Random notes on Chapter 3: Kraftwerk and the Electrification of Modern Music from Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany by David Stubbs (2014)
Many Germans probably object to the krautrock moniker for the obvious reason it is an ethnic slur. Equivalent to, say, calling British rock Limey-rock or French rock Frog-rock. And coming from Brits (John Peel, Ian Macdonald, or Brit advertisers used the krautrock term first, it's not entirely clear) probably makes the term an even more annoying dig to a German. But another objection to the krautrock label could be that a lot of the early records that get thrown into that marketing bucket were not in fact very rockin' or rock-like music at all.
Much of krautrock in its heyday, 1968-1975, was more instrumental, soundtrack-like sounds, more ambient, more post-rock, or even anti-rock. Can and Faust owe obvious musical debts to the Velvet Underground. So rock music. Schmidt says the presence of vocalists Mooney and Suzuki in Can's early years decisively turns the band's music towards rock. Sometimes I can mistake Amon Duul ii for a Brit prog rock band. But Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, and Klaus Schultz, the latter a pervasive figure on the experimental ambient instrumental soundtrack side of krautrock in its beginnings, called a compilation of their music that came out in 1972, Kosmische Musik (or 'cosmic music'). And Kraftwerk, originally calling themselves the Organisation, are the models or pop kings, the "Showroom Dummies" of this more electronic and downtempo ambient side-- and possibly more revolutionary side?-- of krautrock. (1)
Kraftwerk were formed in Dusseldorf in 1970 by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider. I think I've always thought of them as a group I admire more for their influences than their actual music. Devo, Talking Heads, New Order, and The KLF, all obviously influenced by Kraftwerk, are personal faves. Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother of Neu! begin in Kraftwerk, and as I've mentioned before Dinger was a major influence on Kraftwerk's version of the motorik sound. No doubt Kraftwerk were true pioneers of electronic music, synth-pop, Goth, electro, EDM, or really almost any other flavor of electronic pop music. Gary Numan's "Cars" (1979). Human League's "Don't You Want Me" (1981). Martin Gore of Depeche Mode credits Kraftwerk as the "godfathers" of electronic pop music. Their legacy is remarkably widespread. But my first teen exposure to Kraftwerk was more passive and relatively indifferent. I had a school friend that played the Autobahn album all the time. That song and "Showroom Dummies," about the only Kraftwerk songs I remember from the '70s, were funny and I kind of liked them as a novelty songs but I didn't like them enough to buy their albums.
The first Kraftwerk single I actually got physically excited about and went out and purchased was a 12" single version of "Tour de France," which appeared prominently in the 1984 hiphop movie Breakin'. The song is now known widely as Breakdance, as in the song origin of breakdance music. They put out an album called Tour de France Soundtracks in 2003, elaborating on the EDM associations in Kraftwerk's electronic sound. It was actually hiphop founding godfather Afrika Bambaataa's praise of Kraftwerk in the early '80s that got me to eventually give Kraftwerk a second and closer listen.
Trans-Europe Express (1977) is perhaps their best, my favorite anyway, an electronic road/train song theme or two and a seamlessly gloomy electro Goth soundtrack. On the album "Hall of Mirrors" is a dramatic prelude to "Showroom Dummies," the song I'd only known as a radio single. And the whole second side, "Trans-Europe Express," "Metal on Metal," "Abzug," "Franz Schubert," and "Endless Endless" melds into one immaculately dark synth-pop suite of music. Their rock and anti-rock tendencies in perfect tension.
That said all their peak run of albums in retrospect, Autobahn (1974) to Computer World (1981), have their moments and seem to effectively burnish Kraftwerk's robotics and cybernetics pop mystique one way or another. I can see Kraftwerk fans getting behind any one of these five albums, preference based mostly on timing, when and how they came to find the album. I think another old music pal used to rank Computer World (1981) his favorite Kraftwerk album in more or less these terms. And "Numbers," off that album, is a touchstone for early '80s Detroit techno and all kinds of later '90s EDM. Carl Craig, second wave Detroit techno pioneer, said of this vintage of Kraftwerk, "they were so stiff they were funky." Anyway, "Numbers" in the early '80s Black dance music context is not to be missed.
To be honest, though, in my most recent check-in with the Kraftwerk catalog I still found myself reaching most for Kraftwerk's first two experimental albums, the least familiar to me, and especially Kraftwerk 2 (1972). No motorik tempos, more flute, even some guitar; absolutely minimum words, strictly experimental and generally chaotic. Meandering and slow building jams eventually reach these momentary peaks and then recede again like the tide. Maybe a precursor to Einstürzende Neubauten, the '80s German industrial band? Lots of bell ringing clanks and industrial like atmospherics anyway. Hypnotic and, again, vaguely psychedelic.
I never caught up with Kraftwerk's funky appeal until late but can see now their dark gothic melodicism, always in evidence, was maybe their greatest lasting influence. Anyway, they were a significant influence on Goth and hiphop and electro and EDM, that's a pretty impressive legacy. But I guess I'm still admiring them most for their influence and not how personally satisfying I find playing their records.
Footnotes:
1. Apparently, later, Schulz is dismissive of the 'kosmiche musik' name as too corny and sci-fi. Hawkwind indulge in this even worse-- corny sci-fi allusions, I mean-- but like 'space rock' I think 'cosmic music' fits. Or fits as well or better in many instances as krautrock, anyway. Psychedelic tinged German instrumental soundtrack music circa 1968-1975.
