The Factual Opinion

The Best of 1992: #5

Beastie Boys
Check Your Head

Just so you can hear it for at least 4000 times before you die, the Beastie Boys started out as a punk band.  A really awful one.  Although there might be some arguement that they maintained a "punk sensibility" with their first two records, Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique.  When it came time to make Check Your Head, they'd pretty much exorcised any demons they may have had in referencing their idols, and they'd pretty much gone as far after Mr. Rabbit with the Dust Brothers, so it was about time for them to come up with a sound, something they could call their own.  In doing so, they constructed one of the strongest albums of the 90's, one of the weirdest hit-sellers of any decade, and, quite possibly their best possible "Beastie" album ever. (Credit has to be given to the Dust for Paul's, or it would stand alone.)  Without the overlord control of Mixmaster Mike or the visual stamp of Spike Jonze, and, most of all, without all the irritating Buddhist 'let's-all-be-pals' shit, Check Your Head is, to some extent, the last time we get to see the Beastie Boys: after this, they just grew up too fast.

Whether it was sticking dicks in mashed potatoes or nodding out to "Something's Got To Give,"  haunting thrift stores for the outfits in the "So What'cha Want" video, Check Your Head got a ball rolling in 1992 that hasn't stopped yet.  These tracks are still cooler than the rest, still as adventerous and dope-laden as they were when they first showed up on tape-decks.  The picture on the front said it all: they don't give a fuck about anything, and they're waiting on you to try to be as cool as they are.  After this, it's all babies and memories: so what do you want?

-Tucker Stone, 2006

Has any band ever released three sequential albums as diverse and successful as the first three Beastie Boys records? License to Ill lives somewhere in the CD collection of anyone under the age of thirty-five forty who owns more than three CDs. That album spawned nine [1] nine!) singles, all of which entered immediately into the cultural lexicon, and all of which are nearly flawless [2]  even though the Beastie Boys have since mostly disowned them. The follow-up, Paul’s Boutique, had nowhere near the commercial success of License to Ill, it makes up for that with sheer ambition. The Beasties and the Dust Brothers team up to transform more than 100 (legal) samples into what can only [3] be described as one of the sweetest works of postmodern art of any genre. After all of this—artistic success, commercial failure, and vice versa—in 1992 the Beastie Boys set out to reinvent themselves once again, as well as launch their own label, Grand Royal. They did this by creating an album even more ambitious, impenetrable, and commercially risky than Paul’s Boutique. Their backwards logic paid off. Check Your Head hit number 10 on the Billboard charts, and cemented the fan base that both the Beastie Boys and Grand Royal retained for the next decade.

Check Your Head is the kind of album that even casual listeners can recite backwards and forwards. The Beastie Boys picked up their instruments from their punk rock days and laid down thick, inimitable grooves—not strictly hip-hop, not strictly punk rock, not strictly funk, but embracing all three genres—and rocked them into as dense a sample-scape as on Paul’s Boutique. Some of the samples that they recontextualize—like Bob Dylan’s famous assertion from “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” “I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough”—take on even more dimension than in their original contexts. [4] That they managed to drop sweet, iconoclastic rhymes into this mix—is there a better line anywhere than “Don’t touch me/ ‘Cause I’m electric/ And if you touch me/ You’ll get shocked”?—is gravy. In a year of incredible genre-bending [5] and mix-taping [6],the Beastie Boys out-genre-bend and mix-tape everyone.

 

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[1] Ten, if you count “She’s Crafty,” which was the B-side to “Girls.”

[2] With the possible exception of “Brass Monkey,” only because it’s 1) impossible to dance to, yet 2) an infuriating 80’s dance party staple.

[3] Actually, this is a lie, since Paul’s Boutique can really only be described as “bangin’.”

[4] I use the Dylan sample here because it’s a bold thing to say, and it may sound a little extreme, but I also believe it.

[5] See The Factual Opinion’s Best Albums of 1992 #6, 11 &12

[6] See The Factual Opinion’s Best Albums of 1992 #6, 17 & 24

-Marty Brown, 2006

 

The Best of 1992: #6

Sublime
40 Oz. To Freedom

You are a teenager in Southern California. In nearby Los Angeles, millionaires spend hours upon hours distilling the complexities of the human experience into their most easily digestible essences. Television is either Cheers or In Living Color. Radio is either rap or grunge. But you are a white kid going to Martin Luther King Jr. High School in a predominantly Hispanic city, and nobody knows who you are.

