33 rebellions per minute
"A million dreams come to play for a while, til morning calls them home"
1993
Babe the Blue Ox, (BOX)
If my question for THE WAY WE WERE, Babe's 1998 album, is "how did any major label avoid making these guys famous?", my question regarding their debut is "how did any major label decide to spend money on these guys?". (BOX), a brief apprenticeship on Homestead Records, shows little signs, here and there, of impending accessibility: undeniable power, certainly, tinges of melody, a gift for singing thoughtfully from an underdog's perspective. I'd recommend it as one of the decade's better heavy metal albums, even though it isn't heavy metal, in large part because real heavy metal albums these days disqualify themselves from my "best" lists with vocalists who sounds like trolls screaming while dissecting themselves, whereas Tim Thomas and Rosalee Thomson don't (Tim sings low, somewhat growly, and expressively; Rose sings/yelps like a 13-year-old tutored by Kim Deal and Alison Faith Levy). But unless we theorize that the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's failure to dominate world consciousness was a sole product of its too-long (over 40 seconds) attention span, (BOX) was not the clearest stepping stone to riches.
"Home" leads the album in step with the times in its loud, lumbering Alice In Chains dignity, interrupted between verses by nimbly squawking lead guitar, Spencer by way of Lynyrd Skynyrd. "Honey Do", written and sung by percussionist Hanna Fox with momentary ha!-fooled-ya gentleness, runs into Rosalee on bass doing an impression of Megadeth struggling desperately to guess at what "blues" might sound like. "Chicken Head Bone Sucker" is more like Metallica, if Primus's Les Claypool had been hired when he auditioned for them, a steamroller frantically running over its own wheels. "Gymkhana" starts out like a metallizing of "Plainsong", the lead track on the Cure's DISINTEGRATION, and ends up revving like NASCAR theme music while the singers harmonize in powerful near-key unison. "Spatula" sets up a groove of cowbell, triangle, and little metal clank, shifts into Southern funk, into metal, into noodling paced by orc war chants.
To this point (BOX) is a record I sort of like and find intriguing; it here kicks into a record I love. "Waiting For The Water To Boil" is structured like an argument: ringing, reflectively triumphant chords, like a puzzled Matthew Sweet ordered to fill in for U2 without revealing the switch, fight for air time against abrupt, jarring blasts of bass. "Booty", to quote the Trouser Press Record Guide, "careens through along on Thomas's urgently whispered vocals ('a baptism of jism through prisms of ism') over a spastic skeleton of firmly held fusion-factory art-funk complexity - until it turns a corner with a knock-knock joke and launches into shouts and a wiggly electric drive-by, a two-line refrain at a completely different syncopated rhythm and a spare instrumental bridge", which is a wonderful description but overlooks how the "poooowwwwwer of looove" bridge is sung like a country music duo pulled abruptly off their anti-psychotic medication. "Born Again", by Rosalee, is as televangelical (and barely hiding the desperation) in her delivery as in her title, over a Rollins Band grind that, spared the company of Henry Rollins, turns out more compelling than I'd've ever guessed.
Lyrically, a cascade of wordplay sits oddly with the working-man, daily-hassle themes -- which is probably why Babe dumped the habit later, but for here it's charmingly unique. "Musta been a trauma in the drama of the puberty/ at 30 this dirty dude should know enough to humor me/ back off, buddy, and give me my appendages/ smoke another sucker's bone and keep your fingers offa me", indeed; as Voltaire assured Joan of Arc in Foundation's Fear, "I too am equipped to fight them with any weapon, assuming their weapon of choice is epithets". "Waiting..." uses a Some Assembly Required purchase tale to metaphor-ize a relationship; "Booty"'s "the slime and the soup can't recoup/ the pretended intention of looking astute" undermines its own pretention by being about, precisely, the degree to which culture and dignity are used as guises to get laid. Rosalee is more direct in her insecurities: "the next time I see you, you're just gonna fall over/ but I won't care, cuz you'll be out of this brain/ I will stop banging my head against walls/ I will stop banging my head against never". Or she's just "Tongue-Tied".
