The World Is Yours: Some Thoughts on Music in 1998
by Jason Anderson
The last concert I saw in 1998 -- a mere three days before Christmas and a long way from Berlin-was by Einsturzende
Neubauten. To say the very least, the performance was entertaining, a mix of crashing noise and almost sentimental
sweetness, with many of the songs from their 1996 album Ende Neu (recently issued in North America by Trent Reznor's
Nothing label) sounding something like what I feel Blixa Bargeld always hoped the group would. Here were the noises
of industry (contemporary German folk music is how they used to describe it, which was true at least until those
jobs were taken from the West's working classes and given to robots or Third World serfs) shot through the music
of Lee Hazelwood, the American songwriter and producer whose works were even more baroque and surreal than the
norm among Californian studio rats in the '60s and early '70s (e.g., Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood's "Some
Velvet Morning"). No wonder F.M. Einheit, the longtime percussionist and most fearsome physical presence in
Einsturzende Neubauten, quit in disgust.
A friend I was with last saw them in Rome in 1995 and he said that the newly recruited members are no substitutes
for Einheit or Marc Chung- they just didn't fit their roles as well, and perhaps no one could. Nevertheless, Einsturzende
Neubauten put on a fantastic performance, with moments of onstage business that utilized the usual arcane apparatus,
e.g., a jet turbine that was spun and produced a bell-like tone when struck, gravel falling from a height of ten
feet and landing near a microphone, a belt sander pressed to a sheet of metal. Bargeld presided over the proceedings
like a grand old man of the European stage, with all the girth that befits a man in successful middle-age, as well
as a withering wit and a propensity for tiny, disturbing screams that one would fear hearing from a young girl,
never mind a 40-year-old German in a waistcoat.
The audience was principally composed of what's left of Toronto's "urban primitive" crowd-leathered-up,
well-coiffed goths, multi-pierced and multi-tattooed malcontents pushing 30. Good to see them out, because when
I saw Test Dept in Toronto two years before, the crowd was far less bountiful and certainly in less robust health.
But I wish I could have seen more squares like me-the dull-looking white men who look like grad school dropouts.
(A wag in The Globe and Mail made a joke about how ponytails made men look like professional rock critics-actually,
all the rock critics I've would fear that a ponytail made them look too conspicuous.) Einsturzende Neubauten deserve
all possible esteem that could be accorded a group still within the parameters of "rock," but it's unlikely
they'll find a new audience. They're a dimly remembered joke, a cliche, if they're anything at all to the readers
of Spin or Alternative Press or Details or Melody Maker or Jockey Slut.
I suspect that my interests are marginal ones relative to the grand narrative of popular culture. But then I also
suspect that all interests, all passions, all tastes are marginal. Cultural hegemony is a myth for anyone who doubts
the PR of the entertainment industry and discovers that there's other activity going on, a polite level of constant
insurrection. That's why I find attempts to construct grand narratives for popular culture, and for the sanctioned
alternative cultures, offensive and counterproductive. In the official history of alternative music, Einsturzende
Neubauten are in a dusty category called "industrial," significant only in that some of their innovations
were co-opted and made more salable by Nine Inch Nails or, more garishly, Rammstein. They were replaced by a newer
model. The only history that matters in culture, if any history is recognized at all, is that which informs or
gives colour to what is deemed important in the present. Meanwhile, the popular culture takes no longer viable
ideas or trends, waits a period of time for proper fermentation and re-presents them as kitsch.
Despite appearances and 1,001 well-meaning editorialists, culture is not art. Art is a disruptive force, something
that challenges the order, often by doing something as simple as asking a question, expressing a doubt or reminding
one that the world wasn't always like this nor will it be like this again. Art suggests that there exists worlds
besides the one you've been told about. The aphorism in Jean-Luc Godard's book-length poem "JLG/JLG"
that I keep coming back to is that art is the exception and culture is the rule. I do not want the reassurances
of culture when I hear music; I want exceptions. I want to be shown how I've got it the world wrong, or even the
wrong world.
BEST THINGS EVER
In the next year, we'll be inundated with Top 10 and Top 100 lists of not just the decade, but the century and
the millennium too. I can hardly wait.
Working at magazines and newspapers, you soon realize that one sure-fire feature idea is the list. Editors love
lists because they package information in an instantly understandable way and can be applied to just about anything-greatest
films, worst restaurants, lousiest landlords, most important social activists. Any set of objects can become commodities
for appraisal; any set of people can become celebrities. And as soon as the list seems stale, it can be easily
updated and upgraded.
Two such lists in 1998 highlighted a crisis in alternative music, the crisis being that it confirmed that any hegemony
in alternative music was impossible, but it nonetheless made for good business sense to pretend otherwise. Though
the decade itself had another year-and-a-half left (or two-and-a-half, if you include 2000), Alternative Press
published their list of the most influential albums of the '90s, with Nirvana's Nevermind at Number One and Nine
Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral at Number Two. The rest of the selections was logical enough within the context
of Alternative Press, not a place for rocking the boat and upsetting subculture-oriented advertisers-some successful
alt-rock albums, discs for token genres (Beastie Boys for rap, Aphex Twin for rave, Massive Attack for trip-hop)
and some still-being-advertised anomalies for the sake of currency (Hole's Celebrity Skin).
I have no idea what the criteria for selecting or ranking these albums, since sales do not appear to be the primary
consideration (although it is a significant one). Many discs certainly count as influential, but not in the sense
that others have heard these albums and been inspired to make works of their own. No, others have heard these albums
and been inspired to make works that sound exactly like them, even discs as distinctive as Massive Attack's Blue
Lines and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. In this context, even the relatively experimental or innovative works
can seem conservative because the sounds and ideas in them have been so readily and eagerly plundered.
