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"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun" |
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Tuning Fork
"An anarchist pop group made up Last year's best record was a career retrospective by the most obscure band in the universe. The songs on Royal Trux's Singles, Live, Unreleased (Drag City) combine limitless possibility, instant dirty pleasure, and total confusion. The liner notes suggest a concomitant politics: "Write off immediately the temporal materialism of the political and search for the horizon. Our records rest there for an indeterminate need." Whether or not the music on Singles is the rock of the future, it's got the potential to mean new things. But if you're impatient to know what it means right now, you're shit out of luck. Stripped and rebuilt according to rules that might only apply in dreams, Trux's drifting, stumbling, gossamer rock is the furthest thing from propaganda you could imagine. So what does overtly political rock sound like?
As you might expect, it sounds a hell of a lot like Roxette. Chumbawamba's approach to music is both deliberate and a good deal smarter and more inspired than you'd expect from a band that played on a record called Smash Fascism! (a "seven-song attack on fascism"). Indeed, when it comes to artistic property and theft, the group resembles Puff Daddy packing
theory see someone walking down the street with something you like, you want to buy it. So you do, if you have money and find the right shop. There is no uniqueness when it comes to clothes, even when it comes to haute couture. So why can't it be the same way about riffs?" The idea of pure originality in visual or literary art is tied up with a cult of the isolated, unique genius whose basic function today is to sell big sculptures to office lobbies. But when it comes to something like Royal Trux's early, monumental Twin Infinitives, that seriously threatens rhythmic or lyrical structure, people (like me when I first heard it) may run screaming. We'd rather have familiar stolen riffs with just the owner's name and serial numbers rubbed off to ease our conscience.
And we'd rather it fucking rocked - right away, with no excuses or distractions. This is precisely where Tubthumper, (Universal/Republic) Chumbawamba's platinum album, seems to get into trouble. Though the politics bleed through the music as intensely as ever (from a song about being sold out by union leaders to an evocation of the homosexual as outsider - and the outsider as homosexual - via Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy"), anything this smooth and exuberant works as an advertisement for anything it's placed next to. That's why, as MTV notes, "Chumbawamba has previously authorized the use of their song for an Italian car commercial and stateside 'Tubthumping' has appeared in the trailer for Home Alone 3 and on such television shows as Beverly Hills 90210, Veronica's
Closet, winter X Games." That's why it was both overkill and turnabout as fair play to actually go to the trouble of "Tubthumping," as some US Army hacks did recently. Chumbawamba, which has made a career out of repurposing pop to nobler purposes, seems to have been trumped at its own game, sold out by the very compelling slickness of its own music, repurposed as propaganda for Gulf War II: Electric Boogaloo. "Saddambombing (The Iraq Song)"
We should kill 'em
Let's hunt him down
Don't screw with the USA
Now if he does attack
We should destroy
Let's hunt him down
Fade
But is it defeat when your opponents change your words but sing your song? That depends on what kind of game you're playing. Veterans of this particular game will know that as a parody, "Saddambombing" is dependent on the listener's recognition - "Oh, that's funny, it sounds exactly like that other song." This parasitical play on what the listener already knows can turn out different ways: We remember (or forget) that "Yankee Doodle Dandy" is a cannibalized British army tune. The mere idea of a parody can float free from how a specific parody, as song, is disseminated over time and received. Chumbawamba brilliantly exploited this when it proved to the Prodigy's Keith Flint that words do matter in music. After Flint blew off his responsibility for titling a song "Smack My Bitch Up," Chumbawamba simply claimed to have recorded a satire called "Smack My Keith Up," prompting heated verbal retaliation from Flint. Recorded or only imagined, once someone's heard them, they may not be mere words anymore; the outcome is up for grabs each time, dependent on context and listener response.
And if Desert Thunder turns out to be a wash, and the troops come home? "Saddambombing" will start to suck even as a novelty tune. The battle Chumbawamba has entered, to "reclaim pop - to reinforce the meaning of what is sung" is pitched, fought on shifting terrain against diffuse forces. The English press has been implacably hostile to the group for 15 years, and MTV's bemused, mocking coverage reminds us that our media tends to view people of any political stripe other than Business Democrat with distrust. And it's over MTV's channels and a million stereos that the question of what "Tubthumping" will mean is being contested as you read this. The notion of a political act dependent on stimulating the imaginations of 10-year-olds, mall shoppers, yuppies, and old punks all at once is both dismaying and tantalizing. Oddly enough, this brings us back to Royal Trux, for whom "the possibility of a relationship between a misreading and an obsession is foremost in our work." In opposite ways, these records conjure the forces of misreading and obsession and raise the stakes for both. courtesy of Seth Sanders |
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![[some people think we have a sick relationship. it's just cozy.
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![[the next night i woke to feel a paw on my nose, patting it over and over again. i told him to fuck off.
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