December 13, 2008

They Might Be Giants - Lincoln (hear “Shoehorn With Teeth” and “Cage & Aquarium”)

I was hugely into my Lincoln tape back in 88/89.  That and the awesomest awesomeness of my King Missile Fluting on the Hump / They cassette were my number one Piers Anthony novel background music.

Lincoln is such a hugely ideaful bunch of stuff exploding in every direction at once.  The lyrics are surreal to the breaking point.  The instrumentation veers from odd to classy.  John and John Flansburgh and Linnell sing as though they are explaining that they cannot talk to a telemarketer (selling timeshares in Branson) because their shoes have become inexplicably knotted together.

In my view, Bob Dylan made it OK for a significant portion of overly intellectual urbanites to listen to the blues, or the country blues, or what have you, by attaching “intelligent” words, which truth be told were often just obscure and bitter.  In a sense, They Might Be Giants then harvest the remaining fruit from the highest branches of nerdality, by attaching countless weird and unnecessary postmodernisms to what is essentially folk music.  I love it.

I guess that’s what makes their music so easily appealing to children, because basically kids are very weird people who nonetheless want to be able to listen to very normal music.

ps. adding this to my 33 1/3 list, although there are other people who are much more obsessed with this band/album.

I listened to this on Grooveshark, which seems to be in a legal grey area.  Of course, I still own the tape, so I believe I am entitled to downloaded copies.  Have you ever used the “Autoplay” feature on Grooveshark?  It has very adequate suggestions for similar music.  Why do these algorithms think I only want to hear something similar, though?  Might I not be tired of the sound after a whole album?

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Tags: 33 1/3 Dylan cassette kids king missile they might be giants weird wordplay folk
October 23, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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.

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Tags: Lyrics Robert Wyatt bill callahan jazz oxymoron perfect world record reviewers smog wordplay smog