33 rebellions per minute
"Kill yourself! If you want! But I'll say this! Only once! Don't."
1995
Carter USM, STARRY-EYED AND BOLLOCK NAKED
I'll do my best to explain Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine in a way
that will make the review useful for you, but I'll warn you right off
that no other band in the world speaks to _me_ as directly, clearly, and
heroically. Jim Bob Morrison (lyrics) and Leslie "Fruitbat" Carter
(music) understood, correctly enough, that there are four truly
important things in this world: thinking; caring about other people;
dancing; and making ridiculous multi-level puns. And through the end of
1997, every album they made proceeded under the assumption that all of
the above could, and should, be done at once.
STARRY isn't really an album, it's a collection of B-sides from their
singles. But in England the singles charts are actually compiled by how
much money people voluntarily spend buying your singles, not on how
energetically a bunch of programming directors wearing Essence Of Graph
Paper choose to shove a song through your eadrums and into the shattered
remnants of your brain; as a result, English bands (and Carter are very
English, so don't go asking me to explain their references to Stephen
Patrick or Alf Garnett or Jimmy Bloody Tarbuck) often save some of their
best work as incentive to singles-buyers. And with all Carter albums
thru '97, no matter how excellent, being essentially the same album with
different details, I'll review this, my favorite, to represent them. If
you don't like dealing with importers, treat this as essentially a
review of POST-HISTORIC MONSTERS ('94), which you can actually find and
order.
Musically, the Carter aesthetic usually centers on highly artificial
sounds--- drum machines, fake fanfare, real bass guitar that's been
modified into New Wave imitation of life even as it rushes forcefully at
you waving its raygun--- at high beats-per-minute counts that seem,
gloriously, even faster because they spray an endless stream of
16th-notes at you, with occasional sampled calliope or something often
skittering past even faster. The extreme treble range usually features
some point of additional interest: a processed vocal, a flitting
synth-woodwind, the highest notes of a synth-organ. But Carter are also
about dynamics, and when pacing deserves it, or when they want to hammer
home "we _mean_ this one", they'll slow down: piano, synth strings, even
an acoustic guitar for "Turn On, Tune In, and Switch Off", albeit in a
fast-by-normal-standards strum. "Granny Farming In The UK", soft until
it eventually does build up, centers on a drum loops of 6 beats in which
the last 5 seem like progressively weaker echoes of the real first hit.
"A Nation Of Shoplifters", grim enough to make you ponder "I gave my
faith and hope to charity", almost justifies JimBob's liner note "Andrew
Lloyd Webber should write stuff like this". "Watching The Big Apple Turn
Over" opens and closes with city-sound samples, the final ones blended
into by a faded-out chant, and it and "Turn On..." both feature
understated fake choir. "Bring On The Girls", starting a passionately
feminist trilogy, starts and closes with a bit of vibes and jazz bass,
and the regular song's bass bludgeoning, racing cymbals, and tumbling
words seem intriguingly to have kept in metronomic time from three
different starter's guns (til the Vegasy swing enters). "Always The
Bridesmaid, Never The Bride", lovely midpoint of said trilogy, is
solemnly set to music-box; "Her Song" ("Battered, broken, bruised and
bent, I guess God gave her up for Lent. She was weak and he was strong.
It didn't take that long") starts out acoustic and slow, until a
syncopated little guitar filigree signals the forceful race through "Get
of the streets and do it now, get yourself some firepower"--- a rush
that lasts, in different forms, through the remaining three songs. The
majority of the 18 B-sides collected are, still, exciting blurs,
including the punk-rock cover their own (orginally slow) "Stuff The
Jubilee", and "When The Thesauruses Ruled The Earth"'s flagrant swipe of
an EMF riff along to "Love Shack"'s "we can get together" apparently fed
straight through an electric fan set on High.
