33 rebellions per minute
"Take me there, anywhere, out of this where"
1993
Lisa Germano, HAPPINESS
There are some musical artists who will craft their songs and recordings
with imagination and devoted care and let you treat their albums simply
as music: most of the Wayside artists I recommend, for example. Then
there are albums, just as musically striking, tbat absolutely force you
to grapple with them on emotional terms, even when this gets
uncomfortable: anything by Lisa Germano, say. The latter kind,
unsurprisingly, often wind up meaning more to me, but crikey, why is it
that all albums devoted the ins and outs of one boy/girl relationship
are either emotionally mixed, or flat-out depressing? Don't point out
here how happy all of Paula Abdul's songs are; sure I enjoy Paula's
music, but only by ignoring lyrics which carry the displeasing hint that
the safe way to enjoy happiness is to have started flunking all your
vocabulary tests by 4th grade. Whereas Thought Industry, Phil Collins,
the Loud Family, Del Amitri, even Robyn Hitchcock once (on PERSPEX
ISLAND), have been sighted giving love their thoughtful album-length
equivalents of those public service ads against smoking. Even the same
charges: love, like smoking, makes you age fast, get ill, and function
as a gullible pawn of undiluted evil. Which, in the anti-smoking ads, is
absolutely true: don't smoke! Quit if you've already started and don't
whine about how hard it is; you have every right to kill yourself, but
please choose a way that doesn't help fund commercials tempting the next
generation of suicides. (If you must have cigarettes, shoplift
them. I'm serious.) But the medical studies on love are ambivalent, so why do I
subject myself to these musical rampages on the topic? Especially ones
so cuttingly effective as Ms. Germano's?
HAPPINESS starts in mid-drone, with the drummer entering in a couple of
beats like someone had tapped him on the shoulder: "Oh, look, someone
turned the record button on, wanna join?". Which is the last whimsical
thought I get for a while, as Germano starts singing, in her unique,
tired husky waver of a voice, about "What a waste, to feel the way I
feel, when happiness is just around the corner, just around the corner
from forgiveness". Now, side 2 opens with a shaded, empathetic yet
acidic, character study, "Cowboy", from the perspective of a woman who
almost believes that she's the one in real contented charge of her
physically abusive mate; so that's an argument, by negative example, for
ruling forgiveness out. But the square-dancey title track still compares
her fate to beef cattle: "Happiness is like a cow, growing strong, just
for now", and the drum solo and "C'mon everybody, sing!! Pain and
sadness are real to me" have the unfortunate effect of being just aware
and funny enough to win listener sympathy without her doing one
productive thing with it. "Bad Attitude", one of the finest vocal
performances in the history of song, pulls the funny/shattered
simultaneity even tighter, as she addresses herself in the second
person. Her singing of "You wish you were pretty, but you're not,
ha-ha-ha. But your baby loves you, he tells you so all the time. Oh,
that mut be why you're so happy together" goes through an amazing number
of permutations of detachment, amusement, and self-loathing, but the
eerie pitch-bend after "together" seals the victory for downer, and even
the cheeky/ condescending/ helpful/ entertained "But if life was easy,
you wouldn't learn anything, now would you?" has its minimal helium
sucked out by the next line. The song, which had been decorated by
a soft acoustic simulation of an industrial wall of noise plus a 3-note guitar cycle
and 2-note piano cycle, ends in gentle anti-lullaby mode: "You would
give anything to change back/ to when/ the waves/ were smaller/ and you
could jump/ over./ Change back/ to when/ you could laugh/ easy".
"Sycophant" builds around a pounding drum machine, Lisa's violin (a
feature of most songs) in a pained squeal, and such bon mots as "I don't
trust you. But I don't have to. I just need you" and in 3/4, her voice
sharing percussion duties with a piano, "All us/ liars/ stick to-/
gether". It's very manipulative of her, come the final song, how she
uses her voice and piano arpeggios and fake-choir backdrop to make us
feel with her that her relationship's breakup is, improbably, as sad as
its existence. She's just as pushy with her newly-minted ex, mind you:
"You have to feel this. You have to cry".
