Where Is My Mind: Revisiting the Revisiting of the Pixies

    A few nights ago I was at a concert and got into a conversation with a friend, about the headliner's new single and what it signified.  

     As the 1990s came to an end, Fight Club became a cultural touchstone for disaffected Gen-X, particularly white males. Chuck Palahniuk's story of a DID-plagued white-collar worker touched a nerve with a generation that marked the split between the time when you could have a blue collar job and provide for a family, or not. Those who took the collegiate route to success were getting into condos and McMansions, filled with Bohemian Bourgeois trappings, while their lower-income peers seemed to disappear first from their lives, and then from any significance in popular culture altogether, once Roseanne was cancelled by ABC.

   We had a metrosexual president who felt our pain and had notorious affairs, when he wasn't caught up in the humanitarian war on the Balkans and shepherding NAFTA and GATT, the trade agreements that took away so many well-paying blue collar jobs. The buffoonish masculinity of WWF was no longer the province of 12 year olds, big money cracked the demographic wide open.

   In this atmosphere, Fight Club became a beacon; it offered a convenient and highly entertaining answer to the masculinity crisis without challenging its audience to rush out of the theatre and take action. In the end, the movie taught us, nihilism offers a solution that demands nothing and has no consequences.

   Hearing the obscure Pixies song, "Where Is My Mind," as buildings fell and then over the end credits, that was just icing on the cake.

   But from there, an odd thing happened:  a song that pretty much no one among Pixies' fans ever considered to be among the band's finest moments, spent the next 10 years becoming the song that has come to define that band in today's music culture. If you asked a Pixies fan in 1988 to name their favorite songs, they might tell you about "Gigantic," "Bone Machine," "Cactus," or "Nimrod's Son." If you asked them again, in 1990, they'd add "Velouria," "Monkey Gone to Heaven," "Debaser," and "Here Comes Your Man." Ask again in three more years, and "U Mass," and "Alec Eiffel" would have been additions.

   If you asked anyone prior to Fight Club what their favorite Pixies songs were, "Where Is My Mind" barely pinged the radar, even among huge fans. Could have been any number of reasons but for my money the most likely one is that people who came to the Pixies anywhere between 1987 and, say, 1994 weren't there for the drone, and they certainly weren't there for the traditional rock structure this song incorporates more of than most of their other work. Speaking for myself and what I can recall of my friends' opinions, we were there for the twisted pop. We were there for Black Francis' shrieks, his and Kim Deal's delicious vocal interplay, the helter-skelter surf-punk guitar work, and occasionally, like on "Monkey Gone to Heaven," Joey Santiago's premo leads.

   And we were there to release joy. Which is why it bothers me, and some others, that revisionists have made "Where Is My Mind" so heavy on the scale that it threatens the band's legacy of subversive pop.

   In 2012, Stereogum published a list of "The Best Pixies Songs."  5 of the 10 were never high on anyone's radar and 6, if you took the Fight Club factor out of the equation. The #1? "Tame."

   "Tame" was an okay tune. The best part of it was the line, "Lips like Cinderella," and the staccato guitar lick, fine. But honestly? Nothing else about it was very memorable. For most people, "Tame" was the short interlude between "Debaser" and "Wave of Mutilation," and that's pretty much it.

  In the comments to the article, the list was challenged, especially by people who thought it was nuts that songs like "Monkey Gone to Heaven" and "Here Comes Your Man" weren't on the list. I thought this response was interesting:

I really don’t think that “Monkey Gone to Heaven” is a no-brainer to make the list, though. It’s a good song, but I would not consider it one of my top 20 favorites. That song and “Here Comes Your Man” are two songs that seem to belong more to that moment in time, whereas some of their other songs have a strange weirdness that is timeless.

     Now, this isn't the response of the journalist who put the list together, but I find it highly typical of some millennials I've worked with in radio; they have a hard time differentiating between their personal favorites and quality that's going to have a broad appeal. I think a huge part of that has to do with "serious" popular music failure to evolve or, more directly, serious popular music promoters' failure to do their jobs when it comes to youth.

   Due to the huge financial success of rock music — 40 years ago — the part of the music industry that serves young white males doesn't want to let go. The catastrophic error could not have been made more clear to me than it was one beautiful Sunday morning when I was kayaking on the Duck River in Normandy, about 90 minutes Southeast of Nashville. As I came around a bend in the river, I passed two young men, probably in their early 20s, in a fishing boat. Poles out, the iPod on, and they were listening to hip hop. In the middle of outer-bumfuck, Tennessee.

