33 rebellions per minute
"Hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates"
1993
His Name Is Alive, MOUTH BY MOUTH
Back when I was minoring in Psychology, I read some simple but carefully argued book which came within one argument of leaving the sort of strong impression on me in which I'd remember the author, the title, and the detailed structure of its claim. Essentially, the book was claiming that the difference between introverts and extroverts - a root difference which also showed up broad aspects of life from job choice to, um, a huge bunch of other stuff - was simply the amount of outside stimulation each person needs to remain at a fairly constant level of arousal. People whose minds worked at near-full capacity even amid dark and silence (me, for example) would arrange their life so as to receive small, controlled, escapable doses of noise and talk and visual provocation. Other people would seek, would _need_ to seek, chaos and risk, not necessarily because they needed higher levels of activity, but perhaps just because they reached the same amount of activity only with much larger doses of help. Which sounds a little snobbish put that way. My friend Sarah has every bit as self-propelled a mind as I do, thank you, and two days into my recent West Virginia visit to her dorm, it was depressingly clear that her brain has learned to process her thoughts _and_ rock music _and_ a bloody endless 6-or-so-way conversation with her various extremely bright and witty and nice close friends, conducted at a hive-mind mid-sentence vocal switchoff pace to make Beastie Boys records sound like Robert's Rules Of Order demos. Whereas my brain quickly entered a state equivalent to shellshock (including my ears' firm belief that they would never function again), followed, when the conversation finally closed for the night, by about three frantically still hours of cache cleanup. The book's conclusion - and in this case, I think it was right - would be that not only am I no longer capable of existing in Sarah's real-time world, she'd be equally unable to exist in mine. Type of stimulation (the fact that she and I have very similar tastes, senses of humor, values, goals) ends up being less important than amount, because amount is the base physical requirement on which sanity depends.
I refuse, however, to give too much respect to the argument, because that would be to give immense respect to its author (whoever he was). Anyone making a grand, all-encompassing claim for his theory's importance has, say I, a basic obligation to notice when his theory says something stupid, and to adjust the theory accordingly. The stimulation-level theory implies, sayeth the author, that introverts should like less challenge, more familiarity in their art and music; they should be comfortable with tradition, and with experiencing the same small number of favorite works, over and over. Risk, be it bungee-jumping or John Zorn CD's, should be the province of the understimulated (or, in Sarah's case, the over-capacitated). Which is, in practice, nonsense. Extroverts arrange to have many outside distractions; music can be excitement, but only needs to be a badge, a sign of unity. It is precisely the introverts who seek the unfamiliar and spend large sums of money on records and art books that no reasonable person would have the patience for; because, of course, it is precisely the introverts who are listening or looking by themselves, much of the time, and don't need to worry about freaking their friends out. My friends here in Iowa mostly listen to the Corrs, and Extreme, and Garth Brooks, and Roxette; that's fine. Their company is just the right amount of outside data for my brain to handle, I don't need the music to amaze me too. I do want music to amaze me when I'm on my own. And while I'm sure my mind is more than capable of reading scriptural significance into ex-Spice Girls' debut solo CD's (and conceivably, next month, it will do just that), I'm often at my happiest diving into albums like the Loud Family's INTERBABE CONCERN, where neither the endlessly unwinding melodies nor the CIA death-frequency synthesizer nor the five-second attention span nor the postgrad liner notes offer a newcomer a handhold. My local friends unanimously have the following detailed reaction to INTERBABE: "uh… it's okay".
A much better practical compromise, if I feel like sharing my music with any of them again, would be MOUTH BY MOUTH, which, in the worldview where an album is new when it's new to me, is a month away from being chosen Best Album Of 1999. Its surface, glazed and lightly echoed in the style of almost all 4AD label releases, is gorgeous and simple. The entire album could, I think, be rendered a capella and still work. Karin Oliver has a wonderfully pure and beatific and versatile voice, singing on "Lip" with the bored articulation of Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne; on "Drink, Dress, and Ink" with the dryness of Liz Phair circa "Chopsticks"; on "In Every Ford" like an alternate Phair whose twinkling autoharmonies were delivered with rock forcefulness; on "Where Knock Is Open Wide" with the solemn seductiveness of Belinda Butcher if her vocals had actually been the point of My Bloody Valentine; on "Ear" with the good-natured fatalism of a Lisa Germano who'd been born with the gift of a golden voice; on "Cornfield" in a soprano hymnal, like Miranda Sex Garden stripped of all stridency. In practice, "Knock…" has radiantly stummed guitars that double in pace and add a bongo-paced backbeat for the chorus, in standard, proven folk-rock fashion. And "…Ford", introducing itself with what I'll nominate as one of the all-time great guitar riffs (picture "Ziggy Stardust"'s diffused into a rapid 3-beat/3-beat/2-beat propulsion), is a crystalline model of classic rock that generations could profitably study: how to switch naturally from 8/8 to swaying 6/8 time, how to arrange three muted drum thumps as maximally useful punctuation, how to partly cannibalize your first verse for later use without being repetitious. Easy to learn, easy to like.