Forceful, abrasive music for shyness, intellectual insecurity, and the confusing redistribution of household and workplace chores. A non-obvious combination, and, I think, a needed one. Sometimes it's precisely the need to think that provokes the need to jump around spastically, and that's much more fun when there's company.
1998
Babe the Blue Ox, THE WAY WE WERE
One of the charmlessly persistent notions guiding American politics is the notion that business, as opposed to say government, is efficient; that, motivated by quarterly profit, it will make intelligent decisions serving the consumer and thus its own bottom line. The problems with this notion are hundredfold, of course, most obviously the absurd notion that helping us consumers is what business is about. General Motors, facing the 1930's as leaders of a budding automobile industry competing against still-powerful railroads and bus systems, maximized its bottom line by systematically purchasing the nation's largest transit systems and closing them down, thus forcing tens of millions of people to buy cars regardless of whether they could afford them, and dozens of cities to bulldoze housing complexes in order to build highways. Exxon, facing the 1990's with a $10 billion judgment against it for the Valdez oil spill, did not abandon dangerous single-hull supertankers, or repeal its practice of forcing captains to run ships with deadly shortages of sleep; it simply kept the courts tied up such that, to this, day, it has paid not a dime of the fine. Mental hospitals, including the country's largest chain (who keep changing their name -- I'll have to track the current name down) have repeatedly been caught ejecting patients midway through therapy in order to accept new patients with better per-diem insurance payments, sometimes with fatal results. My own employer, Citibank, allows customers to remove their new credit cards' security blocks simply by typing the account number and social security number, making it easy for wallet thieves; but of course wallet thieves spend money too. The tobacco industry, of course, has worked far harder on increasing the nicotine supply of its cigarettes (thus encouraging unhappy, as well as unhealthy, dependence) than on public health. It's difficult to see why government, for all its many flaws, is the medium regularly vilified in comparison as "inefficient".
What that paragraph allows, of course, is the assumption that business is, for good or evil, competent in defending its own interests. I have my doubts. Take Xerox essentially inventing the MacIntosh computer and office suite in the mid-1970's at great expense, earning no money from it and waiting up to ten years for Apple to "innovate" its best ideas (laser printers, What You See Is What You Get word processing, Windows); take Ford making the Edsel one of the most expensive new car introductions of all-time, or the movie "Heaven's Gate" running $80 million over budget; take New Coke, which I actually liked but oh well. Businesses fuck up. Sometimes ineptitude and mere contempt for customers become hard to disentagle, of course, as in my travails with Greyhound Bus Lines: after losing my bag at Christmas, finding it, losing it again, failing to pay me $250 after two months (their own policy) but later finding it _again_, then losing it again, all while having a New York City phone number that is never answered and a Dallas baggage-claims number that regularly disconnects the caller at caller's expense, they replied to my politely aggressive mail inquiry with a letter refusing all responsibility -- and not offering the sender's (or anyone's) phone number on the letterhead. Incompetence, or an accountant's decision that if no-one can reach HQ to complain, delivering a bag is a waste of money? Given that I continue to ride Greyhound out of necessity (clutching my bags tightly to me), and spend my rides telling very impressed fellow riders the full details and eliciting spontaneous pledges to never ride Greyhound again; given also that I'm sending a mass mailing to Greyhound's company officers, and failing that will sue for damages far more than the bag itself was worth; the question is a false choice. If businessmen were so bright, why has no business successfully overcome McDonald's, Ivory, General Mills, Tylenol, General Motors, Chef Boy-ar-Dee, Columbia Records in their product-line leads? Corporate tycoons rest assured of their pre-eminence based on bright ideas conceived a century ago, aided by a hundred years of audience brand-name passivity. Okay, they have to fight takeover attempts; you call that a reason to trust business over government? Unresponsive bureaucracy, thy name is Mammon.
The music industry, happily, is changing in such a way that the idiocies of major labels become less and less important over time; ever-cheaper four-track recording and video technologies, now plus Internet radio and MP3, make it progressively easier for bands to emerge on independent microlabels and earn profits.
