enough. If he were, say, a deputy town manager for a sunbelt boomtown I’d have no problem with him, and his would-be advocacy that I imagine—issuing bonds for dog parks every quarter mile (or whatever), his singular vision that rescue dogs might rescue us. But, as a person who enjoys “music” even if mostly as the soundtrack to my own workaday mundanity, a person living in my own sunbelt boomtown, I can’t stand the guy!   

To people who want to put him in league with John Prine and Leonard Cohen, may I suggest Isbell’s true songwriting lineage is the creative teams behind the rise of Starbucks and Trader Joes? He seems clandestinely sponsored by a strip mall parking lot designed to keep you from escaping it. The song “Dreamsicle,” probably the best song from his 2019 album Reunions, makes for a cloying example. This is a song that manages to spoil dreamsicles, summer nights, and lawn chairs in a tidy 3:46. The effect is that now if I happen to enjoy a dreamsicle on a summer night I do so with an invisible Isbell over my shoulder reminding me that I am in fact “enjoying a dreamsicle on a summer night” in a way that is wholly similar to how I might glimpse the Michelins on the above-mentioned CR-V and think, despite myself, “because so much is riding on my tires.”

Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” “Dreamsicle” is a song that sounds bemusing on first listen, but turns out to be depressing as hell if you bother to decipher the narrative. Conceptually, the song occupies Isbell’s dominant motif of replacing Springsteen’s everyman with a repentant but clueless redneck who is the victim of his upbringing. That this mirrors the thesis of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is an important clue. Under the “Dreamsicle” spell, we join Isbell in a pastime with which I’m familiar but do my best to avoid: that is, displacing the ache of love denied by obsessively devouring the whole box of dreamsicles. Titling a song after a frozen novelty causes a dissonant, almost subconscious realization of how bleak it is. And, it’s bleak as shit--bleaker still because its bleakness is presented as nostalgia for pain. 

The rest of Reunions proceeds similarly but with less charm. The album is necessary to discuss because it seems now like a sad call to which Georgia Blue offers a sadder response. Its first track “What Have I Done to Help?” has an echo of the chanted quality of Lucinda Williams’ “Car Wheels (On a Gravel Road).” But, where Williams’ song revels in late-afternoon and honeysuckle, Isbell offshores whimsy in favor of something that I guess is metonymy for the thought-loop of a guilt-ridden and fragile super ego, asking over and over, “What have I done to help?” and answering idiosyncratically “Somebody save me.” Throughout, he occupies the persona of the atomized man, haunted by his own solipsism. In total, the album sounds as if sung by a tortured mud puddle. Lyrically it’s about as deep as a park bench designed to inhibit sleeping. The storytelling for which Isbell is often extolled amounts to something like detailing one’s mental health history to a stranger at an Applebee's bar.

For all its shortcomings, the portrait of self-medicating and suffering that Reunions offers is exactly what won’t be fixed any time soon by Joe Biden and the Democrats and the 12,670 Georgians who chose Biden over Donald Trump. These things obviously won’t be fixed by a covers album either--something the song “Be Afraid,” the loudest single from Reunions, seems actually to foretell. The song is ostensibly about being a dick to stagehands for fear of not being a dick to stagehands. Its chorus is a celebration of dread. The triumphant refrain “Be afraid. Be very afraid. Do it anyway,” sounds to me like a manic, end-times redux of the expression “Fake it ‘til you make it.” Anyway, for my purpose here it’s too coincidental not to note that in the last verse of “Be Afraid,” Isbell sings, “And if your words add up to nothing then you’re making a choice to sing a cover when we need a battle cry,” which of course lays curious groundwork for a subsequent album of covers in which he shape-shifts again into an Act Blue email that recorded an album.

