33 rebellions per minute
"the time has come to say fair's fair, to pay the rent, to pay our share"
1983
Midnight Oil, 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1
Chihuahuas, in practice, do not look or act like German shepherds. An archaeopteryx, even if not extinct, would be hard to confuse with a hummingbird, but even harder to confuse with a brontosaurus. A neon, slightly reddish blare of orange will not, one hopes, be mistaken for dried blood. Tori Amos's "Me And A Gun" is a wide ways from interchangeable with anything on Metallica's KILL EM ALL. It is one of the oddities of human thinking to be able to come to general agreement on categories of things. Some of the categories prove, in practice, to be worldwide and active from babyhood: "dog", "bird". Some are culturally relative. Our culture wouldn't regard both of the colors I listed as "red", but many would; American music stores file Tori and Metallica together under "Pop/Rock", but I doubt a ten-year-old would spontaneously join them. What the categories have in common is that they were, for several decades, damnably confusing to psychologists, and especially to programmers of Artificial Intelligence. They would attempt to form definitions, lists of key traits; and the computers would look the definitions over and spit back results that made endless good sense but were, by our standards, wrong. A collie and a calico are much more alike than a collie and an attack doberman, but by the time anyone could use A-but-not-B definitions to convince a computer of that, they'd taught it three new errors instead. Yet a random sample of the partially toilet-trained human set would show virtually zero difficulties with the distinction.
The explanation turns out to lie in a concept given the unfortunate name "fuzzy logic". We don't, in practice, define in absolute terms. We have mental images, normally unstated but extractable through things like "draw a bird" tests, that provide a center to a definition: for example, a collie is an average dog, and a robin is an average bird. The pit bulls and chickens of the world get assigned not by _fitting_ a category, but by being closer to one definition's implied center than to any other center. And because animal definitions are, apparently, pre-programmed by evolution, no one needs to think about it - except when they start teaching computers.
Music as it exists today, of course, consists overwhelmingly of sounds that would not even have been technically possible when your grandmother was born, and structures that in some cases have histories of a decade of less. The "Pop/Rock" category exists, and from store to store there won't be much in the way of disagreement, but neither you nor I was born ready to acquire its mental image. We could, I guess, try to center it through its history, but then you'd end up defining rock as spreading out from Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and the number of leaps you'd need to get to King Crimson's dizzying complexity or Underworld's antispectically dancy sonic tapestry makes that ridiculous as a working theory. The Beatles would be a much better nominee: "She's So Heavy" as a branch-off point for heavy metal, "Oh Darlin" for soulfulness, "the Octopus's Garden" for tuneful whimsy with a soft shuffling beat, "Tomorrow Never Knows" for loop drones, "Why Don't We Do It In The Road" for blues-trash, "a Day In The Life" for progressive rock, and any number of models provided for power-pop and jangly rock. Still, in all their incarnations, the Beatles were so _nice_. Admittedly, the only criterion needed for them to stand as our Platonic Image of pop/rock is that Napalm Death or Kristin Hersh be more like the Beatles than like, for example, Mussorgsky, or ambient silence; but it's not 100% certain that even this is true. Besides, there was never really a definitively Beatles sound, and fuzzy logic is supposed to only involve one level of fuzziness (extending in vague directions from a clear center) instead of two (extending in vague directions from a band that thought "Taxman" followed by "Eleanor Rigby" was an obvious segue).
For me, though - and the ahistoricism of this works only because Pop/Rock is a completely artificial notion anyway - the closest thing rock has to a center is the 1983-87 version of Midnight Oil. Midnight Oil was, frankly, an unexpected band to bid for such a role. Their first three albums, all available only in their native Australia until much later, had been a bar-band translation of early Gang Of Four: awkwardly melodic sloganeering shout-alongs for harsh, but conveniently foursquare, guitar/bass/drums bashings. 10,9,8,7,6 was the sort of unexpected ambition that, like U2 opening ACHTUNG BABY with "Zoo Station", had to begin with its most unexpected track, just to get its fans' heads switched into the proper gear. "Outside World" is rock in its gentlest form of drama. The keyboard's soothing whole-note (or longer) drones are undercut by equally synthetic eight-note bass that edges through uncomfortable chords; singer Peter Garrett gently guides his deep, roughened voice through a delicate melody worthy of Sarah McLachlan; the chorus's group singing is filtered through distance and reverberation; Rob Hirst's percussion never helps with the beat but instead holds back for abrupt metallic half-drumrolls with the jumpy edginess of a car backfiring 20 feet behind you. As subtly measured out as the rhythm is, even it disconcerts by its passive resistance to the intense mathematical regularity of rock'n'roll, where not only is the beat counted in fours, but the fours themselves are arranged in further sets of four, so reliably that "Outside…"'s unnanounced, unsystematic breaking of this corollary feels wrong.
