33 rebellions per minute
"Logical inconsistency is the Mr. Bubble I bathe in"
1992
King Missile, HAPPY HOUR
"However strange things might seem, the one thing you can always count upon is change. Nothing ever costs exactly a dollar. Which is true but isn't the point I was going to make, I just thought of it so I said it. Everything changes"
--- Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died And Here Are Some Highlights
My freshman year of college was spent at Carleton, a small, elite school filled with National Merit Scholars and suchlike. Combine the concentrated brainpower with a reasonable system of freshman dorm-assignments in which everyone filled out forms that left plenty of room to express personality, and preferred roommate personalities, and it could reasonably be assumed that I would end up, for better or worse, with some fellow well-meaning bookworm like me to painlessly share a life with, because isn't that the sort of person Carleton was for? The problem, of course, is that if your forms leave enough room to express personality in, they can only be mixed and matched by a fellow human being; and that human being is going to be awfuly darn sure that whatever he expected to be doing with his life, it was supposed to pay one hell of a lot more than designing room assignments pays. And indeed, it took very little time for everyone on my dorm floor to see a vile, vengeful sense of humor in the pairings. Me, I roomed with Kurt: a pleasant, friendly, reputably bright kid whose primary interests in life were lacrosse, frisbee, and beer (though, putting him safely above this elite institution's freshman average, his interests _were_ in that order). I liked him, and he liked me, from as safe a distance as possible.
Kurt did, however, have good taste in rock music. He's the guy who played U2's ACHTUNG BABY often enough for me to slowly realize "This is a great record", and who continued to play it enough that I felt no need whatever to hear this great record til I'd lived away from him for more than four years. He loved Simon + Garfunkel, he loved R.E.M., not unusual but to his credit. His contributions to _my_ musical life, though, were frankly what you1d expect from a man of his cultivated intellectual depth: the mesmerizing juvenile rants of Nine Inch Nails, the drunkenness of the Pogues, the goofy retardation of the Dead Milkmen and Too Much Joy (TMJ actually have a lot to say, but there is no evidence Kurt realized this). Also, he sold me on King Missile, which at that point, after two albums led by John S. Hall preceded by two collaborative albums as "King Missile (Dog Fly Religion)", was a joke band whose pointedness matched, and did not exceed, what you1d expect from titles like "Jesus Was Way Cool" ("He walked on water. I mean, that is so cool"), "the Cheesecake Song" (about eating lots of cheesecake), and "the Boy Who Ate Lasagna and Jumped Over a Church" (about a boy who ate lasagna and jumped over a church). There was occasional cleverness to Hall's drolleries, from the urban realism of "Willy went outside for a walk. Willy loved fresh air! But he went outside anyway" to the amusing historical discussion of "Indians", which mocks yet off-handedly demonstrates the Politically Correct (and historically correct) take on the "discovery" and "exploration" of America by the white men. But the music on the jokes was thin, and the jokes themselves reduced to a belief that pigs are funny, cartoon violence is funny, sex is funny, and any joke that can't be completely absorbed in one listen is too hard. None of which is entriely false, of course.
When I ran across Kurt a couple years later, touching base despite my transfer to an affordable state university, he had become infected by the liberal intellectual environment rumored to exist at Carleton, and was earnestly studying to be an environmental engineer, having decided to live a good, useful life on behalf of humanity (and a not bad salary). This pleased me, and I hope he has continued on this path, because humanity needs such people. You'll notice, however, that I havn't cared quite enough to find out, and I certainly haven't cared enough to buy copies of different annual editions of Kurt and store them in wooden containers in my room. I'm sorry, of course, but I just don't recognize this new grown-up guy. The bands he brought into my life have fared better. Yes, they all matured, and the Pogues started boring me in the process, but the rest used their key advantage: they aren't bloody college students, they're rock stars! They can get paid to mature _slowly_! And so King Missile became able to make albums like HAPPY HOUR.
Mostly the rock songs sound like those on MYSTICAL SHIT and THE WAY TO SALVATION had, albeit better: the slow Sabbathy guitar stomp, the Husker Du full spectrum sound, the somwhat tuned vocals making pointless fun of religion, the willingness to repeat a riff over and over (but newly with more ability to vary it just enough). "Sink", exploiting the words sinking, sink, sinkhole, and holy, is a perfect model throwback on HOUR if you're curious. But even on these songs, "VvV" and "the Evil Children" benefit from modest vocal harmonies, and "Metanoia"'s images show genuine imagination: "Quantum plumbing, the pineal gland, the sixth chakra, the seventh seal, enveloping pelicans pecking at the crumbs of enlightenment, retrograde planets plunging {dramatic withdrawal of music} into the arms of America". Furthermore, "...Children" functions as a warped-but true critique of parental power: "and they refused to ditch the old lady in the middle of a busy expressway. 'No way, we're not gonna'.... They were evil, evil, evil children".
Most amazing, though, are the silly bits, achieving profundity through random creativity. True, the country-rock "Anywhere" has no point other than to prove that with the proper context, "glad to be back in the salad again" can be funny (once). But "I'm Sorry" has an authentic psychology of guilt buried amidst nonsense about "I have never played poker with a one-eyed wooden-legged pirate who distracted me with his hook while his parrot looked at my cards and communicated to him by a complex system involving cawing, vomiting, and morse code". "Happy Hour", soft echoed vocals from under headcleaning guitar noise, skewers ol' Kurt's 3rd-favorite activity: "On this euthanasia morning, colorful carnival of pain, let us drink delicious poison! If they won't let us, let's complain". The deserving hit song "Detachable Penis" makes no point other than how much fun it is to build a song out of an odd 3-chord riff, Iron Butterfly organ, and the repeated backing vocal "Detachable penis! Detachable penis!", but that's a point worth making, and the dazed narration is a marvel. The humble folk-singer announcement "This next song is called 'Martin Scorsece'" leads to an examination of imitation as a form of flattery: "I love Martin Scorcese! He makes the best fffffuckin movies!... I wanna chew his fffuckin lips off and grab his head and suck out one of his eyes and chew on it and spit it out in his face and say Thank you, man! Thank you for all of your fffffuckin films!". And while the "It's Saturday" vox over drum solo sound too self-consciously clever for my liking, "I want to be part of the different crowd, and assert my indivuality along with others who are different like me" is a triumph of suicidal audience-baiting. Besides, he's right: "Why oppose war only when there's war? Why defend clinics only when they're attacked... What ever happened to protesting nothing in particular, just because it's Saturday and there's nothing else to do?"
I haven't even mentioned "Ed", a manifesto for life, the best short story in rock history, and the only song ever to mention Artforum's article on "the three most insignificant paintings of Mark Rothko". So if you're curious, you'll have to hear it. Ah well.
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