As an album, Georgia Blue is wooden and unremarkable. Isbell ruins REM’s “Nightswimming,” but sings Vic Chestnut’s “I’m Through” well enough. His rendition of Otis Redding’s “Since I’ve been Loving You” would probably allow him to advance through a round of The Voice, were he a contestant. When he enlists Brittany Spencer, former backup singer to Carrie Underwood, to sing “Midnight Train to Georgia,” the result is closer to Muzak than homage, and the backup singers’ refrain “I know you will” becomes something you repeat to a friend hellbent on bad choices as opposed to the righteous support they offer in the original. As a whole, the album is chalky and subdued. It sounds like my beer tastes after I suck a zinc lozenge.

Ultimately, it’s not the sound but the intent that’s at issue here. When Isbell gives The Black Crowes “Sometimes Salvation” the dreamsicle treatment, he’s actually doing something pretty close to what he does on Reunions and throughout his discography going all the way back through his time with the Truckers. In all cases he suggests himself as performing the work of witness—depicting the pathos such as it is of the progressive, but country, white Southerner, minutely enlarging the White Southerner’s concerns and aesthetics. The purpose is ideological. It has been all along.

Georgia Blue reveals this ideology to be a hilarious travesty. According to its own jacket-copy, the album is designed to rope a handful of disparate songs into the suggestion that their existence in time and space laid some invisible groundwork for electing a 77-year old centrist who can’t pass an infrastructure bill, who opposes the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, who is too enfeebled, both morally and politically, to actually forgive student debt or make the child tax credit permanent, and who (thankfully) ended the war in Afghanistan, but did so in a way that makes the election of a more fascist version of Trump (if not Trump himself) more likely in 2024. Oh yes, and on his coattails rode two Georgia senators unlikely to win re-election, whose flipping of the Senate to the Dems has served so far only to further expose the way in which the Democratic party has functioned as the more moderate wing of the Republican party since 1992 at least. So that what Isbell is actually celebrating is a thin victory bacon-wrapped around a filet mignon of defeats.

Georgia Blue’s digital release happened on October 15, the same day it was reported that Joe Manchin had succeeded in having Biden’s climate program cut from the budget bill. Obviously I don’t think it’s worth downloading, but if you want just a taste, listen to Isbell let the blood from REM’s “Driver 8” and see if you don’t know a few moments of despair masquerading as peace.

 

 

Jack Christian

Isolation Tracks: High lifve my life like there’s…Nooooo Two-Morrooooow! by Lard Alec

The isolation track is not, judging by my research, a stable ontological category. Even if we climb down the ladder of abstraction a rung or two to the “vocals only” subcategory, there’s still some ambiguity (regarding, specifically, what the word only means). Take this “vocals only” version of Boston’s “More than a Feeling,” which includes some backing vocals, the occasional guitar lick, and lots of clapping. I admit, it would be a shame to shed these bedraggled, surviving elements just for the sake of acapella purity: the guitar, in particular, seems like an ancillary vocalization, and the clapping just rules*.

YouTube doesn’t always know what these are either; the top search result** for “isolation track” is a video of 12-year-old Australian guitar-child prodigy, Taj Farrant, playing tremolo-heavy House-of-Blues-style jam-sesh whatnot (popular with his peers, I’m sure) against a backing track. Skillful and spirited, he looks like he was kidnapped by the ghost of dearly departed bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn, with his skinny dreads and black flat-brim hat. Evidently, he signed a recording deal after “appear[ances] on Australia’s Got [at least some] Talent and The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” His is likely some of the only blues that Ellen has ever heard***. I wish him well, but this is not what I’m looking for.

Mark Merrell’s 471-video playlist of “isolated musical tracks,” however, is just the ticket****. It is an embarrassment of riches. Take Bon Jovi, for example. You’ve probably heard his “Livin’ on a Prayer” many, many times***** but likely have no idea how completely insane his vocal scaling is until you can savor it in the pristine clearing of a voice-only recording. When Jon Bon really lets loose, it’s spill-your-drink alarming. The comment subfields are full of wonder at his erstwhile analogue feats and morning over his shot voice, which was evidently ground to a mediocre pulp by this kind ostentation. 