"Only The Strong" carries similar bits of ambience or, in DJ Spooky's term, illbience. But it's more populist. Squalling guitar riffs busy with feedback, electronic dance beat, and the abrupt stop-start logic of Fugazi each get their appearance here. "Short Memory"'s litany of foreign policy disasters are delivered in a rolling sing-speak that approaches hip-hop cadence, but the guitar playing is genuinely pretty like a sparer version of the Byrds. The chorus, group-chanted, is as elemental a demonstration of 4/4 energy as you could ask, and as it repeats itself towards the end of the song it comes closer and closer to the arena cadence of "We Will Rock You", with Garrett preaching in tongues like the Fall's Mark E Smith. "Read About It" is another anthem, but built on ringing, distortionless guitar, coming out nearer to New Model Army. It also, however, like several parts of 10,9,8,7,6, argues that rock can be constructed as easily from threes as from fours, constructing a simple and catchy 7/4 groove from a measure of each. Its bridge, lengthy and ambitiously played and too relaxing to induce more than low-energy paranoia, nods toward what the H.O.R.D.E. tour would sound like if the unifying drug of choice was heroin. The first half of "Scream In Blue", on the other hand, is as uniform and simple as dry ice (or the Cure's SEVENTEEN SECONDS).
"U.S. Forces" has every alternate verse line delivered in the grunted a capella, over muffled thump, of a pacekeeping march song, but the strummed guitars could be early Dylan, the chorus rises (over fake marimba) through a serious of chord changes as shamelessly uplifting as Roxette, and the synthesizer tingles glassily enough for the 1983 pop charts. "Power And The Passion", an unspecific but fiercely rousing paean to political commitment which I long since decided would make a perfect anthem for a presidential campaign (I'm still waiting for the candidate to fit it), assembles another perfect bass groove from three sets of four beats, and uses it as a base to layer softly inquisitive vocals, an interlocked Lego tower of drum machine parts, a measured rising succession of pre-choruses, and a sing-along refrain which itself builds into a fiery horn section climax and, by my judgment, the single most remarkable drum solo in the history of pop songcraft. The remaining songs gently deflate towards "Outside World"'s territory. Folk and minimalism and xylophones drift through as ingredients, and choruses tiptoe sideways through the door in the hopes you won't notice they're late.
How well does it all work? For quite a while I had mixed feelings about that question. When hard rock, metal, electronica, and gentle melodicism are fighting for space in the same song, it's a seriously difficult packing job to fit them all in with nothing being squashed, and arguably, as novices at the task, Midnight Oil were squashing to the point of damage. Spectacularly catchy moments, ones you could build a good song around, disappear 30 seconds after they've said hello, and even the greatest songs here walk with a Frankenstein lurch, powerful but funny-looking. Especially given the increasing smoothness with which their next albums would resolve the various impulses, it was easy to see 10,9,8,7,6 as a noble failure.
But quite often the best way to appreciate an odd system is, once you've gotten off your back some mouthy comment about "Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic", to assume that aliens can be as cool as you are, and to keep fitting theories until you find one that makes sense. It helps, frankly, that Midnight Oil are a super-tight instrumental combo, with drummer Hirst, the person most responsible for guiding the band through each abrupt tempo change, being flat-out superb both on real drums and programming. It's as vital as having talented actors for a play. On paper, for example, Franz Kafka's "the Metamorphasis" was a clumsy short story, its opening line ("Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to discover that he had turned into a giant cockroach") rendering the annual Bulwer-Lytton "worst opening line" competition an eternal fight for runner-up, and the writing not getting more elegant from there. To render the story as a 75-minute play conducted in bondage gear, with the first 15 minutes conducted wordlessly, and with the script still being re-written three weeks before opening night, is hardly a scenario for artistic triumph; but last week I saw it performed by six gifted actors, one saxophonist, one DJ, and the most amazing choreography and blocking I've ever witnessed, and for the first time I cared enough to notice that, once you accept the story's loony premise, and once the dialogue is stripped of its flatness, the plot is a powerful, moving, tragically inevitable playing out of standard human goodwill trapped by standard instinctive restraints and fears. Sort of like human history as rendered by Midnight Oil, in fact, he says, unexpectedly finding a segue back to his topic.
In retrospect, 10,9,8,7,6 can be seen as Midnight Oil's most Midnight Oil-like moment. Most of the disparate impulses informing the Pop/Rock catalog can be found here, from funk to stasis to disruption, from whisper to chant to shout to hum, from fear to anger to catharsis (though not, yet, humor or glee). But exactly because they're too jumbled to stretch out, they truly form a band sound. Songs don't bounce around randomly; they do veer off to avoid crashing into walls, but the rooms are of nearly adequate sizes for the tasks they serve. Perhaps if I could sustain a single metaphor for more than one sentence (or at least, reliably, sustain it that long), I wouldn't think this good enough. But naah, why be snobbish? Life is, among all the grander things it could be, an assemblage of moments. Anyone who can create as many good ones as Midnight Oil will get, from me, one hell of a lot of slack in assembling them.
