"Chances Are We Are Mad": Mork and Mindy, Throwing Muses, the Pixies, His Name Is Alive, Mental Illness and existing in a mad world

 

Throwing Muses, Throwing Muses (4AD, 1986)

Surfer Rosa, the Pixies (4AD, 1988)

How Ghosts Affect Relationships, His Name Is Alive (4AD, 2024)

Stars on E.S.P., His Name Is Alive (4AD, 1996)

Mork & Mindy 

My favorite television program when I was young was Mork & Mindy, starring Pam Dawber and Robin Williams. The show, in case you've never seen it (which seems more and more likely) concerns an alien (played by Williams) from the planet Ork who lands in Boulder, Colorado and falls in love with the titular Mindy. They eventually have a middle aged son (played by Jonathan Winters). It, like so many sitcoms of my childhood, was "high concept," in that it wasn't just a bunch of people living in New York City rather required some understanding of the underlying narrative precepts to follow the story. Eventually, the show was cancelled in the middle of a narrative arc regarding an antagonistic alien who wanted to kill Mork, and might have succeeded, though we'll never know because the show was cancelled before the story resolved itself. 

Yet, that's only the "content" and, as the namesake of my dog, Walter Benjamin, tells us, the content is the least essential part of anything. Mork is played by the once in a lifetime talent of late 70s Robin Williams who was so funny that Dawber could rarely (if ever) keep her composure as her co-star improvised his lines. Yet the respect went both ways: when the network insisted that Mindy become sexier in subsequent seasons, and Dawber refused, Williams had his co-stars back and supported her refusal to become objectified. In a sense, though these behind the scenes moments didn't explicitly make it before the cameras, the audience could tell the partnership between the two of them, which made the show that much better. This show is almost too good to be true w/r/t my own interests/obsessions: Mindy's father owns and operates a music store, something that seems to become more absent with each passing year: a store where you could buy sheet music, instruments and pop albums. Her father seemed to be perplexed by both his daughter's relationship with a bizarre covert alien as well as the latest Rush album. The final figure in this quartet is Mindy's grandmother, who, in perhaps a too-predictable joke, is far more "hip" to whatever is contemporary than her bald son. 

However, none of these characters were my favorite. My favorite character on Mork & Mindy is Exidor. I'm just going to quote the Wikipedia summary for Exidor in full because it's almost too difficult to summarize otherwise: 

Exidor (portrayed by Robert Donner) – An odd man (with possible mental illness) who regards himself as a prophet. He often appears wearing a flowing white robe with a brown sash. He recognizes Mork as an alien, but nobody believes him. As the leader of a cult called "The Friends of Venus", of which he was the only member, Exidor regularly engaged in conversations with imaginary members of his cult (such as "Pepe" and "Rocco"), but was the only person who could see them. Although his behavior is usually wild and absurdly eccentric, he is shown to have a strongly caring and compassionate side; he frequently makes noisy and vigorous attempts to cure maladies or correct wrongdoings (which often turn out to be either imaginary or laughably minor), and he always immediately rushes to Mork's aid ("I got here just as soon as I heard, Mork!") when requested, although his well-meaning efforts to assist Mork seldom produce any actual results. Most times, Exidor is found yelling at his imaginary cult. He makes the comment, "Entourages can be the pits!". When the Venusians abandon him, Exidor begins to worship O.J. Simpson when Mork encounters him at the Boulder Police Station. He also had a plan to become "Emperor of the Universe" by becoming a rock star; his musical instrument of choice was the accordion. Exidor appears to be something of a squatter, for on at least two occasions, he is present in homes not his own. One time, Mork visits Exidor at a very nice apartment where he supposedly lived with his imaginary girlfriend and her twin sister. Another time, he is "on vacation" in Mindy's family home, where he apparently believed there was a beach in the living room closet. Exidor eventually gets married, in a "forest" (Mindy's attic). Mindy thought his wife would be imaginary, but she turns out to be a real woman named Ambrosia. Exidor became highly popular with audiences, and prompted wild applause from the studio audience when entering a scene.

The last part of that summary made me feel better because clearly I wasn't alone in identifying with Exidor. Not sure how many of those audience members who made Exidor popular were pre-teen children, but, nevertheless, kudos to them! An "odd man" with "possible mental illness" was my favorite character! I identified with him! and, if we're really going into the deep dark night of the soul, I hoped, as a young child, that someday I too might be a mentally ill homeless man who spoke to invisible cult members!

But I digress. From the perspective of 2024, given the fact that both Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters had long standing struggles with their respective mental health, the idea that there was a network television show with literally crazy people trying to make sense of the world with a beautiful, understanding woman (who would continue to have close relationships with her co-stars even after she left the alien world of Mork & Mindy) at the center was some kind of win for those of us who maybe didn't feel so right in the head growing up.  I wanted to write about this because 4AD records just released a box set of the first three His Name Is Alive records, and if there's an alpha to my own realizations about mental illness (Mork & Mindy) then these records, if not necessarily the omega, then certainly a sign post, a respite, in that realization. 

I Hate My Way

Starting in the mid-1980s, the venerable British independent label 4AD started signing American bands to their otherwise European-centric artist roster. Throwing Muses was the first band signed, with Muses' tour opener the Pixies to follow in short order. I first discovered Throwing Muses from a mix tape a friend gave to me in high school. The song he put on there is "Hate My Way," an absolutely blistering song about teenage depression that spoke to me in ways at the time that remain within fundamental conceptions of myself as well as my relationship to the world. Kristen Hersh, the lead singer, begins the song listing any number of maladies, addictions and historical catastrophes which could make her "hate" ("I could be in a Holocaust/ and hate Hitler" is one verse that stuck out) concluding: "no, I hate my way," before the band transitions from the lurching crashes of the opening verses to the more aching and melodic rest of the song. There's no proper chorus to the song, instead what emerges is a stream-of-consciousness series of howls expressing the pain, suicidal ideation, loneliness, horniness of being a teenager. Or at least that's what I hear. 

What is especially significant about this song and recording is that when I first heard it on the aforementioned mix tape, my friend had clearly sourced it from a second or third generation dub (not uncommon back in the day when home taping was skill in music) and so the song always has a murky haze to it, as Hersh's howl warps and warbles as it was read electro-magnetically. I've made the 21st century replica of this mix tape (which sadly I no longer own) in a streaming playlist. It's wonderful to hear all these songs together, but it's not the same. But I'm not the same either. Maybe I am. I'm still depressed and mentally ill, yelling at my imaginary posse, imagining I'm emperor of the universe with my accordion.

Where Is My Mind? 