2. Full disclosure, Bam, an old school hiphop music favorite, has now posthumously, he died in April, been charged with sexual abuse of several under age boys. Ugh.
Recorded in 1981, a foundational record of Techno and EDM ('80s and '90s) music genres. Exudes that hypnotic chill-out vibe that would become pervasive in '90s dance music. Gottsching has some classical training on guitar but turned to improvisatory rock in the 1970s, forming Ash Ra Temple with Klaus Schulz (Tangerine Dream) in 1971. More pioneering krautrockers. If you like minimalism or Eno and Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1981, same year as this record, you will like this. High-speed electric train to Nirvana. Om or Aum!
Fernand Braudel on The Structures of Everyday Life between the 15th and 18th centuries, 1400-1800:
"Luxury then can take on many guises, depending on the period, the country or the civilization. What does not change, by contrast, is the unending social drama of which luxury is both the prize and the theme, a choice spectacle for sociologist, psychologist, economist and historian. A certain amount of connivance is of course required between the privileged and the onlookers-- the watching masses. Luxury does not only represent rarity and vanity, but also social success, fascination, the dream that one day becomes reality for the poor, and in so doing immediately loses its old glamour. Not long ago a medical historian wrote: 'When food that has been rare and long desired finally arrives within reach of the masses, consumption rises sharply, as if a long-repressed appetite had exploded. Once popularised [in both senses of the word - becoming "less exclusive" and "more widespread"] the food quickly loses its attraction... The appetite becomes stated.' The rich are thus doomed to prepare the future life of the poor. It is, after all, their justification: they try out the pleasures that the masses will sooner or later grasp.
The moral is not surprising: every luxury dates and goes out of fashion. But luxury is reborn from its own ashes and from its very defeats. It is really the reflection of a difference in social levels that nothing can compensate for and that every movement creates. An eternal 'class struggle.'
In short, as Marcel Mauss wrote: 'it was not in production that society found its driving force: luxury is the great stimulus'." from The Structures of Everyday Life, 1979-1981.
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Does this mean we can expect the masses will soon all be owning yachts? Or boats? Or at least vacation getaways?
Luxuries are things that set the rich or elites apart but also tantalize ambitions in the poor. It's possible with a generous reading to imagine in this social relationship some possibilities for progress, and not just the dreary treadmill of the "eternal class struggle," IF so many actually existing rich were not such cold stingy misers.
This is also a capsule chunk of an argument economic anthropology has with formal economic science. Econ 101 assumes production is the driving force in social development. Anthropology, Mauss and Braudel, say the pursuit of luxury, this eternal class struggle, is the driving force in social development. Although not "class struggle" like Marx, a dialectic struggle that will eventually resolve itself with armed revolution and then some fully-automated communist Kumbaya utopia. But eternal struggle like there will always be rich and poor and the latter will always desire the exclusive privileges of the former; a cultural social hierarchy in constant state of tension and flux.
World building, or politics, from this anthropology angle then, Mauss, Braudel, Polanyi, Marshall Sahlins, might concern negotiating some sustainable peaceful balance between those that would rather defend existing inequality and property relations by force, conservatives, Republicans, police state fascists, and those that would rather liberate the poor from the predations of the rich. Braudel's sympathies are obvious and appreciated; if too CRT for the present.
Liberal in the sense of government protections for individual human rights. Governments, communities, investing in progressively reducing the hardships of poverty, food insecurity, homelessness, lack of health care, education, etc. Not neoliberal in the sense of protecting wealth and markets from democracy and basic human rights.
My memory, spotty as it is, is that I first heard about The Fall from Carter Wood in 1979.
Carter went to my high school, although we never hanged out in high school. He wrote for the school newspaper, took college prep classes, and was on the Honor Roll. In high school, by contrast, I was busy going to keggers with my buddies and trying to find ways to be alone with my girlfriend; and playing a little sports, although I wasn't all that good at that either. School was an afterthought; I felt no pressure to get good grades at home and found it exceedingly easy to skate by. In short, we didn't travel in the same circles. But a couple years into college, Carter going to Reed, me Portland State, we ran into each other at a Wipers show in Portland and we saw some more shows together over the next couple years; The Rats, Sado-Nation, Gang of Four, like that. He knew lots of punk or especially post-punk stuff like The Fall and turned me on to them.
Grotesque ('80) was the first album, The Fall's third long player, that I fell for. Truth be told, my initial reactions to earlier albums, Live at the Witch Trials ('79) and Dragnet ('79) were much less enthusiastic; too shambolic, too dry and tuneless to my virgin Fall ears. But already by '81's '77-'79 Early Years, a cassette collection I ended up playing to death before losing, I was already reevaluating and thrilling to a handful of early classic Fall numbers: "Crap Rap 2/Like to Blow," "Industrial Estate," "Repetition," "Psychic Mafia," and "Rowche Rumble," etc. Listening to this early stuff again recently I can't get "Bingo Master's Breakout," their debut single, out of my head.
The Fall were always on the surface forbidding, noisy, often sounding as if on the verge of collapse. They found some difficulty getting recorded in those earliest years, like other longstanding post-punk survivors The Mekons, because even independent record labels, like Rough Trade, thought they were too incompetent as musicians to sell records, or enough records to justify production and distribution costs anyway.
