Popless Week 17: Mixing Pop And Politics

By Noel Murray
April 28th, 2008

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci

Years Of Operation 1991-2006

Fits Between Soft Machine and Paul McCartney

Personal Correspondence I have to give it up for any band as unabashedly geeky as GZM often were, and for any band able to hold onto their hometown roots—they sometime sang in Welsh, for heaven's sake—while roaming fairly freely, exploring prog, Euro-folk, glam, and whatever else caught their fleeting fancy. Prog-rock acts like Genesis, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer are sometimes derided for the often unbearable pretension with which they attempted to mold rock onto classical music frames. But they had another, worthier mission: to move British pop music away from the crusty, city-bound, dance-hall tradition and to find instead a link between American blues music and the folk songs of the European hills. At their best, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci recalled the highland mist and mysticism of '70s prog while indulging rowdier pub music. They could test fans' patience, but there was no one else like them.

Enduring presence? When it comes to GZM, I like the side they showed on Barafundle, which sounds a little like Wings in a pastoral mode. It's so eccentric, and so beautiful.

Stray Tracks

From the fringes of the collection, a few songs to share….

Galaxie 500, "Flowers"

Galaxie 500's reputation in the college/alternative/indie rock sphere has always been—in my opinion—somewhat out of proportion to their actual influence and output, though it's hard to deny that there was something bracing about them when they first drifted down from Boston at the end of the '80s, toting a sound that connected The Velvet Underground, The Modern Lovers, and all the pretty wallpaper music coming out of the UK on 4AD. My main problem with Galaxie 500 has always been that their songs run on too long given how little movement there is within them (and how little variation between them). What they mainly presented was a simple sonic idea, never quite developed into a complete thought.

Gary Numan, "Me! I Disconnect From You"

When I was in college, I had a small clique of music-loving friends, and each of us had one UK-based act that we obsessed over, collecting everything we could find that had their name on it. For me, it was The Wedding Present; for my friend Eric, The Fall; and for my friend Daryn, it was Gary Numan. It took me a while to come around on Numan, who was too associated in my mind with his biggest hit, "Cars" (a song I thought was awesome when I was 9, and silly when I was 18) as well as with all the images I remember seeing of him on TV riding around stages in a giant neon pyramid. He seemed vaguely like a joke to me. But Daryn wore me down with his frequent touting of the Tubeway Army albums and early Numan solo stuff, and after hearing the sonic depth and computer-age paranoia of "Are Friends Electric?" and "Me! I Disconnect From You," Numan started to click in my head. (I even started to like "Cars" again.) It may be a cliché for an electronic musician to sing about the alienation of technology, but given Numan's spacey voice, I'm not sure he ever had much choice in the matter. Anyway, when it all comes together, his sound is suitably clean and spooky.

Gary Wilson, "Rhythm In Your Eyes"

Gary Wilson's self-released 1977 curio You Think You Really Know Me was reissued in 2002, and sounded so distinctively post-modern that some wondered if it was a Beck record masquerading as a 25-year-old, 500-copy vanity release. Wilson's quivery helium voice, over cheap drum machines and minimalist keyboards, make him sound like the most charming stalker in town. His jazz-spiked new wave is so smooth and his girl-crazy yelp is so… not. Wilson's no musical genius, but even in his recent comeback, he's maintained an almost obsessive focus on forging a singular, unified sound from influences that encompass the obviously catchy as well as the freeform. Wilson then filters everything through his nerdy loverman persona. Only a handful of musicians had heard of Wilson prior to Beck's mention of him in the song "Where It's At," but his work has been an inspiration nonetheless—proof that home recording doesn't have to be limited to lo-fi punk and basement-pop symphonies, and proof that artists doesn't always need to worry about finding an audience.

Gay Dad, "To Earth With Love"

Nobody turns out "next big thing"s with the fervor and high turnover rate of the British, and Gay Dad were a particularly spectacular flame-out, memorable because of the band's unforgettable name and because of bandleader Cliff Jones' side career as a member of the very UK press often responsible for pumping up the NBTs before tearing them down. Yet even though Gay Dad's much-anticipated debut album was no masterpiece, the band did throw together a few grand singles—and none better than their first, "To Earth With Love," which recalls Hothouse Flowers and New Radicals in the way it evokes a party in the midst of reaching its peak.