By the time I discovered 4AD's next American band, the Pixies, they were already semi-famous: their music video "Here Comes Your Man" was on heavy rotation at night on MTV. WFNX, the "alternative" radio station in Boston at the time, played that song and "Monkey Gone to Heaven" pretty regularly. I liked both of those songs. However, by the time I got to college, I heard their first record Surfer Rosa, again on a dubbed cassette along with their first ep Come On Pilgrim as well as most of their follow up LP Doolittle. Surfer Rosa was unavailable in the U.S. at the time, only available as an expensive import CD that cost upward of $20 (an unheard of price to pay for a CD at the time. There was only one album I had spent that much money on...$26 for the first Throwing Muses CD, also an import). I have a distinct memory of falling in love with the album driving route 9 back home from Bard college after my first semester (I was too scared to drive on the highway at this point in my life, giving me plenty of time to listen to the Pixies tape over and over again). 

Surfer Rosa has become, I think, the Pixies most well-known album at this point. "Where Is My Mind?" arguably the centerpiece of the album, currently has almost a billion streams on Spotify. Its popularity can be traced back to its appearance in the final scene of the movie Fight Club. Its appearance there, like so much of the film, like the song itself, is fairly misunderstood. Just as the film facilely attempted to depict mental illness and capitalism, a song which repeatedly asks the titular question is a very lazy way of creating a total aesthetic work. If there's a Pixies album that I love with all my heart, it's actually their final record, Tromp Le Monde, an album about education, UFOs, the Jesus and Mary Chain. I saw them live for this final tour: Pere Ubu was the opening act. Dave Thomas played a trombone on stage to "Non Alignment Pact." The Pixies, who were barely speaking to one another at this point, played mostly surf instrumentals. It was one of the best shows I've ever seen. All of the American bands signed to 4AD in the 1980s seem to have one thing in common: mental illness. Throwing Muses explicitly sang about it. The Pixies asked where their minds were. Growing up as a sick American teenager in suburban Boston, I felt as if their maladies were my maladies. I think this form of identification with musicians and bands is unhealthy, but it's also unavoidable. I see how my daughter cathects to Olivia Rodrigo. She's open enough to tell the world she's a nervous wreck, why wouldn't my teenage daughter identify? 

"Put Your Finger In Your Eye" 

The Throwing Muses and the Pixies might have been able to lyrically embody the mental illness that is the Gen X teenager, but Warren DeFever and His Name Is Alive created the soundtrack for it. Warren DeFever is a guy from Livonia, Michigan who once was in the hardcore band Elvis Hitler. As has been documented over a series of archival releases, while in Elvis Hitler (and much before if the dates on the archival releases are to be believed) he was also experimenting with loops and ambient sounds. All of this would eventually go into His Name Is Alive's material as unsettling backgrounds for the inscrutable lyrics. Chances are we are mad. 

What's strange/estranging about His Name is Alive is that they--like the other groups I've mentioned--are tethered to a certain material American culture that none of the other British 4AD groups are. If anything, 4AD was a label that seemed to react against punk and post-punk in England. Treasure by the Cocteau Twins is turning forty years old (today!) and is a perfect example of this aesthetic: it seems both timeless and willfully breaking out of its own time. Dead Can Dance returns to a medieval musical style that seems deeply indebted to a Britishness that has nothing to do with the political and cultural realities of the early 1980s. This Mortal Coil, just to round out the exemplary 4AD groups, is mostly an attempt to make American cosmic music of the early 1970s as alien as possible: decontextualizing something as alien to punk and post-punk music as could be. 

A group like His Name Is Alive takes the haunting musical landscape of a 4AD to illuminate something about alienated American teenage culture: an almost reversal of This Moral Coil. On the Dirt Eaters EP HNIA cover "Man on a Silver Mountain" by Richie Blackmore's Rainbow. The original song is perhaps one of the finest examples of what I would call, with an odd but respectful nod to the British isles, "Hobbit rock." There's something deeply druid about the song about a man, a magic man if you will, on a silver mountain. The deeply sung refrain "come and make me holy again" seems like a benediction, a metamorphosis of the long haired hard rocker into something mystical, transcendent. Warren DeFever and HNIA understand this--it's the reason why young people of my and Warren's generation played Dungeons & Dragons--that alongside of the fellowship and collective joy in overcoming monsters real and imagined, a dark magic is ejected into the world as well. The His Name Is Alive cover of "Man on a Silver Mountain" is a ritual, a liturgy a song to an unholy beast who can make the singers holy again. It also was probably recorded in a bedroom in Michigan. 

I used to listen to His Name Is Alive's second album Home Is In Your Head a lot when I was tripping on acid. Yes, the confluence between an album entitled Home Is In Your Head and taking acid isn't lost on me. I'm not sure it was a healthy album to listen to while I was tripping. It certainly made me perceive and feel things in a heightened way. It was frightening but, just as nightmares might stay with you and fascinate you with their possible meanings for the rest of your life, that's what listening to Home Is In Your Head did for me. So many songs on this record are questions asked by someone, female, into the void: Are we still married? Are you coming down this weekend? So much uncertainty. Is there anyone on the other side of these questions answering? Has the singer just made up a scenario in which they're married? Awaiting someone coming to visit them this weekend? It can often feel that way when you're in college in vague relationships with people who may or may not come down for the weekend. 

By the time His Name Is Alive released Mouth By Mouth in 1993, they were a more scrutable indie-rock group. Even the heavy, mentally ill, funereal vibe of the earlier music was gone. They literally wanted to start over again with the opening lyrics: "Eve and Adam in the garden/ breathe the air and walk around" and guitars crunching all around. Rather than the drifting music in which one song bled into another on Home Is In Your Head or Livonia, Mouth By Mouth has discernible songs that remain separate, apart from one another. One of those songs, "Blue Moon," is a cover, like "Man on the Silver Mountain," but this time southern, porto-indie rock darlings Big Star. Again, just like His Name Is Alive, Big Star were a band from an unlikely part of the country/world who loved a type of music that went against most of the music, to which the band would have been exposed. 

They went even further on their next record, Stars On E.S.P. (the title evoking the disposable pop music of another era: Stars on 45 were a studio band from the Netherlands that covered older songs in medley fashion to a disco beat). The record opens with a chorus of voices singing through the filter of an old phonograph the folk standard "Can't Feel at Home," made famous by the Carter Family in the early 1930s. This is a very different "haunting" than the ghosts affecting the relationships of Home Is In Your Head. The history of American popular music is the primary specter of the record. The brief singing of the folk standard at the beginning of the record is followed by "Dub Love Letter," a unique mixture of girl group, indie rock and dub production techniques. The second single from the record, "Bad Luck Girl," is again a mixture of girl group swing (with actual finger snaps) with country twang and a lot of reverb. The apex of this sampling of pop music's history on the album comes with the first single, "Universal Frequencies." It's a brilliant rewrite, rearrangement of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," arguably one of the most famous and instantly recognizable singles of all time. The theremin is there, the cavernous bass and snare is there. The difference is that His Name Is Alive isn't singing about the good vibrations emanated from being close to a girl you like but, rather, how the good vibrations are merely one example of the universal frequencies all around you. "The universe is all around" voices echo over and over again. We once launched a record into space filled with recordings our species deemed significant enough to share. Stars On E.S.P. sounds like one band's homage to those universal sounds bouncing back to the earth, delayed and echoed by the space. 

