Rock – Page 16 – Rock Salted

Tom Zé – Estudando o Pagode

Tom Zé – Estudando o Pagode (Na Opereta Segregamulher e Amor) Trama 748-2 (2005)

Often described as a feminist operetta, Zé insists that Estudando o Pagode is not one. But he is merely explaining things so he can confuse you. If feminism is defined as the radical theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, then this is absolutely a feminist work. The album was dedicated to philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)), Isabella Faro de Oliveira, scientist Charles Darwin, ethologist/zoologist Konrad Lorenz and science journalist (and evolutionary psychology advocate) Robert Wright. The psychoanalyst Maria Rita Kehl is cited repeatedly in the libretto. A central concern is how the relationship between men and women is crafted in societies premised on domination and how hierarchies evolve and reproduce themselves, often in disguised and hidden ways. In an interview, Zé said,

“I would like to clarify a bit the general attitude of this album, an operetta about the woman situation.

“It is not a feminist work. Though it is not a machoist CD, it is, at least, ‘masculinist’: It calls man’s attention to the huge disadvantage he has created in his present relationship with women.

“A woman, nowadays, is slightly suspicious and cannot permit herself the easy-going kind of well-being of companionship that allows going from affection to a caress.

“Women have incorporated a feeling of mistrust towards men. She is always tense, worried, confronted with a potential enemy, an attitude created due to the psychological context of his situation in the society.”

This is a work meant for men, to convince them they have mistreated women throughout history to hold greater power. It is to convince men to see the world from a point of inclusive difference, not from a perspective of chauvinism. (Regarding the elimination of racism, Judith H. Katz wrote White Awareness from a similar premise: racism is a problem caused by white people and white people are responsible for ending it, not the victims of racism).

What Zé is really driving at is that this is not music premised on so-called “identity politics“. What does “identity politics” mean? In short, it is about building political power by looking at the world through identity, namely, by building groups having a common identity such as the same gender and then exerting the collective power of the group identity to achieve political ends, particularly from the perspective of so-called “minority influence” but also through coalitions. This is something promoted by the likes of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and it has become one of the dominant aspects of neoliberalism — manifested through “inclusive” policies like multiculturalism.

French philosopher Alain Badiou is one of the most renowned opponents of “identity politics”. Badiou has said, “What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? This is what I believe love to be.” If there is a way to relay the premise of Estudando o Pagode short of actually hearing it, this would be it. As acknowledged in the liner notes, following a lengthy quote/summary of Riane Eisler‘s book The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (1987), Zé wants to push for utopian (gender) egalitarianism (using the past to break with the Gordian knot of the present with a form of argument that Walter Benjamin advanced: using the past to argue for a different future).

This music is also, thankfully, not really “opera” in terms of the manner of singing — it isn’t even bel canto popular music influenced by operatic forms of singing. American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) attended a performance of Richard Wagner‘s opera Parsifal and wrote a piece “Mark Twain at Bayreuth” in Chicago’s Daily Tribune newspaper, published December 6, 1891. He summed up a common reaction to experiencing a Wagner opera:

“The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. *** Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be.”

The overriding reason that opera is sung in such an unnatural way is to emphasize distinction among its listeners and partisans. In other words, the very unnatural way about it, in relation to normal speaking voices, makes it esoteric and not readily appreciated. It takes time and effort (and resources) to cultivate an understanding of its objectives, and therefore involves a degree of “conspicuous waste” (to use Thorstein Veblen‘s term) that distinguishes the wealthy — who have time and money to cultivate obscure tastes — from the “rabble” — who don’t. Also, the “great person” aspect of operatic singing emphasizes that the feats of vocalization achieved by trained singers are not possible for everyone. This promotes inequality, and reinforces a sense that inequality is natural and just.

If the concept of a feminist (or masculinist) operetta still seems unappealing, know that this music is wonderfully quirky and idiosyncratic. Tom Zé is one of those endearing weirdos who can put a smile on the face of even the most bitter cynics.

This is the second of the (perhaps still-counting) trilogy of Zé’s “studies” (estudandos) of musical forms. The way he approaches these studies is reminiscent of Conlon Narcarrow, a major musical influence. Nancarrow composed (and recorded) “Studies for Player Piano,” punching holes in player piano rolls in way that produced music impossible for a single human performer to play. Sometimes he prepared the player pianos by rigging the piano hammers with leather or metal to produce different timbres, and synchronized multiple player pianos for performances in unison. Nancarrow’s works are intellectually curious and profound, while also being playful and having an affinity for popular musical forms like boogie-woogie (see his Study No. 3a for example, which, in the best possible way, sounds a bit like four pianists improvising on a James P. Johnson tune, simultaneously, as fast as they can play).

