I’m back with a rare Thursday night edition of  the once weekly and now sporadic “Audio Files” column.  And look out, because I’m armed with the contents of my Google Reader, namely…

The new David Lynch album, which apparently summons a bit of energy from…Peter Frampton? Via a Lynch profile in the Telegraph:

Lynch plays guitar and sings, sometimes in his own voice, sometimes in a voice altered by a vocoder machine, “or using this strange thing like – what’s the guy’s name?” wonders Lynch. “Oh shoot, the famous guitar player that speaks with a tube in the guitar?” Peter Frampton?

FYI: Frampton once (allegedly) hit on my mom, in an elevator. She didn’t let him “come alive” though. (I wonder what a Skepchick would have done?)

ELSEWHERE…

Found a great Mike Patton interview from way back when (during the recording of Faith No More’s Angel Dust album). Some transcript gems:

• …music sucks. I hate all music now…I really don’t like to listen to music very much anymore….nothing’s doing it. I’m not gonna blame anybody but…I’ll let you know when I figure it out…It’s pretty sad.

• Grotus is one of my favorite bands!…they’re not danceable. That’s just a really hard thing to find these days. Something you can’t dance to.

• There’s a lot of bands that I think you could listen to now and not be able to tell what era they come from, and I bet that those bands think that’s really magical and timeless…but it’s bullshit. It doesn’t sound like anything.

• You know, I read this interview with [the Black Crowes] and one of the guys’ quotes from the band was…something like, ‘Oh gee, I guess to be original nowadays you have to bang on a badger carcass or something like that. I don’t wanna do that just to be original.’ It just made me think, well I mean, god, I’d love to bang on a badger carcass. I think most people would. Whether it’s original or not is beside the point.

• I think it’s probably a good thing that computers just  take over music. Because computers are a lot more messed up than people…I think computers could kind of take it to a new level. I’m all for it. [People] are the worst! That’s the worst thing about music, the people that play it.

• We want to become a disco band. We’re here to defend disco from the likes of our guitar player and people like that, who were asleep during the whole era and really missed the point.

The entire load of those Angel Dust interviews can be found here. To read an interview where Diamanda Galas berates Patton, click here. Quote:

God, there’s this shithead out there, Mike Patton. He imitates me. He imitates everybody. That motherfucker short fuckin’ midget, he was at all my shows in the ‘90s. He wrote in Wire magazine that I don’t improvise. I just laughed.

UNCOMPROMISING CUISINE

Steve Albini has a food blog.

FLAVOR FLAV NEWS

I highly recommend Ice-T‘s latest book. I finished it last summer, and there are some great anecdotes in it, such as Ice’s descrip­tion of a car acci­dent involv­ing Flavor Flav:

Flavor gets out of the rental car and for one minute he’s trans­formed back into William Drayton — he’s no longer crazy-ass Flavor Flav. He’s talk­ing to me like an attor­ney, in his real voice. ‘Ice, I am really sorry for this mishap.’ None of that ‘Yeeaaaaaah, boy­eeeee!’ shit.

TRUCKIN’

How does everyone feel about Red Sovine? Found this LP cover on Jim Blanchard‘s Flickr page:

Of Red Sovine, a friend once said:

A great nugget I discovered this week is that truckin’ Dave Dudley is from Stevens Point, Wisconsin, the same town in which yours truly finished college.  See Dave below (also from Jim B’s collection):

Blanchard’s Flickr page is loaded with gems. Here are some more, and they’re not just for truckers:

XEROXED ZEPPELIN

My new Twitter BFF Lucy has an uncle who was in this band. Remember them?

Here’s what’s on my playlist this week:

• “Coming of Prince Kajuku,” UFO
• “I Pity Inanimate Objects,” Godley & Creme
• “Live With Me,” Massive Attack
• “Mexican Icecream,” Tobacco

xxx

Audio Files is published sporadically and whenever possible.

I have a tendency to find songs that I get addicted to–listening to on repeat incessantly, walking around with its lyrics in my head all day. One of the most recent examples of this has been Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” (linked below for your convenience.)

As this song keeps finding its way back on my playlist, I started to wonder what it was that made me love the song, and even the video, so much. I realized that the raw and honest emotion that it conveyed between two people parting ways really rung true to me. And although the metaphor portrayed in the video of his lover removing herself from the tapestry of his life might be too dramatic for some, I really thought the two did an excellent job of emphasizing the emotion of the lyrics without taking away from the sincerity of the song.

