100 reviews # 13 part 2: side 2 of wild planet

One thing about the B52s in their early days was their unwillingness to fuck with the formula. Someone might have had a talk with them along the lines of: this is going to be a hard thing for the mass market to swallow so if you're going to launch this on the world in any sense, you have to basically not deviate from it thereafter. 

I shouldn't pronounce on this because to be honest I don't remember ever having heard a full B52s album aside from the first two (there have been seven plus an EP that's about as long as most albums,* still, a pretty tiny output for a group that's been in existence for 45 years - it's one song every 219 days, including cover versions. 

I have really hurt my back. I am not sure how it happened I think it was when I was trying to put a harness on Nancy to slowly introduce her to the idea of going for a walk on a lead. I have completely abandoned that idea, not because it was hard to get the harness on, though it was, but because when we got to the door she didn't want to do it and indeed turned around and got out of the harness almost immediately. I guess at that stage I wasn't that aware of having pain but it developed soon afterwards with a vengeance. Now it's that interesting situation where you start to get a vague idea not of how your muscles work but that they certainly do have a complex arrangement when you go to do things. It's not great lying down completely, it's better sitting, it's initially uncomfortable but ultimately fine standing/walking, but getting between those states is really, really painful. I'm not here to whinge, it's better this morning than it was last night, as long as I don't throw to many discuses or play too much squash I am sure I'll be fine. 

Side two of Wild Planet only has four songs on it, of varying durabilities. As usual the comedy component is the thing that wears out first, so 'Quiche Lorraine' for instance which reeks of mid-to-late-70s improv and which doesn't even really stand up too well (I know what that's like) on first listening, is the most throwaway (also the storyline makes me uneasy). '53 Miles of Venus' is a kind of faster, sparser 'Planet Claire' and while its emptiness is perfectly evocative of emptiness, and it's a good thing it doesn't have any lyrics (aside from the words which make up the title) so there's no riff on Venus (wolf whistle) Mars (hunting horns or something else warlike) Pluto (woof woof) Uranus (uh-oh), it still feels unfinished. That, or it's a pleasant wind-down after the frenetic work out of the previous eight tracks. 

'Devil in my Car' is possibly the hidden delight of the album and a song I had never really thought about before. If you slowed it down, oddly enough, it would be not unlike one of REM's hits, I can't remember which one because it's too hard to think of one tune while listening to another, but I think maybe 'Radio Free Europe'. It has a little more of an Americana, country feel to it, the - um, bridge? (the 'freeway to hell' bit) - is a bit reminiscent of American X, too, something like 'White Girl'. In any case, it's a keeper. 

I bought the single pictured above of 'Strobe Light'/ 'Dirty Back Road' when it came out, forty years ago, and unlike so many things I have retained it ever after. They are good songs (I like 'Dirty Back Road' the best) but I don't know why the hell I purchased this, considering I could have bought the whole album for a bit more outlay. Anyway - 'Strobe Light' is a pretty interesting take on, sorry to come back to this but all things considered - a pretty interesting take on heterosexual lovemaking/seduction - the thing where Fred rings the girls and they respond with such contempt/disgust/ennui is still pretty funny to me. The later bit about kissing the pineapple, I don't know where to go with that but I will sit with it. 

So looking back on the whole, this album is completely formulaic, in the sense that it's to the formula of the first album and every track is a parallel universe version of tracks from that album; they're not entirely in the same sequence but they almost are (admittedly there's no equivalent to the 'Downtown' cover on The B-52's on Wild Planet but that is by far the weakest track and poorest performance, so there being no quavery/sullen 'Que Sera Sera' or 'The Beat Goes On' here is a plus. Wild Planet is just slightly more electro (I think the drums on 'Quiche Lorraine' are drum machine, for instance, and come to think of it that might also be true of '53 Miles West of Venus').

Thanks for indulging me in this I had a good time. Now to get comfortable to do my real work - 1500 words of book chapter at least. 

*Wild Planet has nine tracks and is just under 35 minutes long; the 'European version' of Mesopotamia, which was marketed as an EP, has six tracks and is six seconds shy of 33 minutes long. The 'European version' is, according to discogs, 'much more raw and electronic'. The US version (which is also the Australian, and the Canadian, version) is 25:43 minutes long.  