I started this essay before the election and am now ending it after the election. It is clear that there will be fewer and fewer options for creative people to show different possibilities for the world. Maybe I'm wrong. When I was growing up in Ronald Regan's America it was a difficult time for creative people and alternate viewpoints as well, yet there were still places you could find it. Public Broadcasting was a space that, at least to my young adult perspective, remained a valuable conduit for creativity and differing perspectives. The show that best represents this ethos in what was otherwise dark times is "Alive From Off Center," which ran on PBS stations from 1985-1992. I watched regularly between 1986-1988. One of my favorite artists and musicians Laurie Anderson (whom I've written about here: https://circlewiththeholeinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2024/06/laurie-anderson-united-states-live.html) hosted the show in 1986 alongside her masculine "clone." However, the segment that has probably stayed with me the longest is the short animated film "Street of Crocodiles" by the Brothers Quay, adapted from one chapter in Bruno Schultz's masterpiece of the same name. His Name Is Alive was not a band when the Brothers Quay made the film, but it evokes the same nocturnal, nightmarish surrealism as His Name Is Alive (it's worth noting that there are a lot of similarities between the aesthetics of 4AD's in-house design team, 23 envelope, and the Brothers Quay--who, not incidentally, got their start designing album covers). Eventually the Brothers Quay would go on to direct two music videos for His Name Is Alive, for the songs "Are We Still Married?" and "Can't Go Wrong Without You." The videos evoke the secret life of toys and objects coming to life in the darkest spaces of the night, much like the disquieting sounds and echoed screams of His Name Is Alive's music does. 

The world where such fears could be subsidized and publicly broadcasted seems very distant now. Fear is all that's transmitted most days, with the understanding that we know and can identify the fear (fascism, climate change, fear of the other, fear of losing one's job) rather than an earlier time when fear seemed a shapeless, dark thing. Perhaps its just the result of getting older and understanding the world, but I'm not sure, listening to the new His Name is Alive box set, that I can still give a name to the fear evoked by the sounds contained here. In German, a language the Brothers Quay often evoke, the word for uncanny (perhaps the only way to describe the feeling here) is unheimlich. Much has been made of the word Heim sandwiched in the middle: home as the most unsettling place of all. For His Name Is Alive, it's fitting that the most unheimlich space has been in your head the whole time.

The Funniest F*cker In the World: Elvis Costello 1989-1991

Spike

Flowers In the Dirt (Archive Edition)

Mighty Like A Rose

I've been feeling nostalgic for a particular moment of my listening life: stuff that I was listening to around the age of 14-17. This isn't unusual: I remember reading somewhere that one's musical taste develops around 14 years old and that music someone discovers around that age tends to be fondly remembered later on in life. Of course, where the artist finds the listener isn't the same as where the listener finds the artist. I just wrote a blog post about the Bob Dylan albums that were released around those ages. I love Oh Mercy, but the other records released around that time don't really trigger any nostalgia or excitement within me. That makes sense since I was a 14 year old looking to a middle aged man to offer me a memorable experience. If I feel nostalgic for music I enjoyed at that age, I tend to look to artists who were a decade or so older than me: R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, etc, not artists who were part of my parent's generation.

There were, however, bands and artists that lay somewhere in-between the 1960s generation and the 1980s generation: these are the artists and bands who emerged from punk and new wave, though most of the artists who were still making music in the late 80s and early 90s from that era had left those labels behind. For all of the discussion (including in my last post0 of the aimlessness, the untimely/too-timely quality of the music 1960s musicians made in the 1980s, there's less discussion of the aimlessness, untimely/ too-timely quality of the music 1970s musicians made in the 1980s. If Paul McCarney, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, George Harrison and countless other musicians had a tenuous grasp on the musical production and styles of the 1980s, an argument could be made that the musicians of the 1970s had similar difficulties adjusting to the music of the 1980s, as odd as that might sound. 

Take Talking Heads for example: their run of albums from Talking Heads 77 to 1983's Speaking In Tongues is rightly regarded as one of the best runs from any band at any time. They seemed to effortlessly move from punk to new wave to post-punk to afro-influenced disco-adjacent art rock to art rock funk during that time without losing credibility or inventiveness. However, they made three records after that run that are almost completely forgotten or, at least, never discussed with the same reverence as the first five records. Yet, Little Creatures, True Stories and Naked are my Talking Heads records: the ones I bought when they first came out, the cassettes (and, in the case of Naked, CD) I wore out by playing every day. These were the albums whose every note and lyric I had memorized. I had a Little Creatures poster on my wall. I'll do another post on those three albums another time (I actually want to write a series about these artists/albums with the possibility of turning it into a book), but there's a similarity to the Elvis Costello records I will discuss here that needs to be investigated. Why do those Talking Heads' records fail where the first five succeed? 

If we think back on the albums 60s artists made in the mid to late 70s (ten years out from their "classic" work) we see bands and artists that attempt to merge their sound with more contemporary sounds which, from our perspective, were more inventive than the contemporary sounds the 1970s bands tried to incorporate into their mid to late 80s sound. For example, what makes Some Girls a good to great album is that the Rolling Stones seem to incorporate disco and punk/new wave ("Miss You" and "Shattered" respectively)--the "cutting edge" music of 1978--into their classic rock sound. "Miss You" not only played in the big discos of the time but also would be spun at more underground, influential discos like the Paradise Garage. Paul McCartney's McCartney II incorporated the sound of groups like Talking Heads, Yellow Magic Orchestra and dub reggae into the typical sweet and joyous sounds of McCartney's music. The last track John Lennon recorded before his assassination was "Walking On Thin Ice," a Yoko Ono single that explicitly honored the downtown New York punk and disco scenes that seemed to finally respect what he and Yoko were doing with the Plastic Ono Band in the late 60s and early 70s. The newer sounds the older musicians were drawing from still sound to our contemporary ears as, if not still groundbreaking, then forward looking. 

Perhaps because the musical culture was already splitting pretty significantly in the late 1980s, it became harder and harder for bands ten years out (Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Public Image Limited, etc) from fully engaging with the popular cutting edge of the late 80s. If it was easy for a band like the Rolling Stones to adapt their music, already heavily indebted to R&B and soul, to disco, it became harder for a band like Talking Heads to adapt their music to the dance music of the late 80s. Talking Heads had adapted their sound successfully to disco and funk in the early 80s, but seemed to retreat from adapting their sound to everything that came after. For example, there's a 12" remix of their track "Blind" that attempts to turn it into a sample driven house track that, while admirable, strips it of anything resembling the original and could be any track of the era being remixed to sound more "house-y." 