Gene Loves Jezebel, "Desire"

This kind of semi-goth post-punk—with an L.A.-style studio kick—sounded at the time like a corruption of the movement towards making rock music for dance clubs, and reminiscent of the way that the disco movement of the mid-to-late-'70s became degraded by scores of cookie-cutter singles with insipid lyrics and interchangeable instrumental parts. And yet, just like a lot of that disco pap now sounds better in retrospect, so "Desire" seems much less offensive now than it might've in 1986. Now it's a worthy example of the John Hughes-ification of the pop charts in the mid-'80s, and it makes some of us nostalgic for the days when scrappy radio stations like Los Angeles' KROQ could make a real difference in the business.

Gene Marshall, "All You Need Is A Fertile Mind"

I have no idea where I got this—probably from a music blog—and I don't think I'd ever listened to it before this week. And, uh…yeah. You gotta hear it. Especially if you're a heavy consumer of pornography. This song will make you think twice.

Gene Vincent, "Dance To The Bop"

What I've always liked best about Vincent is his mastery of the ol' rockabilly creep-up, where the bandleader sings with slow mounting intensity and his boys hold slightly longer spaces between the notes, until finally they go all-in and start rockin' your ass. These dudes understood that "rock 'n' roll" used to mean "sex," and they were determined to keep that association up front.

George Clinton, "Do Fries Go With That Shake?"

I've mentioned before that all my Funkadelic and Parliament is on cassette, so this may be my only chance to write about Clinton, an artist about whom, frankly, I have some reservations. I enjoy many Clinton songs, from across his many manifestations, but I've always had a hard time reconciling the disconnect between his visionary music and stagecraft and the often puerile content of his lyrics. I know the scatology is necessarily intertwined with Clinton's sociopolitical ideals, in that he's all about freeing you from your inhibitions… but I kind of like my inhibitions. That said, Clinton undeniably pioneered several still vital and useful sounds, including the bottom-heavy electro-funk of the early '80s. He's earned my respect, and sometimes even my affection. But I've never gotten all that close to him.

The Germs, "Lexicon Devil"

This one goes out to one of our valued regular commenters… You know who you are. (Obligatory music-related content: I'd never really noticed until this week how on record, The Germs resembled the UK variety of punk more than the kind coming out of their native L.A. This song in particular is snappier and less assaultive than Fear or Black Flag. Sort of makes you wonder what they might've become, had Darby Crash not been such a fuck-up.)

Gerry & The Pacemakers, "Ferry 'Cross The Mersey"

I don't suppose it's too much of an embarrassment to say that my first exposure to this song was via Frankie Goes To Hollywood's cover, since it's not like "Ferry 'Cross The Mersey" is some kind of canonical rock classic. It's not really "rock" at all in fact, despite The Pacemakers' former reputation as The Beatles' biggest rival in the Liverpool rock scene. This is pure cinematic pop, tailor-made for the opening credits of some early-'60s romantic comedy.

Gerry Rafferty, "Right Down The Line"

There are limits to studying pop music via shadowing, as I've discovered more than once after buying albums or anthologies by artists who really don't have much to offer beyond their best-known hits. Last year, I picked up a "two albums on one CD" collection of Gerry Rafferty's City To City and Night Owl, perhaps swayed by the memory of the time back in college when one of my roommates bought a used Rafferty hits collection in order to have a copy of "Baker Street," and was thrilled to find "Right Down The Line," another soft-rock classic that we'd both forgotten. But aside from "Baker Street" and "Right Down The Line," City To City is pretty dire, and Night Owl's not much better. Even the merits of City To City's two good songs may be due as much to the sound of the times—that slinky, moody atmosphere that Dire Straits also did so well—than to Rafferty's songwriting skills. That said, I do still plan to dig back at some point into Stealers Wheel, Rafferty's pre-City To City band, whom I heard at length years ago and recall having more to offer than just "Stuck In The Middle With You." I've also heard some good stuff by The Humblebums, the band Rafferty was in with Scottish comedian Billy Connolly back in the late '60s. So Rafferty's got a fairly decent CV. He just tails off dramatically after 1978.

