Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1990
by Scott Miller

"Theme From 'Twin Peaks'" [edited to TV playing time] - Angelo Badalamenti Postmodernism sprang up in pop culture in 1990 in a fairly noticeable way, led in the public eye if not by Jacques Derrida then by David Lynch's riveting "Twin Peaks" TV drama. Lynch's love for screen reality translates as a continual awareness of what technique does to quaint details, like rural office workers appreciating their morning coffee and doughnuts; to some extent, this paved the way for the ironic distance of grunge from hard rock, or Eightball Comics from Marvel Comics. Angelo Badalamenti's theme sculpts using the raw material of memories of soap opera themes and doo-wop slow dances; it is perhaps the first piece of music that creates the mood of creating moods.

"Birdhouse In Your Soul" - They Might Be Giants
This isn't so much TMBG's forte as TMBG's moment, but one of the late rock era's golden memories is the disorienting spectacle of Doc Severinsen putting his all into a Tonight Show rendition of this little song about a night light's confession that it doesn't really provide any security.

"Cathy's New Clown" - John Wesley Harding
I'm close to complaining that nothing quite achieves escape velocity here, but this modest heaping-onto of "Cathy's Clown" keeps making small, correct musical decisions until evidence has mounted that Wes is really an unusually good singer. He's mostly doing Costello, and doing him well: "Watch out, there's a body talking body talk/A big mouth just gets in the way" is crack-a-smile E.C., but somehow is also the moment that puts the feel of an unquestionable winner across.

"Work" - John Cale & Lou Reed
Songs For Drella was a real bright spot in Velvets-related history. "Trouble With Classicists" by Cale and this by Reed are my favorite cuts—entertaining, musical, focused less on edifice planning than sound, creativity, and, yes, work. The piano and heavily distorted guitar create an ear-pleasing chug, while Lou does sung verse about Mr. Warhol's work fetish—ostensibly critically, but in a way that allows us to appreciate that Warhol was anything but a dilettante attracted to mass media as a way of cutting corners.

"Don't Ask Me" - Public Image Ltd.
Wearing a big good-guy white hat as an environmentalist and further confusing the paradigm with a like-proper-professionals-of-three-years-ago sample drum and synth sound, Lydon continues to get things done impressively in ways that don't initially seem right for who he is. Good for him: "What's it all about/They scream and then they shout" is possibly his beefiest hook ever, and all of the politics make perfect sense to me.

"Americana" - Thin White Rope
Another reckoning parable from Thin White Rope uses variations on a hypnotic guitar figure to teach that "You get what you expected from your eighteen-dollar home/The worth of having cheated and the rage of being alone." Extra points for the fact that the chorus wanders far afield of the verse key, and they don't lift a finger to mitigate the weird interval back.

"The Man I Used To Be" - Jellyfish
Per their version of postmodernism, Jellyfish telegraphed a compelling appreciation of production values ripe for revisitation, from their H.R. Pufnstuff wardrobe to their bright selection of Saturday Night Fever producer Albhy Galuten for their debut album. Especially with Jason Falkner in the lineup, they were the right people to produce a quality result, too; my band rehearsed across the hallway from them for a long time, and you could hear them literally practicing the same three-second vocal cluster for an hour.

"King Strut" - Peter Blegvad
His idiosyncratic, sometimes terrific seventies band Slapp Happy moved in prominent European art band circles with Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, and (of course) Dagmar Krause; this song is high-polish, Dylanesque raconteuring about rags to too many riches, over a winner of a Richard Thompson-like guitar riff.

"The Only One I Know" - The Charlatans
The shuffle beat, sixties organ, and chomping phase shifter guitar were to my knowledge the pioneering instance of a very influential style manifested in, say, U2's "Mysterious Ways" and "Right Here Right Now" by Jesus Jones.

"Everyone Moves Away" - The Posies
Dear 23 was the impassioned, youth-coming-of-age era of the Posies. While the lyrics aren't non-stop brilliance, they tend to have a way with a turn of phrase when it counts, sometimes in passing ("and the family kept its end"), sometimes at focal points ("inside the big, nameless house from which everyone moves away"). Besides the clearly fetching vocal harmonizing, there's Jon Auer's guitar work, which was and is on track to take a place among the best.

"911 Is a Joke" - Public Enemy
I remember thinking that on Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy knew they were making serious art music now, so we're down to a more discreet level of put your hands in the air. "911 Is a Joke" is a great lyrical idea—as serious art goes, a big success in terms of choosing just the right signifier of the breakdown of reasonable U.S. living conditions outside of a certain socioeconomic boundary line. That said, I have a feeling that I won't really have lived until I hear the George Michael version of this.

"Dig For Fire" - Pixies
The irony-ready Pixies use an uncharacteristically big 80s beat to spin an initially condescending-sounding yarn about chatting up dotty old wandering eccentrics about what they're scrounging for ("the motherlode?"). The disconcerting answer is, "No, my child, that is not my desire/I'm digging for fire."