And although there are plenty of songs about broken hearts and break ups, I think what sets this song apart from the others is the fact that you’re not just hearing one point of view about this lost love — you have the rare chance to hear from both parties. Without Kimbra’s accompaniment, this song would still stand on its own, one I would probably still deem worthy of the “replay” button, but I think by providing the additional point of view, the emotions resonate a little deeper with me.

Because, really, we have all been on both sides on the break up — we have all felt like we were the ones who were wronged, that our pain is somehow deeper than the other’s. But it only takes a small break from our regularly scheduled self-pitying to realize that there is more to the story than our perceived pain. Maybe the other person is hurting, too, and maybe their feelings are just as justified as ours.

I started to realize there were a lot of songs in my list of “forever loves” that fit into this sub-category of two-broken-hearts-for-the-price-of-one songs. Further, I realized that many of these were the ones that have persevered the longest through my ever-changing life situations, mainly because at different times in my life, I was able to identify more strongly with one of the different perspectives shared in the song. Essentially I found that, depending on where I was in my life, or what heartache had brought me back to a particular song, I was able to find a new aspect of it to relate to, and oftentimes, it was not the same perspective that I felt most compelled towards upon my last listening.

In some cases, I found that hearing both characters’ points of view resonated with me because it more completely expressed the range of emotions that I was feeling — instead of relating simply to the “man” or the “woman,” I felt that I equally understood and felt both points of view in whatever situation the song was helping me to get through or recall. I recently had a discussion with a friend where I explained that although I understood that Of Monsters and Men’s “Little Talks” (posted below) was supposed to be providing the dialogue of two people who are struggling with how the other is feeling, I also thought it was applicable as one person’s internal conflict — fighting with his/her self about his/her own opposing feelings about staying with something that was known vs. exploring the possibility of making some pretty weighty changes.

So, without further ado, here is the short list of songs I was able to think of that fit the 2-for-1 sub-genre I’ve recently taken note of. Would love to hear from any of you about any songs you love that fit this bill, too.

“Life Effect” -Stars

“Nothing Better” -Postal Service

“Little Talks” -Of Monsters and Men

“I Remember” -Damien Rice

I first encountered Rammstein in an almost empty cinema on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, during an afternoon matinee of the largely unloved David Lynch movie Lost Highway. Balthazar Getty had just broken into a house, a porno starring his lover was unfolding on a giant screen, and something was about to go very wrong — a point underscored on the soundtrack by sinister chanting, tolling church bells and an impossibly low German voice muttering words I didn’t understand. It was ominous, bombastic, absurd, utterly hilarious- and yet also thrilling:

Was ist das? I thought. The credits revealed that it was an outfit called “Rammstein”, but that meant nothing. A few weeks later however I was back in Moscow where I lived at the time, shopping for sounds in the open-air pirate market Gorbushka and lo! I stumbled upon a weird cassette, featuring six oiled, naked from the waist-up Germans posing in front of a giant flower. This, apparently, was Rammstein, and track eight — “Heirate Mich” — was the song from the movie.

At the time I was more of a 70s art rock/Algerian Rai man than a fan of Teutonic heavy metal. But beneath the grinding riffs, the guttural vocals, the industrial synths I detected something unexpected: a gift for melody, a sense of rhythm, almost, at times, a groove. It was, in other words, sehr gut:

Mere weeks later Rammstein released their second album, Sehnsucht which featured more grinding riffs, a female vocal and a bit more synth. It also contains what is probably the band’s signature track, “Du Hast” which became briefly notorious in the US since the Columbine killers dug it big time. Note the martial beat, and the obvious pleasure lead singer Till Lindemann takes in enunciating the sounds of his native language. Like Kraftwerk before them, Rammstein embraced their Germanic identity, albeit very different aspects of it:

The clip above is from the concert film Live Aus Berlin, when their stage show was big but not yet the epic piece of infernal rock theatre it would become. It also dates from a period when Rammstein’s sense of the absurd was less on display. Two tours later, and some members of the band had abandoned the “scary cyborg” look for lederhosen and even (in guitarist Paul Landers’ case) a monk’s tonsure. However Lindemann’s unique body language has always remained constant  — a champion swimmer in his youth, he is a huge presence on stage, alternately doing the “Rammstein squat”, pounding his fist on his knee, or staggering around looking alienated from his own ageing carcass, a profound melancholy in eyes.

