33 rebellions per minute
"You break fingers, I'll break thumbs"
© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
1990
Beautiful South, CHOKE
On January 1, 1999--- around eighty hours before I write this--- my best friend Kristian's life was probably saved by Ralph Nader, the man I supported for president in 1996 (and whose 0.8% of the vote fit into the best votes-per-dollar-spent ratio in decades). This was not, of course, quid pro quo, but it was benevolence aforethought; Ralph hasn't heard of me or Kristian, and his efforts that here saved Kris were completed during the Nixon Administration while Kris was being born. Nader and his young idealist allies, at that point, were crusading for automobile safety. This is not, as it happens, a democratically popular cause, since according to an old Harper's Index 98% of American drivers consider themselves to be better-than-average, driving-wise; to make autos safer when it comes to seatbelts and airbags is to insult the abilities of the drivers you'd protect. But the legislative triumph that saved Kris, as he swerved to avoid a recklessly pulling-into-traffic vehicle and caught ice and was lifted into a phone pole, is luckily an invisible one. When Kris, despite being seatbelted (another Nader reform), smashed his head into the windshield, the windshield itself absorbed most of the shock in a decorative sideways rippling of cracks and shards. Windows that do that are tens of dollars more expensive for the manufacturers than the windows used in cars of the '50's and '60's, which Kris would have smashed through, head, neck, and shoulders; the only reason such absorbent windshields are made is that Nader's Raiders pushed a requirement into law over the objections of GM, Chrysler, and Ford, all of whom warned (as usual) of the prices that would be raised and the jobs that would be lost. Nader's auto reforms in general seem to have saved about 25,000 lives each year below the previous trendlines (over half a million lives saved total so far), Kris and 24,999 others. Of course the auto companies _have_ been raising prices and laying people off, but only to increase profits that, these days, are again pretty impressive. That's what companies do. Safety is what they don't; not without politics, anyway.
Musical politics, where it exists, does not tend to emphasize success and good works. Any random collection of punk or thrash metal bands can tell you The System is evil; agitprop poets like Fatima Mansions and Kingmaker can elegantly show you _how_ The System is evil and why it matters; but when optimism shines in, it tends to come in songs of personal relationships as a shelter, a harbor from worldly concerns (New Model Army being the most explicit user of this theme, Ani DiFranco the most prominent). This can be tempting, and any fair analysis of how I spend my time places me, on the whole, among the successfully tempted. But then, suddenly, a reminder comes along that The System, left unchallenged, can mess that haven up in one deadly moment.
On the other hand, in the absence of such a direct challenge to the apolitical paradise rule, songwriters like Paul Heaton of the Beautiful South perform the valuable function of reminding us that 1) politics can be a fun, challenging haven from 2) the sheer competitive hell of love relationships. The band's debut WELCOME established their almost Sinatra-esque musical style, one borrowing smooth instrumentation from the most popular, laid-back elements of jazz-pop and soft-rock; Paul did the articulate tenor crooning, Brianna Corrigan a refined but slightly squeaky counterpoint like a Brit-accented Edie Brickell. But I consider WELCOME a little _too_ smooth and consistent, with all due fondness for its final track "I Love You (But You're Boring)", an agonized reflection over pitch-bent music of a life spent with a woman who keeps watching Carousel. CHOKE, a few months later, rectified the error. Starting the album uptempo, "Tonight I Fancy Myself" throws the opening gauntlet: "She'd brought along the oranges, he'd brought along the tea, they'd both brought along a sick-bag just in case. The plates of chicken sandwiches were lovely, they agreed, and I watched him spit the bits into her face". Ani DiFranco's most devoted love song, "Pulse", involves vomit in her lover's hair and considers it a bond; it's very sweet and touching; Heaton, more sensibly, tilts the scenario towards "Ooh, gross". A hypothetical vow "for richer or for partly severed head" seals his commitment to love someone reliable: Paul Heaton.
Not that the next song, the strutting duet "My Book" doesn't self-eviscerate with equal venom, acknowledging Paul as a "half-hearted, broken-hearted and a failure" and inventing a doctor's grim acknowledgement that "we've had some ugly babies, but none were quite like you/ Diary '62, End of May/ it looks as if the nose and chin are here to stay". "Lips" and and the peppy angry duet "A Little Time" are about infidelity, the WELCOME flashback "Let Love Speak Up Itself" accepts working on relationships as a doomed concept, and the multiply devolving arrangments of "I Hate You (But You're Interesting)" set a double-bind tale of "Tables turned over and curtains ripped/ bottles uncollected, collected here/ nothing seems to shine like these razor edges do/ it's a crazy little world without you". As the faint, echoey middle of the song endorses, "I went to a doctor and she said 'Yes go ahead, throw yourself into the sea'/ I wrote a will for my friends and this is what it said: 'Me me me me me me'".