So, what a lot of late 70s bands did were to either sound as out of place in the Fairlight synthesizers and gated drums as their 60s counterparts (think of Public Image Limited's Happy? or 9) or to retreat into older sounds. XTC made Skylarking, Oranges & Lemons as well as the side project Dukes of the Stratosphere to sound explicitly like late 60s pop music (with a modern sheen). Talking Heads made two albums of roots rock Little Creatures and True Stories, the latter of which featured songs that were explicitly country. Their final record, Naked, tried to return to the polyrhythmic sound of their early 80s records, but it was almost as if the world had gotten too big, there were too many musical possibilities and, as things fell apart for the band, nobody was really paying much attention.

Elvis Costello (with and without the Attractions) has a similar story in the 1980s. His albums from My Aim Is True to Imperial Bedroom are considered (for the most part) unimpeachable. Even the one weird outlier from this period, 1981's Almost Blue an album's worth of country covers recorded in Nashville with country veterans, seems way ahead of its time: demonstrating the affinities between the working class fears and desires of punk and country music. When Costello decided to openly embrace the production technology of the 1980s on Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World, it kind of worked on the former and failed dismally with the latter. He also retreated into the country and folk tinged American mythology of King of America and the aging punk of Blood and Chocolate with the Attractions (produced by his old pal Nick Lowe, who never embellished a recording (for better and for worse)). 

In 1989 Costello moved from Columbia records (where he sort of fulfilled the role in the late 70s and early 80s that Dylan had had from the mid 60s to the mid 70s) to Warner Brothers records. He seemed to get a much bigger recording budget, access to famous older musicians and the freedom to make longer records. This all coincides with the rise of what many have referred to as "CD bloat." Starting in the late 1980s, the storage capacity for the increasingly popular compact disc format was expanding, and artists could make albums as long as 79 minutes on one CD. Remain in Light, arguably Talking Heads' best record, is forty minutes long. Their last record, Naked, is fifty-two minutes long. Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, even factoring in all the tracks on both the UK and US editions, is forty-two minutes long. Spike, his first album for Warners, is sixty-four minutes long. There was less incentive to edit albums when you had all that space to fill up. 

Then there's the notion of genre: thought Costello jumped from genre to genre quite easily in his early 80s records, each record stayed in a particular genre for its runtime. Spike begins with "...This Town...," an explicit Byrds homage with Roger McGuinn himself on guitar. Gated drums are the first sound we hear, and the whole thing gets more and more cluttered with effects and sounds, fighting to bury Costello's voice describing the soulless, greedy bastards populating "this town" (Hollywood? London?). It reminds me of both Oliver Stone's Wall Street (there's a reference to Mr. Gekko in the song, Michael Douglas' famous character in the film) and Martin Amis' novels (Success, London Fields). It also might be a critique of the person Elvis had become or was perceived to have become: a "bastard" who just happened to make it to the opulence of Warner Brothers records. Columbia, of course, is just as famous (and probably just as opulent) as WB, however Columbia/CBS (from its fonts to its bare-boned CD and cassette "Nice Price" reissues, wherein I first heard Elvis Costello's "classic" albums) seemed to give off an aura of independent, stripped down, no-nonsense sound that something like Spike was reacting against. In the liner notes to the CD reissue of Spike on Rhino records, Costello claimed that the budget for Spike was the equivalent of "a small independent movie." 

The other big difference from the earlier recordings from Spike was with whom Costello was collaborating. Starting in 1987, Costello started writing songs with Paul McCartney. It was almost too good: along with Dylan, Costello had been compared to John Lennon as well. McCartney was in desperate need of legitimacy after the film/album Give My Regards to Broad Street and the album Press to Play. Having a bitter cynical songwriter who loves rock n roll and has a nasally voice compliment Paul's sweet, affable rock patriarch was almost too good to pass up. I think the songs they wrote together around this time are the best from the Spike/Flowers In the Dirt (Paul's record that came out in 1989) sessions. "Veronica" (co-written by McCartney) is one of Costello's best songs, as well as his highest charting hit. It's a rare contemporary pop song about old age, about growing old with dignity, something almost completely alien to rock and pop's obsession with youth since its inception. For example, the Rolling Stones released Hackney Diamonds last year (2023) with little to no indication that all the members are in their eighties. It's impossible to know what the Rolling Stones think about getting older, because to reflect on such things would be to break the spell. 

Around the time of Spike's release, Costello appeared on the cover of Options magazine (a great music magazine that straddled both cult artists who had bubbled up to the mainstream, and reviewing mail order cassette tapes from bands you had never heard of) with Tom Waits. As a huge Tom Waits fan in high school, this was very exciting to me. Indeed, Costello uses a number of Waits' sidemen on Spike and a few of the tracks, "God's Comic," "Chewing Gum," and "Miss Macbeth" self-consciously echo Waits' interest in odd instrumentation and pre-rock n roll song forms. Costello had dabbled in that before, but not with these forms and instrumental juxtapositions. In fact, Spike seems to a response to the artist he had become on Columbia, alternating between punk anger, new wave pop sensibilities, and a deep and abiding love for country and folk forms. These still exist on Spike: "Coal Train Robberies" is a rave up that continues Costello's interest in the intersection between capitalism, liberalism and racism in contemporary England. "Tramp the Dirt Down" is his sincere hope that he lives long enough to see Margaret Thatcher die (he did). However, these are the outliers, and the album suffers from an over-stuffed, same-sounding template that bores after a while. Much better were the songs when I saw him live in 1989: a marathon show which ended with "That Day Is Done" and a promise from Elvis that he and his band literally hadn't practiced any more songs to play. 

In 1991 Elvis was on another magazine cover: this time he and, of all people, Jerry Garcia posed on the cover of Guitar Player magazine. This was quite a shock for several reasons: first, EC had never indicated that he was a fan of the Dead (at least not anything I had read or heard up to that point). Second, while Elvis certainly wasn't as "hip" as he had been a decade previous, the Grateful Dead were very much out of vogue to anyone who had enjoyed the previous decade of music. Third, no one would have mistaken Elvis for a great guitar player (he called himself "the little hands of concrete" to dismiss his own playing). Yet, here he was with a beard and round glasses, arm around Jerry, with his own beard and round glasses. As if this weren't odd enough, Costello went on to record a fantastic version of "Ship of Fools" for the Dedicated Grateful Dead tribute album. 

"Ship of Fools" is off of the Dead's 1974 album From the Mars Hotel, an album that reflects the Dead's fatigue from touring for the better part of a decade, as well as a disillusion with being countercultural left-overs. "Ship of Fools" is a final kiss-off: the Dead would take a year off after touring the album. "It was later than I thought," Garcia sings, "when I first believed you/ now I cannot share your laughter ship of fools." The ship of fools here could the be the ship of state (Nixon would step down summer of 1974), or it could be the ship of merry pranksters who had nurtured and followed the Dead since late 1965. Elvis Costello's voice and bitterness go hand in hand, and here there's more than a suggestion that Costello had become disillusioned with his own ship of fools following him for more than a decade. 