Mark E. Smith (MES), the band leader, always center of attention on the mic, talk-singer, poet or wordy crank, take your pick, was the initial draw and, as it has turned out nearly forty years later, the only lasting figure in The Fall. MES was a punk! Not the cliche punk stereotype but as if you had found a real one in the wilds of England (read: outside London). He came off like an update of one of those 17th century English ranters depicted in Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Angry, inscrutable, disjointed but unflappably cocky in his right to speak for himself. Whatever he was yammering on about he was a "Hip Priest," a "Slang King," and crucial to his staying power, he had a uncanny knack for writing catchy, impossible to escape earworm hooks.
Again, not that I ever had much of an idea of what was really going on in MES's lyrics or ever studied them too closely. I've learned later he was into the books of Philip K. Dick, John le Carre, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, and other weird fiction authors. I knew The Fall name came from an Albert Camus novel. But his earworms, for me, were never more than a hook, a fragment of the lyrics, and often as earwormy for the catchy way his vocal played off and against the music, his sneering slurs and chants set against angular, cut-up, bass-drum-driven (equally catchy) tempos; in short, as catchy for the music as for his actual words or anything they added up to. I've learned only much later that the words in one of my favorite earworms by The Fall were not even MES's original lyrics.
A longstanding early favorite of mine was "Lie Dream of the Casino Soul" (1981). It lived in my brain for years as an impossible to escape earworm; specifically, a dramatic bridge that is repeated twice in the track. The music drops out, a simple circus-y keyboard figure and a chunky guitar riff strike a spare groove, before MES intones dramatically, "Meanwhile in the States/Proles retch/Dancing in the streets." It took the internet age for me to finally learn that the actual MES lyric in "Lie Dream" goes: "Meanwhile in the sticks/Proles rich/Dance in cardboard pants"?! Obviously, I was projecting. But, also, it just goes to show that often MES/The Fall's knack for hooks was as much about the music, the sonic punch of a musical passage, as about MES's words.
Still, MES definitely had a way with hooks made out of trigger words and provocatively conspiratorial language; "Hail the new puritan," "Jew on a motorbike," "What About Us?" etc. This was his earworm superpower. "LEAVE THE CAPITOL! EXIT THIS ROMAN SHELL!" off the Slates EP,* also '81, maybe my first wave Fall peak, was another MES hook stuck in my head for eons. But I really had little idea what he was actually going on about, other than he hated London and wanted to blame it on Rome. I never looked into it too much. More recently, I thought I'd maybe ran into the source of "Exit This Roman Shell" in this history book I ran into recently, Escape From Rome, before I realized the book came out in 2019. Still, a rich historical allusion is what MES's image of London or Britain trapped in dead Roman traditions tapped into.
"New Face in Hell," another early fave, sported lines that went: "Wireless enthusiast intercepts government secret radio band and uncovers secrets and scandals of deceitful type proportions." He appeared to be mocking communications snoops while confessing his avid curiosity in scuttlebutt. Like he's swapping shop talk with his conspiracy theory buddies at the pub. MES was also often satirizing the pop music process; the hype machines at NME and elsewhere in the music press. Or bragging about how legendary he was and is to the bitter end; or bitching about how unappreciated he remains. He was funny, caustic, obscure, over half the time I experienced his vocals mostly as gruff barks, yowls, cleverly accenting the tempos, that varied between circus funereal melodrama and Bo Diddley on drugs.
The title of "NFIH" refers to a movie from 1968, the paranoid conspiracy theory vibe "of deceitful type proportions" is vintage MES.
Original postpunk sublimity. The Fall's music in the early 1980s was called "Mancabilly," for Manchester rockabilly; or MES called it "Country 'n' Northern," as in northern England. MES sums up his favorite things as: "Scottish people, cats, Coronation Street [British soap opera set in Manchester], and Can." Like Can, OG German Krautrockers, already legends by the late '70s, the Fall were a mixture of high and low, progressive primitivists, if you will; MES going all in for the spoken word as performance art but always set to shambolic tribal postpunk sounds. He asserts "I am Damo Suzuki," former Can vocalist, notorious for his improvised free-associative lyrics, in one Fall song. In sum, The Fall, 1980 to 1984, that lineup, MES, Marc Riley (keyboards, guitar, banjo), Craig Scanlon (guitar, piano), Steve Hanley (bass, guitar), Paul Stanley (drums, keyboards), Karl Burns (drums, guitar), and Brix Smith (guitar), were the Fall peak in my first wave experience of the band.
I know some people think the Fall were over after Hex Enduction Hour ('82), when Marc Riley left the band and Brix joined. I'm less partisan about Riley or Brix on guitar; I love both Grotesque ('80) and Hex Enduction Hour, Riley's albums, and Perverted By Language and Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall ('84), (more or less) Brix's albums, for different reasons but more or less equally. During this classic period the band could do the slow Sturm und Drang, darkening MES's working class crank poetry (like Suzuki, like Pere Ubu, like Nick Cave), but were best for my money at uptempo, polyrhythmic, heavy melodic bass rumble and clatter (including often two drummers and always some pounding extras, plinky keyboards, kazoos, etc). The thick bass center of that now classic Fall sound is as signature post-punk Manchester as New Order's Peter Hook or anybody else. This was peak postpunk Fall for me.
I remained on board through Wonderful and Frightening World (WAFW). I mean, I listened to each of their studio releases from Grotesque to WAFW pretty soon after they came out and played them many times. But I started to drift after that, turning to other music, other records, giving only glancing attention to The Frenz Experiment ('88), and then nothing for years after I am Kurious Oranj ('88). I even saw them a couple of times in this period, good shows. I liked the title track "I am Kurious Oranj. Another bass-centered guitar jangle, reggae inflected, flourishes of atonality, MES rocking his claptrap about being the unappreciated hitmaker. The sound is there but, and this had maybe been coming on for me for a bit, maybe "Slang King," which I liked, but maybe sealed the deal for me in 1984. It felt like MES was already settling into a schtick, too much repeating himself, the cut-up poetry of a self-aggrandizing crank from working class Manchester, England.
