A Year of Music

Stuck in my head this morning: “Carpe Diem” by The Fugs, from their Second Album. By the standards of The Fugs, this song is eminently gentle, being a delicate meditation upon the certainty of death and the need to do something with yourself now rather than later.

I stress its gentleness because The Fugs are one of the filthiest, most scabrous, and straight-up entertaining bands of the 1960s. Their unhinged hooliganism, coming from a bunch of Jewish East Village Beatnik libertines, is as fresh – and startling – today as it was when their records were first released, over 40 years ago. Songs about mutants with 9-headed penises porking watermelons and farmers having hard times raising them hemp plants and poppy flowers are the rule of the day on Second Album, and there’s a sharp, wild-eyed sensibility to The Fugs that got badly diluted by the time the hippie explosion made it to San Francisco. Everybody name-checks the Fugs, and it’s pretty obvious why. Highly recommended, especially to fans of the Velvet Underground or Tom Lehrer (I bet you don’t see those two put together very often, do you?).

If we’re going to be talking about famous rants about the record industry, of course, we have to include a link to Steve Albini’s famous essay, The Problem with Music. If you don’t know who Steve Albini is, start here to get a quick understanding of why Albini might be entitled to an opinion on the subject. His importance and influence can’t be overstated, for all his claims of being a mere “recordist”. In the pantheon of independent rock, he is a Zeus-class godlike entity.

The essay is from its very start endlessly quotable, filled with Albini’s pithy cynicism and irrepressible annoyance at the mendacity and greed of the “industry” side of the music industry. You really ought to just go read it right now, even if you’ve read it before. It’s a genuinely important document. It’s also surprisingly restrained and extraordinarily educational, serving, in its hyperbolic and polemical way as a highly condensed version of All You Need to Know About the Music Business for bands. Here’s the punch line:

The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 millon dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month.

Have you ever played Guitar Hero? If so, you’ve seen the cheeky summary screen that comes up after you play a song, enumerating all the expenses (“damage to venue”, “top-shelf liquor”) that get in the way of actually making any money for a live performance, which in its way restates Albini’s argument by showing how much even a good performance yields relatively meager rewards. The saddest thing is that for all of the hip, knowing “attitude” exuded by those screens, they actually significantly understate how bad things are. I mean, Guitar Hero is just a game, they don’t want to depress players with the grim reality, and if they were realistic you’d never get to unlock the Grim Reaper because you’d always stay broke. It’s very easy to be a hugely successful band and lose money at it, even without hookers and blow and puking out the windows of the tour bus every night.

If I sound cynical about the major labels, and the recording industry in general, this essay is a good chunk of the reason why. In my ideal world, every new band would be forced to read through it several times, carefully, before they sign their first contract. A lot of them would still push themselves into the whirling blades, but that just means the rest of us can point and laugh when the inevitable happens.

I’m a bit intemperate when it comes to the music business, but that’s only because I’m by nature fairly pessimistic when it comes to capitalism and market-based economics, and (probably excessively) jaundiced about the possibility that the intersection of capital and culture will produce anything worth caring about. Which is a highfalutin way of saying that the majors crank out huge piles of crap, I expect them to do so, and I don’t really care because I don’t listen to much major-label music anyway. So it’s nice to come across things like this blown-out rant in the Guardian’s weekend magazine.

A quote, just to give you the flavor of the writing:

Imagine the outcry if people working in a factory were told that the cost of the products they were making would be deducted from their wages, which anyway would only be paid if the company managed to sell the products. Or that they would have to work for the company for a minimum of 10 years and, at the company’s discretion, could be transferred to any other company at any time.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal investigated the industry and concluded that ‘for all the 21st-century glitz that surrounds it, the popular music business is distinctly medieval in character: the last form of indentured servitude.’

I don’t actually agree with the hyperbolic rhetoric on display here, as entertaining and schadenfreude-y as it is to read. For one thing, the analogy cited above is far from accurate, inasmuch as you’d have to take into account the factory-workers getting a huge chunk of cash dumped on them up-front. Advances are the best and the worst thing about major-label contracts; if you’re savvy and know what you’re getting yourself into, it’s possible to use that to your advantage. Whether any band smart enough to have that savvy would benefit from a major-label deal – especially today – is another matter.

Severed Head’s last album with significant distribution in North America was 1991’s Cuisine (with Piscatorial), and their last album to be released at all in the United States was Gigapus, which was released by tiny indie Decibel all the way back in 1995. Severed Heads didn’t disappear, though, “they” – Severed Heads has been Tom Ellard alone for quite a while now – just moved on, without looking back to see if we were keeping up.

Back around the turn of the millennium, you could download low-bitrate MP3s for their entire catalog from sevcom.com. You could buy their albums as shareware, although the purchase interface was clunky. Then, once the rights to their recordings had reverted to them, Sevcom started selling CD-Rs of their albums, but still offered streaming audio for the curious or chintzy. Now, digital distribution has finally caught up with Tom Ellard, and you can buy a large chunk of their catalog through iTunes, most of it as “iTunes Plus” DRM-free AAC files. Or you can buy them as MP3s straight off sevcom.com and get, as a free bonus, Tom Ellard’s demented liner notes included as PDFs.

I highly recommend you do so, because there are few experimental pop musicians at the level of Severed Heads, and even their oldest, most primitive material still sounds pretty fresh. Also, I’m sure Tom Ellard could use the money. I’ve always thought of Severed Heads as being like Wire: both are artists who outgrew their original style (in Severed Heads’ case, tape-loop based experimental industrial), developed an ear for sickly-sweet melodies that play on in your head for days, write stream-of-consciousness lyrics that have no relationship with reality, and are driven by irascible eccentrics.

Severed Heads have released 9 albums since they last had a distribution deal in North America. Well, actually, that’s not quite right: they’ve put out 4 standalone albums, a couple remix collections, a side project (Coklacoma, a purposefully awkward electro-pop project which doesn’t do much for me), and one continually mutating, versioned release, Op.

The Op releases are intended to be sketchier and looser than the “full” albums. In reality, they’re also punchier and contain more of the loopiness and elusive melodies that have kept me a dedicated fan of Tom Ellard all this time. My favorite is Op 2.0, both for “Symptom Symphony 2.0”, with its Autechre Lite breakbeat (turnabout is fair play, and anyone who thinks Autechre doesn’t owe a huge debt to Severed Heads needs to hear more Severed Heads) and nonsensical lyrics, and the “Hank” half of “Pinagoal / Hank”, which is a disorienting, almost melodic looping blurt. It also features “Kern That Bembo Tighter 2.0”, which is about the nerdiest type-related title I’ve ever seen. They all have their moments, though, and Op 3 is free.

While you’re over there, grab Gashing the Old Mae West / Kato Gets the Girl (which is also free), and then buy some stuff. I recommend Come Visit the Big Bigot or Viva Heads!, but all of it is worth hearing.

A couple months or so, British post punk old-timers Wire put out Read & Burn 03 on Pink Flag, their own label. Since the last Read & Burn came out a few years ago, it’s sort of strange that they’d continue the old series. It’s especially weird as the record sounds less like the material on those EPs and the album (Send) that drew from them, and more like their late-80s material. I think their 80s output is a brilliant fusion of Dadaistic wordplay with strangely conventional, polished art rock, but a lot of people hated it. Since this carries over the tightness of their new material, it might be appealing to people who thought A Bell is a Cup Until It is Struck and the other albums of that period were a little too slick and diffuse.