THE POP UNDERGROUND

By Mike Baron

The disconnect between beauty and popular song has never been greater.  Where once America sang the Beatles or Motown (“The Sound of Young America,”) today the music industry lies in fragments.  Gangsta rap.  Speed metal. Trip-hop.  The major recording companies whine about declining profits even as they pay Mariah Carey eighteen million dollars not to record.

Unanimity of public opinion over popular song has passed.  Music, which used to unite, now divides.  Eminem and Ludicris would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.  We live in an antinomian age where it’s hip to defy conventional wisdom, long after every vestige of conventional wisdom lies in tatters.  Where Yeates’ Grecian Urn once proclaimed “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” today’s antinomian consumer proclaims, “Whatever,” in a voice oozing ennui.

Cultural arbiters such as The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and People regularly cover hip-hop as serious art, generally in the music section.  But if music is a combination of rhythm, harmony, and melody, where does hip-hop, with its chanting and choruses “sampled” from better songs fit in?  Is it music?  Not by definition.  It’s mostly a perpetuation of “the dozens,” the tradition of Black cultural put-downs, and sports-style cheerleading.

Let’s give rap a ‘C’ and call it what it is: crap.  Its major consumers are juvenile white suburban males.

Thank God for the divas.  Thirty years ago, the divas were Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Martha Reeves, Patti LaBelle and their ilk, real women with real songs.  Today’s divas are Britney Spears, Christina Aguillera, Whitney Houston, and Ashlee Simpson.  Can anybody hum anything by Britney Spears or Christina Aguillera?  How about the Back Street Boys, ‘N’ Sync, or Justin Timberlake?  Today’s divas, exemplified by the vocal acrobats on American Idol, prove their divaness by avoiding the melody.

There are Top Forty artists who still value craft.  Occasionally, a real song makes it on the play list.  Avril Lavigne and Alicia Keyes suggest song craft is not entirely dead.  It has merely been driven underground.

What an underground.

If you’ve never hummed a Beatles song, have no love for The Who, Cheap Trick, the Raspberries, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Stone Roses, Tom Petty, Linda Rondstadt, the Bangles, the Beach Boys, the Beckies, Badfinger or the Byrds, stop here.  Go back to your X-Box.

Like Australian convicts, eucalyptus trees, and the nutria, pop music has flourished in exile.  Thousands of bands have taken advantage of new technology to record themselves, and offer their product over the internet.  Thanks to downloadable programs like GarageBand.com, you don’t even need to produce CDs.

Most self-released records go for twelve to thirteen dollars.  Not cheap, but they offer things no major label can match: unalloyed joy and soaring pop song craft.  Peter Townshend, lead singer and guitarist for The Who, coined the term “power pop” to indicate the type of complex, joyful, upbeat music, pioneered by the Beatles.  Power pop songs use harmonies and have at least three chords.

Powerpop.org keeps track of many of these bands.  Most have their own websites.  All pursue song craft with skill and passion: The Bottle Rockets, The Churchills, Drive By Truckers, Jay Farrar, Flaming Lips, Fountains of Wayne, Scott Miller, The New Pornographers, Redd Kross, Superdrag, The Shazam, Heavy Blinkers, The Hang-Ups, Hindu Rodeo, Splitsville and The Davenports, to name a handful of the more important bands.

Not Lame Records in Fort Collins is foremost among tiny independent labels carrying the power pop torch.  The brainchild of Boston-born Bruce Brodeen, Not Lame’s premier act is the Nashville-based Shazam, a trio with soaring, anthemic songs and enormous guitar.  Last year they toured the States opening for the reformed Urge Overkill.  It was like Chris Rock opening for Henny Youngman.

For years Brodeen had been trading tapes with friends, tapes of great bands that couldn’t get label deals.  “Not Lame started as a hobby in late ’94.  I was living in Aspen, halfway up a ski lift, when I had one of those connect-the-dots, revelatory, beam-comes-down-from-heaven moment. I’m gonna start a label!”

Brodeen, scion of a long line of preachers, had studied theology in college, but ended up in LA doing band and concert management and promotion. “The last four years in LA I was becoming psychotic.  I couldn’t deal with the crime, density of people, the vicious display of scarier characteristics of human behavior.  My wife and I literally sold everything we had and moved to Aspen on a lark.”