Cool but I drifted away. To be sure, some of it was what I was doing with many of my punk/new wave/postpunk favorites in the late '80s. They quit or fizzled or I lost interest and moved on to something else: Husker Du, Public Enemy, MJ, Madonna, New Zealand's Flying Nun Records, etc. Really, too much music, too little time for listening to music. But maybe some of it was I ran into a wall with the MES persona? It had grown stale.
Rip It Up and Start Again
I returned to The Fall recently while reading Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again (2005).
Reynold's avowedly "personal history" of postpunk music between 1978 and 1984. I've gathered since reading the book it has its critics. I will paraphrase: Too British, too much Green Gartside/Scritti Politti, a whole section devoted to the tenuously postpunk, "The New Pop and New Rock" (from Human League to Frankie Goes to Hollywood)." I have some sympathy here for both sides (more Talking Heads/Eno in the next edition, please) but I liked the angle Reynolds takes: postpunk was any music that was essentially created as inspiration or reaction to the Sex Pistols hostile takeover of the British charts at the end of 1977 and beginning of 1978. This covers the conventional postpunk canon, PIL to Throbbing Gristle. But also 2-Tone to Duran Duran, the latter of whom early on explicitly cite the Sex Pistols commando assault on the charts as a model (even if they were equally committed to not sounding anything like ugly punk rock, which they snarked in the music press at the time).
Anyway, Reynold's write-up of The Fall tweaked my interest. He makes a compelling case for recognizing Hex Enduction Hour ('82) as their best album. I feel like I toggle between HEH and Perverted by Language ('83). But what I realized most in Reynold's informative review of The Fall's long career was how much more Fall there was after I tuned out. MES died in 2018 at the age of sixty; he was a alcoholic and struggled with his health for years. Still, the most lasting legacy of The Fall might be how long they lasted. Between 1988, when I tuned out, and 2018, MES's death, The Fall put out twenty more albums. They've put out over fifty live albums, only a couple of which I've heard. And a bunch of singles; most I'd heard up to "Free Range" from 1992 but I don't think anything after that.
At any rate, ready to acquaint myself with more of the Fall catalog I poked around and decided I'd also read long-time Fall bassist Steve Hanley's book The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall (2014) while digging into some more Fall. I always like doing this: reading about some music while listening to it. But it used to be magazines and music zines; now it's books. In this instance, this turned out limiting in that Hanley's account of the Fall's records stops in 1998 in a fiery breakup. So nothing really on The Fall's last two decades of records but good background on the longest-tenured Fall operation from 1980 to 1998.
The Fall have gone through many lineup changes since their beginning. The only mainstay 1977 to 2017 is MES. But Steve Hanley, bassist, is the longest running Fall member besides MES, lasting in the band from 1979 to 1998. Moreover, his resonant bass sound is considered, and this take has been endorsed by MES, foundational to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Riley and Hanley were roadies, hauling the band's equipment before being asked to join the band as teenagers in '79. Once up and running Hanley's bass became the axel around which The Fall's sound evolved.
Not sure if I've ever read a book about touring musicians who actually loved touring. Living on the road is hard. In the best circumstances the musicians enjoy some intensely strong performances and, hopefully, maybe some groupie party action, notably none in Hanley's account for The Fall, but life on the road generally sucks. In short, the corrosive grind of touring with an erratic, endlessly combative MES for eighteen years is the prevailing theme of Hanley's book.
And the final straw for the original lineup, or what was left of it, Hanley and Burns, was MES messing with their instruments on stage during a performance in 1998. They fought, stormed off stage, and finally once and for all any remnant of the early Fall band broke-up. That was that. But, must say, I actually remember seeing MES doing something like that on stage, messing with other band member's equipment and them visibly not enjoying it, at least ten years earlier. The last straw was likely a long time coming.
Another limitation of Hanley's book is as a source for greater insights into MES's lyrics. Hanley doesn't offer much. You'd like a phrase or two but then nowhere, he opines. And undeniable. MES at least some if not most the time, reportedly, used a cut-up style, remixing randomly a bag of lyrics; like Dadaists, William S. Burroughs. In Hanley's account the guys in the band paid most attention to MES's lyrics when they thought they heard lines insulting them. Otherwise, not much to offer.
(I don't know if I'll ever get to it but I see now there is a book about MES called Messing Up the Paintwork: The Wit and Wisdom of Mark E Smith from 2018 that might answer any remaining questions about MES's wordsmithing.)
Some of MES's irritating ticks were funny, though. Hanley complains that on early tours he was constantly making the band watch The Producers (1967) or Zulu (1964), so making fun of Nazis and Britain's Alamo last stand against native Africans. While in the tour van Hanley and his bandmates got into listening to The Clash, or especially other Manchester groups of the day, Joy Division, New Order, Echo & the Bunnymen, Smiths, and MES would invariably grouch about what shit they all were and force the band to listen to Frank Zappa.