Laguna Beach is not Southern California. Friday is not Southern California. 40 Oz. to Freedom is Southern California. Never have so many cultures collided so fantastically in the span of one 74 minute album. Here, an unironic cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Scarlet Begonias” lives alongside Bradley Nowell’s list of the things KRS-1. Also: “Chica Me Tipo,” sung almost entirely in Spanish. Sublime lays bare in the length of one album what no one in Hollywood would ever attempt: Southern California as a culture clash where everybody wins.

Plus, dudes have got songs. “Badfish,” possibly the catchiest melody Sublime ever wrote, begins as a pick-up at a house party before transforming into an up-tempo ballad about addiction and mortality. The album opener, “My Ruca,” strips reggae down to a voice and a pulse—the beat could have come from the Clipse’s next album. “Ebin” justifies the entire third wave of ska. Everything gets laced together as an elaborate mix tape. They sample the Minutemen and Eazy-E and Led Zeppelin and George Clinton. And this doesn’t even take into account their cultural impact. Nowell holds KRS-1 responsible for his education, but how many kids in Irvine did Sublime hip to BDP? Or Jimmy Cliff? Or the Dead? How many finally felt that they could embrace Bad Religion AND Steely Dan? Hispanic culture AND black culture AND suburban white culture?

But it’s remembered for “Date Rape.” Wake up.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #7

The Pharcyde
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde

Listening to the Phacyde's debut LP in 2006, in light of the two solo careers it's spawned and the cocaine problems that caused them, should probably make for a bittersweet afternoon.

But this is Bizarre Ride. No depression is permitted. One wishes they could call this album a trailblazer: but that would imply that somewhere, there is some hip-hop artist following along in the footsteps of this merry band of lunatics, screaming at each other over jazzy beats about hermaphrodites and jerking off, insulting each others mother (and not killing each other over it), and that just ain't so. Bizarre Ride is the closest hip-hop has ever come to Frank Zappa, or the Fugs, or any other rock musician who makes music becauase they are goofy bastards who can't explain themselves without album art: beyond that, or hell, even before, The Pharcyde showed up in 1992, started picking fights with a (for-real!) crackhead producer and recorded a goofball sexified young men romp and then watched as every one of their contemporaries went with Raiders caps and surly grimaces. When the battle cry is "Keep it real" the Pharcyde reminded everybody that most of us, people in the projects included, don't really want to 'bust caps.' Most of the time, everybody just wants to have a good day: the Pharcyde just happen to enjoy their good days on Freddie Hubbard roller coasters while drinking Mai Tais and trying to find a tee-shirt with Mao Tse Tsung eating out a rooster on it. It may not be everybodies cup of tea, but if this is the soundtrack that lifestyle produces--then maybe a trip to Coney Island wearing a gymnastics outfit is in order.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #8

Godflesh
Pure

To describe Godflesh’s music as movements of prolonged abrasiveness punctuated with moments of stunning beauty would be accurate, if a bit disingenuous. In truth, Godflesh’s Pure is not as uninviting as it may sound. Set against the backdrop of industrial metal at the time, it comes across as more forward-thinking than Broken, more timeless than Psalm 69, with stronger grooves than Meantime, and more accessible than any of them. Two years after the release of Pure, Justin Broadrick, Godflesh’s founding and only constant member, told Guitar Magazine, “Our music is about hitting an emotional core in people with brutal power. At first all we wanted to do was crush our listeners, but then we wanted to hypnotize them.” Nothing could better describe the band. The hypnotic qualities of, say, “Don’t Bring Me Flowers” far outweigh its potential abrasiveness.

Godflesh never achieved the success deserved by and expected of them. Pure meant to capitalize on the headway made by Nine Inch Nails in the mainstream, but the kids were too busy listening to downtuned guitars and dissonant vocals to hear the intricately crafted, gut wrenching songs Godflesh offered. They became influencers instead. You can hear them in, say, Godspeed You Black Emperor or Liars. Over the course of their decade and a half career, Broadrick got invited to join both Danzig and Faith No More, but denied both in order to pursue Godflesh’s singular sound until 2002, when he suffered a nervous breakdown and broke up the band. They remain largely unknown, but emphatically loved. Kirk Hammett was reportedly a big fan of Godflesh, which makes you wonder if Metallica would have chosen to make Pure if it could have.