The Get Up Kids, "How Long Is Too Long"

Outside of Guilt Show, I've had a hard time getting into Kansas City pop-punkers The Get Up Kids, because both their songwriting and their subject matter have always seemed so minor to me, and somewhat choked off by the band's earnestness. On Guilt Show they found a sweet spot, putting Matthew Pryor's cooing, boyish voice in front of classic pop arrangements—complete with piano accents, acoustic bridges, moody electronic/orchestral interludes and climactic crescendos—that bring a touch of class to what might otherwise be standard half-hook emo, faintly catchy but fundamentally unmemorable. Consequently, a song like "How Long Is Too Long" zooms and swoops, but ultimately follows a constantly changing flow, like the frank conversation that it's meant to recall. Of course, because it is The Get Up Kids, the conversation is a one-sided post-adolescent lament—the line that follows "how long is too long" is, naturally, "when you're waiting by the phone"—but for a fleeting moment, The Get Up Kids make self-absorption almost heroic.

Ghosty, "Add/Drop City"

I haven't heard the most recent Ghosty album, but I'm curious to learn whether they've built on the promise of their debut, a slight collection of indie-rock songs shaped primarily by bandleader Andrew Connor's distinctive songwriting personality. Connor's words and melodies sound almost improvised, like he's speaking off the cuff while spontaneously remembering some tunes from an old K-Tel AM Gold collection. The shambling style falls apart at times, but Connor keeps his happy-thoughts-and-sharp-hooks dream aloft for an impressively long time. Is that the best Ghosty can do? Does it matter? These are the questions that nag at a critic.

Gil Scott-Heron, "Winter In America"

Scott-Heron worked with keyboardist/flautist Brian Jackson on this 1974 lament, which like most of Scott-Heron's work has echoes of beat poetry, Afrobeat, and jazz-fusion. This would be an example of a political song that falls in the middle between eloquently persuasive and intentionally unsubtle and didactic. But as much as any of Scott-Heron's often haunting turns of phrase, what makes this song so powerful is the martial beat and mournful instrumentation, which convey a sense of giving up. It's not a song to inspire; it's one to ease the pain of losing something dear.

Gilbert O'Sullivan, "A Woman's Place"

Here's another political song of a kind, and equally depressing in its way. Or is its old-fashioned chauvinism cute? Can we learn to love it and accept it the way we love and accept our sweetly crotchety grandparents and their painfully insensitive comments about the immigrants who prune their trees? It helps some that O'Sullivan always was a fairly quirky (and talented) artist, almost like an Irish Harry Nilsson. Still…ick.

Gilberto Gil, "Andar Com Fé"

Like a lot of music-lovers of my generation, I was first turned onto Brazilian pop by the David Byrne-curated Beleza Tropical anthology, a really remarkable set that contained an eclectic batch of catchy songs by the honest-to-goodness cream of the crop, like Jorge Ben, Caetano Veloso, Milton Nascimento, and Gilberto Gil (the latter of whom used a light, everybody-sing-along style to convey substantive content). Beleza Tropical was the perfect record for world-music dabblers, because it gave those who wanted to dig further a good group of artists to start with, and those who were happy to skim the surface a few relevant names to drop in conversation.

Gillian Welch, "Paper Wings"

I'm not completely sold on Welch, who's always seemed to be trying too hard to turn Patsy Cline into performance art, by stripping down retro-country to as few elements as possible. She has an amazing voice—and on songs like this beguilingly moody nothing, that's plenty—but I tend to feel that she and her frequent collaborators are holding something back, just to be difficult. And I don't always see the point of it.

Gin Blossoms, "Hey Jealousy"

A friend of mine picked up New Miserable Experience shortly after it came out in 1992, in part because he liked the name "Gin Blossoms" and in part because he was getting into the spreading alt-country scene that Gin Blossoms were almost a part of. Shortly after he got the record, he started proselytizing about "Hey Jealousy," a fluid, tuneful rock song that—in the context of the indie-rock he and I were immersed in at the time—sounded pretty amazing. A year later, I started hearing "Hey Jealousy" on the radio, and soon after that, Gin Blossoms weren't some upstart roots-rock band. They'd become, like Goo Goo Dolls and Soul Asylum before them, the major-label arena-rock heroes they were never quite cut out to be. Now when I hear the song, I'm not sure whether to associate it with what I thought Gin Blossoms were when I first heard them, or what they turned into.

Girl Talk, "That's My DJ"

When we did a Random Rules with Greg Gillis (a.k.a. Girl Talk) last year, we had a contentious discussion in the comments section from people who felt that Gillis' ignorance of some of the music on his iPod reflected badly on him, and that as a mere DJ, he was hardly one to sit in judgment on actual musicians. But I don't know…Girl Talk's Night Ripper is a hell of a record, and one of the truest realizations of the early sampling experiments of Double Dee & Steinski. It's dizzying in its density, and a great deal of fun to boot. I know I wouldn't be able to make the pop connections that Gillis does, or to combine so many different sounds so seamlessly. He's a musician in my book.