Is it fair to doubt the value of "good" or interesting art work because it causes "bad" or
plainly derivative art work? The good will out, hopefully. Like Blue Lines or Loveless, Coldcut's seminal remix
of Eric B. and Rakim's "Paid in Full"-which resurfaced this year on a new edition of Eric B. and Rakim's
Paid in Full album of 1987 -- still sounds fresh because there's too much in it. For every innovation that's become
a cliche (e.g., MC hip-hop sound-bites, "Funky Drummer" breaks), there are other idiosyncracies that
were overlooked. It's important to see the forest, not the trees. Enjoy the view.
On the Alternative Press list, though, putting albums like Blue Lines or Loveless next to dimly remembered mid-level
heavy metal with Sub Pop's stamp of cool credibility and Hole's utterly abhorrent Celebrity Skin-an eagerly promoted
and defended collection that contains approximately two good Go-Go's songs, a handful of passable Lindsay Buckingham
tunes and a frightening amount of "self-actualization"-is a poor attempt to construct a history. After
grunge's colonization of MTV, it seems deluded of the editors to insist that there's still an "underground"
with borders that need to be defended, instead of what it's become: a farm league for the mainstream, a cheap research-and-development
department. Moreover, it suggests that alternative music must have a commonly held sense of aesthetics. The best
albums on the list suggest that these things cannot exist.
Around the same time, The Wire published a cover story feature listing "100 albums that set the world on fire."
Though it's the Earth that's pictured a-flame on the magazine's cover, they must mean a different planet than this
one. Here's a brief list of albums praised, often wonderfully, by the list's contributors: The Homosexuals' Record
by The Homosexuals (difficult art-punk, apparently), Un Peu de Neige Sailie by Bernhard Gunter (extremely quiet
microtonal compositions), They Say I'm Different by Betty Davis (by a former wife of Miles, pictured on the cover
of Filles de Kilimanjaro and a singer of extremely hot funk), Another Side by Fingers Inc (doomy but sensual house
project by pioneer Larry Heard) and Nesting Stones by Cathy Lane (modernist musique concrete and the only title
from 1998). In 15 years of conspicuous music consumption, I never seen these albums in shops or read references
to them in books or magazines. The handful of selections I actually own (e.g., the Silver Apples' Contact, John
Cale's Paris 1919, Arthur Russell's World of Echo, a few others) now seem about as square as a Cat Stevens record.
The joke (and this offended many people who may've been miffed at AP's list but were positively stupefied and/or
outraged by The Wire's) was that these records did the impossible-they set the world on fire despite only three
people (tops) heard them. Or else that's because three people heard them, because it's a helluva a lot easier to
turn on three people than 5 billion, unless you have the marketing departments of Coca-Cola, Disney and McDonald's
onside. Who's to say Cathy Lane's album is less important than Radiohead's OK Computer because the latter was sanctioned
by more magazine writers and by more consumers? What do magazine writers know, anyhow?
And since when was the marketplace a good judge of art, especially when many artists disregard its apparent criteria
for successful work? Oval's beautiful 94 Diskont is here on The Wire's list, and in an interview with a friend
of mine, Oval's Markus Popp insisted that no one has ever bought one of his albums. When my friend told him that
he had, Popp laughed and offered his sympathies.
And if these are influential works, then they may be in a truer sense than AP posits because most of these albums
are experiments that couldn't be repeated and straight-up plundering has been difficult. The inspired listener
would therefore have to take a more original route to their own art. Even the artists themselves couldn't repeat
some of these experiments:
Miles Davis made many masterpieces but none like On the Corner; and some artists, like Lou Reed with Metal Machine
Music and Iggy Pop with Kill City, disowned these works. Almost every entry on the list implies a secret history
that the reader/listener can investigate and the artist can't suppress-the work lies somewhere out there beyond
both of them.
The marketplace may have never recognized most of these discs, but they each set someone's world on fire because
they offered the possibility of living on a world different from the one constructed ready-made for us in the culture.
And that's the world that should be set alight.
TROUBLE AND DESIRE
An album that set my world on fire in 1998 was PJ Harvey's Is This Desire?, but the reception it received was far
different than those which greeted her previous albums. Alternative Press put Rid of Me in its Top 10 and Is This
Desire? acts very much like its double. Like Rid of Me, it doesn't seem to be dominated by one persona, like the
vampy Lotte Lenya in a red dress pictured on the sleeve of and audible in most songs on To Bring You My Love. Is
This Desire? rejects overt theatricality just as Rid of Me rejected the singer-songwriter confessionals of the
first album, Dry, and both do so in favour of a freeplay of identity. Now, Harvey seems a cipher again, a medium
for the emotions and expressions of her characters. And like Rid of Me, Is This Desire? could be seen as having
a subsidiary work filled with working, unfinished versions of songs or ideas found in the later work. Shortly after
Rid of Me came Four Track Demos, which included alternate versions of Rid of Me songs except without the heavy-metal
muscle. (It's possible they were recorded after the versions on the Rid of Me albums, and it's not clear which
version is supposed to supersede the other, if at all.) Between To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? came Dance
Hall at Louse Point, a collaboration with longtime collaborator John Parish that seems very much like a first draft
for Is This Desire?, with some similar characterizations and song structures but little of the careful texturing
in the production of the later album. (The songs performed at Dance Hall at Harvey's concert in Toronto in October
drew me back to that album, and my impression was that they'd only recently been "finished," although
the versions on the 1996 album were more interesting than I remembered.)
This sense that competing versions of the same songs or the same albums may exist further clouds the issue of authorial
presence, as does the variety of characters on the latest album (e.g., Angelene, Catherine, Joy, Dawn). On Is This
Desire? and Dance Hall, as with Rid of Me and Four Track Demos, there are too many different, competing voices
to easily discern where "PJ Harvey" is supposed to be.