Zé uses a lot of different musical techniques here, drawn from many different quarters. The opening “Ave Dor Maria” features a processed, computer-like voice, reminiscent of Prince & The Revolution‘s “1999” (“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you…”). The song draws on hip-hop and has a sturdy electric guitar-led rhythm. Many of the songs utilize electronically programmed sounds, for beats or just for noisy effects. “Teatro (Dom Quixote)” throws in anachronistic horns.

There is melody too. The Second Act in particular draws on pleasant lyrical statements, on “Eleau,” “Prazer Carnal” and songs around them.

Speaking about his talents — or lack of talent — he said,

“I am a very bad composer, a very bad singer, a very bad instrumentalist, but the text is the most important thing of everything. Because I am so bad, that is the reason I am here. I am always going to the edges where nobody wants to go and try to work it out.”

The studies albums are the most explicit in describing a process of working through problems at the edges of possibility. Syncretism has always been a part of Zé’s music. Yet here there are as many — or more — different types of music in one place as anywhere in his back catalog, and the mashups are both as dramatically incongruous and creatively provocative as they can be. This is also incredibly playful music. The themes may be intellectual, but the performances are approached almost like stand-up comedy. Tom Zé has always embraced compositions with disparate elements moving not in unison, but together, independently. There is much of that here: staccato guitar riffs and whistles, slowly moving washes of noise, tuneless glissandi caused by blowing on ficus leaves. There is a pervasive tension between lead and backing voices. They jostle. Zé calls these approaches “induced harmony” and likens them to “incipient practices” like he used as a child performing in the Brazilian folk genre of música sertaneja, and like the intuitive sociopolitical life strategies of ordinary people.

The story of the operetta is summarized on the back of the album. It vaguely resembles another strange psychoanalytic epic, El Topo. But don’t approach this thinking that following the libretto is crucial. It isn’t. The music is worthwhile on its own, even if you do not speak Portuguese.

Tom Zé – Tropicália lixo lógico

Tom Zé – Tropicália lixo lógico Passarinho PASSCD0001 (2012)

The late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said, “I believe that if the sociology I propose differs in any significant way from the other sociologies of the past and of the present, it is above all in that it continually turns back onto itself the weapons it produces.” A similarly reflexive position is taken in certain psychoanalytic/philosophical discourses (dealing with “permanent self-questioning”). Tom Zé’s self-released album Tropicália lixo lógico (crude English translation: “Tropicália Logical Waste”) kind of follows a similar approach to music.

Zé is a kind of musical analyst (most likely a logical-intuitive introvert, just like cinema’s Jean-Luc Godard). This album draws on Zé’s past in the late 1960s Tropicália movement, without being beholden to it. This is a fairly mellow collection of music, much like his prior studio album Estudando a Bossa: Nordeste Plaza. He is ironically using bits of popular music, some old, some newer. What is different here is that unlike recent efforts his appropriations are in a way more crude, less nuanced. This is kind of the point! What made Zé’s misadventures in Tropicália decades ago so unique is that they dissolved many of the contradictions of straight-up cynicism. When he appropriated bits of mass culture he didn’t do so just to cheaply trade on a kind of guilty-pleasure enjoyment in kitsch but to elevate the appropriation in relation to the content, honoring the sources without becoming beholden to them. That last part was always the key. When rudimentary cynics like Frank Zappa do things like this, they tend to prove in the end that they are really beholden to the past and can at most recall it to reinforce its underpinnings (and try to show off in the process). Zé, on the other hand, robs the past of its coercive force, opening up the future to other possibilities. He’s doing that again here. But this man is in his late 70s!

Tropicália lixo lógico is an excellently produced album. Much like Jogos de armar (Faça Você Mesmo), this is as conventional and approachable a production style as you will find anywhere from Zé, while also retaining the man’s essential weirdness and edginess. There are hints toward indie rock, bossa nova, and so forth, with fewer and softer angular rhythms than on his most experimental recordings. But he still has tricks up his sleeve. One of his best devices is to cut off many of the songs. Rather than fade out, or reach some kind of clear resolution, many of the songs are cut off mid-verse and the next song abruptly begins. Consider this a litmus test. If something like that sounds absurd to you, perhaps it is time to move along. If the idea of cutting off the ends of the songs to refuse any sort of resolution sounds kind of interesting, then buckle in for a lifelong fascination with one of Brazil’s most fascinating musical figures — this probably won’t be your last Zé recording.

