33 rebellions per minute
"Avoid the baked beans and the racists"
1997
Life In A Blender, TWO LEGS BAD
Whoo, these guys are out to annoy some people. Start with They Might Be Giants at their perkiest, most jingle-like melodic cheer. Add, sometimes, a loud (as in garish) guitar of abrasively unconvincing heaviness (has there ever been a band called Plaid Sabbath? Here's a model for them). Give TMBG's John Linnell a growl and/or unconscious headcold that sounds something like Alice Donut's Tomas Antona, and rename Linnell "Don Ralph" of all things.
Add a heavy patina of smarmy insincerity, then sound completely earnest and enraged for the one song you sing about Thomas Edison's vendetta against George Westinghouse (who had the nerve to promote alternating current instead of direct--- "Asshole From Menlo Park" is a true story). Use your single catchiest riff on a 47-second song with the complete lyrics "A man and a woman, and a piiile of excrememnt! A piiiile of excrement!". Write an attractive, heart-on-sleeve romantic, countrified chorus and stick it in between stumbling 7/4 verses (with marimba-rolls!) about "Come close, crawl like a young spider/ Get lost--- I know you're not a minor/ unless all your papers are forged/ then I'm the giant ass of a horse". Sing about "Teens" in a way that satirizes adults who hate the young generation while also showing no empathy whatsoever with teenage fumbling incompetence ("Let's get real mopey and real destructive. Pick on someone else, blow up a mailbox, throw a real big rock. This is a cry for help"). Write a song ("Big Hat") like if Jon Spencer, or perhaps the Reverend Horton Heat, had mistaken Lawrence Welk for one of the blues idols he typically mutilates. Write another song ("Grand Union", with actual guest accordianist John Linnell) which is simultaneously a polka, a march, and a song with a lead banjo part, and giggle while your audience slam into each other in confusion.
Finally, insert pointless liner-note metajokes like giving every song a different title on the lyric sheet than it has on the CD case, and a back cover blank except the word "Bastard". You will, if you follow this recipe, get sued by Life In A Blender, who got there first. Plus, the odds are they wrote way better tunes than you did. They probably even stumbled on more universal issues than you did: "Where's my mail???!"... "You can't hide from your family"... "Flowers surrounded in clover/ I'm stopped by the beauty/ I run them over". And sometimes a fondness for odd details stops being comic and starts suggesting a realness after all: "Breathe and draw a smiley face/ hit defrost and watch it fade/ god I hope she won't be late". Lucky thing the next song's rock'n'roll escape fantasy makes the acute(sy) observation "We'll make love because we look so cute", or I'd have to re-interpret this shit. The fact that they miss my 1997 top ten list says a huge amount about how much wonderful music is out there, cuz this here, for all its obnoxiousness, is splendid, mate.
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© 1997 bokonin@hotmail.com
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