   And because we've got a music industry that refuses to let go of rock, in spite of today's piss-poor record sales, we've got a group of young'uns (that segment that didn't find hip-hop) are identifying with music that's 4th or even 5th generation spin cycle. No matter how talented some of these artists might be, they aren't using those talents to come up with a single original idea. And we've been stuck here ever since Nevermind was unleashed and Alternative's turn to the left was effectively killed.

   So the only thing for millennials and younger to do to hear something that actually was kind of, sort of, brilliant, they're stuck going back to 1989 — and trying to make it their own.  It's no wonder some people might have a problem with that. To draw a comparison, imagine some '80s hipster writing in Rolling Stone or Musician magazines and creating such a list for ... say, the Doors. And listing "Maggie M'Gill" as the best Doors song, ever. You know damn well their editor would laugh them out of the room.

  Where do we go from here? The current folk revival offers some promise, but there's a lot of it that's simply Rock music with Bluegrass instruments.

  Oh, wait. Guess the show I was at the other night ...

   

Lily Allen Is Mocking the Dominant Culture. You'd Be Pissed Too, If You Were In the Scene

      My neck is sore from all the back and forth over Lily Allen's new video,  and its satirical mocking of pop music conventions that rely on objectification of women.

      The music business has long been known for sexism, but in the last decade its taken on horrific proportions. Three months ago, Huffington Post wrote an article about how Lorde's song "Royals" was the first song by a female artist to top the Alternative charts in 17 years. That's shameful, considering it's coming from the genre that got its start with bands like the B-52s, X, Eurythmics, Sinéad O'Connor, and thrived with Belly, Throwing Muses, Concrete Blonde ... shall I keep going?

      Anyway, here's a link to the article. Make sure you read the comments and see how many people immediately started taking shots. The hatred pouring out on the page is astounding.

     So it's interesting to see what the negatives are about "Hard Out Here." From the men in the scene she's satirizing, the typical response boils down to, "shut up, cunt." But the women ... oh my. Sad to see so many supposed feminists jumping all over Lily for the use of black dancers in twerking. In butt-jiggling. Champagne pouring over body parts.

     At first, it's easy to get caught up in their rationalizations. "Lily only cares about White Feminism," etc. In the Washington Post,  Soraya Nadia McDonald writes,

Black women are not here to be used as collateral damage in the fight against patriarchy. We’re smart, resourceful, capable allies, but that stunt Allen pulled is not ok, and hiding behind the explanation of “satire” is weaksauce, because this happens over and over and over.

       At a certain point it dawns on you: these women are actually here to defend the abusive patriarchy whose balls Allen is kicking in. That's one of the top symptoms of a dysfunctional society, in the first place. And it was there that I was reminded of the infamous reaction Aerosmith's Steven Tyler had to the movie, This Is Spinal Tap.

     Rob Reiner's famous "mockumentary" took a playful hand to the excesses of a once-famous, now on the skids, hard rock band in the 1980s. It came out in 1984, when Aerosmith was trying to come back from drug and personnel problems. The following quote comes from excerpts of music industry Joe Smith's taped interviews, now in the Library of Congress (the emphasis is mine):

"...When we got into the thick of stardom in the Seventies, I found the most outrageous things I asked for, would've thought of asking for, had already taken place the week before with some other group. It was harder to do something that hadn't happened . . . I can remember the height of my oblivion, I was into doing things just because I could. I would think nothing of tipping a whole long spread, and I'd be so livid – explicit – no turkey roll! Give us a turkey – no gravy, no stuffing, just real meat. No hockey pucks, no mystery meat, just a turkey. And I would come in after coming offstage, and I'd have 12 ounces of Jack in me, and half a gram, sweating profusely, and I would see that tray, and I would go "Yeeow!" and just turn the thing right over. And that would feel good to me. That felt real good . . . That movie [This Is Spinal Tap!] bummed me out, because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"

 And here's what Brad Whitford told SPIN magazine:

"I'd swear those Spinal Tap guys were at half our meetings," says Whitford. "The funniest thing is, the first time Steven saw it he didn't see any humor in it. That's how close to home it was. He was pissed! He was like, 'That's not funny!'" -- Spin - May 1997

   
     I also have a recollection of reading an article on INXS in one of the big three (Rolling Stone, Musician, SPIN) that recounts Michael Hutchence's negative reaction to the film. I can't find it online, unfortunately, but it was along the lines that he found it depressing because it hit so close to home.

      Bottom line: These supposedly intellectual viewpoints, claiming the ground of "Black Feminism" are acting as nothing more than shields for the excesses that we've been through before, and (rightly) derided before.

    Mock on, Lily. Mock on.
   

