The Concept of Albums

Today we hone in on the concept of a concept album. Now pay attention...

The Concept of Albums

I was listening to Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime today, wondering what makes a great concept album.

Apparently many people don’t know what a concept album is, judging from Wikipedia’s list of purported concept albums. I’m unfamiliar with many of the names, but a random sampling include Metallica’s ...And Justice For All and Load (wrong on both counts and if Load, why not Reload?), the first four Blur albums (I mean honestly) and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage (this one I find the most baffling of all).

What’s just as surprising here is what’s missing, given these albums represent the criteria on which we are supposed to judge what makes a concept album. Metallica but no Megadeth, several of who’s album get nearer to approaching a unifying concept or theme. I’m not sure that a jazz album can be a concept album, but if Maiden Voyage is a concept album then I can think of several that have a better claim, including Hancock’s own 1973 album, Head Hunters and certainly Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain. As for Blur, well to paraphrase a line from something the source of which escapes me for the moment, stop it, now you’re just naming albums.

Most egregious in the Wikipedia list is the inclusion of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the most famous concept album that isn’t a concept album, the clue being in the fact that The Beatles themselves said it isn’t a concept album. Abbey Road might have a better claim, or at least the second side of Abbey Road, which is broadly conceptual, like the second half of Queen II, an album which also appears in the Wikipedia list.

For me, an album must have something of the musical about it to be considered conceptual. It must be almost operatic. Which is odd, given that I can’t stand musicals and I can only listen to opera. Watching opera is like having teeth pulled. I do enjoy a good concept album. However, a group or musician attempting a concept album is like a footballer attempting a bicycle kick. Get it right and it’s spectacular. Get it wrong and you look like an absolute dick.

Operation: Mindcrime is a fine example of getting the concept album right. It contains all of the elements for a good concept album. It has the structure of an hour long musical, including talky acting bits in between songs. There are leitmotifs borrowed from Wagnerian opera, which return to haunt the album at various points. It also has a clear plot of revolutionaries, terrorism, murder and corrupt priests, which is quite easy to follow. The narrative is circular, ending at the same point at which it begins. 

Operation: Mindcrime also contains echoes of maybe the most famous actual concept album yet recorded, Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Especially near the end of Mindcrime will you hear very deliberate musical strains referencing The Wall. It’s a nice touch. You hear the same thing in Mastodon’s Leviathan, a concept album built around Moby Dick, which tips its hat to Iron Maiden’s 1988 concept album, Seventh Son of the Seventh Son, which is about... well, guess.

It’s perhaps a little kitsch to admit this, but I love The Wall. A friend of mine used to say that rather than watching horror films, he preferred sitting down to listen to a Slayer album with the lyrics sheet in front of him. I used to do almost the same with Pink Floyd. I would have a smoke or four, get into bed with all but my face wrapped in sheets and listen to the whole of The Wall in the dark through a pair of headphones. It beats the hell out of a emersion tank. The Wall’s musical narrative tell the story of the rock star, Pink, and his slow decent into madness. I love The Wall because it’s an album of eighty minutes of unrelenting bleakness, punctuated by two minutes of light at the end of the tunnel. I also love it because by accident or by design songs like The Trial contain many of the same tropes as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

The Wall and Operation: Mindcrime can perhaps be better described as rock operas than concept albums, the same as The Who’s Tommy or The Kink’s Arthur. Yet this, in one sense, is exactly what makes a concept album. There are many that describe Floyd’s previous three albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals as also being conceptual. I would submit only the last album of the three for consideration. A concept album isn’t just one in which similar themes are explored, there has to be an overarching, unifying theme, if not an actual fictional narrative. If Dark Side of the Moon was a concept album, then so would most other albums ever recorded. I’m sure every One Direction and Justin Bieber album could be considered conceptual using this standard. Is that what you want? Is it?

  

Sloppy categorising is exactly the same thing that allows ...And Justice for All and Maiden Voyage to be accepted into what should be a highly exclusive club. For instance, what about the Alice in Chain album, Dirt? Is this a concept album? All but one of its tracks can be argued to be about heroin addiction. I would say that no, it isn’t, for exactly the reason that one track (Rooster) is about the experiences of guitarist Jerry Cantrell’s father’s experiences in Vietnam. Yet Dirt probably has a better claim than half of the albums in Wikipedia’s list.