I was lucky to discover Rammstein in Russia, because they were massive over there. Each release was an event, rather than an esoteric fringe thing as in the UK or US. The Mayor of Moscow was outraged by their sturm und drang stage antics, thought they were fascists and banned one concert I had tickets for lest Moscow’s many skinheads were inspired to go on the rampage. A year or so later he relented, which was good because it meant that after I had cleared multiple police barriers I could enjoy a live performance of “Mein Teil”, a song inspired by the penis-munching German cannibal Armen Meiwes:

Both “Du Hast” and “Mein Teil” are present on the recently released overview of their 16 year career, Made in Germany: 1995-2011. Putting together an effective compilation is an art, and Rammstein kept the track list secret until the last moment, making fans such as myself nervous. How could you select a single disc worth of songs from five excellent studio records (the band have in fact released six, but Rosenrot was rubbish). Would the sequencing work? I feared a travesty like the cult British band Pulp’s Hits- an incredibly lazy serving of four songs each from their four Island albums, presented in chronological order. Dreadful.

Fortunately, the sequencing of Made in Germany is excellent. The thing about Rammstein is that they sprang fully-formed from the head of Wotan. Membership of the band has remained constant, and they have always worked with the same producer. Rather than mess about with different styles, they have rather refined and explored the sound they were born with. Thus although the first six tracks were recorded over a period of almost ten years, the riffage is consistently mighty, whether exceedingly brutal in the case of “Links 234” a military march proclaiming the band’s allegedly leftist leanings (they were tired of being called Nazis), or exceedingly brutal, as in the case of “Keine Lust” in which Lindemann laments his lack of desire to do ordinary things such as masturbate or chew food, whereas those things he would like to do- say, have sex with large animals, involve rather too much risk. This fine song was accompanied by a rather entertaining video (available on the luxury box set edition) in which the band perform in fat suits:

It’s not all brutality and perversion however. Rammstein may operate within strict sonic parameters, but this does not stop them from experimenting with their sound. Thus track 8, “Mein Herz Brennt”, begins with a rising swell of strings, as Lindemann sings the opening narration from an East German kid’s show “The Sandman” rendering it into something anguished and nightmarish:

Indeed, Rammstein’s lyrics are well-written, featuring neologisms and word-play, while also being steeped in such fine German traditions as romantic and decadent poetry, porn and, er, sadistic stuff in the newspapers. Lindemann published a volume of poetry in the early 2000s and when the German composer Torsten Rasch took Lindemann’s lyrics and melodies and rendered them as orchestral lieder nobody laughed — in fact, one reviewer at the UK’s conservative Spectator magazine selected it as his best classical recording of 2002:

Attentive listeners will have noticed that the last two videos are in fact the same song.

One of Rammstein’s great strengths vis a vis American heavy metal is that they are not inspired by rage, with its drastically diminishing returns (see the career of Metallica for an example). Rather they do melancholy, perversion, yearning, grief. Lindemann was already 34 and a divorced father of two when he became successful. Knowing the hardships of adulthood, and the deprivation of an East German upbringing, he is not inspired by adolescent themes. Rather, he is inspired by the thought of Snow White enslaving the seven dwarves and doing coke, before dying of an overdose in the bath:

My only substantial complaint about Made in Germany is the quantity of tracks (five) selected from their third album, Mutter. Sure it is a work of art, possibly their finest recording, and it was their major international breakthrough. But they could definitely have cut the title track in favour of, say, “Heirate Mich”, which I linked to above. Meanwhile their sixth album, Liebe ist fur alle da is represented by an odd song selection, which might dissuade a neophyte from investing in a copy when I’d rank it as one of their best. Tokenism then lumps us with a track from Rosenrot which could easily have been omitted in favour of something better. But that’s what the skip function on a CD/MP3 player is for- so you can hop over minor mistakes to enjoy tracks such as this:

Some of the missing classics appear on the CD’s second disc, albeit in remix form. I’m not sure whether this second compilation will make much sense to those unfamiliar with the originals, but it’s a lot of fun nevertheless. I suspect Faith No More thought they were taking the mickey when they reduced “Du Riechst So Gut” to romantic strings and voice. Little did they realize that Rammstein were in on the joke already, and would go much farther in their pursuit of radical or frankly bizarre reworkings of their songs. In many cases the heavy metal guitars disappear completely, and the focus is on electronics and voice, such as in the trancey remix of “Stripped” by Tiamat, a Swedish black metal band. The somewhat tiresome satire “Amerika” is rendered into a boppin’ bossanova, while “Rammlied” becomes a polka, complete with banjos and yodelling. And if you have ever wondered what the Pet Shop Boys would sound like with a guttural German bass baritone as their lead singer, why not try out their disco version of “Mein Teil”? The best remix however is probably Laibach’s version of “Ohne Dich”. The mega-bombastic Slovenes were a major influence on Rammstein’s sound, imagery and provocative tactics- something, it seems, the band was for a long time wary of fully acknowledging. But Rammstein never really got into Laibach’s ultra-arch, cerebral irony, which left their elder Slavic cousins the creative space to make this preposterous/awesome version of Lindemann’s mournful, melancholic ballad:

My verdict: Rammstein: Made in Germany gets eleven stars out of five. Give the gift of Teutonic metal this Christmas. Wait a minute, Christmas has already come and gone. Never mind, give the gift of Teutonic metal anyway.

For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later.

That was the plan at least. Unfortunately as I came up with this idea the day before leaving, I had no time to reorganize my MP3 player and so the music I brought with me was just stuff I had picked up recently- Television, Bonnie Prince Billy, Arcade Fire and a few others. Immediately after I arrived I was too overloaded on sensations to listen to any of it. And besides, I hate earphones. Playing the tracks back now, they evoke nothing. However, the Black Eyed Peas’ criminally awful My Humps-which was playing everywhere in Turkmenistan- immediately transports me back to that shitty nightclub in Turkmenabat where a fat girl with a moustache kept bumping into me on the dance floor. Then there’s the acoustic version of Hotel California, which summons unpleasant memories of the gruesome meat market in Balkanabat, from which I fled into a night that stank of burning petrol and despair. But those two fusions were all accidental- like Rock Me Amadeus on the ferry. Maybe that’s just the way it works and the experiment was doomed from the start.

But there was an exception, a moment when my plan transformed a song and the contents of my skull forever, giving me one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life. This is how it happened: I was standing on the edge of a vast pit of fire inthe depths of the Kara Kum desert.  In that abandoned nocturnal wasteland, the burning hole seemed almost mythical, even though it was just a crater accidentally created by Soviet engineers digging for gas, and then set on fire by a nomad worried the methane odor was poisoning his sheep. At that moment however, it was as awe-inspiring as the Mouth of Hell itself. After gazing into it transfixed for about fifteen minutes, I realized no photograph could do the hole justice, and the memory would rapidly fade. Suddenly I remembered my plan, to fuse a song with a landscape. I searched through the MP3 player and found some Rammstein- infernal yes, but rather redundant when confronted with an actual pit of fire. Next came Roy Orbison’s In Dreams. Immediately I stopped- this song was already rich with meaning, memory and images for me. Nevertheless, mysterious and perfect as it is, I knew it could absorb more. Better yet I thought the bizarre contrast between eerie 60s pop and satanic inferno would give me an authentic, almost classical surrealist experience, like something straight out of Andre Breton’s manifesto.

But as soon as the Big O started singing in his lower, ghostly register the experience went way beyond surreal. There was no bizarre collision, but rather the music actually fused with the moment, with the desert, the night sky, the dancing flames and the epic emptiness. In fact, as the song continued I realized that that strange, miniature symphony of obsession and dark longing had never sounded so haunting, so piercing, so perfect. I played, and replayed, lost in the song, the heat, fire and darkness. Clearly I had just discovered the perfect conditions for listening to Roy Orbison: on the edge of a pit of fire, in a void. My friend Joe appeared at the edge of the hole. I called him over – I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t suffering from an aural hallucination brought on by the psychic deprivation of the desert. Joe stood there, entranced by the fire and the music, playing and replaying the track. When he finally gave me back the earphones he was wide-eyed:

‘That was almost a shamanistic experience,’ he said.

