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 #18 Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

Today we mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Bill Hicks. 

Best Things Ever #18

Bill Hicks: Rant in E-Minor

“Bill Hicks, blowtorch, excavator, truthsayer and brain specialist, like a reverend waving a gun around. Pay attention to Rant in E Minor, it is a major work, as important as Lenny Bruce's. He will correct your vision. His life was cut short by cancer, though he did leave his tools here. Others will drive on the road he built. Long may his records rant even though he can't.”

          Tom Waits

Twenty years ago this month, the comedian Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer at the tragically young age of 32. Three years later in 1997, two posthumous album were released by Rykodisc: Arizona Bay and Rant in E-Minor. In this article I am going to concentrate on Rant in E Minor, which I consider to be both the greatest comedy album and the greatest spoken word album of all time.

The material for Rant in E Minor was recorded at the Laff Stop Comedy Club in Austin, Texas in March and October 1993 and at Coobs, San Francisco in July of the same year. Unlike the albums Dangerous and Relentless that were released during Bill’s lifetime, Rant in E Minor, as well as Arizona Bay, presents the material in the form of chapter points rather than as a traditional live comedy album. It’s more like a concept album, the live material interspersed with musical interludes performed by Bill and his producer and childhood friend, Kevin Booth.

I’ve always found the music on Arizona Bay to be somewhat intrusive, though it’s still a good album (it’s a Bill Hicks album). With Rant in E Minor though, the music is pitched perfectly and serves to divide the seventy five minute album into a series of movements or acts.

The other thing to say about Rant in E Minor is that most of the material included is unique to this one album. There have been a number of subsequent albums released, as well as countless bootlegs of other Bill Hicks’s gigs, which all have significant overlap between them. Yet aside from the bootleg of his final gig at Igby’s, which does include some of the material featured on Rant in E Minor, it’s a pretty unique set list. Even the Igby’s set contains many well-worn routines that you won’t find on Rant in E Minor.

Rant in E Minor is Bill Hicks at his bravest, his angriest, his most free and his most engaging. The material from the later recordings at the Laff Stop was recorded when he knew he was ill and any pretence that Bill was holding back at all is gone. To hear him screaming at his audience, “You fucking morons, you fucking morons.” is cathartic. As Hicks himself says:

“That’s what this is all about, man. It’s supposed to be a fucking catharsis, man, you know. It’s supposed to be a release from the fucking daily grind.”

In that catharsis, Hicks takes aim at the anti-abortion lobby, Christianity, Billy Ray Cyrus, the perpetrators of the raid on the Waco complex, including Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, homophobia in the military, women who defend abusive partners and Rush Limbaugh. One of the reasons that the comedy of Bill Hicks stands the test the time is both because of the universality of it content matter, but also, depressingly, because of how little seems to have changed and how much has come full circle in twenty years. If Bill was alive today, instead of riffing about hosting a TV show called, ‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Bill Ray Cyrus’ it would be have to be called, ‘Let’s Hunt and Kill Miley Cyrus (with special guest, Robin Thicke)’. Rush Limbaugh is still allowed a platform from which to spout his moronic opinions. The show Cops has been replaced by a thousand and one equally fascistic “reality TV” programs and rather than senselessly slaughtering women and children in Waco, Texas, it is instead in Pakistan and the Yemen that women and children are gunned down with drones by executioners who never leave the comfort of their armchair in some military base in the desert wilds of the United States, or have the decency to look their victims once in the eye.

I think Bill Hicks would be appalled at the level to which soldiers have been elevated to the level of heroes, protectors of freedom, even as they are used as instruments of brute terror and blunt force to destroy freedom in favour of corporate profit. He was never one to shy away from criticism of the military, questioning why a suicide bomber was a coward but firing Cruise missiles from a ship hundreds of miles away in the Gulf was a heroic act. In dealing with the issue of gay people serving in the armed forces, Hicks says:

“Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in... I don’t care how many sit ups you can do, put on a helmet, go wait in that fox-hole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody.”