Both the sonic time period (the 1960s and early 70s) and a disillusioned bitterness permeate Costello's next album Mighty Like A Rose, an album he describes as angry in the liner notes to the 2002 CD reissue: "This record says the world we are making is grim, and I believe that it is. We are cruel to each other, we lie and manipulate until the unworthy encounter a love to which we must surrender." Elsewhere he states that the dour mood of the record was a direct response to the success of "Veronica," and the popularity of Spike in general. While I wouldn't say that Mighty Like A Rose is a difficult listen, Costello is too married to the pop song format to give up on it, some of the arrangements and vocals on the album suggest the more classical oriented direction he would go with his next record The Juliet Letters (an album I have never liked). 

The first song on the album, and the album's first single, is "The Other Side of Summer," a direct homage to the Beach Boys, although, interestingly, in the liner notes to the CD reissue Costello claims to be echoing the less popular, far more interesting material the Beach Boys recorded in the early 1970s. Indeed, "The Other Side of Summer's" interest in ecological collapse echoes the opening track of the Beach Boys 1971 album Surf's Up "Don't Go Near the Water." For Costello it's not just the water that's toxic, the entire planet is on its last legs: "good night, god bless and kiss goodbye to the earth" he sings before singing "the other side of summer" into oblivion. This goes immediately (a popular feature of CDs in this era was to have the tracks feed into one another to make the album one, long continuous song) into "Hurry Down Doomsday (the Bugs Are Taking Over)," another cheery song about apocalypse and natural disasters. More importantly, with a Jim Keltner drum part looped on the track, this is Costello's first nod to then contemporary music in a while. After Costello stopped working with popular sounds in the mid 80s, he purposely removed himself from sounding "contemporary" by the later parts of the decade. Spike, with the exception of some dated production, seemed to be willfully eclectic in its musical nods, which, one could argue also became a signature of artists facing the pressure of CD bloat. The use of loops became a hallmark of "edgy" and "contemporary" production for a while. Though the use of loops in popular music goes all the way back to the 1960s, the type of loop that provides the basic rhythm track definitely seems borrowed at this time from hip hop and club culture (not just dance music, but genres like industrial and dark wave). So if the first track of the album is retrospective, the second track seems to be fully engaged with what was going on in music at the time. And yet, while the first song works (if being a little too obvious), the second song does not. The following song, "How To Be Dumb" (honestly, my favorite on the record) returns to Costello's classic, petulant, punkish sound that everyone associates with him. 

And this returns me to my original point: though I love Mighty Like A Rose for personal reasons (I was just as pessimistic about the world as Costello seemed on this record), I can hear now why it sounds like a failure: it wants to observe and critique the world around it, but suits itself to the comfortable sounds of previous eras: "Now you can't afford to fake all the drugs your parents used to take/ Because of their mistakes you'd better be wide awake." Good point, while the sixties generation was enjoying all the drugs, their consumption habits significantly damaged the habitability of the planet. Every singer-songwriter who wants to point out this very fact is faced with a choice: does the comfort of the music made by that very same generation invalidate the critique being put forward? Is the ecological critique set forth in "The Other Side of Summer" doomed to only exist as irony, a meta commentary about how the very fun, fun, fun proselytized in the early Beach Boys song leads to "the other side" of summer? The answer would seem to be yes given that "Hurry Down Doomsday's" attempt to update the sound for an early nineties audience makes Costello (in his late thirties at the point the record came out) seem like an old man yelling at a cloud. 

This is where my love of Costello's music ended. As I mentioned before, I couldn't get into The Juliet Letters with the Brodsky String Quartet. Brutal Youth and All This Useless Beauty were the final two albums with the Attractions and have some great songs on them, but, like the Juliet Letters in their own way, retreat into something like nostalgia for musical forms that seemed removed from what was going on in contemporary music. Contrast this with Neil Young who, during this same period, toured with Sonic Youth, made To Sleep With Angels about Kurt Cobain's suicide and eventually recorded an album with Pearl Jam. It's strange to think that the generation of musicians who emerged from the mid to late seventies, an era defined as an explicit reaction to what rock music had become, seemed to become less relevant with the passage of time as compared to the previous generation. This isn't true of all musicians from that era (Wire, for example, continued to make abrasively indefinable music during this time) but Costello's facial hair and round spectacles wasn't the only nod to comfort and retreat while he sang he couldn't believe he'd never believe in anything again. 

The Ugliest Bob Dylan Records in the World

Empire Burlesque 

Knocked Out Loaded

Down in the Groove 

Dylan & the Dead

Under the Red Sky 

This summer Bob Dylan is touring as part of Willie Nelson's Outlaw Festival. There's been a lot of buzz around this tour given the fact that it's the first post-Rough and Rowdy Ways shows, which had a very limited set list centered (mostly) around the songs from his most recent album. Before Dylan started touring with the festival, people online started speculating whether or not Dylan would just perform the same songs he's been performing for the last three years? Prior to the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour Dylan would perform an ever-changing set-list (almost) every night as part of what is commonly known as "the Never Ending Tour" (1988-2019 RIP). Would he return to that type of concert? After about a month of touring, it's clear that he's definitely playing a new setlist of old songs and covers, although he's pretty much stuck to the same set of songs and covers each night. 

Two highlights of each show are the performances of "Shooting Star" and "Under the Red Sky," songs from Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky respectively. These songs are special to me because they come from the period in which I got into Dylan's music. Though I first discovered Dylan's music from my mom's vinyl copy of Greatest Hits, I first became aware of Dylan from MTV, USA for Africa and music videos in general. This might seem ridiculous because Dylan appears to be an artist who didn't necessarily take to the medium particularly well, but I have a distinct memory of seeing the video for "Jokerman" one afternoon on a local music video show (such things existed for the kids who didn't have access to cable).

I was 14 in 1988 when my serious Bob Dylan interest began. I saw him live that year, about thirty or so shows into the Never Ending Tour. His then latest album Down In the Groove would be named the worst album of the year by Rolling Stone. The next year he released Oh Mercy, which would be named one of the best albums of the year by Rolling Stone. Oh Mercy was the first good Dylan album that was mine. It was the first demonstration in real time what people had celebrated in Dylan's sixties albums: the use of language, the murky mythology, the ability to write songs that sounded as if they had existed forever. And the production was different from what I had heard from Dylan in the 1980s: gone were the drum machines and the blues rock, in came the famously swampy reverb of Daniel Lanois production. Dylan sounded relevant, if older, and artist who could still be as cool as he had ever been. 

So, naturally, I was very excited for his next record titled Under the Red Sky. In those days the only information you would have about an upcoming release was usually an album title followed by a blurb in Rolling Stone. I knew from said blurb, for example, that the new album would be produced by Don Was, from the group Was (Not Was). Was (Not Was) had a minor MTV hit with their song "Walk the Dinosaur" from the album What Up Dog? I had the cassette and I'd still defend that record. Like so much of Was (Not Was) the album is a strange mixture of avant-skronk, dancefloor bops, neo-soul and Frank Sinatra Jr. The band itself has in the 21st century acquired some cache for their work in the early 80s, pioneering the mutant disco genre giving it one of its enduring themes "Out Come the Freaks." 