In an age in which celebrity's public persona must be as marketable and ready to be sold along with the cultural
consumable to which it is attached, it's strange to say that I really have no idea who PJ Harvey is, even though
I've followed her career in the '90s fairly closely. Though she did a tiny number of intelligent but not necessarily
illuminating interviews at the time of its release, Is This Desire? was not accompanied by a big, well-orchestrated
publicity push to completed the package for potential consumers. (This is increasingly necessary for albums that
need to open with big numbers-e.g., the media blitzes for Madonna's Ray of Light, Alanis Morissette's Former Supposed
Infatuation Junkie and Smashing Pumpkins' Adore, which were identical in intensity in Toronto, lasting as long
as four days a piece.) Also, there wasn't a strong, radio-ready first single-"A Perfect Day Elise" works
in the context of the album, but was so far from the standard modes for female voices on modern-rock radio that
its presence there was fleeting. Unlike other female acts, she did not join the Lilith Fair and capitalize on the
modish salability of her gender, though there was a well-received club tour in North America with a band featuring
album musicians and collaborators like Parish and Eric Drew Feldman. After nearing a breakthrough with To Bring
You My Love, the album's meagre sales in England and North America was undoubtedly a disappointment to her record
company Island. (They were rumoured to have rejected Is This Desire? a number of times in hopes of Harvey providing
a potential hit single.)
Perhaps as a response to all these conditions and the dimming of her commercial prospects-in fact, her apparent
indifference to them- critical reception was relatively cool in many circles. For instance, Spin reviewed it very
favourably and kept it in a "recent recommendations" feature for a few months afterward, but did not
list it on their year-end Top 20.
Though it feels likely that alt-culture historians will appraise it as a curio or a cryptic and anti-commercial
folly, Is This Desire? is PJ Harvey's most sophisticated and affecting album, and her first to provide a coherent
sound world. By "coherent sound world," I mean to describe a work that does not rely on a system of direct
musical reference or quotation (extreme examples being Oasis and Puff Daddy) to provide context for the listener,
but instead has an identifiable palette of tonal colour, rhythm and texture which to refer only to themselves in
consistent if mysterious relationships. It is an original arrangement (or rearrangement) of all the tools at a
musician's disposal, from production effects to choice of instruments to style of delivery, as well as the relation
of song lyrics or mood to musical or production details. As you'd guess, it doesn't happen that often.
As well as a plethora of unfamiliar voices and sounds, the songs on Is This Desire? feature a variety of gestures
from seemingly disparate musical genres. The album has the density of much trip-hop or electronica but few moments
of beat-friendliness. It is filled with the sort of tragic figures who populate traditional folk ballads but situates
them in a decidedly non-naturalistic soundscape. It is specifically concerned with the trials of female characters
yet has none of the reassuring pop-feminist arguments or self-empowerment that can be heard in pop by Lilith Fair-friendly
artists. (Further confounding the pop-feminist quotient on Is This Desire? is the fact that a large amount of the
action takes place at a remove, with Harvey favouring a third-person perspective and neglecting to suggest a particular
emotional response by the listener.) It has the intensity of much blues music but none of the primitivist posturing
that many purveyors insist on. In an interesting article in The New Yorker article- interesting because the author
claimed to have never known a black person who bought an album by Aretha Franklin-Hilton Als cited Harvey and several
other white artists (Rickie Lee Jones and Laura Nyro among them) as being more authentic soul and blues artists
than Aretha Franklin and Lauryn Hill.
What PJ Harvey does is undersell what she's doing. Considering the increasingly hysterical tone of every aspect
of Western culture, that might be the bravest possible decision for an artist of her esteem.
DIMINISHING RETURNED
And so Is This Desire? might be construed as a failure, but then most of the albums I put on my personal best-of
list were failures of one kind or another.
As far as I could tell, PJ Harvey's album and Einsturzende Neubauten's concert were evidence that there were new
sound worlds to be made, that there are new works that are alternately beautiful and horrible, sentimental and
corrosive, affirming and confounding. Is This Desire? is among a small number of unique sound worlds on albums
released in this decade: among others, I'd cite Scott Walker's Tilt, Oval's 94 Diskont and Systemich, Tom Waits'
Bone Machine, Techno Animal's Re-Entry, Genius/GZA's Liquid Swords, Stina Nordenstam's Dynamite, Portishead's Dummy,
Tricky's Maxinquaye and LFO's Frequencies (one of many albums I've rediscovered since reading Simon Reynolds' history
of rave culture, Energy Flash a.k.a. Generation Ecstacy). All of these albums mystify me. They are what sets my
world on fire, even if my choices seem slightly more obvious than those of The Wire's contributors. (That means
with a bit of legwork anyone could find them in the average city's CD shops rather than having to break into the
original creator's hovel to steal his or her copy.)
Other albums released in 1998 provided glimpses of sound worlds. But more often than not, there wasn't quite as
much going on in them as I first believed. Pole's LP01, one of many good European electronica albums finding favour
in North America after being reissued by stalwart trendy indie Matador, was praised as the most innovative piece
of sonic architecture since Oval's 94 Diskont. True, the surface noise and crackle was strangely gorgeous, and
I was happy (after shelling out nearly $40 on a European vinyl import) that it wasn't nearly as "difficult"
as I expected. Instead, LP01 contains some splendid, accessible new-school German techno, coloured by said crackle
and imaginative dub effects. But the album ultimately seemed short on ambition next to Oval's Dok, which came out
last January but I still don't fully appreciate (in that work, Markus Popp ran the Oval software with field recordings
of bells as the primary sounds instead of the squelches of digital hardware in action-the resulting sonority would
make a monk cry). Along with the American release of LP01 (or CD01) came the expected cries of "Breakthrough!"
but slathering fuzz on an album is nothing new. There was little intrinsically fresh about the album, as Pole's
Stefan Betke was less eager to destroy old structures (of which electronica has no shortage)and build new ones
than Oval or Pan Sonic, whose Endless collaboration with Alan Vega was fairly pedestrian but whose concert in Toronto
was bruising and magnificent. Likewise, Plastikman's Consumed had about 10 good minutes of work smothered in a
debilitating self-consciousness and a lot of minimalist hooey.