If Hanley has an axe to grind it's that MES doesn't give the band or him enough credit for The Fall's music. As Hanley tells it, from 1980 to '98, some music was composed with the band all together, collaboratively, but most of it was MES writing the lyrics on his own, or early on with Riley or Scanlon, and the band, led by Hanley, coming up with the music on their own, without MES, and then going back and forth with MES editing songs via cassette copies and then finally rehearsals all together.
There is also a scene in Hanley's book when some reputable studio producer is having a final meltdown, fed up with MES's methods, lamenting his efforts to make the instruments and recording sound good in the studio, only to have MES take the recording home and alter it with a home cassette recorder and then ask the producer to turn his cassette recorded version into the record they put out! MES, not much of a musician, was instrumental to the Fall sound, from beginning to end; for better or worse.
And Hanley's bass sound was totally essential to the original blueprint of The Fall sound. Both these things, MES and Hanley being crucial to the original, peak or classic, Fall sound, regardless of Hanley's grousing, are still true.
More stuff I've learned reading about and listening to The Fall again recently:
1) There is this Complete Peel Sessions box set of The Fall doing 15-20 minute live set recordings with DJ John Peel at the BBC studios that came out in 2005. The box compiles 24 sessions the band recorded for Peel's radio show between 1978 and 2004. The uncanny part is how Peel seems to get the best out of The Fall, many live in the BBC versions besting LP versions of Fall songs.
Sample classic session from 1980:
I'm not saying there are no duds in the Peel Sessions-- again, late '90s was obviously a very rough period, MES going through some kind of substance abuse breakdown-- but with Peel the strong sets stretch into the '90s easy, even the early '00s, after MES's breakdown. If there needs to be a one-stop- shop record with The Fall this would have to be my recommendation. It's very expensive but free all over youtube.
2) So, again, keeping in mind I knew almost nothing about The Fall's recorded output after '88, so Hanley's second and last decade, and then the next two decades this century, when MES put out 12 more albums. Maybe a song here or there but no albums. But I've been dabbling enough around these last three decades of The Fall lately to suggest it appears clearly that the breakup with Hanley and the old lineup in 1998, actually, artistically rejuvenates MES some. The Unutterable (2000), especially Fall Heads Roll ('05), and Your Future Our Clutter ('10), for examples of his post-breakup output, sound stronger again to me. Like MES learned how to rock out with his band again, even if this likely meant bossing them around, nearly all his post-'98 bandmates are a generation younger; and meant bossing them around in a way Hanley and the long list of other bandmate casualties could no longer endure. At any rate, in my best rock critic voice, if haphazard and terribly incomplete survey, MES's post-'98 records show MES was still integral to the composition of The Fall sound and could reproduce that sound, or exhilarating facsimiles, with other groups of musicians.
For instance, immersing myself again in The Fall for the past few months, what's striking to me is how much I've returned to this 27 minute master-mix of various versions of a song called "Blindness" or "(Deaf And) Blindness" that MES recorded with a Fall lineup in the '00s, after his breakup with the Hanley unit. A version appears on the last Peel Session in '04 and a studio version appears on the Fall Heads Roll LP* released in 2005. In addition to his knack for the verbal hook, MES retained a remarkable knack for recreating the classic Fall sound: Shambolic bass tunes, dirty metal guitar riffing, some twisted pop keyboards; the band loose but tight with MES. "Blindness" locks into this thick hypnotic groove, riffing guitar, heavy bass swagger, and a perfect minimalist keyboard melody. An intoxicating rocker you want to go on forever and it almost does clocking in at over 26 minutes of drone rock madness. MES barks out stuff, name drops some dead celebrities, a hook he repeats only the way he can,"Hey Blindman, Have Mercy On me," is about all of any story I pickup but there is again, all these years later, MES and his way with the hook. Also, this is very late postpunk mind you, even towards the end of the early '00s neo-postpunk thing, Interpol, The Killers, and near 30 minutes of a postpunk superjam bliss by The Fall to my ears.
At any rate, I'm not saying there are not times, before and after '98, when MES doesn't sound like the indecipherable crank street drunk calling out everybody; barking, slurring, semi-coherently at best. Again, I rarely pick up more than a phrase here and there without looking at a lyric sheet. But it must be said, what Fall albums and records I've sampled before and after the big breakup he never sounds again quite as sick and bad as he did in those final few years with the original lineup, and he remains to the end the inscrutable and hostile postpunk wordsmith; "Your Future Our Clutter," "Sub-Lingual Tablet," and, ending in 2018 with, "New Facts Emerge." Indeed they do.
3) Going way back to This Nation's Saving Grace ('85), regarded by the faithful as The Fall's best, or according to allmusic.com anyway, and Bend Sinister ('86), both of which I shamefully missed when I dropped out with The Fall in the mid-'80s, I would now add to their classic period, stretching that period from 1980 to 1986. TNSG burnishes MES's northern Mancunian nativist schtick while adding electro beats and proving again his mastery with the long edgy jams. "Bend Sinister," again, absolutely no memory beyond maybe "Mr. Pharmacist" via college radio, which stood out to me as a cover I knew, doubles down on "LA" from TNSG, and might be Brix's biggest Fall album. It appears to have more Brix song credits than ever. And there's this California surf-noir guitar/bass sound, not unheard of in the earlier Fall, but never more prevalent than on Bend Sinister that could be attributable to Brix. Anyway, both albums still focused in a way that starts to unravel and/or lose steam with The Frenz Experiment and I'm Curious Oranj, or that's my case anyway and I'm sticking to it for now.
