Daily Listen by Brian Brock

Robert Wyatt - Shleep (listen to “Maryan”)

Even in a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would not be at the Toppermost of the Poppermost.  Beck and Cat Power have far more immediately satisfying music, lyrics, and production; and of course Miles Davis - Kind of Blue would be perpetually hovering around number 10 with a bullet.  (See, it’s funny, because the bullet is specifically placed next to fast-rising albums, hence “perpetually with a bullet” is an oxymoron.)  People like to dance, so put Tom Ze and TV on the Radio up there too.  Robert Wyatt is not everyday music, but he is everyperson music.

In a perfect world, Robert Wyatt would still be making his compelling, complete and complicatedly comforting music, but he would release an album every year rather than every five.  Five hundred thousand people would come to depend on his filling the void left by the waning of his last album.  Maybe he would have a TV show, on cable I’m sure, where he would talk to a friend for half an hour each Monday.

So Wyatt’s music is deeper than but not as broad as, say, Wilco.  They map a similar part of the possibility of music.

Wyatt’s lyrics have a wordplay which I imagine is at first off-putting to many, but which actually breaks thoughts apart and reassembles them with real care.  He calls a song “Free Will and Testament” and in it asks,

So when I say that I know me, how can I know that?
What kind of spider understands arachnophobia?

There’s a certain common approach to Bill Callahan’s lyrics in Smog, especially on Supper, where for example in “Feather by Feather” he says,

It’s Ali vs. Clay
Both pummeling away
A champ always fights themself
And you are a fighter, you are a fighter, you are a fighter

Callahan was brutalized in Rolling Stone as like the guy at a college party who rests on the back of a couch saying things that sound insightful for a moment but which you later realize are meaningless - an only mildly deserved criticism.

Robert Wyatt rather comes off as a natural, a peak-sitting guru who could make your cerebrospinal fluid boil simply by transcribing his everyday conversations with eagles and tailless whipscorpions, but instead looks inward and works over his own vertebral column. (Take that sentence as my submission to the code that “all persons writing about Robert Wyatt must mention that he is paralyzed from the waist down.”  Really, why do record reviewers feel the need repeatedly to reacquaint us with their talking points for each musician?)

To seal the deal, he harnesses a team of jazz musicians, free- and otherwise, to a cart filled with great melodies and cool rhythms.