The Mothers of Invention – Freak Out!

The Mothers of Invention – Freak Out! Verve V6-5005-2 (1966)

There is something really curious about Mothers of Invention records. They rely on a kind of double irony. That is to say that there are songs like “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” and “Any Way the Wind Blows” that look back to 1950s doo-wop and pop/rock with a dose of sarcasm, or “Wowie Zowie” with a melody near the end cribbed from The 4 Seasons‘ 1962 sunshine pop hit “Sherry,” but the sarcasm is itself ironic and sarcastic. It’s like this: given the wave of counterculture that was underway in the late 1960s (a year after the release of Freak Out! was the “summer of love”), the only way for the Mothers to hold fast to the pre-countercultural norms was to do those things ironically. So when someone hears a song like “Go Cry on Somebody Else’s Shoulder” the listener hears sarcastic, mocking vocals, she is really supposed to like the song and not sarcastically dismiss it. In the liner notes there is a comment about “Any Way the Wind Blows” that says, “It is included in this collection because, in a nutshell, kids, it is…how shall I say it?…it is intellectually and emotionally accessible for you. Hah! Maybe it is even right down your alley!” But why put a song like this on the album at all — or write it in the first place — if it is only for squares? And why go on to do Cruising With Reuben & The Jets, an entire album of doo-wop? Again, this is why the real intent is to like the song for its retro qualities. Really, what is wrong with that though? Probably the best career move bandleader Frank Zappa ever made was to sign the Philadelphia doo-wop group The Persuasions to his record label! In some ways, the doo-wop tracks are some of the very best cuts on the entire double album.

One of the most successful rockers is “Trouble Every Day.” This song, commenting on the Watts Riots and race relations generally, turns out to have less of an Abbie Hoffman “militant activist” vibe than a Hubert H. Humphrey “compassionate liberal” vibe!

All this positions The Mothers not as a faithful part of the counter-culture, but as part of the counter-counterculture. The band’s labelmates (sometimes appearing together on tour) The Velvet Underground represented a real musical revolution. But Zappa would mock them on stage. Zappa, and by extension The Mothers, were basically crypto-conservatives (of the liberal-libertarian-conservative strain). If that seems like an odd characterization, it is in the sense of adapting to and blunting revolutionary impulses to avoid a real revolution — think Igor Stravinsky instead of Arnold Schönberg or The New Deal instead of the Bolsheviks.

Challenging that view, however, are songs like “I Ain’t Got No Heart,” “How Could I Be Such a Fool,” “You Didn’t Try to Call Me,” and “I’m Not Satisfied” that appropriate easy listening, marching band and plaid suit old boys club horn section atmospherics, and place them alongside rock guitar riffs. According to one source (not verifiable by any other online source), Zappa attended musical training by Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the use of wildly disparate musical styles was an approach that showed up in the work of many such students — Zappa’s fellow student Rogério Duprat from Brazil employed that effect with more startling originality and subversive power on records for Gilberto Gil and others in the tropicália movement. Zappa’s use of this technique is the most rudimentary. It seeks to provide a contrast, but never really succeeds in mocking the underlying premises of the horn section music. It just shows up like a fart joke (and those kinds of jokes were mainstays of The Mothers’ repertoire). The lengthy closer “The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet” was an unfinished track that Zappa and the band did not want included. The the abstractions of “Help, I’m a Rock (Suite in Three Movements),” “It’s Can’t Happen Here,” and “Who Are the Brain Police?” add other layers and music elements to the mix — only the first part of “Help I’m a Rock” really succeeds though.

This album is decent. It is worth giving a listen every once and while, but doesn’t quite come together enough to likely be a perennial favorite. As my friend Brian put it, “Freak Out! is a more important release than it is necessarily a great album.” The Mothers did better with We’re Only In It for the Money. And other artists later improved on many of the ideas here: The Grateful Dead on Anthem of the Sun and CAN on Tago Mago with a hybrid of rock and modern classical; Brazilian tropicalismo with juxtaposition of seemingly opposing elements; and The Red Krayola with absurdist humor on the likes of God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It. But Freak Out! still deserves credit for attempting a unique blend of countercultural rock, retro pop, and avant garde modern classical musics. It clearly tries to normalize the weirder elements — to prove that the weird stuff isn’t really weird at all. Yet it was making these attempts and making its experiments sooner than most. The floodgates of truly revolutionary music would only really open in 1967 and 68. Legendary producer Tom Wilson deserves special credit for the album’s best elements. He summoned a lot of resources to help make an album of base humor with the finest studio recording techniques and equipment of the day.