Also, still notable that their only proper Mancunian anthem, "Hit the North," doesn't appear before The Frenz Experiment ('88), when it appears they were losing sufficient steam as a band to produce engaging albums and were becoming preoccupied with turning into a non-hit singles band. They maybe couldn't figure their way out of that stuck-place for awhile. Another tension in Hanley's book is he and Brix really wanted to see The Fall get big hits. MES wanted that too but only on his incorrigible terms, which were way too weird and tuneless and hostile for Top 40.
4) So how big of asshole and creep was MES really?
In Hanley's telling, basically, MES was a drunk, so was Hanley eventually, but MES was drunk most the time, and an even bigger asshole when he wasn't drunk; according to Hanley throughout several parts of the 1980 to 1998 period you could measure how long MES had gone without a drink by his temper. At about 45 minutes it was always time to duck and cover.
MES was also proudly nativist. He acted like he was a local polka king, and fancied he had connections with the local mafia, according to Hanley. He was incessantly oppositional, hated most everything that wasn't Scottish or from Manchester. Right from the get-go, in "Bingo Master's Breakout," it's like he imagines he's MC at a local bingo night, a mouthy nutcase breaking from the script and ranting to the local hangers on in a language he imagines only fellow Mancunians can understand.
This gives MES and The Fall a certain rooted charm but also had its limits. When asked about Brexit shortly before his death he is reported to have expressed support for Brexit and insisted that next England should immediately go to war again with France.
MES drops N-words in songs. I know of a couple instances. Once as "obligatory N-word plural," qualifying it as a scorned social role, not necessarily Black. And another time in relation to the Irish, I think. So I've never caught him using it in direct reference to a Black person but the N-word metaphor as a trigger word is part of MES's vocabulary, for sure. And maybe the school teacher in me but I can't hear it without cringing defensively. On the other hand, The Fall played in several Rock Against Racism benefit concerts back in the day, even though MES became a total crank about the music benefit concert scene once it blew up in the '80s. And MES relates with pride, true or not, that Bo Diddley once told him that The Fall were his favorite English group.
MES was also a serial homophobe in his lyrics, as I've alluded before, but nothing, thankfully, more insulting or criminal comes out in Hanley's long account. You get the impression early on he felt menaced by the aggressive interests of gay men, which as long as no one got hurt strikes me as funny. MES fleeing his gay fans. Another group to disdain with his petty hatreds.
As for women, Brix looks like a post-punk trophy wife to be sure, and MES was from the early '80s on mostly aloof and imperious with his bands, but he was also always bringing his girlfriends into the band, often to the chagrin of the rest of the old hands. Also then perhaps reflecting a small check on his tyrannical tendencies.
In Hanley's account MES is frequently throwing stuff in fits of rage, acting like a "Little Hitler" around shows, bossing people around, spitting invective. He throws pipsqueak publicists out of The Fall's backstage tour space on the regular. But MES's victims were typically, as the saying goes, and as it goes with most misanthropes, the people closest to him.
5) Finally, feeling more generous this time around with The Fall, here's their late classic phase again. (The Brix years, basically.) When they're scoring theatrical productions and going on TV. They still look awkward, then and now. It's their glammy pop phase, Smith in purple, Hanley looking like he's dressed for church, and Brix adding the LA glam punk Blondie wannabe look to our awkwardly turned out provincial northern lads.
But what an impossibly insider-baseball catchy post-punk doomed bid at a pop record. "Big New Prinz" ('88) is so preposterously not a Top 40 record and so undeniably a Fall record that you imagine maybe it was a big hit record. But, not quite, peaking at 59; "There's a Ghost in My House" was their actual chart peak reaching 30 in 1987. This was the best The Fall could do when they were actually trying to sell out. A triumph of style and personality. The tune has got that clap and stomp along Fall tempo, the choppy repetition, the compellingly postpunk tribal rumble of bass and drums. The noir guitar riffing is pro forma but encases the snotty attitude of a combustible pop song concoction. And then MES on the mic:
Check the record
Check the record
Check the guy's track record
Check the record
Check the guy's rock record
Then the band chanting in the background:
He is not appreciated
And then follows a salute to the legend, Slang King, The Big New Prinz:
Drink the long draught down
Drink the long draught
Drink the long draught down for the Big Priest!
He, apparently, drink too many long draughts down but is now a marvel for how long he actually did last as a postpunk Hip Priest, a proto-postpunk rapper, as if he were barking and shrieking into a bullhorn on a street corner, an oppositional crank and earworm artist to the very end!
"Vampire lesbos are after me." In the beginning The Fall were Manchester cousins to The Cramps, without the monster movie getups. A stylized version of primitivist rockabilly. Do the frug in a beautiful garden! The Cramps made great dance music. Your moment of zen.
"We avoided the two major rock guitars, the Fender and the Gibson. Playing Gretsches was about bringing back a sixties sensibility, but still having the freneticism of punk. Nobody else used them at the time."--Edwyn Collins in Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, by Simon Reynolds
Orange Juice were a post-punk outfit from Scotland early 1980s. A New Wave band into reading. Proto-New Romantic British pop in an indelibly Scottish jangle pop indie record label style. Edwyn Collins' style, OJ's nerdy Lothario front guy. Sort of Brian Ferry as a "New Puritan." And another post-punk vocal original.
Orange Juice were the feature band on Postcard Records, a Glasgow indie label that put out 12 singles and an album between 1979 and 1981. The album featured label mates Josef K, named after a character in Kafka's The Trial, and true to form sounding like Gang of Four agit-funk with a literary bent.
