33 rebellions per minute
1987
10,000 Maniacs, IN MY TRIBE
The most common sort of music consumer, by far, is the person who flips on the radio, or a cassette, in the background while conversing, working, doing dishes, gardening or other procreative activities, or whatever, and who doesn't, in some important sense, even _comprehend_ the notion of putting a record on and just listening to it (any more, truth be told, than I can understand the idea of putting on a record if you don't plan to listen; I live my life without background music, unless you count what's playing in my head, which you probably should). There is nothing at all morally wrong with this--- my best friend here in Amherst, and my two best friends home in Iowa, are of this listening type, which doesn't prevent them from being splendid and bright and creative people--- but the predominance of the backgound-only habit tells you all you need to understand the content of radio playlists. A much smaller but still significant number of music fans do in fact listen closely, even with headphones, perhaps studying the lyrics if the mood hits, awaiting new-release dates for indie artists, and those people are a bit, well, odd. They are, nonetheless, much closer to mainstream sanity than people like me (and, perhaps, you?), who do not merely listen to music but _read_ about it. Often. Reading, if necessary, about artists we haven't heard of yet. I suspect the mere idea of that would conjure, in most people's minds, a picture of a hopeless weirdo, undermuscled and socially awkward with thick glasses. Which is nonsense. I don't wear thick glasses. When I've tried, they've kept falling off my nose, and besides, they distort the corrective effects of my contact lenses into a headachy blur.
Seriously, though, I consider my reading about music to be, in an off-kilter sense, a sensual activity, like the Marquis de Sade carefully cross-indexing the Consumers' Digest versus Consumer Reports articles on chains and spiked whips, or like a junkie robbing old people at gunpoint: it is a simple, functional means to obtaining the newest and coolest high. Like the armed junkie, though, I run the risk of meeting remarkably hostile people in the process. They don't tend to attack me, granted, but the diatribes give off enough shrapnel to sting even allies of the assaulted. For example, there are music-fans in this world who, with no prompting, will gleefully inform me (and anyone else in hearing) that they despise Joan Baez. She corrupted folk music, you see, diluting it into baby-food for the masses, prettily sapping eloquent words of all possible meaning (even when she wasn't rewriting them, and I'll grant her mangling of the words to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" was a bad sort of presumptuous). Okay. I grew up liking Joan Baez, but very off-handedly, so, whatever. I wouldn't get annoyed at all if these same people didn't need to draw the lines to her spiritual descendents, making it clear how equally loathesome--- not just not-to-their-tastes, but soulless and contemptible--- such folkies as Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs are.
What becomes discouragingly clear is these people's belief that they can hear passion, and the absence of passion, through their speakers; that somehow, Natalie's even, quiet, note-perfect elocution proves her hollowness. Now, I'll grant that I might be biased if you'll grant that bias may equal better information, but: the female singing voice I grew up on most was my Mom's, singing '60's folk along to her autoharp strum. Mom doesn't sound like Natalie, but she's in the same clear-voiced reserved category. But ahem: if she didn't care what she was singing, don't you think she _wouldn't sing it_? My own singing voice, at its best, sounds like Stephen Merritt's affectless tenor croon, yet I know very well how much I care about what I sing, especially if I wrote it first, and I give Stephen the same credit. Natalie Merchant's voice, when she does covers, _is_ a bit stilted, and we know for a fact that she disowned their cover, on IN MY TRIBE, of "Peace Train", a single which happened because record company pointyheads decided "You're hippies, and Cat Stevens was a hippy, and he got a hit with 'Peace Train', so we want you to have a hit with 'Peace Train', before you, like him, grow up and start threatening to murder everybody in the name of Allah". And while I don't know the story behind their hit cover, four years later, of Bruce Springsteen's "Because The Night", Natalie's delivery of phrases like "because the night belongs to lovers/ because the night belongs to us" fitted her public image as the sort of person who decided to skip the nun certification program and just take vows for the fun of it; fairly or not. But Natalie otherwise writes all her own words, and puts obvious effort into them. Given that she seems, in TV interviews, to have a speech impediment, her ability to sing articulately and prettily should, I think, be seen as an _expression_ of passion, not a denial. It is fine to enjoy Janis Joplin's caterwauling, but it's not fair to set that as a standard for everyone. Free expression exists not just to make Janis's defiance possible, but to make honest dissimilarity to Janis possible. Just because everyone thinks you're pretty when you grow up, doesn't mean they're wrong, nor does it mean pretty is bad.
