33 rebellions per minute
"Bold colors maybe, anything you like; you can be happening too"
1984
Jane Siberry, NO BORDERS HERE
My original love for Siberry came from her '85 masterwork THE SPECKLESS SKY, which I consider one of the world's few perfect albums, so I tend to think of NO BORDERS as a warmup for it. Which is in fact more than half true, but nonetheless is a careless way to treat NO BORDERS, an individual and excellent album. Five of the songs sound catchy and almost New Wave, as if the Waitresses (a charmingly snarky band of social commentators who were a good 30% subtler and more fully 2-dimensional than you'd guess from "I Know What Boys Like") had attempted SPECKLESS's futuristically synthetic, calm, everything-in-place grandeur and gotten closer than you'd have any reason to expect. Those five see Siberry randomly scattering her amused observations on life and compulsiveness. I'm guessing the waitress songs are autobiographical, just from the consistency between them. The perky "Waitress" announces "I have to empty ashtrays, so I empty them. It's right to keep them clean, so I clean, yes I clean, I'm the queen of clean. And I'd probably be famous if I wasn't such a good waitress, waitress, waitress!", while "Symmetry (the Way Things Have To Be)" observes, along with symmetrical kissing rituals etc, how "even though you try to seat everyone on one side of the room, they spread themselves out evenly from this side to that like atoms in a model". She rushes breathlessly to fit all those syllables into the meter, a delightful gracelessness she'd never commit later, but there's also that "you can't chop down a symmetry" chorus to forgive her for, or not.
Meanwhile, "Extra Executives" is a direct criticism of a man whose "card says executive but mumbles just a salesman. He's not sure just who you are, but you might be a good connection. Extra executives with a general desire: I want, I want"--- her blissfully ditzy inflection on "he took a course in sales; he's never been the same" cracks me up. But the most interesting of the five, to me, is the most superficially chipper, "I Muse Aloud", which deadpans about her boyfriend "When he's walking down the street, he smiles at all the girls. The girls they smile at him. I fill my baby up, I fill him up with so much love, he falls in love with them". It's a distinctly Siberry moment, a detachment meant to be seen through at once, and it pairs with "You Don't Need", a beautiful and wounded song which turns out to be the lyrical and musical prequel of SPECKLESS's "The Taxi Ride"; this one has her acknowledging that her mate doesn't need her, even though "I almost have yourself convinced", while the next album has her sending him off, mourning how hard it is to "find the perfect lover for your lover". But the depression is _not_ typical; a more accurate foreshadow of her later work, "Map Of The World Part I", is three abstract speeches at once over whirring synth and a rototom/floor-tom/Keleida drum bed, all concerned in part with the need for more time to be alive in. And on "Dancing Class", where the pristine-ness and the ever-shifting beat suggest a danceable Gentle Giant, the account of her own driven perfectionism doesn't change the fact that her persuasive well-described love of her classes is the immediate cause of why I've signed up for Beginning Modern Dance starting next Tuesday.
"Mimi On The Beach", however, is where she comes into her own, a perfect map of her future best self. The titular Philip Glass reference is relevant: much of the song builds around variations on an unearthly and motionless repeated-note hook. But the title phrase is part of an anthemic chorus, and there are plenty of sonic decorations--- Ken Myhr's midsong guitar, and Al Cross's drumming towards the end, strike me as fairly simple, but thrilling. In a way it's a song of banal evil: "One girl laughs at skinny guys. Someone else points out a queer. They're all jocks, both boys and girls; press the button, take your cue. See the girl with perfect teeth. She picks up lonely guys in bars. Then she takes off when they've bought her drinks. Don't you have money I ask? Of course I do". But there's also the tale of Jane making a mystical connection with a never-met "girl out on the sea, floating on a pink surfboard" and trying to telepath her into doing--- well, we don't know what, but something to set the local cosmic forces into proper balance. She also sings, repeatedly, "I stand and scan on the strand of sand". Yep, that's our Jane. And until someone finds a way to forward the beach-area traffic and and floating needles and litter (and jocks) into the 5th dimension, which will immediately declare war on us, Jane's idea of a day at the beach is as hopeful as any _I've_ devised.
1985
Jane Siberry, THE SPECKLESS SKY
I bought this album in, what?, May or June of 1998, and am writing this essay in November. I'm now a proud owner of five more Siberry albums, but SPECKLESS remains my favorite. I want to say the album has changed my life, and it feels true, but even if I ever pinpoint how, it wouldn't do you much good. My real point, then, is that this seems to me like the sort of album which _should_ change a life for the better. Even beyond the excellent music, which I'll get to.