Postcard were dedicated in general to "The Sound of Young Scotland" with a romantic literary bent, in spite of or because the label's boss, Alan Horne, was something of a parochial Spinal Tap-like eccentric petty tyrant band manager type. Postcard also put out records by Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens (notably not Scottish) and for a few years there were a promising post-punk enterprise from the north country of Great Britain.
Orange Juice joined The Undertones on tour in the fall of 1980. What a hot double-bill that would have been!
At any rate, after one good album, You Can't Hide Your Love Forever (1982), a couple more iffier album propositions, pioneering the C86 jangle pop sound but unable to score the chart hits they wanted, the OJ's called it quits in 1985 but Edwyn Collins finally scored a couple of proper Top 40 hits in the 1990s as a solo artist. Here's one:
"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," PJ Harvey (1991):
"Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair."
Actually, Harvey calls her song "Sheela-Na-Gig," after carved figurines of a naked woman with an exaggerated vulva, architectural grotesques found on cathedrals, castles, and other buildings throughout Europe in the middle ages. Love the esoteric feminist history but had to look it up, of course. I was originally slow on the uptake with Harvey when she first came out in the early 1990s. Both Dry ('92) and Rid of Me ('93) first struck me as too much like Patti Smith. That same melodramatic shamanistic banshee vocalizing thing. Which was such a rock snobby take, no doubt, but for the life of me now I can't hear what a fuss I was making. I mean, sure, there's a vocal styling resemblance but Harvey is way more Sturm und Drang, and way more intensely sexual. Being her own person, like Smith, the power in that, is what Harvey shares most with Smith. Don't try to pigeonhole them too much. They will arrive in their own time and on their own terms. Maybe Harvey was a little bit to the '90s what Smith was to the '70s, rockers, sui generis strong women art rockers. Salute.
"Leave the Capitol," The Fall (1981): The Fall at an early peak; from The Slates EP. In a fitful nightmare I imagine Mark E. Smith taking down Grump in a battle rap royale, jabbing him with his rat a tat tat militant nonsense, dancing around the Fat Bastard spastically. Never being touched. The TKO'd G crumpling with Smith leering over him, pointing a finger at him, taunting him with the hook here, "Then you know in your brain/LEAVE THE CAPITOL!/EXIT THE ROMAN SHELL!" Over and over. The dream look is Clockwork Orange. No doubt the obtuse ranting lends itself to such fantasy because Smith is a little Trumpy; like one of Elvis Costello's "Two Little Hitlers." Apparently, the song is about Smith wanting to get out of London, to get away from the pop press hype. Post-punk revenge pop.
Pounding tribal tempo, alien punk explicit sex body shaming ranting. Electropunk OGs from LA. Wonder if NG ever played a Burning Man, although do BM's go back that far? Speaking of, a missing piece in Erik Davis's otherwise very engaging book, High Weirdness (2019), was more musical analogues to the druggie hippie cyberpunk synthesis networking through California during the 1970s. The Dead were throwbacks and don't seem to count, not techie enough. One strong candidate is Nervous Gender, along with SF's Chrome or Tuxedomoon or even The Residents. All from the same classic punk/New Wave/post-punk 1978 to 1982 window, or that was their wheelhouse anyhow. Technologically mutant punk rock. Psychedelic cyberpunk. Sexually explicit acid-punk. Scifi-punk. Art-punks having sex with cyborgs. A nugget of high weirdness, "Alien Point of View," in '70s/'80s California music. BTW, you might remember lesbian folk singer Phranc from the '80s. Started out in Nervous Gender but was gone before this recording. Many parts of other classic LA punk rock bands, Germs, Screamers, The Bags, support and cycle through NG. Edward Stapleton and Matt Comeione, core band members, are still at it. Gerardo Valazquez, another founding member, died in 1992.
"Headache for Michelle," Au Pairs (1981): I think I thought of the Au Pairs at the time as Johnny-come-latelies, last year's news, or by the time I had caught up with Playing With a Different Sex, anyway. But they actually went back to 1978 and had a way with the post-punk song that shoulda coulda produced in a better world several sharp Top 40 singles; It's Obvious, America, We're So Cool, and this moody, caustic, finely etched post-punk record, for just a few striking instances. Vocalist Lesley Woods was their signature, and a savage critic of contemporary sexual politics. And not bad with the pop hooks. You wouldn't go terribly astray to think of the Au Pairs as a distaff counterpart to the Gang of Four, or as they were. Both inspired by the art school side of the class of '77 punk protest. Both into funk but it comes out more nervous and herky-jerky and clinical when they do it. Both sound like they read hip academic literature on sexual politics, and they chatter a lot in songs about demystifying patriarchy and capitalism. And although the Au Pairs were from Birmingham, they actually did play together often live with Leed's Gang of Four during post-punk's original heyday. And what a double-bill that would have made. The Au Pairs music has aged well and stands as an exemplary model of early 1980s post-punk agitprop feminist dub funk. Shouldn't be missed.
I really don't follow what's happening with the rock & roll hall of fame much. I visited the place once in Cleveland. Lots of fun rock & roll trivia. I wore a baseball cap with a yellow 7" record insert symbol I picked up in the Hall merch store until it was threadbare and falling apart. The annual ballot for new inductees into the Hall usually turns up in one of my news feeds and at least half the lists, it's been my impression, look like no-brainers to me.