When the first single/video from the Dylan album dropped, "Unbelievable," I was disappointed. I believe the album was panned, again, by Rolling Stone and it was quickly forgotten. His next album would be all acoustic covers, Good As I've Been To You, but it was too late. I had lost interest in Dylan's new records from that point on. It didn't help that a year after Under the Red Sky Dylan released the first three volumes of his Bootleg Series, containing then unreleased masterpieces from his then thirty years of making music. Why listen to the new stuff when you could listen to "Blind Willie McTell" or "She's Your Lover Now" or "Series of Dreams," unreleased songs that ranked with the best of his work. Shortly after Good As I've Been to You came another covers record World Gone Wrong followed by MTV Unplugged. In my mind Dylan had become a nostalgia act, happy to resurrect his career as a folk troubadour, while also milking his mid-sixties hits for a Gen X audience at venues like Woodstock 94. 

While I didn't mind any of this stuff, I hardly thought it was as interesting as what Dylan's old friends/rivals were doing at the time: Leonard Cohen had released two of his best albums in I'm Your Man and The Future, both of which sounded weird, electronic and both out of and born in time. Neil Young had started a string of amazing comeback records: Freedom, Ragged Glory, Harvest Moon, Sleeps With Angels plus a couple of blistering live albums, Arc and Weld, the former of which had more in common with Sonic Youth (who toured with Young around this time) than Dylan's MTV Unplugged (Neil would do his own Unplugged during this time too, but even then Neil proved to be far more adventurous in his song selection, choosing "Transformer Man" from 1981's bat-shit electronic album Trans as the first single and video from the Unplugged set). 

The nadir of Dylan's career for me came in 1993 when Dylan rounded up many of his contemporaries for a thirtieth anniversary tribute show, praising the great and powerful Dylan, and performing for him and us for free. It didn't help that this was taking place the same year that PJ Harvey released Rid Of Me, covering "Highway 61" with a manic energy that none of the thirtieth anniversary performers captured in their mostly reverential performances (though, Lou Reed's "Foot of Pride" came close, and Sinead O'Connor's rehearsal performance, though not manic, comes closest to besting Dylan's original). This period of Dylan's career so soured me on the man and his music that I initially didn't listen to his great "comeback" album Time Out of Mind because I was convinced it couldn't be that good. It took me a while to listen to most of his late 90s and 2000s music because I just assumed it wouldn't be as good as what came before. 

Thinking about this now it doesn't seem that unusual to me. It seems much more unusual that younger people would have been expected to listen to and enjoy music made by musicians who had careers before they were born. At the time, "classic rock" functioned like Stockholm Syndrome: not only did boomers argue that their music was still relevant, but that it was actually better than most of the stuff younger musicians were making at the time. The period from 1987-1994, from the twentieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper's and the Summer of Love to the twenty fifth anniversary of Woodstock, was both the apotheosis of this idea and, I would argue, the end of the idea as well (when people think about Woodstock '94 they mostly remember Green Day's performance in the middle of a mud fight. Though Green Day is nostalgic for earlier music in its own way, the dominance of their performance suggested a changing of the guards). This period also covers most of the time period in which Bob Dylan was making the ugliest Bob Dylan records in the world. 

Empire Burlesque

If you're thinking of the quintessential "80s" Dylan record, you're thinking of Empire Burlesque. The first single, "Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love) has the gated drums, the synth pads, the back-up singers that mark the "classic rock" of the era. It sounds like Dirty Work by the Rolling Stones, hints at the much more commercially successful Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits (Mark Knopfler had produced Dylan's previous studio album Infidels), more often than not flails around like Rod Stewarts music from the time. "Tight Connection" even had an MTV video in heavy rotation directed by Paul Schraeder that is brilliantly absurd with its Miami Vice aesthetics, though its also head scratching in its attempt to be contemporary in its very music video-ness. The album is a mess to be sure, but it also works some of the time:  "Tight Connection" is actually one of the catchiest things Dylan had written since the 1960s, a song that could have been a hit if sung by someone who didn't sound painfully middle aged. "When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky" is a great song, and is the actual successful blending of 80s production (the album was produced by Arthur Baker, who had worked with everyone at that point) and Dylan's lyrical qualities. It sounds like a New Order 12" with a guest lead vocal from the man himself. It also sounds like a blueprint for what Leonard Cohen would do on I'm Your Man. If anything, I wish more of the album sounded like this. Reportedly, Arthur Baker thought Dylan should end the album with an acoustic number and Dylan wrote "Dark Eyes" in a night. If you miss the old Dylan, it's probably the best thing on here.

Knocked Out Loaded

When Bob Dylan was awarded the Kennedy Center medal of honor, Gregory Peck presented the award to him, which I'm sure made Bob very happy, but must have been confusing to any number of people watching at home. This album is the reason why Gregory Peck presented him with that prestigious award. Nevertheless, this is probably, legitimately Bob's worst album. It also happens to have one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs in "Brownsville Girl," the song about seeing a movie starring Gregory Peck. It also has absolutely forgettable songs like "You Wanna Ramble" and truly excruciating songs like "They Killed Him," which might be the worst Bob Dylan song. The way his vocals are recorded on this record, he sounds lost, alone with only his voice accompanying him in an echo box. "Driftin' Too Far from the Shore" is probably the only other good thing on here, but it's just a kind of pleasant dated soul-rock number that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Bruce Willis' The Return of Bruno released around the same time. "Got My Mind Made Up" isn't bad and is elevated by the co-writing credit of Dylan's young friend Tom Petty. Much better are the recordings of the concerts Dylan played with Petty and the Heartbreakers around this time.

Down In the Groove 

This was the record Bob Dylan was "touring" when I saw him live in 1988. He only played two songs from the record "Had A Dream About You Baby" and "Silvio," which perhaps reflected his own feelings about the record. I have to admit, perhaps because I saw him on this leg of the Never Ending Tour, Down In the Groove might be my favorite of Dylan's Ugliest Records. By 1995 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds had recognized the greatness of "Death Is Not the End." I see this song as Dylan's own response to Cohen's original recording of "Hallelujah." "Silvio" was co-written with Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, with the Dead providing backing vocals. It was the highlight of the show I saw, stayed in my mind for a while, and was finally rewarded with a place on Greatest Hits Volume III (more on that later). Much of the album consists of covers "Let's Stick Together," "Shenandoah," "Rank Strangers to Me," the later two of which are quite good. Is it a good Bob Dylan record? No! It's ugly! But being the ugliest girl in the world is its own reward, I guess. Oh and yeah this is the record that has "Ugliest Girl in the World," where I cribbed the name for this essay.