Another two Matador electronica releases, Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children, and Burger/Ink's
Las Vegas, offered more whimsy. Boards of Canada's music has some of the same angularities but none of the harshness
of Autechre's ae and was a marvelous work of near-ambient lushness and pillowy softness. My only fear was that
it veered a bit too often into the realm of "nice music."
This was a more serious problem (or unserious problem, as they case may be) on Air's Moon Safari, which has some
fabulous singles ("La Femme D'Argent," "Sexy Boy") but soon thereafter nonetheless devolves
into mush. At their best, the French duo make an intelligent reinterpretation and recontextualization of sounds
used in some very dodgy music (Electric Light Orchestra and Hot Butter both spring to mind), but when not on form,
they settle for doing a kitschy, tongue-deep-in-cheek simulation of that music and hope it still sounds dreamy.
Moon Safari was the best album of 1998, according to Spin.
I like the idea of "uneasy listening" in Stock, Hausen and Walkman's Organ Transplants albums, sort of
Henry Mancini on mandrake-pink elephants on a funeral march. Jarvis Cocker admitted that Organ Transplants was
an influence on Pulp's extraordinary "This Is Hardcore" single, and I'd guess SHW also made an impact
on U.S. lounge revivalists Combustible Edison, who made the surprising move of having Scanner mess around with
their latest album with better-than-usual results. In uneasy listening, the cliches of light or lounge music are
mangled and distorted until the familiar isn't just unfamiliar but unsettling. Notes seem to head off in a predictable
direction but don't get there. Soothing tones are distorted and made ugly, though the essential structure of the
piece may be unchanged. Music made to relax by is remade as something to worry to.
And so Air wants to make beautiful music from sounds may be garish and lurid, and I'm happy that they succeed as
well as they do. Matador's third foreign electronica offering, Burger/Ink's Las Vegas, foregoes that E-Z route-instead
the German duo want to recapture something in mid-'70s art-rock, albeit so they can put it in the sort of structures
Pole are more than familiar with. I'm still unclear as to why there are so many Roxy Music puns in the song titles,
but it does point to a particular interpretation of Las Vegas: that Burger/Ink hope to make something lush but
also lean and imaginative, like Roxy Music's Country Life or Siren. And so there are very long songs that may initially
seem mindlessly repetitious (the sort of Coles Notes version of Steve Reich occasionally offered by Orbital) but
are also techno extrapolations of cool European rock (which can evidently mean both "Autobahn" and "Mother
of Pearl"). R.E.M. came at the same territory from a much different and more privileged vantage point on Up,
with its overt references to trip-hop and to early Roxy Music. It's unfortunate that Up has such poor sequencing
(increasingly draggy tempos make the last third a tough hike) because it's one of their key '90s albums, as well
as their worst-selling. I don't know how these Roxy Music-isms connect with the instrumental single by Peter Godwin
(singer for wildly pretentious Roxy copyists Metro, whose "Criminal World" was covered by Bowie on Let's
Dance) that I just discovered on the new Tommy Boy collection of early '80s electro hits, but I do know that I'd
rather hear Burger/Ink, R.E.M. and Godwin than the Roxy repertoire covered by the Britpop celebrities on the Velvet
Goldmine soundtrack. Thom Yorke will never be Bryan Ferry.
SWEET 'N' LIGHT
There were too many smart artists trying to make nice music in 1998. There were the stabs at R&B sophistication
that fouled up 4 Hero's Two Pages, the kitsch synths of Air's Moon Safari, the tame Latin jazz slathered on Amon
Tobin's Permutation, the quasi-fusion finickiness on Tortoise's TNT...
"Nice" implies a failure of nerve, in the sense that the artist chooses to rely on familiar musical quotations
or contexts in order to cover over the gaps in the thing that they haven't quite thought all the way through yet.
The other day, my dad was complaining about a set of family pictures we'd had done with us posed on some wicker
seat before a tree and a brook. He dissed them as "artsy." But they weren't artsy, because artsy could've
looked good. The problem to me was that the photographer used cliched ideas of what makes a "nice picture."
So I heard a lot of discs this year that had some intriguing moments but whose creators wanted to make something
nice, even if, like most people, they despise the word and all that it implies.
PJ Harvey's Is This Desire? was quiet but not nice-too brittle, too despairing. With some of the same terms, I'd
describe most of my favourite albums of this and most years. In 1998 there were: Stina Nordenstam's People Are
Strange, a typically strange covers album by a '90s artist who rates as an equal to PJ Harvey and Bjork in her
ability to be both inventive and self-re-inventive; Leila's Like Weather, a set of oddball techno-pop by a former
Bjork keyboardist (based on Simon Reynolds' appraisal of it in Spin and the strength of his '96 disc Autojumps
and Remixes, I'd probably pair this with Shantel's Higher Than the Sun, but I'm still waiting to hear it); the
Pernice Brothers' Overcome by Happiness, featuring some hugely sad American pop with strings by Joe Pernice, the
former singer of a promising alt-country band and a great character songwriter in the Randy Newman mold; Mark Hollis'
Mark Hollis, which is certainly more modest than the later Talk Talk albums, but definitely qualifies as the quietest
of this lot; and Massive Attack's Mezzanine, a dark, mean and heady thing. There wasn't a Bathers album this year
and the Tindersticks only put out a compilation and the Go-Betweens may have reformed to tour but not to record
and another Blue Nile disc must be another few years off and technically speaking, the Apartments' amazing Apart
came out late in '97... well, none of my romantic neo-pop favourites were around to show up Belle and Sebastian,
who I came to despise as much for their records as for their supporters. The Scottish band descended from their
1997 masterstroke "Lazy Line Painter Jane" into the depths of the most despicable smugness on The Boy
With the Arab Strap's "Seymour Stein" and "Chickfactor" (which proves they believe their press),
as well as "Modern Rock Song," a trite recent single about how dull modern-rock radio is in the States-well,
duh. The group's Stuart Murdoch can be a good character writer and a reasonably fine Nick Drake impersonator, but
when faced with a grownup emotion, he and his group crumble.