Not Lame comprises three labels: Not Lame Recordings, Not Lame Archives (reissues,) and Not Lame Limited.  “My passions are completely unharnessed.  I have no idea how many bands are on the label,” Brodeen says.  Anywhere from fifteen to seventeen, the most significant of which are Jellyfish and The Posies.  (The nadir of the ugly music movement occurred in 1993 when Spin, the bible of the pierced tongue set, dismissed Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk as facile and unctuous.)   Not Lame has produced handsome boxed sets for both bands, featuring previously unavailable material.  The double-paged photo spread in the center of the Jellyfish booklet, which must be seen to be believed, took six days to shoot and cost fifteen hundred dollars.  Not Lame has sold 7000 copies of the Jellyfish box, an astonishing number for such an upscale item.  Their Posies boxed set is sold out.  Run, do not walk, to www.notlame.com.

Not Lame’s most significant discoveries are The Shazam, a powerfully melodic Nashville trio, and Myacle Brah, Andy (Love Nut) Bopp’s one-man show.  It is pointless to describe these bands as hook-laden.  By definition, all Not Lame bands are hook-laden.  Not Lame has bet the farm on The Shazam, investing a heretofore unheard-of twenty-five grand in their new recording, Tomorrow the World.  The disc kills.  Not Lame recording artists are seldom heard on radio. There are exceptions.  Scot Sax had a hit on the American Pie soundtrack, the swooningly gorgeous “I Am the Summertime.”  Brodeen runs the whole operation out of a garret, and sells almost exclusively over the net (notlame.com), although some stores are stocking certain titles.

“Yes,” Bruce says, “it is a mission. There is a principle at work here. It is that this style of music will not be marginalized or ignored without some struggle to be heard. We do feel that what Not Lame is doing has important artistic merit and relevance, for music fans, as well as for the music industry at large.”

After three albums on Not Lame, Myracle Brah moved to Manhattan-based Rainbow Quartz, the brainchild of music attorney and former rocker Jim McGarry.  Rainbow Quartz’ artists include Norwegian psychedelic popsters the Jessica Fletchers, Israel’s RockFour, Cotton Mather, The Gripweeds, and the Waxwings.  RockFour’s A New Beginning, recorded in Tel Aviv, is similar to the unobtanium in the Scrooge McDuck adventure, “A Cold Bargain.”  Scrooge discovers a rare substance in the Antarctic.  A single molecule, added to a gallon of water, creates a gallon of ice cream.  RockFour’s music is dense and sweet.  The Byrds have been their greatest inspiration, but on their new disc, Nationwide, they’ve forged their own sound, admitting more space without giving up their bone-crunching power chords.   

Not Lame and Rainbow Quartz are doing God’s work (and for you Christian power pop fans, get your hands on all the PFR records.)  There are individual prophets too, bands who insist on controlling their destiny.  They do their own recording, put out their own records, and offer them on their own websites.  Minneapolis-based Hindu Rodeo has released two records since 1995.  Their self-titled first was among a handful of transcendental power pop albums, records like Sgt. Pepper and Jellyfish’s Spilt Milk that have the power to alter your mood. 

Now they have released Nalladaloobr.  Except for Dirk Freymuth’s sitar, the Hindu/Indian trappings are hooey.  This is gutsy power pop with the type of sophisticated lyrics Cole Porter used to write.  Every song delights with powerful chord progressions and self-deprecating wit.  

Hardly a day goes by that a pop hatchling declares its arrival on the internet.  You can find virtually all of the above bands with a Google search, often simply by typing the band’s name followed by dot com.  Not Lame offers just about everything, including rival Rainbow Quartz, on their website.  Music is fun again.  You just have to know where to look. 

The so-called “music industry,” giant entertainment congloms like Sony and Warner Brothers, may collapse like the Soviet Union under the weight of their own greed, and their distance from what was once a devoted audience. Good riddance!  Artists with something vital to communicate will survive.  We don’t need a Chairman Mao—a thousand flowers are already blooming. 

THIS WRITIN’ LIFE

by Mike Baron

I remember the moment I decided to become a writer.  Thirteen years old, standing on Main Street in Mitchell, South Dakota, outside Chappy’s, a bar that had two spin racks of new paperbacks in the window.  I was holding John D. MacDonald’s second Travis McGee novel.  It wasn’t the first, because I remember looking for his name.  I liked the way the guy wrote.  There was his name on the cover.  Obviously he wasn’t doing this for free.  MacDonald was writing for a living and I was buying his stuff.  That’s what I wanted to do.  It would be years before I picked up a pen.

Two Main Street pharmacies had comic racks.  It was 1962, and not much was happening, except for Uncle Scrooge.  Uncle Scrooge’s intelligence shone from the comic rack like a Harley’s headlight coming through the rain.  Carl Barks’ Scrooge stories dealing with the nature of supply and demand are probably more truthful and instructive than what modern teachers call “economics.”  Scrooge teaches that the accumulation of wealth is the result of hard work, intelligence, self initiative, ethics, and luck.  All elected law makers should be required to read the complete Scrooge, or at least spend some time in the private sector before running for office.