1985
Midnight Oil, RED SAILS IN THE SUNSET
RED SAILS, nonetheless, will stand for me as the band's masterpiece - and, in some sense, as Pop/Rock's masterpiece, its central one if not quite its most staggeringly brilliant. 10,9,8,7,6 was like an encyclopedia of possibilities, with an encyclopedia's unity of style, in which everything was modified, sometimes via Procrustean bed and other violent means, into an overall sound. RED SAILS's songs, instead, take on independent lives, seeking unexplored territories in order to grok them instead of merely catalog them and take souvenirs. Thus less unified, they are still arranged, for me, into an even more directional, emotionally powerful album flow.
"When The Generals Talk" rips off Depeche Mode's catchy "People Are People" electro-beat and gives it a sinuousness, a sensuality that its robotic origins had prohobited. The earnest main topic, power and subservience, would've suited Depeche well, but the hip-hop scratching and Max Headroomy echoed speech give a newfound playfulness to the break for "introducing the new/ introducing the new/ introducing the new generals. General Electric. General Dynamics. General Insurance. They're the worst generals of all, you know! (ha ha ha)" Equally playful is imagery of the catchy, three-times-and-out chant "sitting on the fence, both ears to the ground/ the fat cats still push the thin cats around". Not that any of these jaunty complaints are false, but the searing follow-up rocker, "Best Of Both Worlds", is freed to drive its electricity home on promises -- no, urgings -- that "the old world is not as safe with the new world closing in/ the great south land can be as great as one it could have been".
"Sleep", built on a winding series of point-counterpoint melodies, shuffles along on a bass pattern too tired to be funk; hollow chorales of Oil-men trying to pass for Joy Division's Yamahas; and an empty ambience to match the physical setting of "spray-can information/ covers the lonely station/ checkpoint for the state of the nation". It resolves into a lovely chorus, though. The anti-nuclear "Minutes To Midnight" keeps "Sleep"s spaciousness and dampened but effective echo, but injects rock beat and evangelical call-and-response; where Lisa Germano might've phrased a tossed-off "we're all gonna die now. C'mon everybody, sing!", Garrett insists "Everybody say 'God is a good man'/ Everybody say 1,2,3/ Set up those gunsights in H.G. Wells' backyard", so that the conversion of wealth to self-destruction can be to all of our credit, hallelujah. The labor protest song "Jimmy Sharman's Boxers" also ducks us-against-them formulations over seven minutes of slow, implacable rock-plus-horns crescendo: "Why are we fighting for this? Why are you paying for this? You pay to see us fall like shrapnel to the floor/ What is the reason for this? Is there a reason for this? What is the reason we keep coming back for more?". Because, of course, even the most oppressive corporation depends on the workers who will accept its terms.
"Bakerman" ends side one, and one thing I find myself missing about the CD era is the whole concept of "side one". "Bakerman" is a wonderfully timed and charming break to the tension, a goofy trombone trio instrumental that would make a perfect soundtrack for a black-and-white movie segment illustrating the assembly line of a bakery. Only when we were ready to flip the tape were we meant to plunge headfirst into "Who Can Stand In The Way?", a slow-moving assemblage of country atmosphere, eerie Moog melodies, verses like Beck being hired to update the Communist Manifesto for Greenpeace: "Now choppers strafe the supermarket sky, and people wonder why/ chopping down trees, got seas of print not a soul can read, say why do I drown?/ build brick boxes one by one, they block my sun/ but it's metal on metal, it's the dance of TV/ if Christ were here he'd camera check, he'd cry so loud the planes would stop/ he'd cry so loud the earth would shake and men would fall in Tinsel Town", and a growl-sung chorus that might be a challenge or a surrender: "Who can stand in the way/ when there's a dollar to be made?". But the ending of the song, though equally earnest lyrically, is funny, a bizarre hurried bluegrass ending abruptly with a self-referential sound effect. "Kosciusko" returns energetically to their abrasive bar-band days. "Helps Me Helps You" is another call-and-response song, but an optimistic one, saluting generosity and unity by stealing unfashionable words like "conspiracy" and "ideology", all of which do, in fact, mean working together for a cause; the jaunty twang suits the good mood.