I saw the first wave of rave reviews for The Boy With the Arab Strap when I was in England, but I was happy to
find two more tragic and/or epic-minded albums there. Perry Blake's self-titled debut is remarkably ambitious,
as he seeks to amplify the grandeur of Portishead's trip-hop by using a real orchestra (as Portishead themselves
did on the unfairly ignored PNYC live album) and match it with a blustery-yet-existential delivery in the manner
of vintage Scott Walker. Not perfect, but great. Same applies to Black Box Recorder's England Made Me, which, considering
the aural abrasiveness of Luke Haines' work on the last Auteurs album and the Baader-Meinhof side project, I hadn't
expected to sound so sweet. Naturally, it's a false face that it shows to the world, because the songs are all
about sickness and madness and contempt and other interior/ulterior motives. Haines maintains the right tone and
finds a way to present the black-hearted bastards and walking wounded in his songs in a sympathetic fashion. Or
else he found a singer, Sarah Nixey, who's more appropriate to his material than he is.
So the moral of that story is that even when it may sound nice, it may not be. It's a simple trick done so well
on the Pernice Brothers album- perform exquisitely sad songs (for Pernice, suicide is a preferred topic) very brightly.
As for rock music, I didn't want anything nice. Considering what was on offer this year, I hardly wanted anything
at all-Reznor-derived hard rock, ska-punk, Radiohead copyists, the last possible calculations in math rock. I retreated
into a handful of excellent Cheap Trick reissues (one of rock's great lost causes, the Beatles as '70s pre-punk
hard rock) and the Nuggets box set (one magnificent junkyard tire fire over four discs), only venturing out when
some European or Japanese nutbar freaked out.
On the gentler side of things, there were: Alankomaat, another good, thoroughly ignored album by the Nits from
the Netherlands; Thirst, a fun piece by the Notwist from Germany that was released on Duophonic and therefore trendy
in the U.K. (it seemed to share a certain fixation on Steely Dan with the Boo Radleys' Giant Steps); and several
highly worthy French discs recommended by a Francophile friend (e.g., Francoize Breut, Mendelson).
Like Matador picking up a few electronica albums that put to shame the largely tired sounds of their pop and rock
acts, two other U.S. indies twigged on to the fact that Europeans, free of the temptation of the spot on the Vans
Warped Tour, aren't afraid of making art punk. Touch and Go released the Steve Albini-produced, Chicago-recorded
Starters, Alternators by Dutch anarcho-punk group the Ex, an unbelievably intense and highly evolved go at the
endlessly fragmenting Beefheartian rock that the Gang of Four could've been playing if they'd survived for two
decades and been reviled for it at every step. And Epitaph rereleased Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come, which
matched Fugazi both for their level of political discourse (no other album addressed the art-vs.-culture issue
I've been on about so explicitly or, come to think of it, at all) and for bloody-minded complexity of material,
complementing a dub sensibility with equally welcome takes on jazz and techno.
The least nice music I heard in 1998 were two releases by Montreal's Alien 8 label. Merzbow's Aqua Necromancer
was the Japanese extreme noise composer's most conventionally percussive album, with bits sampled from the likes
of the Soft Machine. It veered toward psychedelic, though the true Jap-noise freakout was achieved on Masonna's
Frequency LSD. Up until this point, my appreciation of extreme noise was purely theoretical-I've never listened
to more than five minutes of any Merzbow disc. Last year, I reviewed the Prodigy's The Fat of the Land together
with a Merzbow disc, so I think I knew what I was after all along: Masonna. Reputedly influenced by the most lead-footed
of American psychedelic rock and flaunting a very long hairstyle, he has all of the energy of heavy metal with
little of rock's familiar tropes, even the tropes that exist in its most extreme forms (me, I favour the Stooges'
Fun House as the paragon, but you might pick something Blue Cheer or Black Sabbath or Black Flag or Husker Du or
Napalm Death or Discharge...). Masonna's skill is in editing his skrees and squelches with a cut-up technique that's
as fast and furious as any of the year's most cited turntablists (e.g., Mix Master Mike, Q-Bert). He sounds totally
fucking on-brutal yet remarkably deft and swift.
Who could compete?
ALTERNATIVE NATIONAL ENQUIRER
Alas, Frequency LSD did not make it onto any of the major magazine's best-of lists for 1998 -- here's hoping it'll
be there on the list of the loudest albums of the '90s or most terrifying art works of the century. 'Round these
parts, the indie-rock kids got very excited when Neutral Milk Hotel came to town, seeing as Elephant 6 remains
the label of the moment. They were a pretentious mess, with a poor singer, a brass section so incompetent as to
kill both rhythm and the blues and a band that was both out of tune and unable to keep time. The forthcoming album
by their nominally more Beatlesque labelmate Olivia Tremor Control is even more irritating, hampered again by the
de rigueur Elephant 6 production values, which you too can have if you make your record for $39. My position is
hypocritical, naturally, because all the things that I complain about the artists in the Elephant 6 posse I may
deem to be virtues in the work of other groups. I'm not entirely sure why when the Fire Engines or Shaggs or assorted
obscure Icelandic punk groups played out of tune and out of time, there was something compelling or endearing about
it. Maybe what sounds like genuine naivetÈ in some music seems like laziness and incompetence in other music.