Now, I’m sure that Bill didn’t really mean a lot of the things he said but, like Jonathan Swift, used extreme views to present certain arguments as reducio ad absurdium, as well as a way to get laughs. My parents met in the Royal Navy and I exist because of the armed forces, so I tend to give serving personal the benefit of the doubt that they are merely following orders and they simply trust that those orders are given in good faith. Yet I don’t think there is anything particularly heroic about following orders, especially when the Nuremberg Trials established that “I was only following orders” is not a valid defence (although Nuremberg also established the invasion of another sovereign state to be the supreme international crime under law, but that doesn’t seem to stop us).

For all the supposed threat from Al Qaida in the last decade or so, the simple fact of the matter is that the most successful terrorist organisation in the last hundred years is the CIA. More coups against democratic regimes and more loss of innocent life than Al Qaida could ever even dream of taking. They kill thousands, we kill hundreds of thousands in retaliation. In America the repeated mantra is, “Support the troops, they protect your freedom. “ If you need protecting, you are not free. And all that all this killing really achieves is to intensify the level of retaliation that will be visited upon your children after the empire falls. You would think that the richest country in the world would have at least grasped the basic fact that all debts get called in eventually. That’s karma, man. It’s also the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Bill’s routine on gays in the military manages to correct one of the niggles I have with his early routines, especially on Dangerous and Sane Man, where his material is somewhat homophobic (although he did out George Michael several years before George’s own actions did it for him). Again, this could simply be a matter of taking things to extremes for deliberate comic effect. I like when graphic images of gay sex are used as a weapon against homophobes and other fatheads, so Hicks’s observation that Rush Limbaugh reminds him of “one of those gay guys who likes to lay in a tub while other men pee on him.” is especially brilliant. Although it gets too graphic for me when he comes to the part about Barbara Bush unrolling her flaccid labia, then shitting in Limbaugh’s mouth. Then I have to skip forward.

I’ve described Rant in E Minor as my favourite spoken word album, as well as my favourite comedy album, because as funny as Rant in E Minor is, it also represents Bill Hicks at his most philosophical. The power of comedy is in its repeatability and yet with Rant in E Minor there are so many lines that are as much like stanzas from Dylan’s It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) as anything else and worth listening to whenever you are feeling down or need a call to action. As well as his comments on catharsis, one further example will suffice here:

“The argument doesn’t work with me Flapjack. Go back to your fucking crackerjack lifestyle and I’ll meet you at the evolution bell curve. I’ll be sitting there awhile, it’s kind of a tortoise and the hare story.”

Many comedians and sitcoms can make me laugh till I cry, even after I know every word, but there is only Rant in E Minor that can make me actually cry. To hear Bill talk about thinking about taking his own life, but not having the balls to do it, and to realise that in that instant he is facing up to his mortality and the fact that he is going to die is heart breaking to hear. He’d struggled to build an audience in his home country, but was a star across the Atlantic. He was about to have his own TV show for real in Britain and died right on the cusp of major success. On that day, the world lost a true comedy genius.

In many ways, Bill Hick was a visionary and a man ahead of his time. Some of his material, like his alter-ego, Pan the Randy Goat-Boy, was considered extreme at the time. His honest discussions of his use of pornography were not applauded by all and yet to listen to many comedians these days, his comedy seems somewhat mild by comparison. The ubiquity of the internet, it seems, has made us more voyeuristic and more cruel.

If you read Agent of Evolution, the Bill Hicks biography consisting of interviews with the people who knew him, you see that there were elements of his life about which he didn’t talk openly (like visiting brothels and experimenting with just about every drug yet invented, not just the fashionable ones). He could go too far sometimes, but there was also as much that he held back. Compare that with, say, the average Doug Stanhope routine, where very little is censored or held back. I love Doug Stanhope, by the way.

There has been a lot written about Hicks in the media in this twentieth anniversary week, especially by other comedians. He has been lauded as a fine comedian, but some question his elevation to the level of Messiah. I don’t think Hicks was the Messiah, but I do think that some art and artists transcend the medium in which they exist. Was Shakespeare just another playwright? Is the Mona Lisa just another portrait? When Billie Holiday sang Strange Fruit to hushed audiences, was that just another artist singing another jazz standard?