I understood what he meant. Songs for Orbison were incantations of power, gateways to other worlds. This meek, shy man with a passion for radio-controlled airplanes sang of dream realities where his fantasies came true, where the grim world he inhabited was transcended, even replaced. In Dreams makes this urge to cross into a better world explicit in the lyrics, but even in apparently mindless pop such as Pretty Woman Orbison describes an individual who, by the power of his will and growl, can force a woman to do his bidding- like a medium summoning the dead at a seance. There is always something slippery going on in Orbison’s songs, and he is not always opening the door he thinks he is. I’m not sure which door I’d stepped through, myself. There were no intoxicants in my system, but high on music and fire and the desert and the bottomless sky I was now somewhere else entirely. I spent over an hour wandering through the burning dream palaces of Roy Orbison. Then, I’m not sure what happened. Something moved me to step back from the pit of fire. I turned and saw a hill. It was blacker than the sand, blacker than the night sky, an eerie pyramid of negation in time and space. I was close to where Zoroaster, the world’s first apocalyptic prophet had heard God talking and founded a religion that had dominated Iran for a millennium before the Islamic conquest. Perhaps, perhaps if I climbed that mountain… well, what exactly?

I switched off the music and started walking. The hill was about half a mile away across a flat plain, but it seemed to take an eternity to reach it. It took even longer to climb. And once I reached the top I wondered what I was doing there: there was no hole in the sky through which I might perceive the color out of space. Mildly disappointed I descended and returned to the camp, where my friends were waiting.

Between my ears however, deep in the meat in my skull, Roy Orbison, the Great Shaman of the Kara Kum Desert now lurked, imprisoned forever, waiting to be released like a djinn from his bottle only when I played that song. And when I do, he summons the flames again, and the desert and the darkness, and I step into that burning dream palace, and spend a little more time wandering its corridors and rooms. And the world is transformed- for two minutes and fifty seconds, at least.

In memoriam Roy Orbison (1936-1988) and Barbara Orbison (1950-2011)

Fantastic and strange Godley & Creme tune.

We’re all familiar with the genius of YouTube; how it lets the unknown masses contribute to pop culture as freely and often as they’d like. But lately I’ve taken a particular shine to YouTube’s vast array of fan-made music videos (i.e. fan-chosen footage splattered onto musicians’ songs).

A few such gems recently caught my attention.

First there is MGMT‘s “Time to Pretend.” The footage consists entirely of  panoramic BBC nature shots. It’s a 4-minute-22-second synopsis of life itself. No joke:

Next, some fan broke out the dreary existentialism of the beach and deftly applied it to Smog‘s “All Your Women Things.” Pretty good.

I also really like this take on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “I’m Only Happy When it Rains” (demo version). It’s slow developing and doesn’t use too many shots (frames?), but it has a nice little understated payoff at the end:

Then there’s Flash Gordon. Set to the great music of Freddie Mercury, Brian May and Queen. Spectacular shards of awesomeness all around.

And we’ll always have the Legion of Rock Stars to give us such perfectly transmogrified content as:

That collapsing expression of song got me on the hunt for the most rewarding of musical disasters: The grade school band. Check out this version of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by an adorable group of scamps. They really thunder through that shit.

I’m not making fun of them though. I feel their angst. I remember when my high school wind ensemble slaughtered Toto‘s “Africa.” Just a wholly owned subsidiary of total f#cking crap.

Anyway, here is what’s powering up my playlist lately.

• “Bus Terminal,” Dysrhythmia
• “Dead Head,” Godflesh
• “Down by the Water,” PJ Harvey
• “Driftwood,” Merle Haggard
• “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” Neil Young
• “Fuck This Shit,” Belle and Sebastian
• “Julia,” Carla Hassett (w/Mike Patton)
• “Living in Sin,” Bon Jovi
• “Night Riders,” by Rahzel (w/the Ruler, Slick Rick)
• “May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door,” Mogwai
• “The Words That Maketh Murder,” PJ Harvey
• “Turk,” by High on Fire
• “With My Own Bare Hands,” Ween

…and…

• “Let England Shake,” PJ Harvey (You’ve got to see the video for this song; it’s set in an abandoned amusement park and filled with all sorts of strange dystopian energy.)
  

’til next time.

– mc

xxx

Audio Files is published sporadically and whenever possible.

Like many people I enjoy the music of Kraftwerk and think that their reputation as musical pioneers is entirely justified. Indeed I would choose to listen to Trans Europe Express or The Man Machine over anything by The Beatles any day. Come to think of it, I’d listen to their 2003 album about riding bicycles over anything by The Beatles any day, but that’s another matter. I enjoy their dry humour, their minimalist, retro-futurist aesthetic, their decades-long dedication to pretending they are robots… and of course, their music.

And yet, there is a problem. And if you know Kraftwerk then you will know its name: Electric Cafe.