Godrays, "Both Your Names"

Rising from the ashes of Small Factory, Godrays were one of the last of the first wave of indie-rock (as clearly distinguished from college rock, alternative rock, and modern rock). Unlike current indie-rock, the original brand had a more unified sound—sloppy, guitar-based, melodic and indifferently sung, and frequently dressed up with excessive basement orchestration—and was usually parceled out on singles and LPs that wore their no-big-dealness as a badge of honor. This was the alternative to alternative, meant to sound intimate and off-the-cuff, and not like just another arena-rock band that had been weaned on punk instead of Foreigner. Most of the indie-rock of that era is decidedly "you had to be there," but part of what made it so refreshing to those of us who haunted indie record shops is that every now and then a band like Godrays would bury a catchy, exciting rock song like this one deep on Side Two of an album nobody bought. And then, long after we'd forgotten all about Small Factory and Godrays, we'd find the song in our CD collection, and think, "Oh wow…now I know why I used to think this stuff was so good."

The Good Life, "Album Of The Year"

As a bookend to the column I wrote about rock auteurists a few week's back, I'm going to write in some future week about rock-by-committee, and one of the things I want to explore is whether you have to eschew collaboration if you want to write lyrics as unselfconsciously corny (but effective) as Tim Kasher does with Cursive and The Good Life. I know Kasher works with others on his music, arrangements, and production, but I can't imagine him running lyrics like those on "Album Of The Year" by anyone else for final approval. "Album Of The Year" would be more impressive if Kasher didn't write so many songs that document the specific details of fractured relationships, but still, on its own merits—for those willing to go with Kasher's drift, and able to stomach lines like "we started laughing 'til it didn't hurt"—this song's references to John Fante and Elliott Smith and its sketch of a romance from start to finish are stunning in their fullness and believability. It's like a Gen-Y version of Harry Chapin's "Taxi."

Regrettably unremarked upon: Gang Starr, Garbage, Gary U.S. Bonds, Gemma Hayes, Gene Pitney, Generation X, George Winston, Giant Sand, Gil Evans, Girls Against Boys, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Gnarls Barkley, Go To Blazes, Godley & Crème, The Go-Betweens, The Go! Team, Gonzales, Gordon Lightfoot, The Gories and Gorillaz

Also listened to: G. Love & Special Sauce, Gal Costa, Galactic, Galaga, Gallery, Gamble Brothers Band, Gamble Rogers, Ganger, The Gants, Gary Bennett, Gary Glitter, Gary Lews & The Playboys, Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, Gaspar Lawal, The Gates Of Eden, Gato Barbieri, Gaunt, Gaylads, The Gena Rowlands Band, Gene, Gene Allison, Gene Autry, Gene Chandler, Gene Harris, General Johnson, Generation Gap, Gentleman Reg, Geoff Love & His Orchestra, Geoff Muldaur, George Baker, George Marinelli, George McGregor & The Bronzettes, George Pegram, Georges Delerue, Georgia Crackers, Georgie James, Gerald Collier, Gerald Price, Gershon Kingsley, Get Him Eat Him, The Get Quick, Get Set Go, The Ghost Is Dancing, Ghostface Killah, Ghostigital, Ghostland, Giant Drag, Giddy Motors, Gift Of Gab, Gingersol, Girls In Hawaii, Girls Of The Golden West, The Gits, The Glass, Glasseater, Gleaners, Glen Hansard, Glenn Adams, Glenn Lewis, Gloria Gaynor, Gloria Jones, Glory Fountain, The Go, The Go Find, Go West, go[machine], The Goatdancers, GoGoGo Airheart, Gojira, Goldcard, Golden, The Golden Dogs, Golden, Golden Earring, The Golden Gate Jubilee, Golden Gate Quartet, The Golden Republic, Goldenboy, Goldie Lookin' Chain, Goldrush, Gonga, Gonzaguinha, The Goo Goo Dolls, The Good Mornings, Goodbye Girl Friday, The Goodnight Loving, Goodthunder and The Goons Of Doom

Next week: From Graham Nash to The Hidden Cameras, plus a few words on mind-changing albums

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