We Will Rock You .. Yes, They Will

We Will Rock You TPAC Jackson Hall

      There are times when I thank my lucky stars to have been born just early enough to catch the tail end of the baby boom, and late enough to have experienced the late 1970s with the appropriate amount of youth and innocence to accept what Queen contributed to rock and roll dramatics and theatre at face value, and not spend any time speculating on Freddie Mercury's sexuality or whether it mattered, at all. In art, tv, and film, the mid-late '70s and the first years of Ronald Reagan were an explosion of ideas and imagination that still had some value for art's own sake, and people dared stupid.

      Let me veer slightly off course and provide a separate example of stupid, fantastic entertainment  that succeeded wildly: 

       At 35 seconds in, one of the most famous exchanges in daytime history: "Luke? I love you ... you aren't going to let anybody freeze to death, are you?" "No, no, no I'm not going to let anybody freeze to death I'll talk to you later." Genie Francis and Tony Geary sold us the Ice Princess in all its cheesy glory because, in that era, the entertainment industry was willing to dare stupid, and offering support to people who were willing to play along. The above clip was from a show at the top of the heap in the Nielson ratings during its original airing. The actors sold it because for the 30 minutes they were performing, they let themselves believe it. That was 1981.

   
      For Queen, 1980 was the year of both their greatest commercial success and their first relative failure. The Game was their first album to hit #1 on both the UK and US album charts, and it yielded no less than 5 radio hits and two Billboard #1 singles. The Flash Gordon movie sound track, released later in the year, never made it into the top 20 in the US and barely top 10 in the UK. 

      1980 was also the year I got to see Queen at the 8,000-seater in my little town. Because Ticketmaster & charge-by-phone didn't exist in 1980, and the internet didn't either, a teenage kid had a fighting chance to score good seats if they cared enough to get to the box office an hour or more before tickets went on sale and wait. 

Freddie Mercury in and out of a jumpsuit
Richard Aaron photo

      Desire and good fortune put me in the 5th row for the most spectacular, best fucking rock show of my life. It was loud and brash and crude and fun and the light show brought us kids to near-sensory overload. I found the setlist online.  Shit, what a list. 

      And you know what's amazing, looking back? That tour, not just in Glens Falls but all over the place, they started their set with "Jailhouse Rock." And that might not seem significant given the undisputable iconic status Elvis has now, but in where I lived in 1980 teenage kids and twenty-somethings didn't give a crap about Elvis Presley, except for a small tribe of rockabilly fans.  The only Elvis that existed for most of us at that time was still the Fat Elvis in the white studded jumpsuit. But Freddie was a jumpsuit guy, and he dared to be that uncool.  

      So, about We Will Rock You. It's stupid. And it's brilliant. Stupid in how it tries to invalidate pop music that comes from synthesizer use (Queen did, during the 1980s, use synth). What's the point of railing  against the electronic/internet revolution if you're not going to try to break the machine? 
   
   The plot: 300 years in a future, dystopian society, Earth is called iPlanet and run by Globalsoft Corp. Musical instruments aren't allowed, let alone rock songs. A teen boy is arrested when he comes close to creating his own. In another part of town, a girl is arrested for failure to dress like all the Ga Ga Kids in her school. The two deviants find like souls, run away together and eventually wind up with a tribe of vagabonds at the ruins of the Hard Rock Café in Las Vegas. The brigands would all love to rock out - if they only knew what it was. 

    The dialog and plotting that gets us to and around all of that is sometimes contradictory, sometimes drags, and often the humor shoots for the low hanging fruit. In spite of all that it works for the same reason Queen's over-the-top live show worked, and the same reason Luke & Laura worked. The actors throw themselves into it with everything they have and no stepping back to consider how ridiculous they might be. The band members, that we can't see most of the time, throw themselves at the material with no holds barred, even though they'll never be Queen. The same can be said for the light set. Over the top and in your face in a way that you might have to cover your eyes, especially near the end. Everything about We Will Rock You is what novelist Tom Robbins' character Quivers would call, "Vivid." 

    A person couldn't ask for much better source material; many of the songs used are on the set list that's linked to, above. Most of the musical performances work great within the context, and "Somebody to Love" is probably my favorite stand-out.

    It may not hold up to all of the rules for brilliant theatre, but We Will Rock You does everything that counts for serious entertainment. As a testament to just how well it entertains, after the company takes their initial bow, there's an unexpected encore. Before the play indicates the encore is coming, the audience was already giving a standing ovation and prepared to go home happy. I won't spoil the surprise for you, but when you realize what you almost didn't mind missing it's icing on the cake.

At TPAC's Jackson Hall through Sunday, Nov. 17.