Carter have an excellent official web site, so I'll refrain from quoting
every wonderful line (i.e., most of the lines from most of the 18), but
it's worth pointing out how quickly they switch in and out of
spot-the-reference: "No boiled beef and carrots as the medicine goes
down. No handles on the windows, no lights on the stairs, it's way past
your bedtime and nobody cares. From Granny Farming In The UK to
Heartbreak Hotel, there's 25 tunes on the visitor's bell. And the
postman rings twice with a telegram from the Queen as your legs change
from red to amber and green...". "R.S.P.C.E." (Royal Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Everything) is an energized romp: "from agony
and ivory to pure beef lobotomy: there's a difference at McDonald's,
kids, and we know what that difference is"; that doesn't make "let's
show those Mother Nature fuckers!" any less a manifesto. They can
portray a person even while ending with a double-meaning pun (triple if
you count the Dylan reference): "Armed with only your unruly red lips,
and a fistful of dollars for tips, you took off from the sticks to get
stoned". And they even save me the effort of telling you to go spend
money: "If you buy this record today, it's not true what the
advertisements say: your life won't be greatly improved; but Christ,
you've got nothing to lose. And we've got so much to gain". And now that
they've recently retired, you wouldn't bet their fate on the future of
social security, would you?
1998
Carter USM, I BLAME THE GOVERNMENT
"Dont'cha know when you're being walked all over? Are you just gonna sit back and take it? Did Custer sit back and take it when the Japanese attacked? Did Joan of Arc let her religion stop her from eating her enemies raw without salt? Did Dagwood cower like a whipped dog when Mister Dithers hit him with a typewriter? You bet he didn't, boy! He went ahead and asked for a raise anyway, and when Mister Dithers hit him with another typewriter, he asked again! And here you are, standing like doofs with your elbows up your noses, afraid to" (John turned towards Leonard and whispered) "What are they afraid to do?"
"Anything", Leonard said. "Everything."
--- Bradley Denton, "the Calvin Coolidge Home For Dead Comedians"
I hate to endanger my Sensitive New Age Guy status over such a minor personal detail, but: I don’t cry. No reason, I just don’t: gave it up when I was eleven and haven’t looked back. Once, my first week away at college, I broke down and ended my no-cry streak, but it resumed. And I think it’s permanent now, but only on a technicality. The first time I played Carter’s final album I BLAME THE GOVERNMENT, I listened to the end, pushed play, listened to it again. And absolutely the only thing separating what I was doing at the end of play 2 from “crying” was the fact that my eyes, out of practice, had forgotten the part about generating actual liquid.
This, to me, is the album where Carter’s central balancing act, of being an insurrectionistly empathic political party while never forgetting the other meaning of “party”, breaks down almost completely, even while they feebly try to pretend otherwise. Their first-ever reliance on almost purely rock instumentation, drums/ guitar/ bass/ piano/ strings, gives them some novel ways to act someone younger’s age, true. But still: it’s the most heartbreakingly aware and feeling album I ever expect to run across. Forget “bleeding-heart liberals”; this is hemophilia.
Not every song supports this impression: the rave-up “Psycho Bill” is purest nonsense (“Be bop a lula, Bony Marone/ She’s as skinny as teddy-boy Tony/ Looks fantastic in Piccadilly/ Mr. Bombastic, Psycho Billy!”), while “Citizen’s Band Radio” plays like their usual revved satire (“Conspiracy theory number one: Jesus was a man from Mars. The stable was a pub called the Rising Sun and the Three Wise Men arrived in cars”). And “Sweetheart Sugar Baby”, a funny (but pained) rock song about spouse abuse, is as clearly Carter as anything they could record, down to the tossed-off political manifesto “How can you tell your right from your wrong when you can’t tell your Right from your Left?”. But even “...Radio”’s crackpot theories sound, more than not, like Carter’s _own_ rants about evil multinationals. Similarly, “Growing Old Disgracefully” is rendered by music-writer Fruitbat as a tantrum, but lyricist JimBob has fewer lines that sound like a mocked narrator (“I want a funeral with a band that plays jazz”) or even ambiguous (“You won’t still need me when I’m 64 years old/ cantankerous and greedy and complaining of the cold”) than sound like JimBob from the heart (“I don’t think this honeymoon will last, I just want my future to live up to my past”). The last of which connects straight to my favorite cheerful mantra of 1998, “Sunshine”’s “It won’t get better, but it might never get worse”--- but even Carter are in trouble when the album’s Fun part (and it _is_ fun) peaks with “Tobacco is a drug! Caffeine is a drug! Microwave ovens put toxins in your grub! And if your grub is fried, that’s a Heart Attack Plus. Or you can step outside, and get run over by a bus”. But the jokes of “Winning The War”, compared to those of “Sunshine”, are truly grim. I don’t think I’ll spoil them for you.