Bruce Springsteen – The River

Bruce Springsteen – The River Columbia PC2 36854 (1980)

So I was standing around with some people talking to critic Dave Marsh years ago, and Marsh was going on about how The River was the best of Springsteen. So I gave it a try. I can’t say I agree, at all. Another reviewer cast this off as too much like Billy Joel. These songs are a bit too slick for their own good, and self-indulgent too. Ahh, the 1980s were clearly underway by this point I guess. But, there are still some good tunes here, and the jangly 12-string guitar adds a nice touch. “Hungry Heart” is great (sounding exactly like what that kind of song should sound like), and “Sherry Darling” is a great song, somewhat ineptly produced (too much glitz and clutter). “The Ties That Bind” is the other really good one. There is a handful of other pretty decent cuts and the rest forgettable — really there is nothing to recommend about the entire second disc, which should have been omitted. Springsteen often does the thing that was by this point his shtick: the wall of sound that makes his narratives seem inevitable, with the band members shouting along trying to be heard among the din. This, I guess, is Springsteen’s go-to metaphor for American society. His sense of irony is like a fart in the wind though — people tend to like Springsteen for all his worst qualities and the irony can’t stop that from happening.

Just to draw out these points a little further, “The Ties That Bind” illustrate an important aspect of Springsteen and his politics. He came along right when the New Deal coalition was falling apart, and he represented an ultimately failed attempt to prop it up — Johnny Cash was doing this too around this time. Anyway, the point can be illustrated with reference to Sigmund Freud‘s notion of the primal father figure. Not necessarily a male parent, but any authority, the “father” represented the injunction to sacrifice one’s own enjoyment for the good of family/community/society. But the modern father instead commands individual enjoyment. This is basically what Christopher Lasch described as The Culture of Narcissism. Lament for this shift — anomie — practically pours from the lyrics of “The Ties That Bind.” But it is a a kind of inauthentic lament, because it dwells in a pre-established ethics that can’t help but contribute to the decay it purports to oppose, if for no other reason than, in hindsight, it was insufficient to prevent its own demise, though mostly because it looks backwards to recreation of dubious traditions rather than forward towards authentic freedom.

Tom Zé – Correio da Estação do Brás

Tom Zé – Correio da Estação do Brás Continental 1-01-404-177 (1978)

Tom Zé was one of the most explicitly political of all the Brazilian Tropicalistas. Later in his career he would call his music imprensa cantada (“sung journalism”). But his early musical efforts found him associated with the CPC (Centro Popular de Cultura), which was part of the left-wing National Students’ Union that was in turn linked to the Brazilian communist party. This was during the time before socialist President João Goulart was ousted in a U.S.-backed, right-wing military coup. As Christopher Dunn has commented, “Zé’s songs often reminded listeners of deep class inequalities and forms of social exclusion in the sprawling metropolis.” There was a dogged tendency for his music to mock powerful elites and their culture, revealing their hypocrisies and contradictions. Like others who were a part of the tropicalismo movement, he utilized cultural artifacts considered base and distasteful by elites, developing a kind of solidarity with the underclass by merging the highbrow and the lowbrow. From a slightly different perspective, these negated or abject cultural artifacts ironically stand for universality, as a point of exception in the allegedly democratic global capitalist (neoliberal) system, giving lie to the supposed goodness and fairness of society by showing how the cleaving of musical forms into the acceptable and unacceptable symbolically reinforces domination of the weak by the powerful and by uniting different musical factions with a common purpose (namely, fighting oppression). This had the effect of erasing the subtly elitist satisfaction derived from the very essence of making highbrow/lowbrow distinctions at all (quite apart from the “substance” of the highbrow or lowbrow). He had a unique, outsider’s ability to do this as someone who grew up in what was considered the rural, inland netherworld of Irará, Bahia (north of the state capital Salvador), silently controlled by absentee landlords, but relocated to a big city as an adult in order to work from the urban metropolis of São Paulo. Even his tropicalist contemporaries noted his rural accent when he sang. His outsider perspective never really went away, but it mutated into concerns for deeper, less obvious topics.