Oddly, it's that spirit of pushiness that makes this album listenable,
even lovable for me. I do think the actual answer to my first-paragraph
question ("Why aren't relationship-focused albums ever cheering?") is
that happy people don't _have_ to focus so completely; my experience,
certainly, is that the women I fall in love with are exactly the women
who push my brain into overdrive, ricocheting giddily from topic to
topic, finding inherently interesting things to share and _do_; the two
times I can remember spending 60 consecutive waking hours obsessing over
a relationship itself were once feeling severely hurt, and once
wondering (needlessly, yay) if I was going to have occasion to feel
severely hurt quite soon. But if Lisa really can't manage to think about
something else for a change, it's somehow comforting that she can at
least rearrange the power structures here and there. "These Boots Were
Made For Walking", the Lee Hazelwood classic ("these boots are gonna
walk right over you"), is the clearest example, heavy bass/guitar/violin
accompanied by pots and pans and a fun temper tantrum; better than
boots, the hard-rocking "Everyone's Victim" sonically places the
stomped-on lyrics in the shell of a steamroller. "Energy", a 3-chorder
where the fact that she used to be John Mellencamp's violinist actually
tells you something about what you'll hear, complains "you never wanted
this to last... who hurts most? is what you wonder... you don't laugh
like you used to", but the goofy plainness of "I want your energy, I
want it, make it mine, mine, mine, mine!" takes it from a woman begging
her man to revive the relationship, to a vampire asking him if he really
needs all that blood he's carrying around; much healthier.
Germano's self-awareness and humor, fused with her defeatism, brings out
a protectiveness in some guys, including me. But I know from
un-asked-for experience how unpleasant it is to protect someone who
never does anything for herself. HAPPINESS, at least the Capitol Records
version I'm discussing, avoids that trap, and I think it's a great
record. She remixed it for 4AD: minus "...Boots" and the harmless
instrumental "Breathe Across Texas", with two broken-woman new songs,
and with much of the life sucked out of the arrangements. She prefers
that version, and her '94 GEEK THE GIRL is more harrowing
still, widely considered the scariest record ever made. For me, no thanks; even here I insist on taking the 3-chord
folk-with-violin "You Make Me Want To Wear Dresses" as the plausible
love song it reads like instead of the "this is a portrait of a woman
who's sickly dependant and naive" she claims in interviews it is. There
are enough of _those_ here already.
1996
Lisa Germano, EXCERPTS FROM A LOVE CIRCUS
Easily one of the most brilliant production jobs in rock history,
surrounding Lisa's hypnotically wavering voice with the instrumental
tracks a Cowboy Junkies/ Trent Reznor collaboration might've yielded had
both parties taken one tab short of a fatal dose of Ecstasy, leaving
them in a mildly enervated and displeased mood. Actully, Lisa desgnated
these songs in concert as "you're allowed to feel okay with these", and
some songs are positively cheerful with a bit of editing. Prime here is
"I Love A Snot", a marvelous single driven along by junkyard percussion,
a hummed vocal hook, the chorus "You're a snot/ and I love you", and any
number of instruments so imaginatively processed that I literally
haven't a clue what they are (I think I hear a reverbed, pitch-bent
xylophone quoting the piano line from Nine Inch Nails's "something i can
never have"; "Victoria's Secret" contains two DOWNWARD SPIRAL lifts). It
would be even more fun if she could dissociate love from the bodily
inadequacies list of "tubby tubby butt (etc), when I am with you".
Similarly, "Singing To The Birds" (piano, acoustic guitar, violin,
harmonica, whistling) is an affirmation of life, but it does ask "So
what if your heroes have sold their souls? So what if all your dreams
seem dreary and dull?". "Baby On A Plane", the opener and another where
I can't tell what the instruments originally were, is the loveliest song
here, a tribute to new love ("Your eyes, beauty, and tequila/ I have
taken a picture/ this might not last forever") that does at least bring
up the question of why bother-then and provide an answer that, although
not a new phrase in pop music ("the way you look at me"), has never
before sounded so thought-out. Two songs here go off the whiny
unpleasant deep end, but CD's are programmable. 10 weird and gorgeous
and acquiesently non-suicidal songs is enough to make EXCERPTS a
treasure. And the 3 brief tracks building bits of music around samples
of her cats is a nice reassurance that someone, some species, is going
to be keeping her around for a sequel.
