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.