There’s nothing wrong with being a comedian, making people laugh is a fine way to make a living, but it doesn’t mean that some comedians can’t transcend comedy. Bill Hicks wasn’t/isn’t the Messiah but with the greatest respect to many other comedians that I listen to and love, neither was Bill Hicks just another comedian. He was somewhere halfway between comedian and Messiah and his genius in no way devalues the comedy of others, only drags it up by its bootstraps. If you want to realise the potential of stand-up comedy, listen to Rant in E Minor.

It’s hard to say what Bill Hicks would be doing if he were alive today, 52 and grumpier than ever, but I like to imagine him having his own weekly podcast. Anyone who listens to Greg Proops’s podcast, The Smartest Man in the World, can get a sense of what that might have sounded like. Proops has his own style, his own rhythms and way of doing things, but he also channels the spirit of Bill Hicks, frequently citing Hicks as the bravest comedian he ever saw. The Smartest Man in the World is one of the highlights of my week and I can highly recommend it.

It’s useless to dwell on what might have been, only what is. Bill Hicks died too young, but his comedy lives on through his recorded material. Rant in E Minor is his crowning achievement and remains a call to action against hopelessness. If he could be this funny and thought provoking as he was dying, imagine what we can achieve even as we live.

Get it done.

See also (click link)

Best Things Ever #8 Roadmaps for the Soul: The Music of Bill Hicks

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

Today, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

The first year of the millennium found me working at a temp job with a girl who would become my girlfriend during the course of the contract. There was only the two of us working in the room, so she brought in a tape deck and we would take turns to play music for each other. As we listened to The Kinks, The Beatles, The Clash, Stones, Elastica, Joy Division and Dylan (even Bill Hicks and Eddie Izzard), we’d also talk music to while away the hours.

One day the conversation turned to Captain Beefheart and how neither of us knew much about him, except that ‘Trout Mask Replica’ was supposed to be a masterpiece that sounded like white noise when you first heard it. We ended up driving to the local library that lunchtime to see if they had it. They did, but the CD was out and someone had it reserved for when it came back. I ended up buying a copy from HMV after work and putting it on tape for the next day.

She was either hung over or hadn’t got much sleep the night before, but what I remember is her with her head cradled in her hands, begging me to turn it off because it was making her brain bleed. She’d lasted twenty minutes into an hour and twenty minute long album.

Someone once told me that if you’re going to be drinking mixed spirits, like rum and coke, you should always have the first one neat. This will make every subsequent drink taste mild by contrast. I mention this only because the comparison with Captain Beefheart’s back catalogue is apt. Listening to ‘Trout Mask Replica’ first renders everything else the Captain did mild by comparison. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a masterpiece by a twisted genius, who kept his band under cult-like conditions in a house in the suburbs of LA for eight months, where they were made to practice the tortuously complicated compositions for fourteen hours a day. On coming to record the album, produced by Frank Zappa, the majority of the music was recorded in one four and a half hour session.

‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a difficult album, full of free jazz and irregular rhythms and off key horns. Not being a musician, the only thing I can compare it to is that perennial favourite of mine, the novel ‘Finnegans Wake’. The first time through it simply makes no sense and even by the tenth, the hundredth time even, parts of it will remain bafflingly obscure forever. Like jazz, you have to learn to speak a new musical language in listening to Beefheart. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is like a Latin primer for everything that sits around it. I read somewhere that ‘Dachau Blues’ is the song you play at the end of a party when you want to get rid of the last stragglers. I agree. A masterpiece to be sure, but fourteen years after first hearing it, ‘Trout Mask Replica’ is a still a masterpiece I have to be in a very particular mood to be able to listen to.

It’s only the first shot of the evening though. If you can survive ‘Trout Mask Replica’ then you’re well on your way to appreciating Captain Beefheart’s genius. His first two albums, ‘Safe As Milk’ and ‘Strictly Personal’ almost sound like typical 60s pop records when placed next to his third. Almost. ‘I’m Glad’ could be a Motown single, but with ‘Ah Feel Like Acid’ and ‘Electricity’ we’re in more familiar Beefheart territory. What makes his music unlike almost any other artist in musical history is Beefheart’s refusal to conform to anything like a regular rhythm. His music rarely does what is expected of it. Even reggae isn’t as offbeat as Beefheart.