Electric Café’s tormented 5 year production is a thing of legend. Following the excellent Computer World, the electronic pioneers had become victims of their own success. Synths were in; Gary Numan had had a hit about driving a car; and the austere, Teutonic fathers of electronic music feared they were about to lose their eminent position to a bunch of pimply upstarts.

Band leader Ralf Hutter’s initial response was to get into cycling. Following that, the other members also bought bikes. Out of this came the highly enjoyable single Tour de France. Then Ralf Hutter fell off his bike. As Herr Hutter was convalescing the world of music continued to evolve, and increasingly Kraftwerk felt they needed to make a big statement to prove that they were still the most futuristic sound around.

Precise details are thin on the ground, but it seems that the band spent several years toiling on an album called Techno Pop and pretty much had it in the can when Ralf Hutter decided it was insufficiently “cutting edge”. So he flew to New York to sit in with dance producer Francois Kevorkian, whose solution appears to have been the judicious application of electronic slap bass and loud, tinny drums- popular sounds in the mid-1980s, as older readers will recall. The album was renamed after a café that was electric and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the weakness of the concept, released to no acclaim and very poor sales. Kraftwerk disappeared from sight, its two junior members quit, and since then new material has been exceedingly scarce to say the least.

Was this critical and commercial rejection justified? Well, for many years, I too struggled with Electric Café, although at times I could appreciate what the band was trying to achieve. The first three tracks- Boing Boom Tschak, Techno Pop and Musique Non-stop constitute an extended suite built out of clicks, beeps, beats, fragments of robotic and human vocal sounds and repeated, largely meaningless, phrases . Quite radical, and yet at the same time somewhat reminiscent of the type of mid 80s 12” remixes Mr. Kervorkian excelled in, as if there were other, original versions of these songs which the band had kept secret. The Telephone Call makes entertaining use of telephone sounds and is OK, I suppose. Electric Café, in spite of the terrible name, has some nice rippling bleeps and bloops in it. But Sex Object, the centrepiece of the more song-oriented side 2 is simply bizarre, as Ralf Hutter sings in flat emotionless tones: I don’t want to be your Sex Object.

Ah yes, Ralf Hutter. That’ll be the German bank manager type wearing red lipstick on the cover of The Man Machine- a sex object indeed.

Is it possible that Ralf Hutter succumbed to a terrible delirium? Did he fear that the computer- having consumed all his energy and creativity- was now also badgering him for sex?

Is this song a joke? I wondered. Or alternatively, some kind of irony free, Germanic feminist statement? A critique of the dehumanizing effects of pornography on women, perhaps? But if so why have a man pretending to be a robot sing it? It made no sense; and the melody was not up to their usual standards. Even the Stephen Hawking voice that “sings” “Yes/No/Maybe/Perhaps” couldn’t make it better. And so this indigestible, humourless, emotionless, juiceless, funkless atrocity of a song just messed up the whole album for me. Every time I could almost appreciate what Kraftwerk were trying to do, Ralf would complain that I was making him his sex object- or at least that somebody was; but who? No, I mean- really?

For years the mystery remained unsolved. And then last week I found myself watching a Swedish documentary about Kraftwerk on Youtube in which ex-member Karl Bartos frankly admitted that the band had lost their humanity while working on Electric Café. Yes, he said, (I paraphrase), we were often compared to robots and played with the image- but listen to the earlier Trans Europe Express, listen to how warm it is, how human. On Electric Café the band placed technology ahead of the music, and that was their mistake.

The next day I played Electric Café in my car, and as I drove through the Texas landscape while reflecting upon Bartos’ critique, experienced an epiphany. It came to me during Sex Objekt, (I was playing the German edition). As Ralf intoned Ich bin nicht dein Sex Objekt I realized that he was not talking to a woman, but rather the machine he had fetishized for far too long.

The image was clear in my mind- slumped in a chair in Francis Kevorkian’s NYC studio, the exhausted synth pioneer from Dusseldorf was complaining about the Synclavier II that would not let him rest, moaning at the expensive high end modular synthesizers that wouldn’t permit him to ride his bike, but instead insisted that he coax ever more futuristic sounds from their circuits. Far from home, exhausted, trapped inside his own myth and separated from his beloved bicycle is it possible that Ralf Hutter succumbed to a terrible delirium? Did he fear that the computer- having consumed all his energy and creativity- was now also badgering him for sex?