-Martin Brown, 2006

Seven Soldiers #1

Written by Grant Morrison
Art by JH Williams III

What an unholy mess Mr. Morrison likes to put the reader in.  With this issue, Grant's nearly two year odyssey along the outskirts of the DC comics universe comes to a close.  Without Morrison, it's unlikely that we'll ever see Klarion the Witch Boy, Zatanna, Frankenstein, The Guardian, The Shining Knight, Mister Miracle or The Bulleteer ever treated this reverentially again: and that is just too damn bad.

Seven Soldiers was an intensely unpopular, and intensely bad comic from the early days of comic books: it's never attracted the sort of nostalgic importance now given to all of DC's pre 50's stuff.  Simply put, Soldiers was what most early superhero comics were when they first appeared: not very worthwhile.  Years later, the name was thrown on a variety of teams, although few of these issues are memorable and no lasting series was ever made out of them.  When Morrison signed an exclusive with DC a few years ago, part of his agreement was this, the Seven Soldiers "maxi-series," which would be based both on fresh interpretations of archaic, un-used characters and under-used C-level characters.  The series arrived with a little bit of the usual "what's Grant doing" fanfare and proceeded to produce 2 long form bookend issues (the one above and the previous Seven Soldiers 0) and 7 four-issue mini-series, each focusing on the aforementioned characters.  While all 7 ranged both in quality, and timeliness become something of a factor when some books didn't ship on time, all sold relatively well (if one takes into account that absolutely none of these characters even remotely achieved the popularity of Stephen Baldwin's recent Christian autobiography.)  At times, some of the mini-series were a bit incomprehensible (Shining Knight and Mister Miracle specifically) while at other times they were a bit simplistic genre exercises (Bulleteer and Frankenstein.)  However, with yesterdays release of Seven Soldiers 1, it's become abundantely clear that these books were, regardless of Morrison's claim to the contrary, designed to be read as one massive piece.  Seperately, they are either entertaining or interesting, and on occasion, both.

After his success on Doom Patrol, Morrison released a four issue mini-series called Flex Mentallo, an exploration of the various time periods of comic books.  Due to his usage of Flex, a character lovingly copied off the real Charles Atlas, the series has never seen reprint--Mr. Atlas' attornies saw that DC would have to split the profits if they did, and that's never interested DC.  Finding the issues has never been a difficult prospect, although it is expensive--which, for anyone interested in any of Mr. Morrison's non-mainstream work, is a bit of a problem.  After all, it's in Flex Mentallo 4 that Grant laid down his own thinking on what comics should look like, and it's only now, in 2006, that we're seeing the actual product of that thinking.  For Mr. Morrison, the cringe-worthy violence and depressingly un-creative angst of the 80's and 90's has remained for far too long; deconstructionism, as they say, has gone on too long.  His current work on All Star Superman and Batman, while totally within the constrictive bounds of the standard super-hero format are excellent examples of what a non-Watchmen version of Batman might look like, while All Star Superman has reached the point where it's really only comparable to the Superman that lives in a little boys mind--the comics themselves have never been this good.  Still, Morrison's own hand has made it clear that this sort of storytelling was never a problem for him--in a way, that also makes his mainstream work somewhat redundant.  After all, asking Picasso to paint a barn may get you an excellent barn, and the potential for miserable, horrific failure is far less, but it also lessens any potential genius.  Morrison has always been good at super-hero mainstream comics...but he's never been very far off the beam of acceptable with them.  (Animal Man, for those thinking of Grant's super-hero work there, wasn't a top tier character before or after Grant worked his magic.)  Reading Morrison's work in any sort of chronological order would result in a schizophrenic experience: unlike every major writer, Morrison's style changes, drastically at times, from comic to comic.  In the late 90's, while revamping a sterile Justice League, one could reach higher on the shelf and be blasted into the psychedelic freak show that was The Invisibles. Seven Soldiers, while filled with the suits of superheroes, is given life by it's astronomical goals: Morrison seems in these pages to be more concerned than he's been since those heady days of Flex Mentallo to bridge the time period between modern super-hero comics back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, trying to connect our current myths to the myths of old. It's daunting, impossibly difficult stuff going on in these pages. Whether Seven Soldiers worked or not isn't the point (it did, sort of. Not really.) The point is that Morrison tried something here, that, instead of plying this sort of metaphysical self-examination of fiction for any of the indie publishers who would have gladly helped him, he got permission from his corporate masters to use some of their dustiest toys and then proceeded to, heroically, build a ladder that would take us to the moon.

