33 rebellions per minute
"What's going to change except the characters and the color?"
1993
Ric Ocasek, QUICK CHANGE WORLD
As Ric Ocasek established as the leader of the platinum-selling Cars, and confirmed over the course of his
first three solo albums, he is an extraordinarily consistent artist. This, of course, is shorthand for "his brain
froze over in 1978 and stopped admitting even smidgeons of new ideas, but I don't mind", or it would have
been shorthand if I hadn't patiently explained what it was shorthand for. Every album was a reliable source
of driving one-note bass lines, minor-key notes over I-IV-V chord changes, synthesizer noises that always
sounded like some catchy keyboard-y noise you'd make by pressing a key on a keyboard, 32-bit sound
cards pretending to clap their hands, sung vocal lines finding hooks in the small but pleasant range of notes
Ric is capable of hitting, and lyrics expressing a mild ironic distance from their basic pop-standard topics.
Then came QUICK CHANGE WORLD.
Then
came the second half of QUICK CHANGE WORLD, anyway. After starting with "The Big
Picture", distorted spoken-word over whooshes halfway between those in Pink Floyd's "Welcome To The
Machine" and those made by rapid-firing guns in Laser-Tag, songs two through seven are simple classic
Cars songs, with "Hard Times" veering past simple into moronic by repeating the A-A-E-D bass riff,
loudly, every two bars throughout the song (sure, I like it fine). Then, suddenly, slow enveloping
tremolo'ed chords play softly as a synth-flute decorates and Ric sings "I feel things you'll never know, and
I feel things I dare not show, but I still believe". What? He does? Yeah. "Come Alive", authoritative
8th-note backbeat and frantic singing and unobtrusive (but effective) squealing-brakes sample and an
ominous 2-note organ line stolen from an Inspiral Carpets album, announces "When I try to sit tight, I get
nervous and confused" and cautiously endorses the adventurous sense of efficacy "it takes to be a general, it
takes to be a president, it takes to be a healer, it takes to be a clown". "What's On TV" mixes percussion
from Nazi rallies, furnace rooms, and the intendedly (for once) chilling sound of no hands clapping while
Ocasek speaks with a voice like a professor who's mildly distracted by the sight of his own flesh
disappearing: "so they all went along and yelled to the heavens, or someplace as good where you can find
the right toothpaste without hardly looking". "Hopped Up" is just that, as loaded with intriguing edited
sound-samples as Jesus Jones prefer their songs to be. And then comes the finale "Help Me Find America":
glossily produced but identifiably a hymn, and with weepy pedal-steel, as Ocasek sings, in his lowest
baritone, "why can't we try to live in harmony? Why can't we try to live in peace?".
Banal? No. Banal, for Ocasek, was warbling about needing someone to bleed him. Banal was famous
philosopher Hegel inventing the concept of "dialectic"--- in which intellectual progress comes from taking a
belief ("thesis") and its opposite ("antithesis") and combining them into a new and better belief ("synthesis")
which then becomes the new thesis, repeat--- and announcing by final synthesis that human progress was
complete in the form of the German monarchy (which was paying Hegel's bills). I despise hopeful/uplifting
greeting card sentiments about harmony and peace, but I despise them because they are, in context, the easy
way out, purchasing flattering second-hand wisdom for 79 cents. When Ocasek, after 15 years of equally
convenient alienation, synthesizes a Hallmark card, well, it intrigues me. I'm also glad, of course, that
synthesizing finally taught him that those simple preset voices on his Yamaha are _optional_.
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