33 rebellions per minute
"Shut me off, cuz I go crazy with this planet in my hands"
1995
Monster Magnet, DOPES TO INFINITY
I am aware, on some level, that I am expected to provide news. The world of music reviewing is, thank heavens, a relatively bucolic one. It's not like politics, where the latest wrinkle for the year 2000 presidential campaign (to be over within a day of me posting this) is that both the Bush and Gore camps employ round-the-clock teams of researchers to send, per side, around two dozen mass e-mails per day, attacking and counterattacking with research the reporters will have an average of several minutes to verify the accuracy of. That level of franticness -- a mania tied to the equally insane cycle of the 24-hour news channels and the web-surfer world of "information" -- is, I'm absolutely sure, a wretched thing for the country. The central contradiction of democracy has always been that the only citizens with the time and determination to take full advantage of their political rights will the people paid to do so; and the people able to do the paying will always have interests opposed to that of the majority. But it was tolerable when the number of issues, bills, constituencies was kept modest, and the work was confined to 8-hour chunks. That left, in theory, enough mental focus for the monied elite to do their job right: to nurture their own parasitism in some sensible way that wouldn't come crashing down on the prone host organism in a few years.
I suspect the point where that was possible was passed, in the United States, decades ago. The number of bills offered for introduction each year in the U.S. Congress is something insane, several thousand I think, with dozens of bills floating around in minor variations on the same issue (well, theoretically major variations, but if no one has time to read the different bills, their own differences become vanishing next to the difference between either of them and reality). Add to this the pressure of instant information and instant disinformation, in which no one can fairly ponder ANYthing for longer than 10 minutes without Tom Brokaw wondering what cowardice or weakness prevents a rebuttal, and it becomes no surprise that people act crazy. The monied elite hasn't had time to step back and wonder why they're rooting for Alan Greenspan to stomp out all traces of economic growth, or how they expect to be immune from the disappearance of the ozone layer, or why they're letting their money get shuffled into ever faster, ever more invisible forms (today's research assignment: learn what the "derivatives market" is. Assignment for the next 1458 days: taking account of crowd psychology and economic history, formulate one good reason why it couldn't randomly collapse at any moment and stay collapsed. Assignment once and if that's completed: formulate one convincing way in which the existence of the derivatives market, safe or unsafe, benefits anyone in the world except day traders and their mistresses).
So by the time you read this you'll already know whether the election went as I hope (Nader gets 7 or 8%, and Bush wins, so at least the far right wins with an ineffectual, beatable twerp) or as I expect (Nader gets 3 or 4%, Gore wins, liberals heave a collective sigh at having saved themselves from more than moderate Republicanism, and we spend the next four years watching Gore pride himself on delicately enacting only 45% of the right-wing agenda until, Greenspan recession firmly in hand, the Republicans win in 2004 with a _competent_ extremist Visigoth). In fact, maybe you know now, as i'm writing; maybe the polls are clear, just like the election of 1996 was a quaint exercise in validating the Times/ABC pollster methodology. I don't want information to be that up-to-date, that overwhelming. I don't want to see as many subway-stop conversations occuring on cell phone as between physically present friends, as if physical distance was no longer an acceptable excuse for taking a few minutes to not think about the person you're not with -- or, indeed, to think about that person silently, to see what wisdom needs space to surface. I don't really even like seeing huge long lines at the "pre-premiere" showings of movies that are necessitated because the pre that's in "premiere" is no longer soon enough to be acceptable.
Yet, at lower levels, the expectation of novelty does sink in. When I read a music magazine and it discusses an album that came out six months ago, I pause in puzzlement, wondering what release-date shuffle caused this. I'm used to reading breathtaking praises of albums that aren't going to be out for another couple of weeks, and I'm used to feeling slightly left out of discussions of albums by favorite artists that I personally won't own until the album's been out for three weeks, and won't have an opinion on for a month after that.
My writing schedule reflects, to be sure, that I _am_ behind. My Dar Williams page received more hits than anything else I've written, a huge search-engine-driven flurry when her 2000 album GREEN WORLD was released, and while I got a few lovely e-mails about it, the numbers and their timing suggest that far more people scanned down, didn't see any acknwledgement of her new release, noticed also that I seem to use one big lot of long words on her old releases, and backed cautiously away. But usually I fight that, search for a news angle. When I decided it was important to tell you about Dream Theater's IMAGES AND WORDS, or the Miranda Sex Garden's FAIRYTALES OF SLAVERY, I used the hook that they had new projects, also worthy, and then slipped my original point in as background. And having spent almost two months without a functioning CD player (I have one as of this past week), listening through my 700 cassettes that I'd left in Massachusetts until my recent move back, discovering treasures I barely knew I owned, I remember why this news hook is important: it's frustrating to tell you about albums you'll probably never find. I could spend 500 words enthusing about Fact Twenty-Two's THE BIOGRAPHIC HUMM ('91), a likeable and intriguing time capsule in which the band starts to imagine the toys and samples and atmosphere of "electronica" into existence from an older template of New Order, late Wire, and a hint of early Nine Inch Nails. Or the Heartthrobs' JUBILEE TWIST ('92), made for a time capsule that had been interred the previous year, when it looked like "alternative"'s critical mass might form out of My Bloody Valentine's shoegazing atmospherics, R.E.M.'s dreamy early rock intensity, and the Cocteau Twins' pretty feminine near-goth evasiveness. Or Fuzzbox's WE'VE GOT A FUZZBOX AND WE'RE GONNA USE IT ('86), a lost girl-punk classic featuring the didactic half-melodies and unexpected production gleam of Penetration, the joy and handclaps of the B-52's, the saxophones and (sometimes) vocal warble of Essential Logic, the promised fuzzbox, and even punk violin. And maybe I'd convince you, and then what?
