Kitsch of Distinction

Over the past 30 years, every vital conundrum of rock has been unravelled, impaled, dredged, reified and counter-reified. So if, as happened recently, a critic such as Dave Marsh tells you why he believes Neil Young is a minor rather than a major rock artist, you can be forgiven for yawning sideways toward questions of more compelling import, viz: what is the relationship between heavy black eyeliner and the pagan sacrificial rites of the Incas?

Or: how did record producer Neely Plumb, along with Juan Garcia Esquivel and the entire staff of the RCA Victor Music Centre Of The World studios in Hollywood, create the disturbing psychoacoustic illusionism of Stereo Action, whereby sounds hang so tangibly between your loudspeakers that you reach out instinctively to caress them? Or: after many years of neglect, why has the black blue comedian Rudy Ray Moore found favour among the tuxedoed Generation X-ers of Manhattan and the nihilist gangbangers of Compton?

None of these mysteries are plumbed explicitly in the two volumes of Re/Search Publications' Incredibly Strange Music books but the terrain is mapped implicitly by truckers, loggers, strippers, Hawaiians, Christians, psychics, wrestlers, Satanists, singing cops, sound sculptors, rockabillies, monsters, surfers and people who have yet to discover a talent of any description and seem unlikely to do so in their lifetime. So first things first: how to define the incredibly strange music aesthetic?

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Incredibly strange records can be, quite simply, the products of a silent (or vociferously vocal) army of crackpots, bigots and kitsch kommandos. They should be produced by people who believe in their own work with absolute sincerity and seriousness. Not even a vestigial trace of authenticity should live in their grooves. The final product should fail to match the original intention. The record cover should portray a Utopian, improved or more desirable world - after listening you'll be more relaxed, more spiritual, you'll be fitter, you'll have better sex, perfect your fascist tendencies, play better golf and know how to rescue a big-breasted babe in a leopard skin from a cannibal. They should be the sort of records that could not, in any circumstances, be carried under the arm at any pivotal site of 'youth movement' emergence, ie The Roxy, Shoom, Glastonbury, etc. Some of them may be highly valued and preserved in clear plastic folders by a distant relative you once met and have since learned to avoid.

In a world of definitive judgements and cultural canons, incredibly strange music can be summarised in one word: crap. But not all of it and not really. This is why we like it. Some of us. So, to borrow the title of an incredibly strange but easily found CD of Indo-classical misunderstanding (track titles include "Mad Mod Mood Fugue" and "I Met Bach In My House") by Ilaiyaraajaq: how to name it?

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For those of you who have been content, thus far, with the work of major artists, but who want to live a little, there are certain guidelines for recognising the genre. A record cover which features large breasts, for example, can be a sure sign of incredible strangeness. Likewise, singing parrots, spacesuited men holding goblets of green and lilac brandy aloft. Theremins and Moog synthesizers, men in turbans playing the Hammond organ, animals in underwear, gurus and fanatics of any political or religious persuasion, displaced sitars, accident victims and convicted criminals, jungle drums and any depiction of bamboo, particularly in close proximity to large breasts (sometimes male). And Heino.

Who is Heino, you ask? My sporadic past experiences as a touring musician in Germany were uplifted from grim reality by visits to record shops, all of which stocked quantities of Heino albums. Even a think tank of David Lynch, John Waters, Russ Meyer and Wes Craven could not have invented Heino. Possibly born as seen, this crooning Bavarian frightener emanates the embalming fluid fumes of a 90 year old teenager. A sex object for the Aryan nations, Heino is never seen without a blond wig, rectangular sunglasses and doggy companions (poodles for the ladies, alsatians for real men). In the realm of toxic album art and poisonous music, he has no rival.