100 reviews # 13 part 1: side 1 of wild planet

I wonder how I would have felt about the B52s in 1980 when I was 15 if I had known they were 4/5 gay.* I had a very ambivalent attitude to the gayness of others during my teens because of some odd episodes that I now realise were just part of life but no-one talked about things like that then. I always knew I wasn't gay but like a lot of other things I didn't realise that my desire for people to not discuss things that went outside a (my) very heteronormative (etc etc, elite) world view wasn't just a wish for people to be civilised and tasteful and logical but a wish for people to deny a core element of themselves for my peace of mind. Luckily, my opinion didn't matter and also, it had fully changed within a few years. To be clear, though I was terrified of being thought of as gay, I was never hostile to gayness, but I certainly didn't want to know about it. 

The other side of the story is of course the B52s completely sidestepped from any discussion of - um - anything at all really, because they just went with this kitsch weirdness look, and a sound that at the time I thought of as retro but I now appreciate that was just me responding to visual stimulus - I mean, 'Planet Claire' off the first album was a step beyond Kraftwerk really, and there were quite a few other songs (I'm thinking for instance 'Dirty Back Road' on this album) which were just set and forget grooves which could have as easily been tape loops as a band playing (probably to a click - if they did that then - I think they did, otherwise how could they have done that party remix album). So that's kind of modern, and there is an extra disco oomph to a lot of the songs here which were possibly so common for the time no-one noticed. Then there was the other thing they did, which was often very Fred Schneider-directed, with his public-announcement voice half-singing, half calling a square dance. A propos of that, I'll just say that the song 'Private Idaho', which closes side one of Wild Planet, is the song that shows up how much of a progression (in terms of instrumentation) Wild Planet is from the first album, basically because it doesn't fit on Wild Planet and it would have easily fit on The B52s. 'Private Idaho' is not a terrible song I guess but it already felt old hat in 1980 whereas 'Give Me Back My Man' was a very fetching new hat. I'll get this out of the way now: that 'I'll give you fish, I'll give you candy' is fucking ridiculous and someone should have had the hard talk with the 52s back in 80 about the wisdom of ruining your chorus with something that embarrassing: 'do you want to be singing that for another forty years?' (Ricky: 'wouldn't mind').

So, let's look at the side as a whole: it starts with 'Party Out of Bounds' wherein the gang crash a gathering and bully the attendees. Best bit: the really awful trumpet noise half way through - or the fucked up walkie-talkie grind noise at the end. But I love the way it's partly a recipe for social success, partly for social suicide. It has a slightly threatening vibe which I have to deal with every time. 

'Dirty Back Road' is this album's '52 Girls' and it's got all the same ingredients: Cindy and Kate in unison sing a vocal melody which seems to come from nowhere - certainly not from the fairly pedestrian instrumental track created to be featureless to let them do their stuff - and which fits perfectly. 

'Running Around' is the 'Dance This Mess Around' of the album, and while it's very energetic, it's probably not as good though the interplay between Fred on the one hand and K&C on the other is very engaging. 

'Give Me Back My Man' is everything that's good about pop music, including that execrable fish-candy chorus line. They get to it almost immediately. It's Cindy singing solo and her voice (I wonder if this would have hit me at the time?) has a certain edge to it that wasn't common to female pop singers then. The way John heard traces of Yoko in the B52s says more about how glibly sanitised pop music was in 1979-80 than it does about Yoko's influence on them I suspect but it's still a thing.** A voice like that not only cut through in terms of sound but also, while you never for a moment thought that anything the B52s sang about was important to them in and of itself or had resonance for them or genuine feeling (at least, not on the first couple of albums), there was something more genuinely expressive about it (kind of 'help! I'm trapped in a fucking pop song'). Along with the evocations of Lesley Gore, etc, which added to the overall. 