The “Enter Sandman” vocal track, like the Boston one lauded above, features dashes of complementary instrumentation—muted backup vocals, occasional (hilarious) guitar****** flourishes, and some kind of rhythmic tisking.  The funniest part is when even the haphazard accompaniments freeze for twenty seconds or so and then the spoken prayer (“Now I Lay Me down to Sleep”), which alternates, with some overlap, the voice of a young boy and Hetfield’s own malicious-to-bored recitation, begins. It sounds as shockingly out of place here as it does not in the standard version. In any case, the prayer is soon blasted offstage by Hetfield’s hammy, sultry/menacing metal lullaby, “Hush little baby...,” that is fundamentally confused in its appeals. Is he being mean, comforting, seductive? Kind of all and none, maybe. Would you be able to glean this corny weirdness amidst all the fuzzy distortion of the complete track? Possibly, but it’s much clearer and dumber here.

The gold standard “vocals only” track is Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil.” Here’s how it starts: 

     David Lee Roth: “Hooo!...Oh-Agwaragharr Ye-es! [fingers snapping] Yeah-he-yam-ee-yam! Hhhowhhyyjahhheh!...................High lifve my life like there’s…Nooooo Two-Morrooooow!”

And it keeps getting better from there. 

David Lee Roth was in his early 20s when he recorded this song, but his voice is that of a much older man, oscillating between conspiratorial smokiness and train whistle key changes. His swagger is robust, to the point of lunacy, combining weirdly un-rock elements, like the Vegas stage show, with a poor unconflicted white man’s version of Little Richard. All of this was, originally, set against the amphetamine spider-strumming of Eddie Van Halen’s lewd and zany lead guitar and the band’s harmonic backup vocals. Freed from all the early pop metal apparatus, however, Roth comes off as the wildest kind of interloper, a madman in a sequined suit, trailed by a dancing chorus, howling out fifteen minutes of hallucinatory cocktail tunes before Wayne Newton takes the stage. And yet, we remember, he was a hard-rock icon, at the cultural epicenter of a decade of grandiose front men and foolish guitars. 

What’s the worst iso track I’ve ever heard? Hard to say. The acapella version of Nickelback’s “Photograph” is tough to beat. The vocals are doused with equal parts sincerity and strain—it is the tone, I imagine, of a guy proposing marriage while trying to push through a dam of a constipation. The voice-only recording of Five Finger Death Punch’s “Over and Under” is up there. The guitar-only cut of Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” highlights the worst part of the worst of all average songs and so freights a special, dreary horror. Nu Metal and turn of the century alt rock are both reliably nauseating, so it’s no surprise these genres would make for the very worst iso tracks. 

The thing is, though, even when I settle in for some hate-listens, it’s not long before delight takes the wheel. Isos reward the listener’s patience in unexpected ways. Songs with long instrumental intros, especially, lull you into complacency or even task-specific amnesia. Then a voice erupts, out of the void, and knocks you backward, like an exploding cigar, with a mixture of shock and joy. 

Isos defamiliarize inescapable radio mainstays and our favorite hits alike by showing us the surprising but unnoticed nature of their component parts. You might not even know that your favorite singer really can’t sing or that a seemingly unassuming bassline is the deranged doodling of a largely unnoticed but resentful background vandal longing to break free until you hear those things on their own. I could not think or type while listening to the, little did I know, busybody nonsense of John Paul Jones’ bassline to Led Zepplin’s “Ramble On,” a song that in its entirety sounds like a bland summer vacation anthem for 15-year-olds.  But when the rest is stripped away, what remains is a motor-fingered bouncy house of sound that treats your eardrums like a speedbag. Who knew*******?

The Internet’s not all bad. Back when I was growing up, if you didn’t know the lyrics to a song, you had to guess, or find someone who actually knew (some people have an ear for this stuff; I never did). Even if you owned the C.D., they didn’t all come with liner notes, and chances are you were thinking of a song you didn’t own, something you heard eight times a day on MTV. Same thing with movies. It took a village to find out, like, who the EPA guy was in Ghostbusters. You had to ask around, find someone who owned it********, or hope it was somewhere in your friend’s dad’s copy of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. The Internet is narrowly perfect for stuff like that, looking up song lyrics and movie credits, and a few other things, isolation track videos being one of them. They feature that auspicious blend of celebration and critique, through light-touch creative sampling, that’s ideal for glancing semi-personal, semi-public encounters on social-media platforms. They’re roughhewn and at times indifferent to generic parameters, which only increases their populist charm. 

