33 rebellions per minute
"Please put on your avatar masks and let's get underway"
1998
Momus, PING-PONG
Momus, the alias of one Nick Currie, was the Greek muse of comedy, and
PING-PONG opens with a jingle: "Ping-pong, the album, comedy on parade!
Futuristic vaudevillians, thanks for pressing play!", so you're kind of
warned. Of course, a good comedian is going to teach you more about the
world than most serious folks will, and Momus is a good comedian. As a
songwriter, he's something like Pulp if they were a 1-man project. The
solo-ness actually is a great source of arrangement freedom, since there
isn't always the same old guitarist and bassist to add their styles to
every song. PING-PONG, usually built around synth and drum-machine, goes
contentedly from Ralph Records-style eerie weirdness ("My Pervert
Doppelganger") to disco ("Professor Shaftenberg") to several later
dark-tinged dance styles that are not called "disco" due to modest but
precise technical differences and to the fact that everyone's
word-association with "disco" is "sucks". But there's also bossa nova,
samba, bolero, a ripoff of Liza Minelli's "Hernando's Hideaway" (tango,
maybe?), and even garage-rock on "Lolitapop Dollhouse"; pogoing and
moshing are dances too, right? The lullabyish "Anthem Of Shibuya"
combines treble synth bweeps, music box, piano, acoustic guitar, and
electric organ, while the celebratory "Space Jews" has guitars imitating
harps over a wobbly percussion noise that might be what hitting your
beanbag-covered window would sound like, but in deference to my landlord
I will not test this hypothesis. The music is all slow-to-mid tempo,
however, calmly based on loops and simple structures, and all
understated so as to allow his understated voice to be the focus.
Topics, always examined with abnormal precise thoroughness, range from
why wanting someone is good but needing someone is intolerable, to
pervert doppelgangers and CIA employees on a formal mission "to screw
the pants off Japanese girls", to the heroic role of Jewish people in
creating progress, to dubious assessments of progress itself ("The Age
Of Information", on hi-tech loss of privacy, which rhymes "relax" with
"if you are interesting and morally good in your acts, you have nothing
to fear from facts", and comes, among other things, to the useful
singsong conclusion "Cut, paste, forward, copy, CC:, go with the flow.
Our ambition should be to love what we finally know, or if it proves
unlovable then simply to go"). He prefers information to censorship,
however; his "I insert my [censored noun] into your delicate [omit], and
slide it gently down the whole length of your [unfit]" is making a
displeased point. Japan, where Momus is a superstar, is honored by
"...Shibuya" and "Lolitapop...", examining the coming of feminism, in
which young girls seek to "tear my playhouse down" leaving behind the
"porcelain world" for noise, plastic, shiny clothes, sex, and
inomprehensible slang. Momus and I both seem to agree that it is, at
least, a good start.
Certainly "If you really like me, smash the world around me" could be
almost as much his motto as the motto of the delicate maiden flowers of
Tokyo he proudly attributes it to. Earth as is is full of snoops and
prudes and airheads. Worse, it's full of women who go gaga over babies
and Tamagotchi dolls, both equipped only to eat and shit, when they
could be going gaga over Momus. Even his 7-minute conversation with God,
who "gave the world his son and that difficult third album", doesn't
yield advice to cure his obscurity. Probably I can't save him either,
but here. I tried my best.
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