I never really got this forty years ago but subsequent reading has made it clear to me that the first two B52s albums are really testament to the wayward (?) genius of Ricky Wilson, a guitar player who apparently devised his own unique tunings and came at the material intuitively. If you just listen to the guitar on side one of Wild Planet you hear things you wouldn't get from any other record I can think of, although there are probably traces of for instance Television in there.*** 

I have always wanted to own Wild Planet but I never did until Saturday and while other records are presently also clamouring for my attention, this is top stuff. I expect to turn it over some time later in the week. I also want to see One Trick Pony again. 

*I went on a wikipedia search on all their lives and it would seem that not all of them knew it then so it would have been testament to my gaydar if I had. 

** Hilarious moment at the end of John and Yoko: A Love Story when John calls Yoko to tell her about 'new wave' and how it's what she was doing ten years before. Was he listening to the B-52s on the radio when he made that call? Probs.

*** After writing this I read that the only non-B52s recording RW did was when he played on a song on a Tom Verlaine album. So I'm right. 

Boston Globe 22 August 1980

i am the cliche

I seem to recall that my first blog entry on Lorraine Crescent was about coffee, probably about my attempts to give up coffee which was an obsession of sorts in the first decade of the twenty-first century (why? Partly I think because someone had told me that coffee increased one's desire for carbs, and I wanted to lose weight without doing anything icky like exercising; also, living with an addict as I was, I wanted to prove that I could get by without any addiction to anything, and that was my one addiction) (and is). But I bet it wasn't long before my blog entry on cats. Also, dogs. So, coffee and pets, coffee and pets, and pop music, these are the things that move me. Oh, and shitty old television. It's sick, and worse, it's a sickness so many people of my generation/class have, maybe less so my gender but there's plenty of men who have this. Just not as many as nice middle class ladies. 

Coffee entered my life with my first girlfriend, Rachel. I was 15. She drank coffee, I am guessing probably instant, a lot, and so did I therefore. Her family also ate a lot of chinese cabbage, they relished it, but only one of those things have stayed with me (now I think about it, maybe I should try chinese cabbage again, just to see if it evokes anything e.g. the first time I ever saw/heard Duran Duran on Countdown, doing 'Planet Earth'). Coffee has been with me pretty much ever since and probably always will be, though I did successfully give it up for a couple of months some time - I forget when, it's been a long life, but I think I switched to decaf for a time either late 90s or early 00s, but of course like heroin you crave the rush. 

Pets were always there it's silly to even discuss. I have had times in my life with no pets, it's true, but seriously, why would you.

Pop music was always there, but I specifically remember a long drive with a family my family were close friend with, where they as a family sang 'Let it Be' in the car (now, obviously, that could have happened last year or ten years after 'Let it Be' came out, and if I was five I wouldn't have known whether 'Let it Be' was released in 1970 or 1850, but it was almost definitely before 1972, because we moved away from Kew at the beginning of '73 and I wouldn't have gone on a long drive with that family after that time). So that marks for me an early memory, my earliest memory, of contemporary pop music. By the mid-70s I was actually Beatles obsessed, when at school the divisions were clear: Beatles vs Abba. I switched to, or accommodated, Abba in 1976, via two sources: visiting my father in hospital I think when he was having a back operation, and seeing 'Mama Mia' on tv (extra interest because 'mama mia' was a thing kids - Italian kids? - said at school that was exotic enough to almost be swearing) but I was still not ready to be swept up in anything, but then a schoolfriend, John, described 'Fernando' to me on a school excursion, as being about the Swedish-Mexican war, and that made it stick in my mind. He also raved about it and I guess his taste had currency for me. However, I also vaguely remember mentioning it to him again a few months (a few days? who knows) later and he was entirely uninterested. I might be extrapolating false memories with that last bit. So by 1976 it was Abba vs Bay City Rollers, although some girls were still uncertain whether they were aligned with BCR or 'horses'. After the Abba thing crashed (1977?) I went into abeyance with pop music interest until around 1980 when I became heavily engaged. Rachel broke up with me and I had been saving money to buy her a nice impressive birthday present, so since I didn't have to do that anymore, I bought myself some albums (I already had the first Pretenders and B-52s albums, and I added The Undertones' Hypnotised, which I'd read about in the NME, the first Dexy's Midnight Runners album, Devo's Freedom of Choice and John Foxx's Metamatic: I actually still own copies of all of these). 