Here's some ideas how a change might logically have worked on me. I might, for example, have become more observant of my physical environment. Siberry is. Every song is permeated with "a basket of apples by the door beneath the sweater pegs", an "I love dust: that it's there, that it falls", an "on the sidewalk here I see a nickel; well, I guess I'm happening", a "man standing in the field, leans on his hoe, counts the furrows"; a proud "my shop is a long meadow in a winding landscape in a series of elevations with a few cows and a babbling brook", a skeptical "he walks across the perfect lawn (you mean the perfect-perfect-perfect lawn?)", the baffled accepting love of "this is the elevator, I press all the buttons, every floor is different; well, a different number anyway... I knew when I saw it: I picked the right office tower". As admiringly as I quote this, it hasn't marked my own existence; until I decided to write this review this way, I'm not convinced I could have told you without looking that my three-month-inhabited bedroom carpet is brown, or that my mattress (which the sheets never want to cover) is dark blue with light-blue and pink flowers. Okay, that's not fair to me; I'm just not someone who files by color, unless it's in an obviously important location like a Chagall painting or an album cover. If I know my Mom's eyes are hazel, it's only because she's told me so; I still could closely describe what she looks like. I had no problem describing my own looks in modest detail for an inquisitive e-mail friend, but when she asked _my_ eye color I had to look in the mirror. Nonetheless, I could have drawn my apartment's entire floor plan to scale from memory: the electrical outlets, the computer desk and stool next to the synthesizer, the three CD cases and the high and low priority new-CD piles, the mattress of unknown color, the temporary deposit spot for late-night chewing gum, the six 100-cassette containers and where the wooden ones (that I knock on) are, the closet, the suitcase that doesn't fit in the closet, the copies (on top of the boombox's otherwise-open CD drive) of Steve Kluger's Last Days Of Summer and Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres... the living-room couch, the shelf with the record-player, the end-table created from unused packing boxes, bike by the wall, and the preinstalled kitchen devices including what would be the front of the dishwasher if it didn't keep falling off despite repair efforts. I also can picture any bus stop from here to Amherst Center; I notice things if it's handy and I get a lot of chances. But in general, no, I am not a visually observant person, and singing "One More Colour" has changed that only slightly. Though it might work for you.
Or, I could be more creatively expressive now. "Same as the vendor who likes to sing as loudly as he can", I could. "He wants to write something down, sing a song or paint something"... "The only thing left is to maybe fly"... "I love to do what I love to do. This excludes anything I do not want to do"... "I should write of birds and flying things" (even though "it reminds me of dumb girls and bad poetry"). That _might_ be why I'm doing bad clay modeling these days, but I'd rather credit my friend Willow, whose idea it was. I still enjoy creating music in my head but still dislike the process of mutilating it en route to reality (personal quote I saw on an AOL page: "I keep a firm grasp on reality, but only in case I need to strangle it"). I do sing more songs these days, I guess. "Seven Steps To The Wall", which urges that practice here, is one of them.
To the degree that my life seems better these days, which it does, it's that I'm radically more confident about introducing myself to new people, and less insistent on pretending to me or others that the 92-94 school years never happened (self-destructive bad shit on my part, still not _your_ business) in the fear that they'll recur in full revived ugliness at a moment's summons; SPECKLESS seems so much like antimatter to self-destructiveness that I can't imagine the two sharing the same soul. Lyrics aside, the melodies are major-key and frequently anthemic. The spoken bits are delivered with an actor's inflections and timing. The production is flawless, not in the sense I sometimes mean (i.e., all the mistakes seem perfectly apt to me), but in the sense of quantized and harmonized and layered with great care. There's a freeing penchant for lyrical imperfection-as-rightness, however, that actually goes well with it: e.g., describing the skyline as "A crystalline set of dominoes, except not really crystalline, and sort of domino-like but not really". Even the occasional stupid leftover puns ("I led my horse along the latitudes") fit: this is an uplifting piece of art, but one created by a human being, quirky, prone to irrationality, but in command of the machines. Dunno bout you, but I've entered data for a living; I've unsealed and grilled 24 1.6-ounce "hamburgers" per 40 seconds for a living, too, passing them on so 1-oz. slices of cheese could be neatly placed atop them and inserted on some vague rubber subtance called a "bun". Machines under the control of humans, instead of vice versa: that's improbable enough to start a worldview rethinking, perhaps? I dunno.
Information content: Siberry seems to have been strongly influenced, in sonics and vocal delivery, by Laurie Anderson's BIG SCIENCE--- though there are guitars and bass on every track, they sound like synths so it's no difference. But Siberry has a much higher and purer voice, and she layers things more complexly. "...Colour" and "Seven..." are the thoroughly melodic songs, each constructed mostly of three recurring musical motifs. "Vladimir Vladimir" is abstract, half its length being six people's multiple spoken conversations at once over a card game and ambient synth. "The Very Large Hat" is a dance track with the blaringest, catchiest hook of Siberry's career on horns and a big synthetic cycling; it and the 6th and 7th tracks all mix monologue with sung chorus. "Mein Bitte" showcases her many speaking voices and chops bits of speech up to loop against each other.
The eighth and last track, "the Taxi Ride", is a delicate ballad, in which Jane breaks things off with her lover and blesses him on his next relationship. It could be seen as just out of place here, on an album whose only other sad thought is "the Empty City"'s "Hope you have your camera, hope you have some paper, because if no one gets this down it's gone forever"--- which at least implies positive action. But the songs are, explicitly at times, benedictions on us the listeners, and to close with the hardest benediction of all to give, is surely a redoubling of the previous ones. Besides, it's a nice song. It's just a CD, you know. Just because it might have magical powers, is no reason to insist on it. Magic doesn't work that way anyway.
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