As egregious as Sgt. Pepper’s inclusion in this list is the exclusion of PJ Harvey’s Mercury Music Prize winning album, Let England Shake, an album that is as conceptual as you can get without actually crossing over into rock opera. I honestly don’t think that a better album has been produced this side of the millennium, a record all about Britain and its involvement in wars now and centuries past. I have waxed lyrical about Let England Shake at length in my essay, The Sombrer Opacities of the Gloom.

Curiously, you also won’t find any Bob Dylan albums in the Wikipedia list. A convincing case can certainly be made for John Wesley Harding, given that it was recorded when The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper and The Rolling Stones were copying them with Their Satanic Majesties. Dylan meanwhile recorded an album that is about as far from psychedelia as it’s possible to go. An collection of songs that don’t contain any choruses is certainly a concept. A argument could also be made for Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind, great divorce porn albums them both. Yet like Alice in Chains Dirt, the concept doesn’t  entirely track across either album. A better case can be made for Jack White’s Blunderbuss, which is both divorce porn and consistently conceptual.

Tom Waits has recorded a handful of concept albums, but many of these were recorded for actual plays (The Black Rider, Alice and Blood Money). Nighthawks at the Diner from 1975 though is that rarest of breeds, a concept album recorded live, in which Wait’s channels the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s beat poet performances. There is also the curious case of the Easy Star All-Stars. The Easy Star All-Stars rerecord classic albums, Dark Side of the Moon, Ok Computer, Sgt. Pepper, Thriller, etc. in reggae and dub styles. That’s conceptual art for you. Meta Conceptual even. Easy Star All-Stars’s version of Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky is one of my favourite things ever.

 

Perhaps the most exciting artist to be producing conceptual albums in recent years is Janelle Monae. Her debut EP, Metropolis, and two albums, The ArchAndroid and The Electric Lady continue the same narrative, where Monae’s alter-ego, the android Cindi Mayweather, falls in love with a human being in the future and travels back in time to the present day to escape arrest. It’s high concept indeed, heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s science fiction silent film, Metropolis, as well as the robotic stories of Isaac Asimov.

I’m not exactly a fan of modern R&B, but genius comes in many forms and Monae is there or thereabouts, taking her influence from artists as diverse as Michael Jackson and Prince, Outcast, the B52s, David Bowie, Scissor Sisters, Rachmaninoff and George Gershwin. Like Dylan, she had the foresight to write a polemic entitled Mr. President, without mentioning the incumbent at the time (Dubya). My one criticism is that she should spend more time singing the song during Obama’s administration and less time hanging out at the White House. After all, Dylan continues to perform It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) whether the President who ‘must sometime have to stand naked’ be Johnson, Nixon or one either of the Bushes.

So there you go. I hope we have managed to establish the concept of a concept album. Or at least tightened our definition. OK Computer, yes (just), Kid A and Amnesiac, no. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, yes, The Kink’s Muswell Hillbillies, no. Any Frank Zappa album, yes, any Captain Beefheart album, no. Got it? Good, ‘cause I don’t want have to run through this shit again (*winks*).

Get it done.

Best Things Ever #19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian

In deference to its subject matter, this started out as a nice little article about Monty Python's Life of Brian, but then it got silly and went off on a tangent.

Best Things Ever

#19 Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't NEED to follow ME, You don't NEED to follow 

ANYBODY! You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals! 

Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals! 

Brian: You're all different! 

Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different! 

Man in crowd: I'm not...

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the true test of great comedy is in its repeat-ability. By that measure, Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a strong candidate for greatest comedy film of all time.

There is hardly a line in Life of Brian that doesn’t bare repeating. While other films, This is Spinal Tap, Withnail & I, Airplane etc.,  can boast of dozens of one liners, most films don’t step beyond the boundaries of the one liner. As a teenager, I was part of a clique that practically communicated in comedy one liners from a dozen films and TV series. Yet the strength of Monty Python was always in their finely crafted sketches and the Life of Brain script represents the Pythons at the top of their game. Virtually every scene is comedy gold and each of our clique had two or three sketches memorised that we would real off for the amusement of each other, like singing karaoke or bashing out the chords to our favourite songs on the guitar. My specialty was always, ‘Crucifixion’s a Doddle’. That and, ‘I Want to Have Babies’.