1998
Lisa Germano, SLIDE
Since you’ve probably never met me, you’ll have to take my word for this, but: I have a tendency to be analytical sometimes. Still, before you conjure some picture of me as a hopeless pocket-protector-wearing geek (actually, pocket protectors are a very sensible way to store pens without getting ink all over your--- all right, all right), consider the social advantages of this. I can and have analyzed myself past my fear of rejection into asking girls out, occasionally with the positive result that the askee accepts (how occasionally is not a topic for this column, although come to think of it my track record has stopped being embarrassing--- gosh, I _like_ living in Massachusetts, don’t I?). I can and have preseved a thoroughly pleasant crush on a female acquaintance by _not_ asking her out, specifically by analyzing to discover that if she’d accepted, I would’ve had to directly experience the fact that we had absolutely no interests in common. I’ve even analyzed myself out of falling in love when it would have been inconvenient (this trick isn't 100% reliable, true). What I can’t do, and what could have been short-term useful this summer, is analyze myself _into_ falling in love; that, apparently, is too hard. Lisa Germano’s SLIDE has become my practice run for an easier goal: can I analyze myself into loving an album? At the moment, the answer seems to be no.
This was an obvious album to perform the experiment on. Lisa Germano has already made two albums I’ve written adoring (mildly queasy, but adoring) reviews of, HAPPINESS (‘93) and EXCERPTS FROM A LOVE CIRCUS (‘96). The most immediately striking thing about SLIDE, given that Lisa had dumped her previous producer (Malcomn Burn) after he’d produced one of my favorite-sounding albums in the world for her, is how extremely closely new producer Tchad Blake gets her to EXCERPTS’s peculiar woozy and imprecise magic, which I believe can now be ascribed to Lisa’s vision regardless of what the credits say. Sometimes a drum or guitar or violin line emerges crisply defined here, as not before, but only against backgrounds of Germano-esque unidentified floating sonics, so it’s essentially the same. And the songs, although no longer grabbing me with specific lyrics (maybe I’m not listening closely? Maybe they’re not as good this time?), ply the same themes as always: love sucks, loneliness sucks. The melodies are generally strong enough, although with a minimalist bent: “If I Think Of Love” or “Way Below The Radio” could possibly be pop hits, given a chance, even though they duck out on the opportunity for soaring, welcoming choruses. Frankly, if you traded all but my favorite four songs on EXCERPTS for any eight songs here, EXCERPTS would probably be a stronger album than it is now.
Yet my feelings go from adoration before to dismay here. It is, alas, easy for me to analyze (yep) why. SLIDE is dank. It is not horrifying: no “Bad Attitude”, no “...A Psychopath”, to plumb the emotional depths and then dive below, through the lowest rocks and into the magma. Maybe it should be like that, once or twice. But it also makes no effort to engage the listener. The four EXCERPTS songs I referred to were “Baby On A Plane”, “I Love A Snot”, “Small Heads”, and “Singing To The Birds”. These are not, per se, cheerful songs: the first three are respectively about, in part, the speed with which love decays, a negative body self-image, and a relationship based on mutual selfishness. But this is music, not a bloody poetry reading, and they _sound_ fun. That matters! “Singing...”, meanwhile, sounds labored, but that labor informs its deliberately uplifting message, and it _works_. And if the rest of the album is downcast, it has the contrast needed to matter.
Whereas SLIDE is a concept album about low blood-sugar content. Maybe you’ll love it, I don’t mind at all: it’s a very pretty concept LP, with exemplary weird production. Even I’ve learned to like it, if I don't pay too much attention. But that seems to be the plateau of my learning curve here. I can be dismal myself, sometimes. I don’t need my CD player helping out.
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