The Best of 1992: #9

The Black Crowes
The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion

In more ways than one, this album is a sort of death knell for 1992.  Not in it's musicality, it's lyrics; not even in it's feel.  But after '92, what was "cool" (meaning what was selling itself as "cool") wasn't white guy rock bands anymore--sure, Nirvana still had legs, but with the release of the Chronic (and specifically, the video for "Nuthing But A 'G' Thing"), intimidating, forceful black rappers took over the top spot.  To some extent, rightly so: a determined, masculine minority with definite beliefs (in most cases, women and money) is always going to seem strong to people to busy to look beyond the surface.  (Again, the problem with music criticism v. popular taste is, in This Factual Opinion, isn't that the popular taste is stupidly embracing banal retreads because they like banal retreads, but because banal retreads are both easily accessible as product, and easily discoursed upon because of their widespread nature.  Attacking people's taste because their too busy to pay attention to what's fresh and new was out of line in 1992, when finding music could take up money and time if one didn't live in LA or NYC.  Nowadays, with file-sharing, it's less true: still, some people are just too busy to keep up.)  1992 was the time period when the white-boy rock groups (with long hair) went to war against black men with Starter jackets.  Starter jackets won, and the guys at your high school who were cool became the guys who listened to rap (it wasn't until the late stage of 2001 that hip-hop became the phrasing of choice, and in all honesty, hip-hop is still a really idiotic name.) 

That's not really the point though: Southern Harmony isn't about any of these things.  It's a rock and roll album, through and through--and it's a great rock and roll album.  It's got gospel back-up singers, it's got a Bob Marley cover, and it has the fascinating quality of becoming exponentially better for every decibel it's turned up.  It's an album consisting of ten tracks, all of which could have served as hit singles if they'd had Jay-Z's marketing team.  Southern Harmony is so firmly rooted in an idea of place (a mythical South that probably seems right below the railroad tracks even to people in Alabama) yet seems absolutely timeless.  These are the things that make a decent album better: but in this case, Southern Harmony started from good--which means that by the end, it became amazing.

-Tucker Stone, 2006

The Best of 1992: #10

Tom Waits
Bone Machine

Tom Waits is only 57 years old.   He hasn’t even reached the optimum age for his point of view yet.   At 24, Waits was a craggily old man.   When he made Bone Machine in 1992, he was 43 years old—which is funny, because he sounds like Yoda.   Funny, also, that so much of Bone Machine talks about screaming—“The Earth Died Screaming,” “Such a Scream”—because you couldn’t imagine Waits working up a scream even if he were drowning in a swimming pool.   Then again, if you know anything about Tom Waits, you already know all of this.   You know about that bedraggled voice and the subterranean, oldster perspective.   You know this because Tom Waits has become more mythology than man.   Bone Machine is his time on Ogygia, held captive by Calypso.   We lost him for 7 years after this—maybe because Bone Machine reaches the apex of Waits’ sound, simplifies and deepens his aesthetic.   “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” encapsulates his career perfectly—a nursery rhyme that doubles as a plea from an octogenarian.   More importantly, it’s a kick ass tune.

-Marty Brown, 2006

The Best of 1992: #11

Neneh Cherry
Homebrew

She came, she saw, she recorded, she released: Blew up like Nagasaki.  (Off "Buffalo Stance," the song your little sister knows real well, and also the song that was not on this album.)  Homebrew was the "Neneh's coming back from Lyme disease" album, Homebrew was the "remember my hit single" cuts, Homebrew was the this-is-what-i-learned while working with Massive Attack piece of vinyl.  Needless to say, it didn't sell.  Of course, it did have modest success on college radio (back when that might have meant something, although '92 was, admittedly, near the beginning of the downturn of college radio--and that success was mostly due to Neneh's "Trout" duet with Michael Stipe.)  Homebrew, however, is a lodestone, a foundational record: it's also an experimental album crafted with intelligence by a black female artist that received wide release.  If that's not a definition of "rare" in most people's vocabulary, that's probably because they haven't bought an actual dictionary in a while.  Homebrew, while still stuck firmly in the critically acclaimed bracket of Low Selling Albums 14 years later hasn't aged a day: it's a totally accessible, excellently crafted pop album.  Each song is perfectly realized, full of all the requisite hooks and imagination that evades today's artists in our .mp3 environment: put it simple, this album is perfect.  Saddling it with the unfortunate title of a "trip-hop masterpiece" doesn't do it justice.  Homebrew is the album that people are going to the store looking for every week--except they keep checking in the new release section, which is where Timberlake, Aguilera and Shakira go to hide from the shadow of Neneh Cherry. 

-Tucker Stone, 2006