No sooner had I asked that last question than suddenly Electric Café opened up to me, becoming a magical album about dehumanisation, isolation and a loss of identity, as the broken up robotic speech and skittering beats on the first three tracks express the terror a man feels when he has listened to sound for so long that it has all been reduced to a jumble of sonic particles. Sex Objekt, as I have said, is about the fear of a computer demanding sex from you. Telephone Call- or Der Telefon Anruf in German - is about the technology you once relied upon resisting your increasingly desperate attempts to connect with an actual human body. And Electric Café is about a café which is electric.

In 2009 Kraftwerk re-released Electric Café under its original working title of Techno Pop. But this attempt at re-branding the most unloved release in their catalogue is unnecessary, at least if my new interpretation is on target. For if I am correct then Electric Café is a timeless masterpiece. Its themes are cyber-fear and techno-dread; its music the soundtrack of a man’s descent into madness as his soul and even his flesh is consumed by machines. It was thus highly prescient of the coming age of technological over dependence, and is more relevant than ever, especially now that we all spend far too much time on the Internet.

I must warn you, however- this interpretation only works if you listen to the record in German.

Also posted hither and yon

One of the loose collective of my friends — The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop — a Vet who’s trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he’s take some classes…and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine.

This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, inclucing time, simultaneously! What is it? It’s all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it’s in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we’re not in France so it has to be there. Don’t blame us, it’s in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the “cost” and L is “a lot” and the relationship is undefined…either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it’s going to really cost a helluva lot.

So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day…Anybody besides me remember The American

Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band…The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can’t sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn’t really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?

Looking for the one thing led to a lot of others. Here’s some other garage-type stuff from my youth…For example, the Knickerbochers. Guys were from Yonkers, or someplace else in the neighborhood,  but everybody thought they were either the Beatles or from Liverpool. Yeah…Liverpool, outside Syracuse, home of Heides Hotdogs…

The Beau Brummels were an interesting group. With that name, in the 60s, they should have been dressed in electric suits (really electric, plugged in like Christmas trees) but I guess they just liked the name. Pretty good song...

The Zombies had an interesting kind of vibe and were a talented band. Sort of stuff the Moody Blues originally did before they discovered psychedelia…and flutes.

Here are the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page supposedly playing the Beck riff because he was off being “brilliant” some place. I hate Jeff Beck, although I think his current bass player is hot. Actually, seeing her with that geezer is something I find scarey… I also think this was lip synching. Here’s the   Original with Beck –and, I don’t hear the difference. To complete the circle of jerks and egos at the time, here’s one their first lead guitarist, What’s his name, Dick Crampton or something…I read something recently that said that the Minor Pentomic Blues Scale was what differentiated the three of them. Beck rarely uses it; Page was sloppy with it; Clapton precise and thorough. Yeah…sure.

Now, We Five was an interesting group — kind of folky, with a big voiced lead singer named Beverly. Who had a helluva voice…since by then the folk voices for women were the amazing altos of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, not too surprising that they got lost in the dust. Kind of a shame — she’s dancing, shaking and jiving on stage like she might mean it, in a nice Christian California girl way.

Syndicate of Sound — A classic song, but what a waste of two Rickenbackers including a George Harrison 12. Couple of Japanese Squier knockoffs from Kresge’s before it was K-Mart would have done the trick for that rif.  Saw these guys in 66, one of the opening acts for the Stones.

Finish up this nostalgia with two organ songs…despite the legend, not  Augie March on both of them. She’s About a Mover was Doug Sahm, Augie and some other guys. Flip side was his attempt at being part of the summer of love, which I think was horrible. MENDI-cino. MENDI-cino. Mover was a helluva number though…\ Then, of course, there’s that great American Band, ? and the Mysterians.

There is nothing about these numbers that doesn’t say the yearning of teenage sex, Budwieser and cold duck on a Friday nite after the dance in the gym…who wouldn’t like that, again?…

That should ruin the weekend for those of you with daughters!

I was watching Paul McCartney in concert on TV the other day. He was playing to a festival crowd — maybe eighty-thousand strong. (It was at the Isle of Wight or the Isle of Lucy or something like that.) As he got the end of “Hey Jude,” the crowd, many of whom had been years away from being born when “Hey Jude” was written, joined in, singing the “Na-naaa-na-nanana-naaaah,” part and it occurred to me that success is a bizarre thing.

Imagine being Paul. Imagine being a guy whose name is recognized by virtually everyone in the civilized world who is over the age of fifteen. Imagine, then, that out of those people, most, if not all, can name a song you wrote and a good number can probably sing one on the spot.