Zé stuck with some of the underlying impulses of tropicalismo longer than most of the original cadre of proponents, even as his precise methods did depart from the original tropicalist manifesto over time. As my friend Toni put it:

Years after the great innovators Caetano & Gil began to embrace the banality of western popular culture instead of ridiculing it, the true genii stand out. João Gilberto has retained his integrity by isolating himself from the popular spotlight and the Mutants are respectfully celebrating their past glory, just to pull some arbitrary examples from the golden period of Brazilian music. This is all fine and dandy, but Tom Zé, always the underdog, is not satisfied with just rehashing his former glory: he has to innovate, to create, to explore.

These qualities were unmistakable during Zé’s late-career resurgence. Yet in the late 1970s, as his popularity was already starting to fade, there was still a question of whether Tom Zé was continuing to innovate or starting to capitulate.

Like most tropicalismo, Zé’s music had to this point relied heavily on ironic use of popular musical forms with kitsch value. But here, he suddenly seems to be using some popular 1970s rock forms more directly and earnestly (“Morena,” “Carta”). There are some warm rock keyboards and near crooning. So, while listeners had always needed to sort out the hidden meaning of Zé’s cutting irony, there was also the added challenge of deciding when he was being ironic at all. He dabbled with this before (see “O riso e a faca” from his second self-titled album Tom Zé), but the technique was more prevalent here. This is perhaps why Correio da Estação do Brás is seen as an abrupt rupture in Zé’s recorded catalog. For some, this was when he washed up and his music lost what it once had. Others like the album — though some consider it under-appreciated, most Zé admirers rarely place it above the middle of the pack of his albums.

One way to look at Correio da Estação do Brás is to give Zé credit for recognizing that he could not just keep making the same kind of oddball music forever. Given that the man’s career prospects declined in the 1970s, perhaps one can read his emphasis on conventional song structures as being about finding enjoyment (if not remuneration) outside of the revolutionary content of his earlier work. But there also seems to be recognition that the ironic distance that his music long proposed was maybe smaller than first assumed (or should be smaller). An artist cannot stand completely apart from the concerns of mass audiences, even if those mass audiences are driven by crass consumerism and distasteful inequities. There are forms of dependency involved. But then what? Zé strikes an intriguing balance, carrying forward a lot of what he had been doing before, but also trying to make use of whatever redeeming elements of popular 1970s rock he could. He attempts both of these things at the same time. In that way he refuses to stand above or apart from the the lowbrow and the social groups associated with it. By adapting to “easy” popular forms, but not completely or consistently, Zé ends up making what, from a conceptual standpoint, is among his more difficult albums, even if from a technical standpoint it contains some of his most unabashedly pleasing and straightforward music. For instance, what isn’t to like about his plaintive, mellow singing on “Morena”? Is it that far off from the Commodores’ 1978 R&B hit “Three Times a Lady”? Yet placing some lovely melodic statements among ironic ones Zé makes the listener question what she enjoys, and whether she should be expected to enjoy what she hears. The listener cannot automatically enjoy an assuredly superior, ironic posture. In fact, the listener may be slightly horrified to have the self-image of ironic superiority shattered. This is a very different kind of message than Zé’s earlier work, but still a daring and revolutionary one in its own way.

So, on the one hand, listeners skeptical of the weirdness perennially rejoiced by many Zé fans may find that Correio da Estação do Brás presents familiar music elements that are superficially appealing, making this a potential entry point to his music. On other hand, the reason Tom Zé is known internationally is not for singing smooth pop melodies but for challenging and reconstructing them to present new and different meaning, so listeners who balk at those parts of this album that push against convention will perhaps venture no further into his recorded works from here. That is the challenge presented by Correio da Estação do Brás.

There is something to be said that this album should not be overlooked, though, even if its most nuanced accomplishments may only become apparent when contextualized against what led up to it. It is really quite a good album. Then again, it is a bit difficult to locate a bad Zé album, in a career as irrevocably unique as any in pop music.

Crass – Penis Envy

Crass – Penis Envy Crass Records 321984/1 (1981)

Crass delivered their finest studio album with Penis Envy, though the album set in motion the forces that would eventually dissolve the band. Later faced with obscenity charges, for this album and others, the legal battle to eventually beat most of those charges (except for the song “Bata Motel”) put a strain on the group they couldn’t really survive — their decision to disband in 1984 also coincided with supposedly earlier plans to call it quits after a few years. Though really by the mid 1980s the punk movement had dissipated and the legal troubles, changes in personal outlook and interpersonal frictions amongst members almost seem like convenient excuses for the band to call it quits. Still, the essence of Penis Envy is a classic punk dare: mocking the powerful to provoke them to show their impotence and powerlessness to prevent the mockery. Sure, the lawsuit left the band with some wounds, but the music survived, to embolden anyone who hears it.

