33 rebellions per minute
"Spin fast enough and maybe the broken pieces of your heart will stay together"
1999
Dismemberment Plan, EMERGENCY AND I
The fact that I write music reviews may mark me as unusual, but it stems fairly naturally from the fact that I read music reviews. The fact that I read them, and regularly buy albums because of them, also marks me as unusual, but it never would've occurred to me, in advance, that everyone didn't do this automatically. It's how I was raised: get interested in dinosaurs, go with Mom to library, check out books about dinosaurs (then mold them out of clay). Get interested in astronomy, go with Mom to library, check out books about the solar system (then design my own planets with primitive tables of statistics and moments of whimsy). Get interested in baseball, go read books about baseball, although by then I'd started to reverse the process. I became fanatical about baseball partly in order to get full value from the Bill James Baseball Abstracts, and in order to lose myself fully in novels like Robert Coover's the Universal Baseball Association, W. P. Kinsella's the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and Philip Roth's the Great American Novel (all of which remain brilliant now that I've lost all interest in the cool, refreshing extracurricular antics of the ever less filling great tasting RJR Nabisco Major Leagues (test drive one today!)). To form a fledgling notion that rock music might be cool, and then to go read Rolling Stone and Spin at the library, was a decision in the same way that buying food from a grocery store or restaurant is a decision; sure, it's possible to do otherwise, to hunt your own game or eat your chair leg or ask the hardware store clerk if he has some spare carrots, but who would think of such a silly thing?
I don't recommend Spin or Rolling Stone to you, though. The moment I gave up on them was somewhere late in 1995, prompted by me buying what is actually a very interesting book, the Spin Guide To Alternative Music. As a work of history, as an essay collection, as a jokebook, it's recommended. As a guide to music… well, it's not that I don't agree with many of the judgments. The problem came looking through the individual Top Ten Records lists submitted by the magazine's dozens of contributors. A list like that is a deeply personal one. The maker processes these physical, measurable (though infinitesimal) spiral grooves or magnetic field shapes or assemblages of digits that look completely identical to each other unless labeled (a Bob Dylan CD looks just like a Johann Bach one from the silver side), and extracts some sort of revelations or joys or hormonal releases, and ranks them and shows them off. There is no rational way to do this. And yet list after list looked like, say, that of Will Hermes:
- Velvet Underground, AND NICO
- Ramones, S/T
- Public Enemy, IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK
- Patti Smith, HORSES
- Big Star, THIRD
- Brian Eno, ANOTHER GREEN WORLD
- Sonic Youth, EVOL
- Joy Division, UNKNOWN PLEASURES
- Captain Beefheart, TROUT MASK REPLICA
- Nirvana, NEVERMIND
- Public Enemy, IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK
- Buzzcocks, SINGLES GOING STEADY
- Eric B & Rakim, PAID IN FULL
- Clash, LONDON CALLING
- Sex Pistols, NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS
- Elvis Costello, THIS YEAR'S MODEL
- Minutemen, DOUBLE NICKELS ON THE DIME
- Talking Heads, REMAIN IN LIGHT
- Ramones, S/T
- Nirvana, NEVERMIND
- Nirvana, NEVERMIND
- Replacements, LET IT BE
- Sex Pistols, NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS
- Pixies, DOOLITTLE
- Television, MARQUEE MOON
- Gang Of Four, ENTERTAINMENT!
- Guided By Voices, BEE THOUSAND
- Elvis Costello, MY AIM IS TRUE
- Talking Heads, FEAR OF MUSIC
- My Bloody Valentine, LOVELESS
Do you see what is horrifying about these lists? If your brain cells are better spent than mine, you don't, so I'll tell you. All thirty of these list spaces -- and a hundred others from lists I could've cited -- are devoted, without exception, to albums that are Sealed And Approved by the rock critic consensus; virtually all cracked the book's top 100 list at the end, and there were far too many voters for these individuals' points to have shaped that list very much. No votes here for SGT PEPPER or AQUALUNG or JOSHUA TREE or LITTLE EARTHQUAKES or DOWNWARD SPIRAL, albums that in the real world have both passionate fans and several million people who'd guffaw at you for mentioning them. Certainly no votes here for anything by AC/DC or Meat Loaf or Donna Summer, though someone was buying them and loving them, somewhere. No votes here for Joy Of Cooking or Swamp Thing or Salem 66 or anyone else that the critic might have discovered by accident, or by receiving a promo copy, or by attending a local club, or by having a girlfriend who was a cousin of the drummer. Not even - and this is truly stunning - any votes for the wrong album by the right artist (Elvis Costello's PUNCH THE CLOCK, or Sonic Youth's GOO, or the Minutemen's 3-WAY TIE FOR LAST, or the Talking Heads' NAKED). There are only two possible ways to make a list like this: either you're lying, or you've refused to ever listen to anything that has not been determined, in advance, to be something you might be laughed at over by some jerk. Either of these are as blank-check a denial of one's own humanity as I can imagine; far more harmless than changing the gas supply at Auschwitz, but not an iota more soulful.