I know well-meaning normal people sometimes make these just because they think the acapella version is cool or beautiful, but that’s not what I’m interested in at all. Instead, I love how the original corporate architecture of a top-40 tune is wobbled by the isolation process and how the music that’s colonized us finally sounds new after years and years of sounding anything but.

_____

 *Especially since it conjures images of recording session clapping takes, and one wonders, of course, how long this went on. Did the Boston guys nail it in just one shot? Did Brad Delp keep screwing it up by losing the beat? Do session players handle the clapping detail?
 **Algorithmically tuned for “Relevance.”
 ***Some facile Internet research shows that she had at least one other early adolescent blues guitarist, Toby Lee, on her show as well.
 ****And it contains much of what I’ll praise in ensuing paragraphs.
 *****Just the other night, I heard my mother-in-law’s neighbor clatter home from the bar, singing it brokenly when she heard it on the radio, which, incidentally, she leaves on for hours at a time when she’s not home, presumably for the sake of her lonely dog.
 ******The guitar work here seems like it was written specifically for all their teenage fans who would badly cover it, in that it is indistinguishable from bad cover music itself.
 *******Musicians, probably.
 ********I only had Ghostbusters II.

If All the Garbage Were Gone by Lard Alec

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents, who are moving to a smaller house in the fall and are, consequently, in the midst of an extended purgative frenzy. My mother is the brains of the operation and an eminently capable and disciplined person. She has a vision and ethos that prevents her from ever accruing the third-rate clutter that rivers hopelessly through my house as of this (and any conceivable future) writing. She returns borrowed items and discards useless ones as often as she can. She is no slave to nostalgia. And yet she finds herself living in a sort of rained-out yard sale, on the verge of a grand indiscriminate liquidation, wondering how throwing stuff away became a full-time, if temporary, job.

What she presents to me is not a practical or moral template; I, lacking her virtues, can scarcely hope to emulate her example, and so her struggles are all the more disquieting. Still, she will prevail eventually, paring her domestic inventory down to the nunish fundamentals in a way I never could. What her predicament offers me instead is a complex figure for the mind—I find myself in a state of perpetual rummaging, plagued by clutter and inefficiency, tempted, at times, to see richness in the mess, though I mostly see it for what it is: mazes of junk that are almost impossible to navigate or shed.

And what is this junk exactly? Memories, most of them bad or dumb. The bulk of them fall into three shitty categories: 1) embarrassing and/or pointedly disappointing experiences 2) scenes from trashy movies 3) snatches of old and profoundly tacky songs. Most of my writing here deals with #3, and this work is both exegetical and archeological—I hope it can help me sort and organize the crapola of my inner life, even if I can’t, much as I’d like to, throw it all away.

In my exhumations, I try to remind myself that category #3 memories didn’t really happen to me but were imposed upon real (though meagre) life events. The MTV videos and jingly commercials I watched are not memories, in and of themselves, and yet they are what I remember, more, in many cases, than my own life. What they obscure is how little I was doing back then, how little I lived. To come to terms with this Kozinskian passivity, I must sort out where I start and where the stupid music ends.

Hamlet had Yorick’s skull; I have Chevy’s “Like a Rock” commercials, scored by the blue-collar rocker and yawn-shaped-like-a-man Bob Seger. I cannot say that Seger’s soulful, full-length adult contemporary “mock-rock”* classic “Like a Rock” has had an important place in my life, since I doubt I’d ever listened to it in its entirety until “researching**” this piece. But what surges and snarls through me at unpredictable times and with variable and sometimes shocking intensity, like Rust Cohle’s flashbacks from his days as a drug-guzzling, deep-cover biker narc, is the tightly edited miniature from Chevy’s iconic if luridly bland ad campaign from the 90s and aughts***. In these ads, Seger’s vocals are cut, copied, and crowded together, telling the viewer how to feel about Chevy trucks, America, and themselves.  The condensed format means you get a lot of money-shot blues yowling; it is like being electrocuted by America’s most boring man.