Maybe there's something heroic in hearing the distance between a band's ambition and their abilities and the struggle
to bridge the gap. This could be a patronizing attitude on my part. In Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control,
I hear underachievement as an aesthetic pose-not a struggle to communicate despite limited means and abilities,
but the fetishization of those handicaps. I guess I believe that they're not really trying, but perhaps it's not
the bands I hate but their fans, so sure that their tastes are the correct tastes. This is the alternative audience
that most firmly believes itself to be the one true alternative audience, the most cerebral of all subcultures,
the most suspicious of pleasure and physical response. This really is unfair to the fans of a little-heralded legion
of bands (some of which are surprisingly young) who still believe in the tenets of progressive rock as laid down
by Keith Emerson, or even the few New Romantics that stay true to the cause (they must be out there somewhere).
Nevertheless, Neutral Milk Hotel, with their tubas, interpretations of American "folk" and "Dixieland,"
were onto something. "Alt-country" lost its allure: last year's poster boy Robbie Fulks made a dud major-label
debut; discs by Son Volt and Golden Smog quickly came and went; and Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue handily
proved that Woody Guthrie knew a helluva lot more about women than they do, or at least wrote like he did. Moving
beyond Hank Williams (the subject of a 10-CD box set at year's end), American alt-rock found... the '50s? One-time
avant-rock ensemble Mercury Rev headed into "nice music" but at least found something interesting there,
something closer to "uneasy listening." Like R.E.M.'s Up, Deserter's Songs was a good 20 minutes too
long and had some serious problems with pacing but was a conceptual marvel. Here was the light and the dark in
a certain moment in American music, with the "beautiful music" of 101 Strings or Jackie Gleason albums
or even the champagne fancier Lawrence Welk contrasted with the disturbing Theremins and electronic abstract expressionism
of the scores from Forbidden Planet and The Day The Earth Stood Still. It dovetailed into an excursion into folk
Americana with guests Garth Hudson and Levon Helm. (Perhaps uncoincidentally, the forthcoming album by the Flaming
Lips, which had a long association with Mercury Rev, sounds like a lost Gene Clark solo album from the early '70s.)
Like another conceptual clusterfuck of an album, Irish-via-Chicago dream-pop project Butterfly Child's Soft Explosives,
I soured on the disc too early because of the frailty of the singer's voice. And I suspect that Deserter's Songs
is more of a museum piece for the future than compelling art for the present.
Elsewhere in the alternative nation, there were small pockets of grace. Drag City released an excellent if conventional
folk-rock album by Edith Frost and an uneven if utterly unconventional debut by Plush. Gastr Del Sol's Camoufleur
was nearly extraordinary and would've been a masterpiece had Markus Popp completely, not partially, integrated
his work on Camoufleur with the Oval album Dok. (Likewise, the best of Craig Armstrong's The Space Between Us,
Madonna's Ray of Light and Massive Attack's Mezzanine together on disc would've been untouchable-a trip-hop disco
battle royale between Elizabeth Fraser and Madonna as filmed by Wong Kar Wai.) Beck made a mediocre Robyn Hitchcock
album which, to be fair, Robyn Hitchcock hasn't been able to do for some years. The Afghan Whigs made a very good
remake of Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run which, to my surprise, the marketplace did not want, just as it didn't
want newly issued outtakes from Born to Run priced at $70. Elliott Smith made a Paul Simon album that, in its own
quiet way, was more pretentious than Simon's panned The Capeman. The Beastie Boys made a shitty electro album with
Hello Nasty while Kurtis Mantronik (whose beats made under the Mantronix handle in the '80s have been stolen by
everybody) made a magnificent one with I Sing the Body Electro. Likewise, Hello Nasty and The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill got all the cred and attention that was deserved by posthumanist old-school flavoured discs by OutKast and
os Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Superstar producers RZA and Timbaland didn't offer much that was new on
their long-awaited debuts under their own monikers, but they can't be dismissed -- in the last two years, their
work had more impact on the modern soundscape than any rock artist or producer in 15 years.
A LAST NOTE ON ART AND CULTURE
I shouldn't complain about retrograde affinities. I spent as much time listening to Nuggets or Cheap Trick's At
Budokan: The Complete Concert or the soundtrack to The Last Days of Disco Nick Drake's Bryter Layter or Gavin Bryars'
The Sinking of the Titanic or TVT's excellent Rhythm Revue collection as I did any new albums. My favourite hip-hop
tracks were on the four-disc Tommy Boy Greatest Beats collection, the average age of the songs being 10 years.
(Their four-disc electro set, Perfect Beats, got more press but has more filler.) And my favourite dance single
of the year, Monifah's "Touch It," shamelessly cops its groove from Laid Back's contemptible but irresistible
"White Horse." (Monifah somehow makes it sound post-feminist.)
What I realize is that what happens in any given 12-month period is irrelevant as soon as one attempts to summarize
the next 12-month period. I'm attracted to artists and albums, not eras, although considering the enormous success
of the '80s-themed Wedding Singer soundtracks, the latter is not an unpopular tendency.
But this music, new and old, is what intrigued me as I spent my last year as a music editor at my beloved Toronto
weekly. Now I'm a music writer again, which means that I hope to expend less mental energy on guessing at other
people's tastes and more on why my tastes are what they are. Less time for culture and more for art. Less modern-rock
institutions and more collapsing new buildings. Hopefully.
A FEW APPENDICES THAT LOOK LIKE ENDNOTES
1. 1998's Most Noble Failure: R. Kelly's R.
Kelly couldn't compete in the frenzied release schedule of October and November this year because he foolishly
released a double CD when everyone else (but Garth) was smart enough to just try to tempt buyers with a single
disc. Even though the duet with Celine Dion, "I'm Your Angel," sat at No. 1 for weeks, it still bombed,
with consumers likely heading for Celine's Christmas album instead.