And so my tales from Lost Cassetteworld come down to chance. DOPES TO INFINITY is the only Monster Magnet I own so far, but they are still making records, so you can buy this one. It's apparently in the genre of "stoner rock", referring to that other meaning of Dylan's "everybody must get stoned", the one that isn't an egalitarian suggestion to the townspeople of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery". DOPES TO INFINITY is loud, loud like Alice In Chains and My Bloody Valentine and the men behind the Doctor Who theme, all re-doing the inept murk of Black Sabbath's debut together, so that the songs hit with the slow lurid comic-book majesty they were meant to have, amid the grandiose evil murk in which slithy toths can klurve you without warning. The melodies focus on minor-key but wind their way steadily back to glee, like Metallica's "Sanitarium" and Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" rewritten to allow smooth segues into each other. "Dopes To Infinity" opens the album on a grand rumble of feedback that sounds more like conversation, then accompanies the stomping bass riff with twittering Hawkwind oscillators and a manly, blue-collar singer named Dave Wyndorf announcing "I can see by the hole in your head that you want to be friends, you're the right one, baby.... Hook you up with the one who makes time with the sun and who keeps us pumping". His voice -- Cobain's ragged intensity but maybe Tom Petty's confidence and flatness, and the power of singing from the abdomen -- echoes at the end of every line like he's singing from the corridors of a pure metal spaceship. "We are all here, my friends, all dull in space but oh so beautiful", he declares, and we have here the hint of an ideology: grandeur is an end in itself, because what's the world and universe so huge for if we're not going to be there? And no matter how far you go, you can hear Monster Magnet from the stage. A promising start.
"Teenage Negasonic Warhead" edges in on the most glorious use of phase pedals that I can recall, just a voice singing (by coincidence, I'm sure) the coolly new wave melody of the Missing Persons' "Noticeable Ones" over the left-to-right-panned whirring of a battlestar patiently warming up outside the restaurant. The lyrics are either hilariously dumb or perceptive, but I vote the latter or no worse than both. "Me and myself killed the world today/ me and myself got a world to save" is a not-bad idealist's metaphor for the human race's 20th century, and "Shut me off, cuz I go crazy with this planet in my hands" works at several metaphorical levels, from the ecological down to the pressures of growing up in a world where information in its miracle density gives us ever more topics to be confused about.
That said, I just _like_ screeching along with "Ego, The Living Planet"s "I talk to planets, baby!". "Look To Your Orb For The Warning", though it stomps, makes some clever use of dynamics and classical strings and even bongos. "All Friends And Kingdom Come" uses sitar and an interesting buzzy synth envelope that renews its attack a little more weakly every 16th-note. "Blow 'Em Off" has a shuffling melodic bass line and strummed acoustic guitar and violins, and circles intricately like Fairport Convention's "Tam Lin", though the drumming is almost orchestral. "Who brings you back when you're gone gone gone/ Who says your prayers when you've blown 'em off?/ Who keeps alive the concept of Mom/ Who cares to care when they're really scared?" -- and as exhiliratingly freaked-out as "Ego..." was right beforehand, one still wonders if more people could get access to drugs this reality-focused. Then we listen to them tune up their instruments at the start of "Third Alternative, and by the time the BOM-BOM-bu-BOM riffs hammer in, I realize I've forgotten to worry about what this song's "pit of darkness" and "edge of nowhere" refer to.
DOPES TO INFINITY is, in its music alone, a very smart album: extremely heavy music delivered with patience, spaciousness, and the imagination to budget out for extra help, be it the tiny angelic synth "whoooo"s in back of "Third..." or the sprightly Manchester organ hook that enlivens "Dead Christmas". It is music for sitting back and being stunned by for over an hour -- or for bouncing up and down to, depending which clears your head faster. It is music for thinking big. Or maybe "thinking" is the wrong word, and if so, I don't care. We have a world pursuing ever more detailed smallnesses -- the smallness of having 10 extra digits to dial when you pick up the phone to call your office to find out if the price of something imaginary has changed since you left work to half-work from home -- because we know how to do smallness, and because somebody else will first if you don't. Monster Magnet aren't racing. They think big or they _something_ big. I would vote for Dave Wyndorf over anyone actually running, because even if he did something idiotic it would be an idiocy big enough to stare at and learn from. I'm afraid that no one in the business of keeping informed will ever again achieve such a thing.
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