Loud Family - Music: What Happened?

1988
by Scott Miller

"Bone Machine" - Pixies
1988 felt like the year of the first successful efforts to pull the eighties out of the toilet. Joe Becker introduced me to the Pixies (am I actually supposed to say "to Pixies?"); the most important thing the Pixies did was to oppose the eighties' tyrannical moratorium on frequent or challenging chord changes. The big eighties iceberg that had formed in 1987 was The Joshua Tree, and the feature of it that stood out to me was that it stayed obstinately on one chord for as long as possible, and when it did go to another chord, it was a boring change. Almost all of creation went along with this direction, but the Pixies were having none of that: in the likes of "Levitate Me" or "Bone Machine," the more audacious and frequent the chord changes, the better. If anyone wonders what Kurt Cobain meant about being primarily influenced by the Pixies, look first to the openness to bold chord changes. But that was just the beginning of the Pixies' charms. They were born entertainers: not to suggest there's anything funny about so on and so forth, but the part with, "He bought me a soda, he bought me a soda, then he tried to molest me in the parking lot, YEP! YEP! YEP!" has some sort of crazed cinematic genius to it. And in the whole artwork theme, Lynch-like tableaux of picture frames, odd people, hair, and detritus marshaled into a credible challenge to all that was Madonna.

"Party For Your Right To Fight" - Public Enemy
This is probably the best, hardest sounding sample-based hip-hop groove I've heard. I think there's a very short delay on some of the tracks that when misused is at risk of making a mix sound swimmy, but here works as chiaroscuro for the performance tracks. D and Flav sound fantastic together, reading the riot act in lock step. It seems almost unsporting to admit the words sound suspiciously like conspiracy theorist nonsense to me, grafted devil that I may be accounted as being; yet a lot of these facts could be wrong and still point effectively to the undeniable truth of the global historical oppression of black people.

"Kidney Bingos" - Wire
Their prettiest melody still has me asking: are kidney bingos some sort of lottery for getting an organ transplant or something? I liked A Bell Is a Cup Until It Is Struck quite a bit; The Ideal Copy seemed too much like a deliberately updated sound, where updating anything from 1979 to 1987 should be carefully avoided. But A Bell Is a Cup felt more personalized. Statue of a horse head. File cabinet. That's my Wire.

"Cult of Personality" - Living Colour
Let's not forget heavy metal as another sad fact of eighties life. But there were bright spots: the production here is bad, and I find Vernon Reid's soloing somewhat horrendous, but the rest of the music is pretty much one great passage after another—no less so the math-rocky indulgences. The equation of bad guys and good guys under the cult of personality is a somewhat bitter lyrical pill. I think I like it. I want to deduce a challenge to acceptance of the verdict of the crowd; the crowd will choose Gandhi or it will choose Mussolini according to its varying needs.

"Mandinka" - Sinead O'Connor
Nice big guitar sound—another eighties scarcity. By the verse B part and those great head-voice hoots, you realize from both the music and words that Sinead is out to take things new places. She knows Mandinka.

"Suckling the Mender" - Cocteau Twins
"Union of love/Union of perfect love/She ain't sent here for him": as Elvis once said, lady, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. But the paced addition of the modifier and the slang feel like they tell their own little story to me: keep the way clear for the ethereal in the presence of disillusionment. The Cocteaus finely crafted fairyland sonics are certainly their own story, too.

"Life Is Grand" - Camper Van Beethoven
This is one dynamite sounding recording—I believe Dennis Herring's first big production. It manages one of the fattest, most direct sounds of the generally anemic era, perfectly setting off David Lowery's uncomplicated refusal to be not cheerful in the expected alternative rock fashion. The guitar riff that starts off with the moving harmony and resolves on the single notes is a terrific little line.

"Fast Car" - Tracy Chapman
Tracy's delicately understated vocal and her outstanding gift for social realism made this a favorite of many, even the ordinarily tin-eared Grammy Awards. The song begins inauspiciously with "nothing to prove" and "nothing to lose" sentiments even suggesting hack work. Then she brings out, "He says his body's too old for working/I say his body's too young to look like his"; woah—definitely a keen eye, and, one infers, a lacerating wit being kept under control. Later, "See more of your friends than you do of your kids" projects a detailed picture and makes a powerful point with very few words.

"Nancy Experiences the Pulse" - Jonathan Segel
With his Magnetic Records, Jonathan Segel, the violin player from Camper Van Beethoven, has had a fascinating and promethean little cottage industry going, producing many bedroom folk, rock, progressive, and generally boundary-pushing releases. A familiar of Fred Frith and Eugene Chadbourne, Jonathan first stepped out with the panoramic Storytelling double album. A typically casual yet precise folk/progressive hybrid verse anticipates Gastr Del Sol of ten years later, then the chorus delivers a monumental hook on the unlikely refrain, "How it seems to really happen/Numbers match on the warp and woof."