The subject matter of the songs is decidedly feminist. The album title refers to Sigmund Freud‘s theory of female sexuality, a concept that has been criticized — as recounted in The Story of Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud called it “one of Freud’s more absurd theories” in a 1983 interview — but in some ways aspects were rehabilitated by Jacques Lacan‘s way of symbolizing jouissance that saw “penis envy” as just a signifier of a fundemental lack (among many other signifiers of lack) and giving women greater awareness and choice in such matters than men. The song “Where Next Columbus?” invokes C.G. Jung, and goes so far as to critique medical profiteering — “You’re not yourself, the theory says / But I can help, your complex pays / Another’s hope, another’s game / Another’s loss, another’s gain.” With all the other thinkers mentioned in the song, the song suggests the limits of ideas and intentions, and that even the greatest thinkers can’t stop others from using their work for repressive control, and to amass power for nefarious, self-serving purposes. Or maybe it is just a contrarian slam against famous intellectuals of all sorts. All that aside, Crass can invoke the term “penis envy” to critique patriarchy.

The opener, “Bata Motel,” offers a first-person account of a submissive, oppressed, hyper-sexualized woman. The premise of the song is to make male fantasies seem crude and horrible, building the case that those perpetuating such treatment of women should feel guilt.

Most of lyrics avoid casting blame on individuals. For instance, “Systematic Death” is an indictment of exploitative systems, such as patriarchy and capitalism.

“Our Wedding” was given away as a flexi-disc (cheap 45 RPM recordings on flexible square sheets) with the magazine Loving as a prank — credited to Creative Recording And Sound Services (which translates to the acronym CRASS). It was tacked on to Penis Envy. The song itself is a parody of sappy music. Though it is also not a bad song.

A big part of what makes Penis Envy so great is the musicianship. Eve Libertine handles most of the vocals, with Joy de Vivre singing one song (“Health Surface”). Libertine is a more versatile and adept vocalist than Steve Ignorant, Crass’ primary vocalist who does not appear on the album. Drummer Penny Rimbaud is able to summon lilting military march sounds, jazzy fills, and itinerant punk rumbles. There are heavy bass lines here, from Pete Wright, that are fairly prominent in the recording mix. The guitars (Phil Free and B.A.Nana [AKA N.A. Palmer]) noodle around, usually in an icy, brittle, high treble range, never quite assuming a dominant role. It is the very deferential stance of the musicians, true to their anarchist political roots, that refuses to privilege any one performer or part above the others. Yet the focus and structure on Penis Envy advances the music further than the sort of chaotic, same-sounding fury of most stereotypical anarcho-punk.

There is a thing about an “anarchistic” approach to music making. When the musicians simply play whatever they want, with only the loosest sense of pre-planning, the process of making the music may avoid exploitation of the musicians, but the results can put a heavy burden on listeners to make sense of something that presents no clear meaning. On the one hand, there is an attempt to avoid imposing beliefs on a listener, who can make his or her own meaning. But the real catch is that musicians cross a line, of sorts, when they actually go about recording and releasing such material, which strips them of any claim of being completely above or apart from coercive imposition of meaning on the listener. This is a tricky issue, and there is no right or wrong level of demands upon a listener. The band is sometimes criticized for putting too many demands on the listener with their later works, like Yes Sir, I Will (1983). But Penis Envy is probably the most coherent (and melodic) of all of Crass’ full-length albums. There is much more focus and deliberate songwriting on Penis Envy than earlier (or later) Crass recordings. There are some similarities to Lora Logic‘s band Essential Logic. Though, surprisingly, on these recordings Crass seems less improvised and less experimental.

To get into Crass, typically, listeners have to be willing to be (righteously) angry. Most of their music is built around takedowns of hypocrites and evildoers. They pointed a lot of fingers. They could get away with it because they lived up to their ideals more than the next band. Still, this wasn’t for everyone. Penis Envy doesn’t come across quite the same way, though. The approach is more bait-and-switch. They try to put forward concepts that are kind of widely accepted, then they render those concepts problematic. Decades later, this still holds up as something that pushes all the right buttons and pushes in the right direction toward a better world.