I cannot summarize the campaign and retain any sense of coherence, so I will offer a couple of general remarks about the breadth and evolution of these commercials before concentrating on the inaugural ad. 1) The trucks got much bigger and more expensive over time 2) so did the blowhard American (often male) Chevy owner, for whom luxury pickups became something of a cul-de-sac status symbol rather than the working stiff’s**** vital and necessary engine of labor. I suspect there was a bit of a demographic shift, rather than just a personal transformation, in Chevy owners during the life of the campaign, but whatever: Seger was fine for either demographic since his vanilla, star-spangled affirmations were and are almost metaphysically inoffensive*****.

But Seger’s voice, despite the musical insipidity that frames it, is a bit of a roller coaster, full of scratchy swoops and stomach drops. Even now, years after being shocked to attention by these commercials and this godforsaken song, I still howl-copy it myself, almost involuntarily, as I sludge around the house. The only lyric I know for sure, when away from the computer, is the title and chorus; the rest I fill in with analogous screech-blues noises: “Like a rock…I was standin’ on a gate! / Like a rock…I was with a dog named Nate!” It will never leave me. And despite my sloppy, performative sarcasm, corporate amber waves of grain imagery always haunt my ululations.

The inaugural “Like a Rock” ad aired in 1991 though it has post-911 feel, with its generic if insecure weave of soft-filtered patriotic chores and scenes. The first thing we see is a flag being raised solemnly in the rainy foreground, by a couple of somber schlubs, with a Silverado parked inconspicuously down screen to the right. Then we see some guys tossing tools and shit into a truck bed from the POV of the truck bed itself (duck!). Then a truck speeds through some blurry wheat. Next, fishermen in yellow slickers toss lobster traps into a huge, inadvisable mound on the bed, Beverly Hillbillies style. After that, a dually bounds through fields of mud, careening wildly to the left, perhaps in a life-ending skid—thanks to some tasteful editing, we never discover its fate. The 30 second ad is maybe half over at this point. Eventually there are images of welding sparks, snow, disaster relief, and a screen full of financial fine print.

All the while, Seger sing-proclaims his metaphorical imperturbability: “I was strong as I could be / LIKE A ROCK / nothing ever got to me,” as the bourbon-voiced narrator touts Chevy’s sales and customer polling numbers. The relationship between these two elements, hymn and sermon, is jarring. In a flash, the church service to the American male self-image is interrupted with a pawing sales pitch for a creek-fording truck that, thanks to magic of advertising, now seems like it should either be priceless or free by birthright. It always felt weird to go back to the Mets game after that.

Two things amused me about these ads when I first saw them: 1) Seger’s weird avidity, and 2) the almost non-genre dinosaur sound of the song itself that, I swore, NO ONE could actually like, though, apparently, most people did. I listened to hard rock and metal, and Seger just seemed like some obsolete but emphatic dud with bad taste, singing songs for flag-hoisting old farts with lots of useless, hard-earned money.