Of course, at two-hours-plus, R. is way, way too long, but then so is Madonna's Ray of Light, Alanis Morissette's
Former Supposed Infatuation Junkie and Jewel's Spirit, and R. says more about men and women and sounds less like
psychotherapy. Dispense with the money-lovin' thug cameos by Noreaga, Nas and Jay-Z (who Timbaland inexplicably
gave his best beats to) and focus on the slow jams and you'll find some sensuous and emotionally acute soul music
riven with contradictions. If "only the loot can make me happy," why does he spend most of his time playing
the repentant philanderer or the despairing rejected suitor? Or maybe, like in "Only the Loot," he's
not actually singing his slow jams to women but to hard currency, just as he equated a fine woman with a fine jeep
"You Remind Me of Something." His honesty and anger are bracing, and it's difficult (and probably pointless)
to discern what R. Kelly believes in-money or love, nihilistic thug bravado or give-Stella -her-groove-back romantic
possibility. He believes in all of it and none of it, which is an appropriately complicated way to regard modern
love and one that mainstream pop and R&B is unable to accommodate.
Besides, anyone who can resist the widescreen ballad "If I Could Turn Back the Hands of Time"-which betters
the similarly styled "I Believe I Can Fly" and "I'm Your Angel" perhaps because it co-opts
the tune and the sentiment of "Unchained Melody"-has a heart of ice.
2. Worst Vandalized Canvas: Willie Nelson's Teatro.
Daniel Lanois had redeemed himself on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, but perhaps since he wasn't allowed the room
for trickery on that project- probably too many musicians around, as many as 14 per song. Anyhow, he made a right
fucking mess of Willie Nelson's album. Despite reverb slathered on every sound without any thought of whether or
not it has any business being there, Emmylou Harris warbling in a painful attempt at harmony vocals (perhaps she
should have heard the songs before Lanois started the tape) and the latest cover of Lanois' "The Maker"
(a song surely more notable for Eno's original production effects than Lanois' lite spirituality), Willie survives
with his dignity intact. He is one of the finest American singers and songwriters of the century, but does he have
to be packaged like some kind of roots-rock Tangerine Dream for the hipsters to notice? His 1996 album Spirit has
all the economy, elegance and power that is absent on Teatro.
3. Why I hate "electronic jazz."
The term is obviously ripe with a variety of meaning. I do not hate electronic jazz in the sense of what is celebrated
in the first chapter of Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun-the electric Miles and the circuitboard jazzrockfunk
of the early Headhunters, or any of the future jazz wrought by Bitches Brew and Electric Ladyland. No, this is
the term that's evolved for the patchwork of organ-heavy jazz motifs and subpar house music of the F Communications
label in France. One writer claimed that Laurent Garnier has picked up the baton from Miles Davis circa '69, which
I guess means that do not look to Garnier for the chunky, deep funk Miles stuff a la On the Corner and Big Fun
or the nightmarishly dense Dark Magus. As far as I can hear, Garnier is finding room in his house for the least
attractive aspects of fusion, which scares me only slightly more than the upsurge of "mondo music," which
is a refashioning of disco-friendly Afro-jazz, e.g., Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa." Unlike that vanguard
music of the early '70s, it fails to be very "electronic" about its "jazz." Eshun emphasizes
how electricity dissolves the musical and sonic structures, whereas someone like Garnier sounds more interested
in "jazzing up" rudimentary tracks.
In a possibly unrelated event, Herbie Hancock reformed his Headhunters and put out a spineless reunion album. It
was the Headhunters who were playing when lightning struck the floor of the stadium at the Tibetan Freedom Concert
this year. I'm gonna have to go with God on this one.
4. Short notes on some perplexing albums
Ice's Bad Blood: An end-of-'98 release not expected to compete with Garth Brooks' Double Live or Celine Dion's
These Are Special Times. Here then is the long-awaited (at least by me) second album by one of Kevin Martin and
Justin Broadrick's several collaborations. Techno Animal is ghostly, abstract ambient techno and Ice is its paranoid,
drooling cousin, prone to acts of random, senseless violence. The group-which also includes Dave Cochrane on bass
and drummer Lou Ciccotelli as well as an array of guests like DJ Vadim, Blixa Bargeld (contributing "vocalisms")
and rappers El-P, Priest and Sensational-veers away from the supersession skronk of God (a defunct Martin project
not to be confused with Broadrick's grindcore band Godflesh) toward the doomy hip-hop found deep on the rosters
of labels like WordSound and Rawkus. Illbient to the extreme, this music is far too dense for me to explain, and
I was initially put off. It doesn't take as much work to like as Tricky's Angels with Dirty Faces, but it mines
the same territory as well as the same mythology. There will be the impulse to write Bad Blood off as inauthentic
because it's arty English types having a go at making the most destructive, cancerous hip-hop possible and not,
say, Jeru the Damaja. But I suspect that this is the best thing out of the Martin/Broadrick post-metal/dark-ambient
quarter in a long time. It sounds so unbelievably fucking evil that it must be some kind of triumph. The Boredoms'
Super ar: In a review for eye Weekly, I compared this to Amon Duul II (makers of the album Phallus Dei, a.k.a.
God's Cock) and the Trashmen (makers of "The Bird Is the Word"), but I also wanted to mention Ash Ra
Tempel and the Safaris. At last: the union of Krautrock, surf-rock and Japanese freakdom. A breakthrough for the
Osaka avant-rock squad, and I've been assured that none of the previous releases are quite so focused as this.