I've learned, therefore, to take my childhood habit of learning through reading, and seek out the occasional underground bright spots where nerds with flashlights type hectic enthusiasms at each other. I skim or sometimes read…let's see…a total of seven weekly or monthly review sites, paper or electronic, all of them minor enough to risk honesty. Where Dismemberment Plan came to my attention, then, was through a webzine called Pitchfork, where their third album, EMERGENCY AND I, won their staff writers' poll by placing first on four of the ten ballots. They were explicit about how this happened: Brent DiCrescenzo, who in other moods is a very funny man, heard it, thought it was amazing, and ruthlessly badgered everyone he knew (such as fellow Pitchfork writers) into trying it out. Quite a few of them went "wow!", even though he was just some schmuck amateur named Brent whom they were completely free to disagree with. Given that I tend to approve Brent's tastes anyway, that impressed me, big time.
Who or what do Dismemberment Plan sound like, then? I'll start with the influences, the Approved records that could, easily as not, have made a love for EMERGENCY AND I mandatory. They sound a little like:
- Talking Heads, the first four records. "A Life Of Possibilities"'s thin, jumpy beat and dry, staccato, somewhat alarming falsetto could be from '77. "Back And Forth" could be Zach de la Rocha (Rage Against The Machine)'s pencil-necked geek doppelganger shouting beat poetry over a complexly static REMAIN IN LIGHT track. The rhythm-to-melody ratio of verses here is similar to the nervously danceable FEAR OF MUSIC.
- the Pixies. Actually, the Pixies didn't make this much use of weird time signatures; Dismemberment Plan are the first song band I can think of to use six or seven beats as much as four beats, instead of as a gimmick (even the most attractive song here, "Spider In The Snow", is in 7/4). But the Pixies did try, and they did model the franticness Travis Morrison emits on, say, "Girl O'Clock": "The burning! In my gut! When I try to get, out of bed. Andyoudon'tknow how these urges, these urges, th-th-these urges! Can be m-m-m-m-misread!". Not to mention the throwaway casualness of, later in the same song, Morrison quoting "Rapper's Delight" to the rhythm of "Pop! Goes the weasel". "I Love A Magician", crooning R2D2 soul over a tune apparently derived from watching NASCAR engines racing, is almost a "Debaser" for optimists (although it reminds me at least as much of Priya Thomas's elegantly feral squall "Antigone", and I've waited a year for a tune to do that for me).
- Fugazi and/or Jawbox. The mainstays of D.C. weirdo hardcore punk. The guitar tone reminds me of those bands very strongly. Of course, since I don't like Fugazi or Jawbox (except the latter's "Savory"), I'm not inclined to analyze very hard. But I tried to like them, and have memories.
- Gang Of Four. Famed precursors of panicked, abrupt, white-boy funk. "8 ˝ minutes" could be from the Gang's own work. "Gyroscope"'s drums are as rapid fire and off-beat as Reznor's "Perfect Drug" intro, dance music for epileptics. "Memory Machine"'s self-tripping 6/4 beat funk does set up a solid grunge chorus (albeit in an odd key), but even that only is a transition between the scrapings of a chalkboard pre-set with child's-toy noise buttons and the guitarist's earnest attempt to demonstrate his new Monotone Concerto For Violin And Car Alarm.
- Live. Because, heck, "What Do You Want Me To Say" and "You Are Invited" do resolve into anthemic choruses with loud, distorted but unthreatening guitars. Of course, "…Invited" gets there and back from a nasal sing-song story that's almost unaccompanied except for some drum machine from the Pong era. But it's really good bad drum machine, and in its universe of origin "…Invited" is probably as cleverly professional a gem of the exact mainstream as Savage Garden's "I Want You" is here.
The tunes do exist; I've heard Prince, Motown, and TMBG used as references for this band, and they're probably in there somewhere, keeping the noises headed in hummable directions. The lyrics are nothing to be ashamed of, either. Morrison tells stories, wandering from detail to detail with the sort of attention deficit that justifies itself by being distracted by the truly interesting. "Launched all the world's nukes this morning/ hoping it would kick start something/ some of them went off course and hit the moon instead/ it was kind of pretty./ Hasn't been a whole of looting/ on the other hand it's fucking freezing/ someone said something about going underground/ guess we'd better start digging" is my favorite, dazed/naif. "…Invited" is a story of a magical invitation that gets its holder any privileges s/he chooses; "I thought it was a really dumb joke" excuses the acceptance of everything which follows. "…Magician" follows its relationship metaphor unwaveringly from the exhilarated non-responsibleness of "I love a magician/ she can cut me in half/ she can find quarters behind my ears/ and make me laugh" to "when she floats me straight up in the air 30 miles/ I don't care, well maybe a little/ it can really stop you from doing something/ when you wonder if they'd really drop you".
Even "Girl…"'s unbridled lust goes "if I don't feel the nails in the nape of my neck/ or hear a nice post-coital sigh..../ Oh c'mon, baby, you can tell the cops why". EMERGENCY is a record of high-speed intelligence, of rushed detail, of careful trial and error from which the non-error has been sifted out, isolated, then flung joyously around the room like billiard balls. Will Hermes and Chris Norris would embrace it, if it were in their social interest to do so. They'd probably give it cooties; perhaps it's just as well they're not around.
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