Crass – Stations of the Crass

Crass – Stations of the Crass Crass Records 521984 (1979)

People tend to say things like this about Crass: “I have no problem with mixing music and politics and I like the lyrics, but when the music is shitty, why bother??” Usually this is more of a political statement that it appears. If there is to be a real (anarchist) revolution, then the music and other cultural forms of the old regime must change too. The sorts of music that rely on “great individual” tropes and reinforce hierarchies of power would all need to go. Does anyone accuse Céline Dion or her ilk of being unmusical? Symbolically, though, her music is all about the “great singer” and therefore inexorably bound to an undemocratic way of life. So, really, these statements amount to saying that Crass’ politics are fine as far as they are consistent with political liberalism, but their music makes an unforgivable step beyond liberalism and therefore must be condemned. Noam Chomsky, probably the most well-known public intellectual with anarchist beliefs, has made this point repeatedly, that liberals draw a line in the sand that they say cannot be crossed (to the left). Well, Crass had no intention of ever recognizing such lines in the sand. They weren’t going to get mired in an endless liberal discussion that guards the safety of the status quo by limiting action to the confines of polite debate.

Drummer Penny Rimbaud wrote an essay/memoir entitled The Last of the Hippies: An Hysterical Romance. While factions of the punk movement saw themselves as opposed to the hippes/yippies of the 1960s, others — like Crass — saw themselves as an extension of that earlier counter-cultural movement. Yet, a common criticism during their heyday, as noted in the The Story of Crass, was that they advocated a middle-class sort of revolution. Some critics saw a proletarian revolutionary stance as needing to be more communist than anarchist.

Regardless of what politics and ideologies listeners bring to Crass’ music, the important point is that Crass’ music was inexorably tied to their own politics. It becomes rather difficult to separate out the politics from the musical forms. What is intriguing about one should be intriguing about the other. The flaws of one are the flaws of the other, too. The criticisms from the communists hold some weight, though at the same time Crass’ music/politics hold some promise of ridiculing power in a manner that is difficult to corrupt — just try to pigeonhole Crass as “sellouts”!

The follow-up album Penis Envy was more conventionally musical, and indeed a better album as such. Stations of the Crass has a more in-your-face sound. The guitars are louder and noisier, and a more prominent part of the music here. The songs rely on mockery and puns (“Chairman of the Bored”). Right from the opener, “Mother Earth,” Crass make clear that noise, the unwanted sound from the standpoint of established society, would be part of what they relied upon and celebrated. The twin guitars deftly grind away. This might not quite have the raw force of American sludge rock that would emerge shortly, but it shares some characteristics.

Tom Zé – Brazil 5: The Hips of Tradition: The Return of Tom Zé

Tom Zé – Brazil 5: The Hips of Tradition: The Return of Tom Zé Luaka Bop 9 45118-2 (1992)

After a rediscovery by Talking Heads frontman David Byrne following years drifting into obscurity, Tom Zé signed to Bryne’s new label Luaka Bop, and picked up an international recording career. The Hips of Tradition finds Zé full of ideas, if a little rusty in the studio. “O pão nosso de cada mês” is basically the template for his entire next album Fabrication Defect: Com defeito de fabricação — those iconic staccato guitar licks (already present on “Mã” from 1975’s Estudando o samba and “Pecado, rifa e revista” from Correio da Estação do Brás) are all over that follow-up album. The groove from the opener “Ogodô, Ano 2000” would reappear on “Chamegá” from Jogos de Armar (Faça Você Mesmo). His manner of singing intentionally “bad” vocals over sweet bossa nova instrumental accompaniment would return on Estudando a Bossa: Nordeste Plaza. The main liability with The Hips of Tradition is that most of the middle mass of the album seems undeveloped. He’s experimenting. And that’s great. But the experiments aren’t all successful — yet. He’s still a bit tentative with some of the ideas.

What was kind of new here as compared to Zé’s early career was the sheer zaniness. He did experimentation before. His older music was also funny and full of cutting sociopolitical commentary too. But the dramatic, almost lighthearted, flighty, comically endearing way of doing all those things emerged in a new way on this album, more manic than before, when instead a degree of lethargic, pensive seriousness appeared regularly. This is even reflected in the way his recordings are presented. Especially in the 1970s, his albums usually featured his image, looking serious, like an intellectual, whereas from the 1990s on he was typically shown jumping, or with crazy looking action shots, and even a title like “Hips of Tradition” implies dancing and movement. There was more of an emphasis on action and doing without relinquishing a claim to being intelligent. This was a change partly made possible due to the end of the Brazilian dictatorship (he has said, “at the time of the dictatorship when you wanted no problems you had to appear to be a serious person.”).