Seger wasn’t alone in praising the straight****** and narrow. Mid-80s radio-friendly white rock had a pretty inflexible sense of rock tradition and an ars poetical streak to boot. Huey Lewis’s “The Heart of Rock’ n’ Roll,” for example, is a kind of ad for itself and its “Hip to Be Square” normie aesthetics:
     When they play their music, ooh that modern music
     They like it with a lot of style
     But it's still that same old back beat rhythm
     That really really drives 'em wild.
“Modern music” here could be anything from new wave to dance pop to hair metal. What Lewis wants is “that…back beat rhythm” that very little girls can dance to with their uncles at the family barbecue. Even the comparatively hard-driving acts that Lewis eschews resorted to rock songs about rock, I should point out, having, perhaps like Lewis and Seger themselves, not a whole lot else to say. AC/DC released “Rock n’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” and “For Those about to Rock…” just a few years after the group had written the definitive rock meta-analysis “It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Want to Rock n’ Roll.” The first two songs pose as defiant, but probably derived from a simple lack of imagination. Seger himself had “Rock n’ Roll Never Forgets” and “That Old Time Rock n’ Roll,” which are, true to form, simultaneously spirited and sonically inert. Like Lewis, Seger pines for (and embodies) a no frills “back beat” driven rock fundamentalism, which is aesthetically reactionary if not quite politically so, heavy on the enormous alto saxophone and light on electronic hullabaloo. I thought it was hilarious that he would devote himself so religiously to such a vast repertoire of anti-modern snoozers. What’s worse is that he built a kind of puritan rock work ethic around it******* that he eventually sold to a major auto company that was selling much the same thing********.

The “Like a Rock” ads feature masculinity without sexual charisma and rock n’ roll without cool. They were tailor made for a repressive conservative ideal of yore, not our current ecstatically deranged one. The ads sell manly prowess and sentimental workaholism—this isn’t the aesthetic for psychos who blast their vertical exhaust stacks at cycling libs or fly Three Percenter flags as they speed toward Sam’s Club at six desultory gallons per mile. Seger describes himself is a political centrist, which means, in terms of commercial appeal, he ought to be dull enough for everybody, but that kind of big-tent banality won’t cut it anymore.

Nonetheless, he’s a legend in my mind, a kind of musical poltergeist who violently but tepidly spooks me at odd moments. While I’m almost glad he’s in their yowling, I do wish less of my soul was comprised of obsolete shlock like this or the Freedom Rock commercials—though I wonder, in all honesty, what I would replace it with. And the answer is…nothing, I guess, because if all the garbage were gone, I wouldn’t even be here myself.

_____

 *The awfulness of Billy Joel, explained. (slate.com)

 **And which I listened to at 1.5 times speed, unable to bear the full six minutes of this horseshit.

 ***There was also a belated, zombie ad released in 2013.

 ****Food for thought: Davide Mastracci has recently suggested banning all non-industrial pickup truck sales in light of their enormous carbon footprint: It’s Time To Ban The Sale Of Pickup Trucks (readpassage.com).

 *****Our era, on the other hand, is predicated on either giving or taking offense.

 ******In “Like a Rock” he praises his younger self for “standing arrow-straight.”

 *******Imagine rock but without the fun.

 ********While profiting off of monthly interest payments.

Twistin’ Like a Flame in a Slow-ass Lady by Lard Alec

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.

I Think Also with Joy and Minor Sickness by Lard Alec

I am in the midst of a years-long and not entirely rigorous discussion with a good friend about what constitutes the funniest moments of popular music over the last 50 years of so.  I will more than occasionally call this friend and fill his voicemail with “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours),” a karaoke version of some lemon by Bob Seger or Crazy Town, or, very worst of all, Fallout Boy’s crowning underachievement “Uma Thurman.” He will return the favor with Billy Joel, Montel Jordan, Tone Loc, or whatever seems upliftingly ludicrous at the moment. Listening to tinny, distorted renderings of these flubby jingles and novelty songs on your phone, while taking a dump at work, is one of the only ways to convert mass-market pop schlock into real joy. It all suddenly sounds like the joke it really is*. 

Seen this way, as a farce and sideshow, pop music is (sometimes) delightful. Songs that once drove you to despair when, say, you bagged groceries for a bedraggled regional grocery chain in the mid-90s, seem altogether thrilling when retrieved from YouTube in the middle of the workday and then deployed as an act of sonic vandalism against a close friend. “Roll to Me”** by Del Amitri is my gold standard. It’s plucky and upbeat to the point of something like catastrophic friendliness, which is perfect for the strained, enforced courtesies of low-wage retail and customer-service work.