There's a bit of their notorious senseless violence and random noise generation but mostly these are long psychedelic
jams with Eye Yamatsuka scatting along overtop. Note for 1999: once I have the money, I'm diving into the Keiji
Haino/Fushitsusha catalog because what Super ar is to Amon Duul II, Fushitsusha's Double Live is to Cream. Or so
I have read. (Actually, that may have been in my favourite piece of rock reporting this year. It was by a senior
editor at Billboard in his "Declaration of Independents" column. He complained of having to spend nearly
40 bucks on a Fushitsusha album, and they are indeed very pricey. He wanted to know why the trendy American labels
were issuing neo-pop like Cornelius and the Fantastic Plastic Machine and garage-rock like Guitar Wolf and the
Zoobombs but not the extreme guitar rock of Haino. This is the kind of outrage I can get behind.)
Maxwell's Embrya: It was a giveaway when this nouveau soulman covered "This Woman's Work" on an Unplugged
session, but this is surely one of the most overtly sensual mainstream albums since Kate's The Sensual World. In
an article about the modern fate of soul music, Hilton Als dissed Maxwell as an Al Green pretender, and based on
his first album, Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, I dissed him as a Marvin Gaye pretender. Well, how can you diss him
for him being something as unlikely as a wannabe Kate Bush? Mostly, Embrya succeeds, at least for the first half,
because of the languid grooves and not because of the ludicrous but deliciously sung quasi-philosophical ponderings
(note song titles such as "I'm You: You Are Me and We Are You" and "Eachhoureachsecondeachminuteeachday
of My Life"). Embrya reaches an early climax with "Matrimony: Maybe You," which could be used in
the future as a sexual aid. (Like many of Green's classics, it is a "hey, it really was you I was looking
for, so come over here and do me" sort of love song.) After that, it's mostly pretentious murk, but Maxwell
earned his vacation.
5. Things I didn't mention but would have if someone asked me to: why Brandy is better than Monica; late trip-hop
thrills by Purple Penguin, Moloko, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation and Leila; the genius of Robbie
Williams as interpreted by somebody who doesn't have to see him on TV everyday; more about Olu Dara and Radio Tarifa
and that one fantastic song on Baaba Maal's Nomad Soul with Eno, Jon Hassell and Howie B.; a brief guide to the
!K7 label's DJ Kicks series thus far (full props to the sublime sets by Andrea Parker and Smith and Mighty); sa
debate of the various merits of the year's two best videos, Tricky's "Money Greedy/Broken Homes" and
Air's "Kelly Watch the Stars"; how the '98 books by Eshun, Reynolds and Ulf Poschardt (DJ Culture) signify
the first wave of "techno nostalgia"; and a critique of the cover of "T.V. Eye" with the vocal
by Mark Arm from Mudhoney that was pulled from the album before release and replaced by the much lousier version
by Ewan McGregor. Cheers.
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From the Pulp Vaults:
(Previously unavailable online)
Bird People In China
The perfect time to take a nap is where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day, within the fleeting magic hour surrounding sunset...
The Institutionalization of Violence
It's the perfect setting. Somehow, as a city, L.A. is so now...
Broken Boulevards Still Dream of Havana
"We were going to outstrip Monte Carlo... the idea was to turn Havana into the world's biggest gambling paradise...
Listen Without Prejudice With Open Ears Volume 1
It's a sunny afternoon, and I'm on way from the Düsseldorf Hauptbahnof to St. Martins Studio...
How Deep Is The Ocean?
The Sinking of the Titanic, and the Burden of Recording
An interview with Christopher Doyle
Christopher Doyle, an Australian expatriate and one-time sailor, has done the cinematography for all but the first of Wong Kar-Wai’s movies...
What used to be paper, is now just skin
An open book with blank white paper makes the same shadow in the middle as two thighs pressed together.
Playing Once Upon A Time With Mercury Rev
Deserters songs, that’s what someone called the results of the basement sessions between the Band and Bob Dylan.
Sound without vision: Do soundtrack albums need movies?
In the last few years, one sentiment I've noticed often come from the mouths of musicians...
Chances Are: Bill Laswell’s Trip into the Vaults of Bob Marley and Miles Davis
It's impossible to write an introduction for Bill Laswell. He's been involved in over three hundred records since the early '70s, so I'm not going to even try.
Designers in the Attic
From the beginning I was convinced that an article about Attik wouldn't be entirely out of place in a magazine like SAB.
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The Often Beautiful Music of Richard Ashcroft
Former lead singer of the Verve, Richard Ashcroft, thinks out loud about his debut solo album, Alone With Everybody.
A Million Tiny Decisions Made By Alex Garland That Affect You and Me
"It surprises how much you can keep in your head while you're writing a book..."
Tezka Macoto's Hakuchi: Parallel Universes of the Mind
"I am powerless in the face of this pitiful reality," goes the voiceover of the main character Izawa, halfway through Hakuchi: the Innocent.
Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps
The swaying of Maggie Cheung's hips becomes something like a musical refrain in Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.
After Life Directed By Kore-Eda Hirokazu -- To Die And Then Have Time
an edited version of a conversation from October 1998 with Japanese film director, Kore-eda Hirokazu, in which he talks about his 1998 film, After Life
Little Steven on Bruce Springsteen, Sun City, The Sopranos, and his friends in Bali
Jason Anderson's interview with Little Steven, a.k.a Steven Van Zandt
Palahniuk Has Entered The Produce Section … he's eating grapes
Jason Anderson talks to Chuck Palahniuk - the author of the Fight Club. His new novel, Choke, is being released in the Spring of 2001.
Scenes : One Particular Scene From The Limey directed by Stephen Soderbergh +++ some jumbled narrative techniques
Miike Takashi -- The City of Lost Souls
a Yakuza eats a blue Popsicle in the harbour, while bodies are packed into oil barrels.
The Angel : In The Realms of the Groove
It's more than likely that you haven't heard of her, but you have heard her. I could almost guarantee it.
Techno Animal Foam At The Mouth
An excerpt from an interview with Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick - musical collaborators in the groups Techno Animal, Sidewinder, Ice, and various other side projects - all of which makes it a full-time job to keep track of them.
Older articles can be found in The Archives
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