Later, after you're already sold, you can start noticing how truly cracked composer Warren Defever's vision is. "Baby Fish Mouth" fades in on fractured pieces of itself and smidgeons of orchestral visions, but ends up, like "Sick" and the bridge of "...Ford" later on, doing heavy-metal the Defever way, chugging bass riffs proud in their monotony and unconcerned with how sweetly everyone else ignores them. "Cornfield" and "Lemon Ocean" sound as though they really were sung unaccompanied, and simply happened to be the right speed to stick Phillip Glass compositions under (the former could be his minimalist extrapolations of the strings from "Eleanor Rigby", the latter messes with an 8-note guitar melody suggesting U2's Eno-atmospheric UNFORGETTABLE FIRE). "Lord, Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace", sung with unnerving Moonie calm, saps disco and soul of all their African-American, or perhaps just human, roots. "Drink…", though tuneful, is an unnervingly disconnected swirl of what sounds less like guitar distortion than like motorcycle feedback. "Jack Rabbits" could be one of the band instrumentals on Game Theory's LOLITA NATION, snapped together like a "Toby Ornette" with dusky, forlornly echoing C+W as one of its sections. "Can't Go Wrong Without You"'s guitars wobble in and out like a tornado siren that's as unclear about which notes it should be playing as about which direction it should be facing. "Sort Of" rumbles over its Boingo-like minor-key vibrophone sputter. "The Torso" could be Curve, its booming double-whole-note bass shattering into disconcerted flutters of 16th-notes and machinery noise.
There's also instrumental loveliness: Alex Chilton's "Blue Moon" is rendered, via cello and sampled trombone, as a variation on Pachelbel's "Canon", while "Ear"'s gently informative discussion of Vincent Van Gogh's self-amputation is set to a softly shuffling drum track and hints of keyboard. What's most notable, overall, is how unaware Defever seems that any of these elements might not be versions of the same thing. The transitions are rapid and smooth (songs don't end, they just morph), and it's all just backing for Karin, who's unflappable enough to serve in Magnetic Fields without any need for Stephen Merritt's "No! No! Snooze more!" form of coaching.
The lyrics blend religion and sensuality with equal unawareness that someone might think those are separate, too: "My wet ear slides into your mouth/ fish me out/ In the place to faith assigned/ where ask is have, where seek is find/ where knock is open wide/ In the dark, your dark eyes always/ always reflecting". A kiss or a donated bloody ear are equal tribute to a lover, and to the kind God who provided them; a song opposing racism can argue "Push me down and claim to be me, my body's borrowed, have you seen it" as the most obvious helpful counter, as if the hypothetical state of uncertainty in John Rawls's theory of justice (choose your social rules as if you might randomly end up being anyone in the society) might be re-enacted anytime, like a play we should go put on in the garage, hey, wanna?
It is precisely by not acknowledging the levels involved that His Name Is Alive make them work as levels, I think. One musical argument from the book I was discussing was, I'm convinced, true: that people are fondest of a musical work when its ratio of familiarity to strangeness is right at the appropriate level for them. That's why power-pop tends to be fun but disposable, why albums like INTERBABE CONCERN are frightening but, for the believers, ultimately lifelong: one starts out at the right ratio and tips quickly into the all-familiar, the other takes forever to supply enough familiarity. MOUTH BY MOUTH has an immensely simple surface that acts - through Oliver's vocals, through Defever's seamless production, through the pantheism and blithe magical realism of the words - like it doesn't have a clue there's anything strange going on underneath. Leaving the listener with complete freedom to explore the underbrush at her own pace.
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