The Wire

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.
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For this reason, I was delighted to find an entire section devoted to Heino in Incredibly Strange Music Volume Two, secreted inside a fascinating interview with Jello Biafra. The strength and weakness of the Incredibly Strange Music books is their concentration on fan interviews, Biafra's 50 pager being the clear winner. This sidesteps the wildly subjective but rabidly self-aggrandising value judgements of critics, which is a blessing. None of these artists will be winning the Mercury Music Prize and few, if any, will find themselves in the index of the Robert Christgau Important Encyclopaedia Of Revered Music Useful For Projecting Your Obsessions Onto Others.

That's the good part, then: an alternate history of vinyl, as used for eccentric and peripheral arts or the expression of socially incorrect (or excessively correct) notions. The bad part is that fans tend to justify their preferences in self-serving, blindly selective and vague theories (just like the rest of us). Most of them are nutty or not-so-nutty collectors who want to make a point about the worthlessness of contemporary life, official culture, rock mythology, high art, bourgeois conformity and digital reproduction. So they all rush out and buy Yma Sumac Albums.

There are far worse things to buy, of course, but the defiant pursuit of seemingly perverse tastes may eventually return 'unhip' music to its original constituency. Thus it is with The Carpenters, who received mountains of hate mail from 'hip' rock fans in the early 70s. In the 90s they can be sold on the crest of a marketing double whammy: as a private, now outed, source of pleasure to those who publicly espoused dirt, dissent, drugs, noise and bad behaviour during The Carpenters' heyday, or as repackaged MOR. Lucky A&M.

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Collecting records which the average intellectual salon would decry as neanderthal trash raises some complex issues. At the hot inner core of the incredibly strange music canon is the Exotica school: Martin Denny, Les Baxter, Arthur Lyman, Yma Sumac and Elisabeth Waldo. The three male arrangers, composers and bandleaders were all schlocky cocktail lounge musicians, heavily influenced by the George Shearing sound, but pursuing an experimental bent. Baxter worked for Mel Torme, Nat 'King' Cole, Abbot & Costello and Bob Hope before striking out to search for his own heart of darkness.

He found it by scoring feature films for Roger Corman and producing exotic theme albums for Capitol. Simultaneously, Denny and Lyman were working in a similar vein, both fronting lightweight Latin jazz combos augmented by fake jungle sounds. Afro-Cuban percussion and Asian instruments. Anthropological buzz words for the genre included 'ritual', 'savage', 'taboo' and 'idol'. One of the attractions of Exotica is its pivotal position between the immediate past and the possible future. War in the Pacific had introduced a new set of cultural parameters to America, and in the post-war period suburbanisation and technology were suggesting a future which combined refuge with expansion. So Exotica was a sexy stereo soundtrack for tropical explorers who moved no further from the 'burb than a polyvinyl lounger slapped dead in the middle of two hi-fi speakers.

The innate surrealism of these records comes from the naive but very professional way in which they overlaid easy listening renditions of standard tunes with strange instrumentation, stereo effects and exotic backgrounds. Travel was the coming thing, yet fear of the unknown still ran high. Maybe it seemed very sophisticated, cosmopolitan even, to listen to "Softly As In A Morning Sunrise" played on shamisen and celeste. The same desire to throw in a touch of highbrow colouration was transforming Country music in roughly the same era, as Country was dragged out of the honky tonks and sweetened with strings and choirs.
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Personally, I find Elisabeth Waldo more interesting. Her late 1950s music is quite as Hollywood bonkers as the Bollywood bonkers film music of Rahul Dev Burman, but cranked even higher on the crazyometer by Waldo's agenda to rescue "the musical values of the Ancient Americas" and unveil "the mysteries of a vast North American Empire, silent for centuries". As Dean Wallace wrote in a concert review for The San Francisco Chronicle: "The effect was slightly devastating". What it sounds like, more than four decades on, is the kind of music you might expect Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) to write, had she been a composer, after her trip to South America in Now, Voyager.

Funnily enough, the Denny/Lyman combination of slow moving arpeggiated chords, lite rhythms, attenuated melodies of slightly devastating banality and 'nature' sounds, faintly resembles the more formulaic end of 90s Ambient. Other tracks sound not unlike, though not totally like, the kind of music Sun Ra was making in his Angels And Demons At Play period, or on early album tracks such as "China Gates", "Sun Song", "India" and "Portrait Of The Living Sky".

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Sun Ra fails to rate an index entry in either of the Incredibly Strange Music volumes. Also missing are Bo Diddley, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Swamp Dogg, JB Lenoir and a whole host of incredibly strange R&B artists; here the whole genre begins to smell fishy. In a revision of whitebread culture, Denny and Baxter have been elevated to a pinnacle of individualist, anti-corporate folk art, despite the fact that Baxter recorded for Capitol, Denny recorded for Liberty, both plumbed the depths of colonial fantasies and both have maintained successful careers through to old age. Admittedly, Baxter was reduced to composing for dolphin shows at Ocean World by the early 80s, but this is the kind of thing that professional musicians do.

None of this need detract from their work, which still sounds simultaneously innovative, funny, tacky and pleasurable. But the sub-text of the Incredibly Strange Music genre is that art is elitist, thus bad, whereas neglected kitsch is egalitarian and accessible, thus good. Seemingly, you're not allowed both, or your sense of identity starts to fall apart.

One exchange in Volume Two is particularly is particularly revealing. Interviewing Robert Moog about the Theremin, V Vale says, "It seems like a very populist instrument, in that you don't need any training." The incredibly stern Robert Moog is having none of this. "Oh, you do need training," he counters. "Actually it's an elitist instrument, because if you compare it to something like a guitar or a ukulele or accordion or piano, there are few people who have the talent to be able to even get a melody out of it."

But let's not be too negative about this. Any book which brings together Bebe Barron with Magma, Louis Farrakhan with The Silver Apples, and Esquivel with John Oswald is a must have. Americana dominates, so let me suggest that serious UK, European and Japanese collectors be consulted in future volumes for more blues, reggae and R&B, more Asian oddities, more Folkways documentary albums, more Euro-trash, more wildlife records, more international peculiarities, more Japanese takes on Exotica (S-Ken, The Peanuts and Harry Hosono), more rebarbative Progressive rock, more disco, more avant garde obscurities and more novelty weirdness.

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A final thought: those of us who were children in the 1950s were subjected, via radio, to a weekly dose of surreal, incomprehensible and terrifying songs such as "The Laughing Policeman", "You're A Pink Toothbrush", "Teddy Bears' Picnic", "I Taut I Taw A Puddy Tat" and "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" (all available on Hello Children... Everywhere, EMI). The final image of Alma Cogan's proto-environmentalist "In The Middle Of The House", a song about a house with a railway track running right through it, can still chill me in sensitive moments, "I'm singing this song in the middle of the house," she warbles, but the sentence is never finished. A train whistles by, leaving Alma, we can only presume, dismembered. A generation grew up with this stuff and then took acid. Draw your own conclusions.

© The Wire 2008