The Hips of Tradition is a good and worthy entry in Tom Zé’s catalog of recordings, though in the coming years he would greatly expand his faculty with studio recording techniques, and also his arsenal of custom, improvised instruments and melodic figures. All this is to say that this album does not disappoint, yet there are perhaps better entry points for listeners new to Zé’s music.

CAN – Tago Mago

CAN – Tago Mago United Artists UAS 29 211/12 X (1971)

CAN was perhaps the greatest German band ever. Highly influenced by James Brown, The Velvet Underground, and classical, CAN defined electronic rock. Far ahead of their peers, the group never enjoyed much more than a cult following. Kraut rock may now be an obscurity, but the popularity of modern electronic music makes CAN very appealing to virgin ears.

CAN’s musical conception is broad and sweeps out large chunks of space. Most cuts on Tago Mago run from seven to eighteen minutes. Roots in psychedelic rock, R&B/soul, and blues are clear in hindsight. The funky drive from one of rock’s greatest rhythm sections takes over the first half of the double-LP. Jaki Leibezeit on drums and Holger Czukay on bass produced extended comic trances. The rhythms used were unlike anything at the time, but now sound quite akin to sampled loops.

Tago Mago is an enormous work that covers diverse terrain without missing a step. Japanese singer “Damo” Suzuki covers enormous territory. He moves from endless vamps, to impassioned cries, to processed experiments (only Yoko Ono dared as much). “Paperhouse,” driven by the glorious guitar of Michael Karoli and the sublime keyboards of Irmin Schmidt, rocks like a Funkadelic tune. “Oh Yeah” and “Halleluwah” move as if a pack German James Browns are chasing you with a funky stick.

Exciting experimentation is CAN’s greatest asset. “Aumgn” developed by randomly overdubbing the recording tape. This process, as identically done with spoken word years before by William S. Burroughs, and followed Steve Reich‘s iconic “Come Out” by a few years, and predates hip-hop turntable mixing in the South Bronx by a year or two. CAN eases into the closers “Peking O” and “Bring Me Coffee of Tea.” Atmospheric space towards the end of Tago Mago largely dispense with traditional song format. The funky beats of the first few tracks disappear, leaving just sound ebbing and flowing.

This is two albums in one. What begins anchored by identifiable roots closes on the level of an avant-garde Stockhausen composition. The album expands your horizons; yet, CAN is always present to guide through this free trip to paradise.

The wide path cut by Tago Mago is consistently articulate. CAN expertly maintains an immediacy while slowly unveiling their abstract themes. Brilliant experiments are still danceable (“Halleluwah”). Afrika Bambaataa described Kraftwerk as “some funky white boys.” CAN were the godfathers of funky white boys. This work makes a clear connection between avant-garde rock and electronic music.

Mainstream music has accepted CAN’s music, though credit is still lacking. Influence may have been indirect, but CAN proved to be decades ahead of just about everyone else.

Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

Courtney Barnett – Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit Mom + Pop MP221-2 (2015)

Courtney Barnett’s first full-length album trades in some of the dense yet laconic wordplay of her first two EPs for more refined guitar sounds. This is definitely a fuller, more developed production than here earliest recordings. The rhythms are crisp and everything is in tune. The trade may take away some of the quirky charm, but it makes up most of that ground with assured rock textures.

Barnett has long worked with a kind of pastiche of old alt rock styles, everything from underground rock of the early 1970s (The Velvet Underground‘s Loaded), to witty underclass poetry with almost incongruously contemporary pop-rock backing (Ian Dury & the Blockheads’ New Boots & Panties!!), to slacker punk (her song “Avant Gardener” from How to Carve a Carrot Into a Rose, with its deadpan vocals, is a dead ringer for “You’re Gonna Watch Me” by the short-live Cleveland punk band Pressler-Morgan One Plus One). This album, though, is less a grab bag of influences worn on her sleeve than an integration of influences into a more streamlined package. Take that as you will. She’s consolidating what has been done before, expanding it to fit her purposes. Is it wrong to say she’s domesticating this stuff? Probably! Anyway, she takes the counter-culture and kind of makes it seem lived-in, and roomy enough to accommodate just about anyone, in a low-pressure kind of way — the sonic equivalent of going to a friend’s place (but not your best friend’s place) and “crashing on the couch.” This probably won’t knock anyone over, but it may just grow on you if it doesn’t seem immediately appealing.