33 rebellions per minute
"Chaperones don't have to worry 'bout us"
1998
Tullycraft, CITY OF SUBARUS
Crucial among the reasons that music is getting better all the time is this one: audible competence stopped being a requirement. This is a battle that took place in stages. In the late 1970's, New Wave established that rudimentary ability was adequate to play great music, and punk established that a complete absence of ability didn't hinder your ability to hop on a stage and scream at people or just spit at them. That was the victory that the technology of the time allowed: from SGT PEPPER being recorded on a historic, ambitious three tracks, now there could be 16-track studios to hide your inability to, like, play your part in real time. The next step, awaiting the mid-to-late 1990's, was the ability to pass 4-track recorders onto the cheapo market where any kid with a bedroom and a decade-old Casio could record the next effort at worldwide mind expansion while keeping one eye on a muted After School Special. Inevitably, a few of these random geeks would have talent. Less inevitably, but more importantly, some of these geeks would have no talent and still record something wonderful.
Tullycraft, for example, sport an extraordinarily reedy off-key singer named Sean who looks much older than 8 if that pic is really him, a girl named Jen who doesn't sound much older, and a repetoire of four chords that you've already heard ad infinitum in Green Day's "When I Come Around", the Offspring's "Self-Esteem", and Better Than Ezra's "Good", among others, except those chords were played with something resembling authority. The best song on CITY OF SUBARUS, "Vacation In Christine, N.D." is built around a pinging synth pattern that sounds like keyboardist Chris had already gotten as far as learning "Chopsticks" and "Heart And Soul", but had enough trouble with the hard parts that he just combined the easy bits. "Belinda" and "Actives And Pledges" and "Crush This Town" all want to be ballads (no, I haven't figured out why a song called "Crush This Town" would be a ballad), but seem to make no further progress on the notion than that Moogs should be given the calming effect of back massages, that vocals should be barely audible, that two chords are less overwhelming than four, and that if you're going to play "Bullet The Blue Sky" guitar strafings in the background, keep them waaaay background. "8 Great Ways"'s dating primers avoids inanity only by tumbling by far too fast, and with far too many mid-sentence vocalist switches, to be comprehensible. "Ticket Tonight" is like the Ramones without the production values.
And yet, and yet… somewhere here is craft, and everywhere here is the sheer joy of being alive and making music. The slow songs are sweet, the fast songs sound upbeat and carefree, everything is pretty, and everything stays pretty even after you've noticed all the background guitar parts consisting entirely of wrong notes, or the detuned synth arpeggios, or all the little touches that have to have been put there on purpose because real incompetents would have settled for a spare track of silence. The lyrics are adorable love songs and worry songs and North-Dakota-is-boring songs, with occasional leans at social commentary like the feminist, anti-romance-novel-ideology, "Lives Of Cleopatra", about "You're the one who lost herself in eyeshadow and faith", and "tried to sell her the lives of Cleopatra, loving husbands and a [number twelve?]", and for some reason "strange events occurred at Gary Numan's wedding". Oh, and there's the tongue-twister delivered three times as a square-dance invocation. I'm not anti-complexity in music; great music can be made from sifting through thousands of ingedients for the correct measures of each. But poignancy, snarkiness, and sheer fun should never be underrated either.
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