IN MY TRIBE is the apt record to go with Natalie's voice. Produced by Peter Asher, who has the Eagles to be held against him on Judgment Day, it is remarkably professional. The band consists of a steady rhythm section with good timing, Peter Buck playing ringingly melodic guitar, and Dennis Drew playing rock organ of the sort linking Bob Dylan's The Band to Jakob Dylan's Wallflowers. Every song except "Don't Talk" begins when Natalie starts singing and ends when Natalie runs out of words. Buck's solos are mild and eloquently tuneful, the verses and choruses and bridges contrast but not disruptively so, the tunes are non-generic but still can be learned and sung with 90% accuracy on three listens, and if everything is danceable, swaying is still an apter response. The lyrics are intelligent, earnest, and superficially seem to be in agreement with almost everyone (literacy and peace good, poverty and child-abuse bad). If I didn't love this record, I might have a hard time understanding how anyone could.
Here's one thing: give the lyrics a lot more credit than that. "What's The Matter Here?" isn't just about child abuse, it's aggressively in favor of interfering with other parents' child-rearing--- placing the rights of a child above the freedoms of a grown-up, which is the basis of most left-wing philosophy (interestingly, the fiercely anti-government Libertarian Party is strongly in favor of using the government to fight child abuse; where I come to disagree with the Libertarians on almost everything is their failure to regard the presence in a child's environment of flaking lead paint, pesticide residues, corporately-cleansed TV, corporately-cleansed libraries, subminimum-wage diets, and freely-traded guns as equivalent to child abuse). Right or wrong, the song is a thoughtful challenge, aware of its own impertinence. "Hey Jack Kerouac" is both similar and different, posing its challenge of conscience (not hostile, more curious) to the self-liberating efforts of the beats. "Don't Talk" is similar too, a tough-love, strategically heart-hardening song for an alcoholic, rejecting comfort in hopes of motivating a cure. Like these ideas or not, they aren't easy. "Gun Shy" and "My Sister Rose" equip Natalie with a brother in the military and a sister carelessly marrying a man (real siblings? fictional? when did I claim to be a biographer?), putting her in the position of having to empathize _and_ fit her beliefs into the picture, resolving intelligently. I'll quote the former, a favorite of mine: "So now you are one of the brave few/ it's awful sad we need boys like you./ I hope the day never comes for 'Here's your live round, son/ stock and barrel, safety trigger, here's your gun'./.../There is a world outside of this room, and when you meet it promise me/ you won't meet it with your gun/ For I don't mean to argue, they've made a decent boy of you/ and I don't mean to spoil your homecoming/ but baby brother, you should expect me to".
She gets away from politics, too; "Like The Weather" is a fine lyrical slice of alt-rock moodiness, "the Painted Desert" is a travelogue that (briefly) demonstrates Ms Merchant's sense of humor (!), and "Verdi Cries", my other favorite here, recalls observing a man on a holiday long enough to feel, without meeting, an emotional connection. Similarly, the music breaks away from its rigidity here and there, be it "...Weather"'s lilting reggae, "...Desert"'s unusually ambitious melody and drama, "Don't Talk"'s U2-ish use of the guitar's digital delay pedal, "My Sister Rose"'s playfulness, the Caribbean danciness on the brief Merchant/ Michael Stipe duet in mid-"Campfire Song", the elegant waltz of "City Of Angels", or the piano, string section, and absence of organ on "Verdi Cries". That said, IN MY TRIBE is clearly a detail-oriented, careful, steadfastly pretty folk/pop record of a modest '80's-style slickness. It is, in my judgment, extraordinarily _right_ in every detail, as well-paced and smoothly layered as it is agreeable, everything meshing into something like genius. The songs, and the belief put into them, deserve every second of it.
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