Nonetheless, it's my humble opinion that the major labels, all of them feeding off reputations made several decades ago, are from a self-interested standpoint stupid. It's not just the little idiocies: giving 25% royalties and huge advances to Aerosmith and R.E.M. despite the simple, easily observed fact that the huge bands of any given right-now will almost always be just another fairly important band in five years, and often be gone or entirely marginal five years after that (even the Rolling Stones haven't sold single platinum since 1987). It's the overall success rate, with 90% of signings losing money. Do you know WHY 90% of the signings lose money? Why, because all of the majors, all five, release ten times as many records as they're willing or able to promote. Eggstone, Something Happens!, the Rainbirds, the Sealand Poets, the Children, dEUS, just to list six bands that took three seconds to pop into my mind, were all major-label bands. Could they have sold a lot of copies? Damned if I know, but the fact that their combined advertising budget was approximately 23 cents didn't help; if the records weren't here in this house, I'd not know they existed. Ednaswap released "Torn", by no means my favorite of their songs, on Island Records twice, but no one heard of Ednaswap until Natalie Imbruglia covered "Torn" under the auspices of a huge marketing campaign (and no, to answer the obvious question, Natalie isn't that much prettier than the Ednaswap singer). My point isn't that Ednaswap should have become rich, although it's a fine idea. My point isn't that Ednaswap were foolish to sign to a major label; given that the majors have so far allowed generous musician's union contracts, Ednaswap may in fact have done okay (they needn't pay back their advance or their $300 per hour per person salary for studio time). My point isn't even that the five-conglomerates/ thousand-minors system is bad for music, since I don't know that. My point is that no competent business would have paid for Ednaswap to record an album, then refused to promote it. Yet all the big labels, releasing hundreds of CD's a year, make it their regular policy.
Babe The Blue Ox's THE WAY WE WERE, released on RCA (which earned its size in the 1920's as the innovate, industry-founding Radio Corporation Of America), is a case as clearly aggravating, to me, as major label behavior gets. Why? Because it _should_ have been a hit. It's as unradical a great record as I could imagine. "Tattoo"'s insinuating 7/4 bass line, slow-burn buildup, and telegraphic lyrics should have become a hit for the same good reasons the Toadies' "Possum Kingdom" did, especially since it doesn't saddle itself with anything as stupid as the "do you wanna die?" coda. "Plan B"'s spastically pounding bass would be a Rage Against The Machine highlight, and I'm still optimistic enough to think the melodic, rhythmically off-beat duet vocals -- Tim Thomas as the deep-voiced macho man doing laundry in these redefined times, Rosalee Thomson singing perky and sweet -- would be an advantage, not disadvantage, commercially. "Basketball" uses the same vocal alternation and harmony in pretty, wistful form over music that my comparison machine is failing to process right now -- Jesus Jones with funky wah-wah guitar, maybe, but toned to agreeable background jangle when Rosalee sings -- but defines "a good beat, and you can dance to it" as well as anything else I've heard lately. "Sheila" could be Pearl Jam evoking THE JOSHUA TREE in the same way that "Black Hole Sun" was Soundgarden's homage to REVOLVER. "I'm Not Listening" attaches a chiming Connells-like guitar hook to its buoyant pop-punk momentum. "My Baby And Me" is skeletal electric blues, a "Bad To The Bone" for romantics, with dreamy tremolo on the bridge; "Betty Davis" elevates a similar structure with a chorus where the soaring dual vocals suggest how compelling Semisonic might be with a girl backup singer. MTV's 120 Minutes, whenever nostalgia leads me to tune in, shows dozens of mediocre imitations of exactly this kind of music. I honestly believe, as someone who can often still tell the hits by listening (Smash Mouth's "All-Star" and Eve 6's "Tongue-Tied", both new to me, stood out this week, for me, well above the obscure crowd), that Babe The Blue Ox could be huge.
Maybe they suffer from leftover karma, too weird then, too weird now. That Babe have now learned to corral their art into accessibly funky, likeable form could be too unexpected to react to. Except, of course, that RCA did react. They signed Babe for the band's third album, the pleasant-enough PEOPLE ('96), and kept funding Babe in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to make THE WAY WE WERE. Then ignored it. Stupid.
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