But politics.... ahh! If you want genuine villains to conduct dealings with, instead of women who insist on splitting the fault, any capitol city in any system will do, for the people empathic and honorable enough to deserve power are all busy teaching, or reporting, or writing songs, or writing music reviews, while those who make can power pay for itself are motivated to seize it. "I've Come For My Award" has an ominous synthetic backdrop but is sung proudly, correctly celebrating shoplifting as Industry and Free Enterprise: "Let hands be shook, champagne be poured, sentence ignored, I've come for my award". "Mother's Pride", though sympathising, portrays the raising of a fat young bully who will probably join the legions, in the gently swinging brass-led "I Think The Answer's Yes", of "people that I'd previously shoot... nothing will dilute, I want to execute". There is, to be sure, a gap between the legalistic trouble-mongering of Ralph Nader and Mr Heaton's "the burning of the Stock Exchange and bombing of the press". Heaton's, for one thing, is more fun. And by threatening outcomes like "A world without hunger, where royalty face death/ the breaking down of barriers, North South East and West"--- of which the royalty line is by far the least threatening--- he makes Nader look moderate, a practical alternative. So did the Unabomber, of course. Heaton has better tunes.
1992
Beautiful South, 0898
I think "0898" is the British number for emergency (corrections welcome; I'm deducing it from a Kingmaker song, that's all). Still, 0898 is a much musically calmer album than CHOKE--- but unlike WELCOME, it interests me. "We'll Deal With You Later" has a dark New Wave-y synth-piano hook; "Domino Man" is another uptempo brassy number; "36D" is anthemic soft-rock like Air Supply minus an octave and plus a hundred IQ points; "Something That You Said" has a rapid synth-rock pulse; "You Play Glockenspiel, I'll Play Drums" (which rhymes with other seductive futures like "You break fingers, I'll break thumbs") breaks for lightly dissonant glockenspiel/ percussion duets; the remaining jazz-pop-rock has its artfulness nicely enhanced by the contrasts.
Thematically, there's continuity with CHOKE. "...Later" is another alert bit of violent propoganda, urging garden-variety murderers to set aside their wasted lives of crime and go kill the power structure. "Here It Is Again" watches people in obviously dysfunctional relationships decide whether they're more ready to marry or kill each other, with Heaton's indifference between bad outcomes implied. The lovers' fight song "Something..." describes "Cupid's arrow looking more like Cupid's poisoned dart" and insists "you can tell a classic ballad by the number of threats/ so if you walk into your house and she's cutting up your mother, she's trying to tell you that she loves you like no other". The duet "Bell-Bottomed Tear", a particularly strong vocal performance from Brianna, is about trying unhappily to turn a proper one-night stand into a relationship; "36D", probably the prettiest song the band had yet done (amid significant competition), tenderly urges a well-built but unhappy slut to "Close your legs, open your mind/ leave those compliments well behind/ dig a little deeper into yourself and you may find", but is just as tender telling her "You cheapen and you nasty every woman in this land".
Here's the strange part, though: Heaton reveals himself for the first time to be a remarkably tender writer of long-term love and commitment songs. This tendency would fully flourish on MIAOW ('94), with "The Prettiest Eyes" (sung, hypothetically of course, to a 59-year-old lover looking back over decades) and "Hold Me Close (Underground)" (randily promising "We'll still be going at it when we're six feet under"). But already on 0898 he generates "We Are Each Other", in which lines about "Said we'd be close, said we'd work perfectly, said we'd toast beautiful company" turn out unironic as accurate predictions; and "You Play...", in which the long future together is still a prediction but "it'll do no harm to spin your yarn"; and "I'm Your No. 1 Fan", which seems, if I'm reading it right, to be a song of lifelong devotion to and from his sister. A too-rare topic, I'd think. So in some ways, perhaps, Heaton is growing into the personal-life-as-respite stage of politics; but he, at least, is only storing energy for the next round of autofire.
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