How do you process that as an artist? If a crowd that size ever sang one of my songs, I’d crash to my knees and weep at the profundity. But Paul just kept playing. Why? Because he is used to being probably the best-known songwriter alive. I’m not saying he doesn’t appreciate it at all; it’s just . . . for the love of baloney . . . how do you get used to that?

Success is an odd thing, indeed. I mean, what happens when Tantalus gets as many grapes and gulps as he wants?

All I know is that it was cool to see the Foo Fighters in concert at Wembley and to watch Dave Grohl get emotional. He’s no Paul, but he’s a big success. At least still has milestones to reach.

I respect Paul immensely. I just feel kind of sorry for him, sometimes. (Magnanimous of me, ain’t it?)

And talk about perspective: I’d be happy to sell three-hundred CDs. You feel me?

(This piece originally appeared on my blog, Hats and Rabbits, on September 7.)

Chris Matarazzo’s ARTISTIC UNKNOWNS appears every Tuesday.

If it weren’t for Lady Gaga, many of the points I have tried to make in this column would have been so hard to illustrate. She consistently delivers. She constantly examplifies the things that, in my opinion, are the unnecessary and even damaging trappings of art, from the element that I have called “artistic weirdness” to plain-old insincerity. At the recent MTV video awards, dressed up and acting like a dude, as “Jo Calderone,” Gaga physically illustrated the pitfalls of insincerity in art — the problems that are caused when “show” overshadows art.

This is not about her music. She is a half-decent pop artist. She’s no Paul McCartney; she’s not even Madonna, though she clearly wishes she were. She’s just “okay”.  But even if her work were great — if she were, say, a painter of the quality of Monet —  it would be as if she chose to display her canvases in a room with a fog machine, lasers and strobes. Too much fur around the sheepdog’s eyes, if you ask me.

I have said before that I think sincerity is the most important thing in art. (Many have read that as “the only” important thing in art, which, of course, is ridiculous.) Some disagree with me on this, though, honestly, I can’t, for the life of me, think why.

On the radio this morning, all of the lines of art and reality criss-crossed when I heard her, as Jo Calderone, reading a tribute to Britney Spears. So what we had was Lady Gaga pretending to be someone else (as if “Lady Gaga” is who she really is, in the first place) reading a “heartfelt” tribute to Britney Spears. If that isn’t warped, I don’t know what is.

Did she mean it? (Does she ever mean it?)

If an actor is playing a role, he should become the role. If an actor is playing Iago, he shouldn’t do it with a voice like Mickey Mouse. If an actor is telling his mom he loves her, he shouldn’t do it as Iago. (Or Hamlet, for that matter, but that gets even more confusing.)

Gaga took the short speech that was, probably, written for her and destroyed its impact by speaking from the mouth of a half-baked character she created who just had to mention that “he” used to touch himself while looking at Spears’s posters. Very sweet. (One radio caller said she looked and sounded like she was auditioning for a bad community theater production of Grease.) If the speech was a spotlight meant to show the video and pop music community’s respect for Spears’s achievements, it was dimmed by Gaga’s flamboyant, self-serving, second-rate theatricality.

I can’t think of a better illustration of the damage that ego, premeditated weirdness and insincerity can do to the impact of either artistic communication or of a simple message; in this case, a tribute to a fellow pop musician.

In the speech, delivered by the Jo Calderone character, Gaga even tried to take the power from people, like myself, who are critical of her facades. The Calderone character criticizes Gaga and tells us that Gaga said, to “him,” at one point: “I’m not real; I’m theatrical.”

Therein lies the problem. Theater is artifice meant to open the curtain, literally and figuratively, on reality. It shows us, in some way, what lives inside all humans. Theater is not layer upon layer of artifice meant to put distance between the audience and the human experience; it is the use of artifice to pull us in — make us lean forward and peer through the absent fourth wall.

Elton John is Elton John, whether he is in Armani or in Donald Duck suit. But Elton never needed the crazy outfits. Even he came to realize that. And one feels ever so much closer to the heart of a skinny kid in glasses, jeans and a T-shirt sitting at a piano playing “Your Song” than one does to a guy dressed up as Marie Antoinette, singing the same song.

At least, I think so.

At any rate, a personal request: If you ever tell me you like my work or if you ever want to spin me a heart-rending yarn of love and betrayal, I’d rather you not do it dressed as a cheeseburger. Just a personal preference.