Dylan and the Dead

The Grateful Dead had almost the opposite experience of Bob Dylan in the 1980s: since the Dead had been a touring band for most of the 1970s and had built up an international following in that arena, they were never really dormant during the decade (unlike Dylan who toured in spurts in the 1980s never to Dead-size crowds) and could always rely on their audiences supporting them. Although I will defend most Dead studio albums, they were never known as album artists the way Dylan had been. Yet, in 1987 the Dead had a huge single and video hit with "Touch of Grey," got a whole new generation of fans, and started playing in the largest venues of their career. "Touch of Grey" is one of their great songs and the album it comes from, In the Dark, is fine, however what is fascinating is that it's no less dated in its sound than Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded. Additionally, Dylan had Tom Petty and Arthur Baker working with him--an artist and producer who were very popular at the time--whereas the Dead were working within their organization, not attempting to reach out to any audience younger than their already established one. 

So while a decade earlier the Dead and Dylan would have been on equal footing as support for one another should they have toured together, when the Dylan and Dead tour took place in 1987, and an album from the tour was released in 1989, it could have seemed as if the Dead were helping their old friend/mentor Dylan out at a low point in his career as they ascended. A lot of people dislike Dylan and the Dead. A lot of people will tell you that there are better shows from which they could have drawn (check out the show from Autzen Stadium in Eugene, OR) and both groups have strong arguments. Dylan seems very checked out on these shows. The Dead clearly want to do what the Dead do best: jam. However, every time Jerry's about to go into a flying solo, Dylan steps on his playing and moves on to the next rote rendering of whatever verse or chorus the song requires of him. Also, "Joey?" Really? That said, the stuff from the gospel period is performed really well ("Serve Somebody" "Slow Train Coming") and the song that sounds as if it should have come from the gospel period ("Knocking on Heaven's Door") is great as well. 

Under the Red Sky

In 1994 Dylan released Greatest Hits Vol. III, an almost inexplicable Greatest Hits compilation for which no one asked. Brief history of the Dylan greatest hits series: In 1967 Columbia Records released Greatest Hits, a stop-gap cash grab the label put together while Dylan (ostensibly) was recovering from his motorcycle accident. The only reason anyone needed this record in 1967 was for the until then unreleased "Positively 4th Street." That said, this was the first Dylan record I ever heard (from my mom's long-forgotten vinyl collection back in my grandparent's apartment), commencing my life-long love of Dylan, and I guess, as a starting point, you could do much worse. Greatest Hits Vol. II made more sense: unreleased songs, deep cuts, "Quinn the Eskimo" "rescued" from Self-Portrait, I don't own a copy but people generally like it and some of the then new songs "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Watching the River Flow" have become staples of Dylan's live show for years. 

Dylan didn't release another Greatest Hits record for twenty-three years. Arguably he didn't need to: other than a few songs here and there breaking through, Dylan didn't really have hits the way he did in the mid-to-late 60s. He had, essentially, become a cult artist and cult artists don't really have "hits." In the mid-1980s Dylan released Biograph, a box set of well-known songs, unreleased songs that would serve as a new paradigm for how artists like Dylan would present their entire careers beyond just the "greatest hits" (think Bowie's Sound + Vision or Lou Reed's Between Thought and Expression box sets). 

There really was no need for a Greatest Hits Vol III in 1994, but, somehow, the collection of songs transcended that need. Indeed, it was odd to think that neither "Knocking On Heaven's Door" nor "Tangled Up in Blue" had been on a Greatest Hits set before this point. Both those songs as singles had made the top 30. So would "Hurricane" and "Serve Somebody." So, depending on how far you wanted to stretch the word "hit," there was some justification for the compilation. However, it wasn't the hits that made the record special for me: "Changing of the Guards" was an amazing Dylan song I had never heard because of the low opinion critics had of Street Legal. I stayed away from the born-again records (again because of low opinions) but "Groom Still Waiting at the Alter" (a b-side from Shot of Love) was one of the best Dylan rockers I had heard since the 60s. No "Tight Connection," (which charted slightly below the top 100) but the ugliest records are proudly represented by both "Silvio," which I fondly remembered from my 1988 concert, and "Brownsville Girl," which was an absurdist, self-referential western complete with female backing greek chorus that was a hoot and proved that Dylan could be very funny when he wanted to be.

Sandwiched between "Brownsville Girl" and the closing "Knocking On Heaven's Door" was the inexplicable choice of "Under the Red Sky." It wasn't a single, as mentioned before that was "Unbelievable" from Under the Red Sky, I don't think it was a fan favorite and the impression I had listening to it for the first time was, with reference to and reverence for Greil Marcus, "what is this shit?" A weird-ass song about homeless children, the moon, said children getting baked in a pie and, eventually, environmental devastation. There seemed to be an oblique Paul Simon reference--"a diamond as big as your shoe"--and the whole thing stuck out like a sore thumb (plunged into a children pie) along side of the other forgotten "hits" of the compilation. I hated it, and, by extension, I hated Under the Red Sky having never listened to the album. I wasn't alone in having a low opinion of the record: with the exception of rock critic Robert Christgau and Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin almost everyone thinks it's one of Dylan's worst. 

This essay was inspired by the Jokermen podcast, which recently did a re-evaluation of Under the Red Sky (after a similar re-evaluation of Down in the Groove). It's clear now that Under the Red Sky has at least one of Dylan's great songs of the period: "Born In Time," a song we later found out had been written during the Oh Mercy sessions. I would argue that "God Knows," a song Dylan regularly played on Sunday while touring in the early 90s, including his famous Woodstock '94 performance, deserves to be ranked highly as well. I can appreciate the humor of songs like "Handy Dandy" and "Under the Red Sky" now that Dylan's 21st century career has more bizarrely humorous songs. "Cats In the Well" is a good rocker that plays well live. I wouldn't say it's my favorite of the ugliest albums period, more like the second ugliest girl in the world.  

 

‘Night, Music

‘Night, Music

I.

The day Steve Albini posted on Twitter/X that he “will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan” and then followed up with “Christ the amount of human effort wasted to sound like an SNL band warm up” was a good day. Not because of the merits of any of his arguments (life-long Dan fan here), rather because it was comforting to know that there were people who seemed to still refuse to be part of a perceived monoculture (i.e. that Steely Dan is a very cool band). I think the best response to this thread came from the brilliant Steven Hyden who pointed out that, as a sixty year old world champion poker player, Steve Albini is a character in a Steely Dan song. 

Steve Albini passed away suddenly last week at the age of sixty one. Since his passing, there has been extensive, deserved praise of Albini: from his various bands, to his legendary production, his ability to reassess the younger person he was and apologize for the wrongs he committed, even his gastronomical opinions. And, since I’ve just finished the second season of the Bear, Albini represented the best of what Chicago has given the world. Even his hatred of Steely Dan was accepted, if not defended, as part of Albini’s principles as well as his authenticity. The guys who run the “bad Dan takes” twitter handle, and host the Gaucho Amigos podcast, vowed to not listen to Steely Dan the day after Albini passed in his honor. 