The first couple of offerings are as near to mainstream as anything Beefheart ever recorded, mixing blues, rhythm and blues and 60s psychedelia. His dig at the Beatles and Rolling Stones in ‘Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones’ (“strawberry moth; strawberry caterpillar strawberry butterfly; strawberry fields”) signified the change that was about to occur.

After ‘Trout Mask Replica’, he never looked back. ‘Lick My Decals Off Baby’ is almost a continuation and again I have to be in the mood. Yet, ‘The Spotlight Kid’, ‘Clear Spot’ and especially, ‘Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)’ are extraordinary albums that can lift the mood in a heartbeat. Boy bands and a thousand and one guitar orientated rock clones send the workforce somnambulistically to production line office death camps for the soul. Try listening to ‘Bat Chain Puller’, ‘When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy’, ‘Sun Zoom Spark’ on your way to work and see how long it is before you despair of your situation. I doubt many ‘X-Factor’ contestants who sang ‘Run Paint Run Run’ or ‘Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ would get through the auditions, or whatever it is they do. I don’t know, I’ve never seen ‘X-Factor’. I have thumbs.

Tom Waits’s fans subdivide his back catalogue into two eras, the one before he heard Captain Beefheart, and the period after he heard Captain Beefheart. The Captain’s influence on his music is obvious and it is revolutionary, for which we have to thank Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan, who got him deeper into Beefheart (Waits and Beefheart shared a manager in the 70s). Waits released some great albums pre-Beefheart, like ‘Blue Valentine’ and the live album ‘Nighthawks at the Diner’, where he’s virtually channelling the spirit of Jack Kerouac. Since1983’s ‘Swordfishtrombones’ up to 2011’s ‘Bad As Me’ inclusive, Waits has been on another level. In recent years, he has eclipsed even Dylan as my favourite recording artist. The influence of no-one else seeps through to his music quite like Captain Beefheart.

Beyond Waits, Beefheart’s influence is wide. You can hear ghosts of his rhythms in many ‘Talking Heads’ albums, particularly ‘New Feeling’ and ‘Psycho Killer’ from their debut, ‘Talking Heads: 77’. ‘Beck’ and ‘The White Strips’ have covered songs by Captain Beefheart. You also hear his influence in much of ‘The Fall’. It’s what makes ‘The Fall’ so great, Mark E Mark the Mancunian Beefheart (compare, ‘Who Makes the Nazis?’ with ‘Dachau Blues’). He even recorded a version of ‘Beatle Bones ‘N’ Smokin’ Stones’ on one of their peerless performances for John Peel (see ‘The Complete Peel Sessions’ disc 5). Peel himself said, “If there has ever been such a thing as a genius in the history of pop music, it’s Beefheart.”

Then there is Beefheart’s influence on PJ Harvey, a woman whom I can’t say enough about (though I had a go, see ‘The Sombrer Opacities of the Gloom’). Up until his death in December 2010, Harvey would send Beefheart advance copies of her albums. This fact alone makes her more boss than virtually any other artist alive. Her early albums are infused with Beefheart’s influence, but of all his musical godchildren, Harvey found her own way. PJ doesn’t stay still for very long and by the time of her own masterpiece, ‘Let England Shake’, very little trace of Beefheart remained.

In 2004, I saw former members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band perform a full set of his tracks at the Manchester Bridgewater Hall. It wasn’t all that. Without the Captain’s effervescence, it felt like we were watching session musicians going through the motions. The middle section of the set was entirely instrumental. I saw a few hard core Beefheart fans walk out in vocal disgust. The real deal hadn’t recorded an album in over thirty years, not since 1982’s ‘Ice Cream for Cow’. His music never gained the widespread appeal it deserved and he abandoned the music industry for painting. He became a ‘recluse’ (a label used by journalists for people with who don’t want to talk to them). He’d also started to suffer symptoms from the onset of multiple sclerosis.

Sadly, as is often the way, it was only after the Captain’s death that I went back and discovered the rest of his back catalogue. ‘Trout Mask Replica’ should have opened to doors to discovery, but I was too engrossed by his disciples. We get where we need to be in the end. Now Beefheart is ingrained deep down in my soul. Safe as milk.

Get it done.