The moments that have ended up defining this album for me have been four songs plus one line. The theatrical but finally subdued “Closedown”, about the life Carter themselves managed to miss, paints the afterlife: “Every job we’ve ever had was boring. You always can depend on a useless and dead end. And when we die, there’ll be a multicolored sweatshop in the sky”. ”I Blame The Government” speaks directly, and I think intentionally, to my frustated and growing anarchist streak, convinced that all my well-considered ideas about how to reform the government to be useful (even my promisingly corrupt ones; ask me sometime about my scheme to turn the oil companies into the leading advocates of solar power) are fundamentally at odds with the nature of democracy and politicians. It’s a bitter violin-led minuet about abandonment of children, about the “welfare-reform” insistence on the work ethic combined with an abandonment of the pay ethic, about the abandonment of cities to the criminal element. JimBob sings, in a desperate whisper, “If I had the wings of a sparrrow, if I had the arse of a crow, I’d fly over Whitehall tomorrow, and **** on the bastards below. It’s ugly and crude and I’m sorry. I just want you to leave me alone. You’re selling us all down the Swanee. I’m tired and I want to go home”.
The soft ticking “23:59 End Of The World” and the unabashedly sentimental piano/strings show-piece “Girls Can Keep A Secret” are the album’s bookends, much simpler and more personal, one about a girl “Too scared for love, unprepared for love, she trips and falls down the stairs for love”, the other about her subsequent kid. And as bleak as these stories are, Carter already warned us in “the Undertaker and the Hippy Protest Singer” that “There’s always hope, and that’s the worst“.
That hope, I guess, is why they had to make the album this way---out with the jokes and the plastic arrangements, in with direct personal appeals--- and why I had to write my review this way. I could have just said “Carter arrange their best set of tunes in an unexpectedly stark, but careful, manner” and shut up, ignoring every hint that they didn’t want such a once-over. It’s chic to feel annoyed by people who put their politics in their songs, and I’ll admit there are songs like Bruce Cockburn’s “the Mines Of Mazmbique” that, though they may in fact be deeply felt by the author, _sound_ too much like journalist-speak, disaster of the week and quick let’s see the blood so we can mourn the profound human loss please. But there is simply no reasonable question that JimBob Morrison identifies with the weak and ruthful who get crushed by the ruthless-hence-strong. And he’s right. So whatcha gonna do about it?
Me, I give money that I can’t really afford to homeless shelters and to left-wing magazines. I’ll also occasionally invite homeless people to sleep on my couch and share a can of soup, a piece of pizza, a bit of conversation--- and it’s unnerving how desperately they often seem to need the last of these. But of course, every review on this site is money I didn’t spent on the needy (in this case, $15 to CD Europe). The computer I use to write the reviews cost enough to feed a child for at least two years. The best I can say is “It’s not my fault that some people suffer; why can’t I have a few luxuries?”. And it’s true, you know, I’m _not_ to blame; I try hard not to be. But my country and Carter’s country are both democracies, wealthy ones, and if people are starving in them--- which they are--- and if children are slowly dying from easily treated infections--- which they are--- or getting cancer because they live where some rich guys in suits want to put their toxic sludge--- ibid--- then frankly, a majority of the people in those countries have agreed to go along with this. And _that_ is why protest music is necessary and useful: it asks the listener “Did you cooperate in this? Did you mean to?” And while I’m not sure it’s a good enough cause to justify off-key badly-played music as a medium (no Phil Ochs reviews here, sorry), Carter music is clever, and passably inventive, and hummable, and good. Especially when you’re singing gleefully about bus crashes to irritated random strangers. Yeah!
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