But drug-store pop***, like Martin Page’s “In the House of Stone and Light,” is, no matter how repurposed, ultimately something to endure. It’s funny but not hilarious because you have to live through it, to really deal with it as it plays, until, for example, you finally get your medication and can leave the pharmacy. The funniest moments in music are, for me, brief jarring departures from, or perfections of, the larger ruins that contain them.

Ambition and breadth can, I acknowledge, summon great and hilarious stakes. Kansas’s “Carry on My Wayward Son” is funny for at least a dozen reasons, almost all of them deriving from the song’s titanic aspirations. It is longish, has an elaborate intro and outro, soaring, trite faux-epic lyrics, at least three bad solos, and more. It was never for a second not a classic, and it was certainly written to be one, despite having not one shred of insight or duende.

But is anything in “Carry on Etc.” as funny as the famous saxophone peel out in Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page?” I don’t think so. Seger’s confessional road poem has no shortage of ambition, and the stakes and context certainly matter (he’s very serious, very soulful), but that sax riff would have been funny just about anywhere. And it’s stuff like that that keeps you going when you’re pouring kitty litter onto a detergent spill in aisle 8.

_______

*Hopefully, it sounds just as funny to your neighbor in the next stall.

**I thought, all these yours, the song was called “Roll with Me.” I only learned its real title 

in researching, if you want to call it that, this piece.

***Andy Kindler on Twitter: "The music at CVS is so bad I assume it’s a bit." / Twitter 

 

Consider the Harmonica

Consider Kid Rock, the Woodstock ‘99 standout who, when he gained broad mainstream success in the mid-90s, dressed and flopped around like a suburban drug dealer who was shoehorned into success by a rich relative. In reality, Rock earned his own success through self-initiated branding research, which culminated in his “raprock…redneck image” that is explained well enough here (Early Mornin' Stoned Pimp - Wikipedia). Rock’s music, even at the highpoint of his evolution, was probably secondary to the adventure of fame and fun that it bought for him.

In the late 90s he released “Cowboy,” which is thoroughly Kid Rock but barely a song. Neither the rap nor rock elements quite manage to impose their reality, and the track sounds, from the first, like a foul-mouthed commercial or a made-up song from a movie. It’s full of both generic affluenza swagger and gray-market entrepreneurialism (Rock wants to travel and “chill” but also start a successful escort business). All of that is funny but it hardly matters. “Cowboy” doesn’t make an impression, though it is capable of interrupting you into awareness because it has a kind of emotional alarm clock built into its opening: the blaring but weirdly powerless harmonica riff, which lets you know, right away, that you’re listening to music of some sort.

Despite the fact that nothing else has really happened yet and that the song is called “Cowboy,” the harmonica still sounds like a bleating, colorless non sequitur. It is the ultimate gag effect before a total gag of a song. Imagine discovering, with a hasty gulp, that a barista had not, in fact, filled your 20-ounce paper cup with coffee but had filled it instead with ice-cold Bud Lime. That is what the harmonica feels like to me. I am never adequately prepared for it. 

And while the studied exurban white idpol aesthetic fatuousness Rock had honed by this time certainly amplify and help explain the effect, the riff is just plain funny all by itself. You can quote it (“Mwaaaaaahem!” you say, leaning around your cubicle divider to distract a coworker who’s just taken an important call). You can imagine it elsewhere (in the middle of Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” for example) to great effect. It has a life of its own. 

I think also with joy and minor sickness of the guitar riff 02:57 into Creed’s “My Sacrifice” (Creed - My Sacrifice (Official Video) - YouTube); the dopey, loopy opening bassline to Sugarloaf’s “Green-eyed Lady”; the silly snarly guitar intro to “Enter Sandman”; the “ack, ack, ack, ack, ack” part of that one Billy Joel song; whenever Bryan Adams scream-sings oh and/or yeah. 

This anthology of sacred and sour notes grows year to year. There is always something new to treasure in the waste. And while I didn’t write any of this shit, the laughter it inspires is all mine—or better yet, something to share with a tolerant and like-minded friend.