Bad TV was always good. If I am grateful to my parents for anything it is the way they encouraged me, leading by example, to regard mass media as always potentially idiotic, venal, etc. I recall at a very young age my father explaining to me that Reg Ansett misled the Australian public/government by claiming that if he was allowed his own television channel, he would produce high-quality local content, which of course he never did. I don't remember my father saying that Ansett had pals in high places who probably didn't care either way what happened, although if he had that might have gone over my head. I recall (as I have probably bored you in years past on this blog) holding uncritical attitudes to cartoons,* though on reflection, maybe having cartoons like Road Runner, or Secret Squirrel, was a chance to have something that was mine, and where my parents' hypercritical attitude didn't matter. Ditto Adventure Island. But at the same time, we would happily ridicule all stupid, obvious, mainstream television but in some instances also enjoy it because we could ridicule it. So, my sarcastic, unproductive, casual arsehole attitude was cultivated from an early age through my parents' own responses cultivated I suppose in the case of my mother, from her parents' highbrow attitude to popular culture and in the case of my father, his university arts degree removing him from his parents' lower middle class attitudes. It shocked me, as I got older and saw other people's lives, how uncritically they accepted mass media, though for all that, I am aware that my own response of trusting nothing mediated by (for instance) commercial television was/is as much a learned reaction. I wasn't taught to think critically, I was taught to always find a way to be critical. I had to unlearn that and enjoy (to pluck something from my brain's offering up of an immediate example, without thinking hard about it) 'Into the Heat' by The Angels, without wondering about who the fucking Angels thought they were or were trying to be or who they thought they were appealing to or what Doc Neeson's theatricality was supposed to indicate. I realise that's a weird example, it's just the first example I thought of, and so I went with it on the assumption that that would be more 'pure'. To problematise this, I guess we all liked older things better in our family on the understanding/assumption that artisans were more involved in the old days, and skill was more prevalent, there was some kind of talent recognition mechanism, whereas the 'present' (eg the 1970s) was more about trickery and faddishness - though if I had challenged my father, for instance, on this assumption I am pretty sure he would have happily reeled off 20 names of actors, artists, writers who were as shit as anything currently popular, and as popular in their day if not more so.  

Hence, by the way, the character of Elyse in Persiflage, who has an uncritical, base, positive response to a tv sitcom which she is too naive to even understand and on which she imprints other emotional ideals, but from which she filters through everything else in her waking life. Sorry to bring it back to my silly graphic novel but of course that's what that shit's about. I'm fascinated by the reality behind fiction/drama/play-acting and I'm fascinated by popular culture tropes and what they really 'mean' to an audience. I am also of course fascinated by the perceived background or underpinning or context to music, or to celebrity. 

To go back to Abba: they fascinated us as 12 year olds at Auburn South Primary. Two girls and two boys in our class (one of the girls was an absolute crush of mine at the time, and I was not alone) were allowed to use the classroom during lunch time to workshop a play they were formulating about the lives of Abba members. I think in hindsight probably more likely they were learning how to kiss, but what do I know (one of the boys later told me and other boys he had fucked the girl I had a crush on, which I accepted uncritically. The story went like this: 'she came to my house with her parents for a party, and I said do you want to come up to my room and she said yeah, and we fucked'. About twenty years later I thought - hey wait a minute - that actually is really, really unlikely, not least because I'm pretty sure the girl in question only had a mother not a father but also for class reasons - those people would never socialise, ever). Another Abba story, from a girl in I'm guessing grade 6: 'Abba all went into a sauna together naked, and the boys went out to roll in the snow and the girls locked them out of the sauna, naked'. This is actually much more likely than the local fucking story, but still that it was told at all shows how exotic and exciting Abba's lives were to us, as we modelled our understanding of what it was to be physically perfect and sexually active super-white adults. Boy were they a cultural manifestation as Australia got over White Australia. They were with us at exactly the same time as the first Vietnamese refugees started to be accepted (or not) as Australians. 

I don't know how to end this but it's not like I'm writing for The Monthly or something** so I don't have to have a neat ending, I can just end. 

*Also comics, which were however a very different beast to me, as different as novels are from films - of course. 

** They wouldn't have me