There's a lot of great rock & roll, why be stingy about it? The Hall ought to celebrate the immense diversity of rock & roll. Not narrowcast it as another classic rock only format. I've heard Chic have been nominated and failed eleven times to get inducted into the rock & roll hall of fame. That's ridiculous, and should be a shaming embarrassment to the music writers who vote. Chic should be in the rock & roll hall of fame for one song alone, "Good Times," and its' tremendous pop influence.
If one song isn't enough, which sounds weirdly anti-rock & roll to me, Chic have at least two other classic disco hits and turned into solid album artists. But, again, for "Good Times" alone, Chic belong in the Hall, easy. See/hear below.
Anyway, they call the place the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but seem unfortunately hung-up on Rock and the rock stars era. To my mind rock & roll takes off in 1954 or 1955. It's Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Bo Diddley, The Coasters, The Shirelles, Ronnettes, Everly Brothers, Sun Records, Atlantic Records (including LaVern Baker, Bobbettes, Ruth Brown), Etta James, The Fleetwoods, the rest of the 1950s and, really, expands exponentially from there til possibly the end of the Century and the collapse of the record industry or why not all the way to the present? Rock & roll is more a mixed race/multicultural, by now vastly complex, constellation of sounds than any classic guitar rock cliche, not that there's anything wrong with the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. My point is Hiphop is as much Rock & Roll as Classic Rock as is Folk Rock as is EDM as is Punk Rock as is Disco, etc.
And maybe it's all only rock & roll but I like it.
"Good Times," Chic: Number one on Hot 100 in 1979.
"Rapper's Delight,' Sugarhill Gang: Reached 36 on Hot 100 same year.
"Rapture," Blondie: Number one in 1981.
The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steal: Also from 1981 a live DJ mix of Flash cutting, scratching, and mixing a bunch of records, including "Good Times," "Rapture," Sugarhill Gang, Queen, Spoonie Gee, and Mr. Rogers. It's an ultramagnetic party mix based musically on Niles Rodgers' funky guitar and Bernard Edwards' super fat bass. And, Flash, winningly, DJ'ing for a bunch of kids whooping it up getting down to his fresh beats and cartoon wit. It's disco and New Wave and Flash's cutting stabs of proto-hiphop turntable hooks.
Oh yeah, and another one: Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust." Spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Top 10 in 1980. In all, "Good Times" is a dominant force on the charts for three years running, helps launch Hiphop, and has been sampled by over 200 pop songs since coming out in 1979.
First song on Seattle Syndrome Volume One (1981), a compilation of local bands representing an awkward post-punk moment in local history. X-15 actually formed in Bellingham, a college town a couple hours north. But they were a thing at Gorilla Gardens, an underground club in Seattle in the '80s. The collection covers punk, post-punk, New Wave, No Wave, and various electronic art party experiments. "Vaporized" sets the bar high as the opening track: Bowiesque New Wave punk rock with a crazy-wild glam-punk thespian-jock vocal. Shoulda coulda been a big chart hit, up there with The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" (1979) or the Vapors' "Turning Japanese (1980). Nonetheless, has the esteemed honor of kicking off in style a period compilation of various artists, probably hated at the time by the hardcore punk bands, but holds up well if you ask me: Nerdy, funky, funny, some proto-Goth, some New Wave noir, hot and cool. But, anyway you slice it, "Vaporization" is a peak.
My first exposure to live punk rock. Not NYC punk. Not Brit punk. Not LA punk although maybe some west coast family resemblance. The Wipers of Portland, Or, 1980-ish. The lead singer, Greg Sage, had a post-apocalyptic look; like a punk rocker in a Road Warrior movie. His lyrics were blunt declamatory identity crisis; "I Don't Know What I am," "Potential Suicide," "Pushing The Extreme," like that. The drum and bass kick up a spirited class of '77 punk rock force-beat but Sage's driven guitar distortion and effects always steal the show. Link Wray as Alien Boy.
"Lift Off," Patrick Cowley (1981): Disco did not die in 1979 but had a big litter of hyphenated disco babies. And should countdowns to Lift Off and exploding rocket engines count as Space Rock?
"Hills of Katmandu (Disco Mix)," Tantra (1979): Italo Disco legend Celso Valli's late-classic era disco project; electro-disco w/ exotic and cheesy Eurasian melodies.
"Magic Fly," Space (1977): I think Space also might figure somehow in the Italo Disco story that gets crazy big popular in Europe in the 1980s. I don't really know but I know there are scads of CD compilations of Italo Disco from the '80s with scores of acts doing something a little closer to Eurythmics Brit New Pop than Tantra or Space's proto-Eurodisco. But the Space Disco thing remains such a big thing all the way through the Italo Disco early 1980s; so big I've seen a best-of Italo Space Disco collection. I've read a couple of books I liked about Spaghetti Westerns but none yet about Italo Disco or Italo House; or maybe it should be 1980s Eurodisco? Like the Spaghetti's nickname leaves out Spanish, German, and other contributions from other parts of Europe in the making of Euro-Westerns. Presumably, the Italian designation means a lot of the production happens in Italy but this record is from France. I do remember reading somewhere (probably Wikipedia) that the production of Italo Disco records really doesn't take off in the early '80s until after the music industry in America abandons disco in 1979 (b/c, remember, some classic rock longhairs burn some disco records in effigy at a Chicago White Sox game in the late summer of that year). When the American disco imports dried up young people into disco in Europe had to make their own records, the story goes, but "Magic Fly," No. 1 in France, proves they were already making their very own disco, Space Disco, even before American disco imports had stopped. Another one for Team Disco.