"Freight Train" - Sister Double Happiness
Falling somewhere between hardcore and B.B.King style blues, this cut from their SST debut is interestingly chilling. I assume "I got the plague of the century" refers to AIDS; it's presented in an unexpectedly stylized, almost rockin'-pneumonia manner, with enough details to stay alarming: "I woke up in the middle of the night/My skin's like a block of ice." Despite—or maybe with help from—the dark subject matter, this succeeds as an uncommonly driving rocker; Lynn Perko's drumming is especially momentous.

"Charlotte Anne" - Julian Cope
This is still definitely the pre-Peggy-Suicide Julian Cope. It sounds like eighties club music, albeit with a non-textbook military march inflection; it doesn't have the spark of druid madness that would fire the early nineties. But it's still very good as its own thing; the "Charlotte Anne/I do understand" followed by the little synth flute tag is a fairly timeless pop hook with a twist that worked for the times, and still does today.

"Bad Machinery" - Let's Active
Mitch Easter and I worked together for many, many hours; almost everything I know about record production I learned from observing him while making my band's records. The Let's Active releases felt like unusual outbursts from sides of him I wasn't used to; it's not much of a secret that he's a crack guitar player, but there's that, and another aspect peculiar to the albums was a flair for what I'd call prophetic weight. His recurring theme was people—in love relationships especially—realizing they'd wandered into a world of undreamt-of emotional turmoil, and how that alone makes the human horizon look dark. On the larger-implication end of that is "Bad Machinery," a blazing, almost Bad-Company-like meditation on the urge to personal advantage gone global. I love the line, "You've got no rendezvous with no destiny."

"Teenage Riot" - Sonic Youth
Until this year, I had the vague impression not many people besides myself were fans of this song. I didn't realize what a big critical deal Daydream Nation is now considered—they and my band were both on Enigma at the time, and you get a skewed impression from the inside. Although, if Gerhard Richter does your cover and I don't realize you are the man, I am just not thinking. As established classics go, "Teenage Riot" does not have that much there there. The lyrics don't really zing me. The tune skirts being plodding, but by a strange gravity reels you in over time. The hooks are really in the rhythm guitar—that in itself is a rarity: just the little lilting notes here and there. And before long, you start hearing that even more meandering intro, and Kim going "spirit desire," and just go: yeah!

"I Don't Want To Fall In Love" - Sam Phillips
I remember thinking The Indescribable Wow was a rapturous return to effective melody writing after a long drought. I think I sort of started actually believing my melodic aesthetic had become a thing of the past and I just had to move on. Well, I sort of never completely stopped actually believing that, but that record made me feel a lot better for a while. Ms. Phillips seems like a formidable, reticent soul, who comes up dependably with art and human observation: "Sentimental circumstance disguised as fate with wild romance/Fools me into thinking you're the water for my thirst." One could suspect an as-bad sentimentality about "fate," but the skill of getting that thought to even fit the scansion has my hat off.

"Summertime Rolls" - Jane's Addiction
Railing against boring chord changes aside, Jane's Addiction could conjure more musical value out of two-chord songs than any other group I can think of; "Jane Says" is also two chords, and it feels like more. Perry Farrell's instincts with blue notes are the key. I thought Nothing's Shocking was the best record of the year, and from my perspective, I'd credit it with pioneering an appreciable chunk of the grunge aesthetic: un-modern hard rock with a dash of irony, shuffle beat, soft-loud things happening here and there. "Summertime Rolls" has a get-loud moment I love—right after, "I mean it's serious/As serious can be."

"Ana Ng" - They Might Be Giants
What a song. The first album made a splash, but it didn't bespeak the level of quality of songs like "Ana Ng" or "They'll Need a Crane" on the second record (Lincoln). As a systematic rejection of eighties values, this is relatively thorough. No big drums. Humor. Accordion. In many ways it sounds nineties. Chord changes—all over the map. The chords and quarter note emphasis on "Exit wound in a foreign nation" exemplify the adeptness of the composition. Now they're making a presumably comfortable living as part of Playhouse Disney. They Might Be Giants/Here Come the ABCs is great!

"Dream World" - Midnight Oil
Here's another case of eighties elements brought out of their initial charter and reassembled to serve the good. Diesel and Dust was a fine whole album, and a big step forward for Midnight Oil (I thought "Power and the Passion" was just irritating). The guitar arpeggios and portamentos are just right. Something about the way Peter Garrett says, "Your dream world is just about to end" makes me think my dream world is just about to end. I guess this is an environmentalist take on undesirable land development but the emotion translates to any case of taking a wonderful situation for granted.