"Harrisburg" upsets, once more, the rally mentality, assembling sound-effects (dig the heavy-breathing "h" sound as an opening loop), piano, and synthesizer rumblings for a twisting melody that could have made an anthem if shouted at double the speed, but the environmentalist point that "once the stuff gets in/ you cannot get it out" doesn't warrant it, especially when a key cause of industrialized "stuff"s is consumer demand (and buying music makes one a consumer). "Bells and Horns In The Back of Beyond", an instrumental, is a kaleidoscope that could've been designed to show off pretty much every musical style Midnight Oil still hadn't gotten to yet. Finally, it is "Shipyards Of New Zealand" that sums the album. As a final statement, it has a lot of emotional threads it could choose to tie together. The backwoods music and narrative at the beginning doesn't make any decisions for us. The plinked-out, hollow keyboard bed and methodical insertion of vocal melody over metronomic "ah-ah…… ah-ah" are sadder, as Garrett informs us "there's so much to do everyday/ dreams keep on disappearing/ we cling to the walls of our heart/ to keep from coming undone". The song, the album, resolve into the plaintive plainsong "I can't get lost/ I can't get confused/ something's misplaced/ maybe for good", and an album with plenty of leeway to hit us over the head at the end with a fight song sounds, instead, like the world floating away from our feet as we frantically try to remember where we put the gravity switch. And yet, it isn't quite that. Getting lost is not an option, we're explicitly told; letting convenience and conflict avoidance steer us towards the greatest evil for the greatest number is irresponsible, and it doesn't even work. We simply need to acknowledge that staying found might not do us any good either - then stay found anyway, because it's right.
1987
Midnight Oil, DIESEL AND DUST
DIESEL AND DUST is the first step on a stylistic evolution that would carry the band through 1993's redundant but excellent EARTH AND SUN AND MOON to 1996's useless (to me), self-consciously underachieving BREATHE. The stray pieces of their sound slowly, over time, started being thrown out if it would be too disruptive to keep them. The discomfort started being slotted neatly into containers so the optimism and fierceness could roll on, undistracted. But then again, undistracted optimism and fierceness have their valid places and DIESEL is still, without question, a Midnight Oil record, identifiable in seconds without any need to consult the label.
In some ways, they're more impressive to me than ever. "Power and the Passion" should have been a presidential anthem, and I mean that as high praise, but "Beds Are Burning" emphatically could _not_ be such an anthem, and in some ways that compliment is even higher. "Beds…" still contains a welcome mark of overreach in a signature hook that, aside from being in 6/4 time to accommodate both the trumpet blast and clunky drum machine's sputtering into activity, is tacked on where the next verse really ought to be already starting. But its dance-rock smoothness and energy, the hook excepted, placed it on the American charts, where millions of white college kids sang along with a plea for white men to give up the countries they'd stolen. "Warakurna" has the structure and uplift to unite a community, in the solemn delivery of "theeeeeere iiiiiiis enoooough", the Woody Guthrie-style incantation about "some people laugh/ some never learn/ some people sleep/ some people yearn". But who'd be elected on a platform of "This land must change or land will burn"? And yes, a natural 8-beat rhythm is delivered in 6/4 as the chord change that would usually come after the sung line is dumped on top of it instead. "Put Down That Weapon", limiting its use of its gloriously simple loud bass riff (R.E.M. later used it in "I Took Your Name"), is sung in stage-whisper, a delicate tune delivering a warning that might simply be about nukes again, but, through lines about "If our skies go dark with rain, does our freedom still remain?" and "It happens to be an emergency, some things aren't meant to be/ some things don't come for free", sounds more as though the titular "weapon" refers to most of fifty years of technological progress. Whether or not he's right, he's being much too provocative to go up against "Good jobs at good wages".
"Dead Heart" carries "Beds…"s message through spookier terrain, the banging half-note snare drum uniting the "we don't serve your country, don't serve your king" defiance, the undead rendition of "do do do do do do do do", and the shattered echoes of Garrett's "Mining companies! Uranium companies! Pastoral companies!" litany. The rest of the album focuses, except for "Whoah"s evasive understatement, on being catchy. "Arcticworld" is as almost-unambiguously simple a folk arrangement as Midnight Oil had yet tried. "Dreamworld"s raucous rock steamrolls over its complicated message. "Sell My Soul" is presumably against soul-selling, but leaves out the "I don't wanna"s most of the time, with the same casualness as some hit R+B song from the mid-'90's that inquired "Would I lie to you, baby (yeah!)".
"Sometimes" finishes this album in full group-sing roar. Like the previous album's "Shipyards…", it acknowledges difficulty: "I know the cannibals wear smart suits and ties/ I know they arm wrestle on the altar". The message of courage is still the same: "sometimes your back's against the wall, sometimes/ sometimes your face is gonna fall/ don't you let it!". But Midnight Oil finally, after two and a half albums trying (I think successfully) to incorporate or at least hint at the entire possibility spectrum of a large amorphous Pop/Rock category, had perhaps taken the last step to making real, exemplary Rock: rousing the children to scare the parents. Sometimes the best way to instill courage isn't through the mind, it's through the pumping of blood through the veins.
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