"Tunic (Song for Karen)" - Sonic Youth
Kim Gordon's performance of this is amazing; in a mostly spoken dramatization, she speaks imagined thoughts Karen Carpenter would have in the afterlife, indicating that given less pressure and more freedom she would have enjoyed a lower-key garage band scenario where she focuses on drums—in her new situation, practicing with "Jimi," "Janis," etc. Interesting. I'd be awfully self-conscious trying to pull something like that off knowing Karen's family is probably paying attention, but there does seem to come across a true and strong wish for the universe to somehow provide solace to a troubled soul.

"Bouncy Bouncy" - The Billy Nayer Show
Veering close to absurdist performance art, Cory McAbee's "Billy Nayer Show" was the most dependably hilarious and outrageous San Francisco band night out for years. This debut indie release captures the crazed, nonsensical glory of which the music was capable, as well as inaugurating a series of first-rate paintings (for example, do a web search on "The Villain That Love Built") and curious film projects.

"Debris Slide" - Pavement
Pavement were probably the postmodern band, what with the recommissioned E&J brandy Matador album art and the equally inspired reference to Sony's "perfect sound forever" CD slogan on this Drag City landmark. I'm delighted to admit I kind of got punked by them around this time (man, me and Billy Corgan)—I had a band called Game Theory, and around 2000 we were hearing confusing reports that we had a "reunion show" publicized somewhere; we eventually traced it to a years-old parody of a future rock festival poster done by Malkmus, including "Game Theory—two original members!" The mighty "Debris Slide" beats even Billy Nayer for sheer what-the-hellness; the combination of the young guys and the awfully colorful-sounding Gary Young was golden in those days.

"Home" - Iggy Pop
Wow, do I adore this song. It's in a way borderline unimaginative three-chord rock, but it just keeps sounding better and righter and more powerful to me. I remastered it to give it a little more punch and less fizz. "Home, boy/Home, boy/Everybody needs a home" is an almost shockingly unlikely chorus. It's the perfect street-level prayer of gratitude for not being quite homeless—not an easy emotional pitch to pull off, but this is really rocking, and infectious, and believable. "You better love it," indeed.

"Voice In My Head" - The Sneetches
That chorus—"Another day, another wrong, another right," etc., is one of the catchiest of the era, or of the catchiest of eras—it could have gone toe-to-toe with "Got To Get You Into My Life." Mike Levy is the auteur, and bassist Alec Palao is a pop connoisseur who, for instance, wrote the liner notes of the Zombies CD box. The organic crunch of the guitar, the tight horns, not too much treble on the drums, a dead cool variation fade-out: all show an instinct for doing 1966 right that would make the Explorers Club jealous.

"Heavenly Pop Hit" - The Chills
Submarine Bells is a dynamite whole album, the international star and culmination of New Zealand's Flying Nun Records scene and "the Dunedin sound." The Chills' 1987 Brave Words and 1992 Soft Bomb were also very decent, but SB sparkles all over (the ending tracks "Effloresce and Deliquesce" through "Submarine Bells" are an uncommonly lovely parting), and "Heavenly Pop Hit" is simply magical in its freshness and luminosity. "I stand and the sound goes straight through my body/I'm so bloated up happy, I could throw things around me" is so peculiar a choice of words it can only be the truth.

"Almighty" - Christmas
Christmas were one of the great marginalized acts. The Vortex album material actually went unreleased until 1993 when Matador put it out, and meanwhile Michael Cudahy and Liz Cox had assumed the identities of "The Millionaire" and "Miss Lily Banquette" in their new "cocktail nation" alternate universe project, Combustible Edison. So for the sake of authenticity of artistic progression, I'm situating this plain old pop music masterpiece in the pre-enlightenment era. The key tracks ("Superheroes" is almost as outstanding) have a strange prophetic weight, grappling surrealistically but only slightly ironically with ultimate concerns of human nature. "A reputation travels time/A man can grow into a monster or a hero" is typical of lines that seem like they're broaching Joycean or Girardian areas. Finally, though, it's the music—those three sections of different, accelerating tempo, all gorgeous—that mustn't be missed.

"There She Goes" - The La's
Almost every living soul likes this song upon hearing it once; that is a staggering achievement, requiring a number of key people to have done everything right. There's no good way to quantify or reckon with the aspect that is perfection of crystalline instrumental composition, so I won't hurt myself trying too hard. I can't offer a clear precedent—it's better than "Ticket To Ride," for instance. It's an excellent whole album, too, the better for not playing by the rules of the times in any discernible way. And they were very good live (I had the good fortune to see the La's on this tour), especially—surprisingly—the drummer. The singer is apparently the prickly sort; you can't trust rumor, of course, so all I'll say is that if there's any chance it's true that some band member or other happened to have, oh, disowned the album because the producer couldn't produce the right 1965 snare drum sound, I'd like to recommend that this entirely hypothetical band member in question ring Mr. Lillywhite and blurt out, for example, something about the job he did being in retrospect rather incredibly good.