My parents encouraged me to read.  There were incidents, like the time I was caught with a copy of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn in Study Hall.  The principal told me, “Mike, I don’t mind if you read this stuff on your own time.  But please don’t bring it to school.”

Between my junior and senior year we moved to Madison, Wisconsin.  I worked that summer as a dishwasher at Camp Indianola, and was in the old bunkhouse the night a tornado took off one wing.  This was the second time in my life I had been in a building while a tornado turned the other half into kindling.

I wrote for the high school paper at West High, on Regent Street in Madison.  I began writing as a direct result of typing class.  The instructor was a dour individual.  He expressed disapproval by snapping his fingers at you, and cutting off his words as if you weren’t worth the breath.  Many students wished him harm.

Not me.  I took to typing like a porpoise to warm waters. If you want to write, you must learn to type.  Even if you just want to sell stuff on eBay, you must learn to type.  I wrote shit.  What else do you expect from a seventeen-year-old, which brings us to Mike’s Rules of Writing Number One: Each would-be writer has a million words of shit clogging up his system, and it behooves him to get it out as soon as possible.  In other words, if a writer you would be, start writing.  (For further instruction, go to www.thehud.com and click on “Writing.”)

There are exceptions to this rule, and I would like to wring their necks.  Neil Gaiman is one.  If Neil ever wrote badly, it’s well hidden.

I largely wasted my college education (if absorbing life can be considered waste) studying political science.  I also took some writing courses, one with Joel Gersman, founder and director of Madison’s Broom Street Theater, and another with Jerry McNeely, head writer for television’s Marcus Welby, M.D. Professor McNeely said, “You make ‘em laugh a little bit, you make ‘em cry a little bit, you SCARE THE HELL OUT OF THEM, and that’s entertainment.”

One day I visited the offices of TakeOver, a left-wing rag, in a shotgun apartment down by the rails.  Mark Knopf was the editor and publisher.  He was awash in free records.

“Where’d you get all these records?”

“The record companies keep sending them.  Want some?  All you have to do is write something about them.”

I staggered out of there with as many as I could carry.  One of them was Edgar Winter’s Entrance, which remains a favorite to this day. More importantly, I learned a lesson.  Free records if you write about them.

In spring of my senior year, I decided to write a paperback novel and make some fast bucks. Thirty years later, I succeeded in publishing my first novel, WITCHBLADE: DEMONS, based on Top Cow’s comic.  Think about that.  Between the time I decided to become a novelist, and got my first novel published, three decades.  This doesn’t mean the intervening thirty years were a wash.  Far from it.  But it does attest to both my determination, and the abysmal quality of my writing.  I must have written thirty novels over the years, or one a year.  When I look back on that material, I want to crawl into a hole and curl up like a carpet worm.

However, when I look back on recent material, not so bad.  So there is hope.  The English writer John Braine, author of Room At The Top, advises would-be novelists in his book How To Write A Novel, not to attempt the deed before the age of forty.  You simply lack the life experience.  For the most part, Braine is correct, although there are again obnoxious exceptions such as Richard Price, whose brilliant first novels, The Wanderers and Ladies’ Man were published while he was in his twenties.

On the other hand, anyone who has tried to read Clockers can see that Price has written himself right out of the entertainment biz.  I love his film scripts, though, especially Mad Dog And Glory.

My writing these days veers in several directions.  First, comic books.  I like it, I’m good at it, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t be writing more comics. Got some announcements coming up.

Second, there is technical and business writing, which I do intermittently for credit unions.

Third are novels, which take two forms.  I have two franchise novels out, courtesy of Byron Preiss and ibooks.  The first is Witchblade: Demons, a decent little police procedural with a fresh twist on the character, and Green Lantern: Sleepers, based on a plot by Christopher Priest.

My agent trudges up and down Fifth Avenue pushing a shopping cart full of manuscripts wearing six layers of clothing, mismatched shoes, a nylon cap pulled down to just above her eyes, and fingerless cloth gloves.  If you see her, make her an offer.  She’s partial to muscatel.  She’s peddling two novels: Combustion, and Mordecai Rath.  Combustion is a science fiction thriller about spontaneous human combustion, and Mordecai Rath is a kung fu Western.

I can no longer claim that my sole influences are Carl Barks and Philip Jose Farmer.  My major writing influence these days is a Western novelist named Pete Brandvold who lives up the street.  Pete shoots from the hip and asks questions later.  Check out his works at peterbrandvold.com.

ORDEAL