Beyond its repeatability though, Life of Brian is as good as it is because of its ability to interchange between ribbing religion and side swipes at the mentality of certain sections of 1970s Britain. One has only to think of Michael Palin chained to the wall in Pilate’s prison, shouting ‘nail ‘em up I say’ in reference to crucifixion and see the obvious parallels, even today, to the sections of the media that still want hanging brought back in this country, not out of a sense of justice but because of a thirst, a lust for blood. Or spot the same hypocrisies in the Daily Mail’s recent headlines about unions campaigning for paedophiles in the 1970s, while at the same time carrying countless pictures of underage girls in bikinis on their website. The Daily Mail: For the Self-Hating Paedophile.

Yet Life of Brian as much ridicules the left of the 20^th century. I read somewhere recently that when those on the left talk, they do so in a circle. The problem is that they stand in the same direction when they start firing. The schism between the People’s Front of Judea and the ‘fucking Judean People’s Front’, a hatred way and above the hatred felt for the Romans, perfectly parodies this situation (cf. The Spanish Civil War, where the fascists won because the leftist factions were too busy fighting each other):

Brothers, brothers! We should be struggling together!

We are! Oh!

We mustn't fight each other! Surely, we should be united against the common enemy!

The Judean People's Front?!

No, no, the Romans!

Life of Brain found itself in a lot of trouble for poking fun at religion and is still banned in a number of countries. Yet if Monty Python makes religion look silly that’s because religion kind of is silly. There is nothing in Life of Brain that shouldn’t be obvious to most people, but offense is taken in reminding the faithful that religion is silly, the elephant in the room to which most religious people don’t want attention to be drawn. Likely, it has as much to do with the fact that the one time we do see Jesus, at the beginning of the film, it’s during his Sermon on the Mount speech, which is one of the many bits of the teachings of Christ that you’re supposed to put as far from your mind as possible. If Christianity actually paid attention to the vast majority of the things Christ is purported to have said then Christianity as a for-profit organisation would be unable to function. After all, Christianity is a church dedicated to a man who said don’t go to church. Silly, see.

I’ve heard Anglican clergy that have expressed a love for Monty Python, even for certain sections of Life of Brian, but not for the end, because there’s nothing funny about crucifixion, especially when Christ was crucified. But was he? After all, Acts of the Apostles states that Christ was nailed to a tree and the Book of Galatians says he was hung and then thrown into a tree. The image of Christ crucified is a fairly recent innovation in the history of Christianity. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the fourteenth century, the pilgrims always refer to Christ as the man who was nailed to a tree. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was tied to a stake and left in the desert to die (or was it yesterdie? – an old Goon Show joke, aw thank yew).

In the original texts, the word translated as crucifix could refer to a number of different punishments meted out by the Romans. I have heard it said that no one was ever crucified using the Latin cross, but rather the Tau or T-shaped cross. The Latin cross was purely ceremonial but impractical compared to the simpler Tau cross, which required less heavy timber. The Latin Cross was a pagan symbol and hanging a cross around your neck is therefore no more appropriate than wearing a pentangle.

There’s also something very fishy about Christ’s crying out at the point of death. Aside from Matthew, Mark and John all giving different versions of what Jesus actually shouted (My God, My God, why hast though forsaken me; Father, I commend myself to your spirit; and, It is done, respectively), the cause of death in crucifixion is by asphyxiation. You suffocate to death due to the fact that all the weight of the body is placed on the chest and lungs. So how could he cry out? Did he fake his death? Did he not come to Earth as a mortal man and was just taking the piss? Or are the gospels just fairy stories, expanded and refined over a century of retelling through the oral tradition, like the tales of Odysseus and the other heroes of Greek myth?

In one sense, Jesus is just another Greek hero. The popular image of Jesus in western art bears no relation to the historical man, if indeed he existed at all. The man we see is in actuality Apollo, the Greek and Roman God of the Sun, reflected by the disc of gold seen behind his head. The Greeks portrayed their gods as having long hair in order to show them as wealthy, in opposition to the shaved heads worn by slaves. Jesus would probably have worn prayer curls at the temples (as demanded by Leviticus, something the Religious Right don’t seem as keen on enforcing as bans on homosexuality). However, the rest of the hair on the head would have been short or shaved.