Not quite a week after Albini’s death, jazz saxophonist David Sanborn passed. Among his many other credits, Sanborn both played with Steely Dan and was a member of the SNL band for many years. You couldn’t imagine two different musicians, and it almost seems perverse to bring them together. Almost. If there’s one thing that Sanborn and Albini have in common it’s the Pixies. Sanborn was host of Hal Wilner’s miracle TV show “Sunday Night” (later retitled “Michelob presents Night Music”) It played late on Sunday nights. I watched a number of them but the episode that will forever be stuck in my brain is episode 207 featuring the Pixies (in their US television debut) and the Sun Ra Archestra. In my memory, the two bands played together on a cover of “Space is the Place,” but this, based on everything I’ve read and seen, did not take place. They were on the same episode and clearly both Black Francis and El Sonny Ra have a life-long passion for the outer spaceways. But it doesn’t matter: these two influential musical institutions shared the same stage within this episode and it seemed that David Sanborn was the orchestrator of this musical adventure. 

Now, obviously, Sanborn wasn’t the mastermind behind Night Music, nor was he its musical director. He was a very charismatic host who, because of his well-liked reputation within the jazz community, could get Sun Ra and Miles Davis to play on his Sunday night music program. The mastermind behind the show was Hal Wilner, the musical polymath who created two seasons out of what he had done on SNL in 1980. Though often considered the worst season in terms of comedy, most consider it the best season for music: Prince, Captain Beefheart, Bob Dylan, The Funky 4+1 (first hip hop group to play on national TV) were some of the artists Wilner chose for that season. Yet, for a kid in high school discovering music when “Night Music” was on the air, Sanborn, the guy who played the sexy sax and had the hair and suit to match, was my guide through the outer limits of music. 

Albini famously produced the Pixies first full-length album Surfer Rosa, one of the greatest records to have been released during my lifetime. As much as Nirvana is rightly considered the vehicle by which “punk” broke big and shifted units in 1991—their third record, In Utero was initially engineered by Albini before DGC made them “soften up” the sound a brought R.E.M.’s producer Scott Litt into the mix—the Pixies really are the pre-history of 1991’s sound. Their “Night Music” appearance would be the beginning of a big media blitz that would see the Pixies eventually host “Post-Modern MTV” for a week and the videos from their second full-length, Dolittle go into heavy rotation. The Pixies made popular something that would be a hallmark of both the music Albini produced and created, as well as Nirvana’s own musical aesthetic: a startling jump from quiet to loud that, with some exceptions, hadn’t really been the hallmark of punk or underground music before then. Also, a certain dryness to the drums that has become a hallmark of rock production ever since: there’s a reason why “Where Is My Mind?” continues to be a classic from generation to generation: the “stop”/slow strum/ dry drums loudly pounding in the background as they come in is thrilling no matter how many times I’ve heard it.

II.

Earlier this year Spotify introduced their AI DJ in the app. It’s a strange experience. It obviously fills a gap left by most people’s movement away from terrestrial radio. People miss the sound of a voice and a choice directing their listening experience. You can easily still experience that every day at, as the Replacements sang, the left of the dial, where college students and old people who DJ for community radio will play you what they like. Someone the other day played all of “Ife” by Miles Davis in the middle of the afternoon on the OSU radio station. God bless them. But most people don’t tune into that any longer, yet miss the pilot of the airwaves steering their listening experience one way or another. And yet, that isn’t what the Spotify AI DJ is actually doing: during the many times I’ve listened to DJ Flex? X?, he/it/the thing that doesn’t think had played me a mix of songs I’ve been listening to recently, songs I listened to in 2022 or various “vibes” that…are just songs I’ve recently played that the algorithmic DJ seems to “think” fit into an acceptable stream of music. The oddest part of the experience is the cadence of the “DJ’s” voice: he’s hip, he’s just hanging with you, you know, playin’ some tunes you’re gonna like. As if I weren’t constantly aware that this DJ doesn’t exist and has no idea what I, or any human, might be like when the just want to hang out and listen to, you know, some tunes, catch some vibes, etc. 

But I realized that what the Spotify DJ gives us is the illusion of a driver, a taste maker, behind what we listen to. And Spotify had to create this, not just to assuage the isolated and lonely streaming culture consumer, but to give the listener the illusion that there is someone behind the selection and not just some algorithm aggregating our listening habits and spiting out what it/the thing that doesn’t think assumes we want to hear. And this is what Steve Albini and David Sanborn have in common: a flesh and blood human who has taste, ideas and values that are reflected in both the art they made and the art they presented. Albini and Sanborn might have had diametrically opposed musical tastes and general outlooks on life and the creative process, but they were trusted individuals who seemed both curious and gracious in their championing of what they liked. 

People always worry about the current state of as well as the future of music. Other people, more often than not, misinterpret this to mean that they are worried that people don’t make good or interesting music any longer. This, of course, is the wrong way to think about this anxiety. Of course humans will always make good, interesting music that has never been heard before. As a species, we haven’t lost our ability to create or imagine art forms otherwise. Recently I’ve been listening a lot to the late, great artist/producer Sophie, whose music doesn’t really sound like anything else but clearly emerges from a long history of queer dance and electronic music. There are any number of other artists out there, those known and unknown, who are changes genres right now as we speak. When people express anxiety about the current state and future of music it has to do with value and distribution. Who values music and, as if one could put an actual value on such things, how is music evaluated in whatever hell-stage of capitalism we find ourselves in? 

According to a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum in 2023, streaming services dominate the way most people consume music. How these companies present music as a commodity is as important (if possibly not more so for their particular medium) as what that music actually consists of. Spotify, the most ubiquitous of these streamers, is constantly looking for venture capital to finance it’s money losing operations. This is why it’s gone all in on podcasts and things outside of music. The corporation has to consistently resign contracts with major labels in order to keep the music catalogues on its service. If, someday, the venture capitalists that fund Spotify were to determine that contracts with music labels are too costly compared to audiobooks and podcasts, what would happen then? Music could still be streaming on other platforms—Apple and Amazon make enough money on other products and services that music is mostly secondary—but given the market share of Spotify that would be a huge loss. 

Besides, the humans who actually make music can’t really afford to do so because these streaming services pay out so little in royalties. This doesn’t really matter to a company like Spotify, which would be happy to populate their various playlists with music made by AI and have already started doing so. There’s a current thread on the Spotify community board of people complaining that most of their “Discover Weekly” tracks are AI generated. If the point of Spotify streams is to simply fill up playlists that people will stream regardless of what the content is then isn’t it more cost effective to just simply fill those playlists up with AI generated garbage. If you need “beats to study to” or “happy songs” or “songs that make you cry,” well, if you already know what that might mean, you can manufacture what you need without human involvement. Which means you don’t have to pay humans. 

Thus music, independent of the creative process that will always make it essential and exciting, sucks as a medium right now. And the deaths of both Albini and Sanborn, though sworn enemies in the trenches of the rough and the smooth, come together to remind everyone that music you love is passion, sounds are weird and exciting, a performance can split your skull open, and, because we stake so much on the differences in our tastes, this stuff is as serious as your life.