The Jesus story, including his parents fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod, is very much a retelling of the story of the birth of Apollo and his sister, Artemis, whose mother, Leda, was raped by Zeus and then had to flee the jealous rage of his sister-wife, Hera (as with much of the Bible, the Jesus story is a Greek myth with all of the women excised). And even the name Jesus is a Latinisation of a Greek name Iesous. But ‘Jesus’ was Jewish, so his name would have been Joshua. Ergo, the Jesus so revered in western tradition is really the pagan Sun God, Apollo.

James George Frazer in The Golden Bough notes that in The Gospel According to Luke the soldiers who beat Jesus and place the crown of thorns on his head are described as being Herod’s men. They therefore would all have been Jewish, putting a whole new spin on their mocking of Jesus as The King of the Jews. Frazer believed that rather than being commensurate to the Jewish Passover, the crucifixion took place during the Jewish festival of Haman, a Babylonian ritual or passion play brought back from their time as slaves in Babylonia.

Frazer identified in the crucifixion elements of a Mock King ritual, where one man would be sacrificed to the corn gods, whilst another, the Barabbas (a ceremonial title), would be set free to be executed the following year. Frazer thought that rather than Jesus being special, the ritual was carried out every year during the festival of Haman and Jesus, a troublesome Rabbi who wished to reform Judaism, was brought up on trumped up charges and ritually executed. His theories have a certain ring of truth about them, but who knows how close he came.

The irony here is that Frazer also notes that the story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis was never meant to be taken as a literal event that actually happened, but rather an allegory designed to stop child sacrifice amongst the Israelites, a practice which was common in the Middle East and elsewhere at that time. If Frazer’s theories have any truth to them, then it seems Judaism returned to this common practice later on.

(James Joyce puns on Frazer’s Abraham/Isaac theory in the opening page of Finnegans Wake: not yet, though venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac – in other words, before animal sacrifice had replaced the bland/commonplace practice of kings sacrificing their own children.)

All in all then, given the lack of a clear method of execution mentioned in the Bible, the Latin cross not used as a method of execution, the parallels to Greek mythology, the doubtfulness of the descriptions found in the Gospels, as well as James George Frazer’s speculations on the Gospel accounts, I think we’re on pretty safe ground to sing, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ from atop a couple of dozen crucifixes. As with most cries of ‘blasphemy’, what those shouting really want is for no one to think for themselves and have the bleeding obvious pointed out to them. Without frequent recourse to the Church’s various inquisitions, Chrstianity (as I prefer to call it) wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.

Life of Brian is also a meta film, a film poking fun at other films about religion and the time of the Romans. ‘I’m Brian and so’s my wife’ is a brilliant parody of ‘I’m Spartacus’. Or the quintessentially British notion of a petty argument about noses going on in the background of one of the most important events in religious scripture (The Sermon on the Mount). If Tom Stoppard had written Life of Brian it would be considered art rather than comedy. Indeed, there is more than a little of Becket and Brecht in Life of Brian. Despite employing an alien space battle as a deus ex machina at one point, which I’ve always suspected was shoehorned in to give Terry Gilliam something to play with, Life of Brian is in many ways the Python’s most serious film as well as their funniest.

Life of Brain is a great film and a great British film exactly because it is so iconoclastic. British comedy, British life in general, has always been about poking fun at authority figures. In the same way that Londoners stood on the banks of the Thames in 1834 to watch and cheer as the Houses of Parliament burned down, so Monty Python gleefully send up religion and politics and British life.

Left to the film industry, Life of Brian would never have been made. It was considered too controversial. Thankfully, George Harrison financed the film and gave birth to Handmade Films in the process, which also came to make Withnail & I, one of the few films that gets anywhere near Life of Brain in terms of quote-ability (I’ll come back to Withnail & I in a later article). The Beatles were falling apart just as the Pythons were coming together. It’s satisfying that it was a Beatle that helped the Pythons stay together just a little longer (although they’d essentially gone their separate ways by this point). The Pythons occupy the same place in the annals of comedy that the Beatles occupy in music.

I rewatched Life of Brian before writing this piece and despite knowing just about every word from start to finish, I was still giggling to myself even as I repeated the lines like repeating the catechism at church. A love of comedy is quite like a fervour for religion. The only difference between religion and comedy is that comedy doesn’t mind admitting that it’s silly.

Get it done.