None of Davis’ earlier work, though, prepared me for his epic spoof of Christgau, whose peerless (and sometimes inscrutable) Consumer Guide recently transformed into a blog, Expert Witness. Davis’ spoof culls negative phrases from more than 13,000 Christgau reviews into a single composite pan. Here are some teasers:

A born liar, showing all the imagination of an ATM in the process, a certain petty honesty and jerk-off humor, a man without a context, a pompous, overfed con artist, a preening panderer, mythologizing his rockin’ ‘50s with all the ignorant cynicism of a punk poser, a propulsive flagwaver attached to UNESCO lyrics about people all over the world joining hands, a simpleton, but also a genuine weirdo, a spoiled stud past his prime, so that while he was always sexy he wasn’t always seductive, a stinker, from Jesus-rock to studio jollity, a tedious ideologue with a hustle, a tough talker diddles teenpop’s love button. Act authentic for too long and it begins to sound like an act even if it isn’t.

Air-kiss soul, alienated patriotic, all clotted surrealism and Geddy Lee theatrics, all form and no conviction, except for the conviction that form is everything. All he proves is that when you dwell on suffering you get pompous. An archetypal indie whiner.

Christgau’s prose, dense with cross-cultural allusions and insider jokes, is ripe for this sort of roasting. He has self-confessed biases (against salsa, metal and prog, and for almost anything African-sounding) and puzzling sources of inspiration (this means you, Black Eyed Peas). Far too cerebral to be considered a gonzo journalist, he’s impassioned and impulsive enough enough to have thrown pie at one of his generation’s finest essayists, former girlfriend Ellen Willis. Christgau only started liking Sonic Youth after they threatened him in a song. When Lou Reed slandered Christgau on a live album, Christgau thanked him for pronouncing his name correctly.

Yet Christgau is one of only three music writers whose work has moved me as much as my favorite fiction authors (the other two are Amiri Baraka, who wrote far less about music, and Lester Bangs, who wrote with more heart but far less consistency). And I admire that after four decades of nonstop listening and writing, he has an insatiable appetite for new sounds and a disdain for sacred cows. I like Radiohead, but won’t forget his take on Kid A: “Alienated masterpiece nothing–it’s dinner music. More claret?” When classic rock still ruled the airwaves, Christgau had this pithy take on Prince’s Dirty Mind: “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home.”

Excerpt from “Robert Christgau: “Rock and Roll Animal” (1999)
(Music: Modern Lovers, “Government Center”)

Just as I was absorbing Davis’ Christagu parody, I discovered that Christgau and his wife, writer Carola Dibble, penned a Consumer Guide to Beer that is almost as funny. Written in the mid-seventies, before the advent of alt-beer and the heyday of Michael Jackson (the Dean of American beer critics, not the singer), the piece is surprisingly sympathetic to flavored-water American macrobrews such as Coors and Budweiser, with nary a reference to obscure Belgian monks.

Still, I love how the Christgaus start with a pedantic lesson on the history of grain fermentation since 6000 B.C. They review San Francisco’s Anchor Steam as if it were a bottled version of the Grateful Dead (“Our bohemian friends found it winy, but we found it one more instance of San Francisco’s chronic confusion of eccentricity with quality”), and describe the Krautrock-worthy Beck’s as if it were a bottle of Can (“This beer is so overbearing that bad-mouthing it seems risky”). As George Clinton would say, can you get to that?

Funkadelic, “Can You Get to That?”

Too Much Joy, “King of Beers”

Note: This piece was originally written for Pagan Kennedy’s book Platforms: A Microwaved Cultural Chronicle of the 70s but was most read at Scot Hacker’s Birdhouse Archives from 1994-2011 before moving to Stuck Between Stations. Dead links have been updated or removed and images/video have been refreshed, but I’ve otherwise refrained from editing the original.

For the religiously inclined, P-Funk [1] offered up an array of minor gods, an intangible and omnipotent metaphysical reality (the funk itself), and a whole flotilla of ministers (actually a loose-fitting assemblage of crack musicians and crackpots dedicated to the administration of an entire cosmology). The roots of this church lay deep in the African polyrhythmic pantheon; its disciples (“Maggotbrains” or “Funkateers”) consisted of anyone who sought a quasi- cohesive view of a universe which included a god who danced, and who knew that having a loose booty to shake was as crucial to the keeping of the faith as the rosary was for the Catholic.

While their ministers were many — a constantly evolving line- up guaranteed the elasticity of the band — it is undeniable that high pope George Clinton wore the mitre. From the cryptic, ridiculously bent versifying of the liner notes to the album sleeve art production (which narrated the genesis and mission of the band in a series of ongoing, albeit disjointed cartoons) to the inception and direction of the outrageous stage production — a black sci-fi extravaganza / space party that could cost upwards of $350,000 [2] — Clinton wielded the scepter of Funkentelechy, and wore the righteous robes of the Afronaut (actually Holiday Inn bedsheets covered with Crayola scribbles).

But what was the aim of this religion without proscriptions? To what heaven, to what Nirvana did it aim? Like good gnostic Bacchanalians, P- Funk had the good epistemological taste not to define their vision of the great beyond too specifically. With commandments like “Shit! Goddam! Get off your ass and jam!”, you knew that whatever, and wherever “the beyond” was, it was going to be funky.

But you knew very well what was going to take you there: the same vehicle from which George descended out of a massive blue denim cap and down to the stage in bad-ass righteousness: The Mothership. Just as protestants distinguish between the icon of the Messiah and the true, ineffable spirit, we knew that George’s silver saucer was but a model — a mechanical and ideological messiah figure represented in the terms of the day, as the glory of UFO contact for a generation reared on honky Star Trek and honky Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But it didn’t matter whether The Mothership was a prop [3], because the hallmark of a myth is that you don’t go peering around behind the curtain — you simply believe. As usual, P-Funk co-opted the pop mythology, made it black, and made it intergalactic — in this case the mythos of (funky) contact.

And so shows began with the descent, and ended with the subsequent Assumption, of what was at once a symbol and a reality: Clinton’s arrival on the scene in his glorious ship through backlit fog and the incantations of the crowd: “The Mothership connection is here!” Disciples held aloft the Mothership mudra in invitation: index and pinky fingers extended upward, the rest of the fist curled. Was this an extrapolation on the black-power fist?, i.e. black power plus archetypal twin steeples-toward-God? Perhaps, but this mudra goes farther back than that. In yoga, this posture of the fingers is held in stillness to channel Chi into the body through the arms and into the chakras. Tibetan art and sculpture sometimes depicts goddesses with one hundred arms in a vertical fan arrayed around the body, each hand signalling the imminence of the Mothership. In the sign language of the deaf, the same hand symbol means “I love you,” and is also seen depicted sometimes on stickers attached to the bumpers of deaf people’s cars (ostensibly as a signal to cops and emergency vehicles that the driver may not hear the sirens) but more likely as the signifier of membership in the society of riders of the everlasting funk wave — to demonstrate that deaf people are cosmic love surfers. Funk doesn’t have to be heard because the aural music is only a physical manifestation of the yet deeper, noumenal galactic vibe, which is always felt by one whose receptors are tuned to Channel One.

If the Mothership beckoned us aboard, where would it go? Certainly not to Palm Beach, Florida, to see Tony Orlando and Dawn. Not to Vegas to watch Tom Jones, although he’s funky too, in the same way that Velveeta is funky because it’s mucilaginous. Let’s supppose for a moment that the Mothership returns metaphorically to the motherland, to Africa. Maggot Brains didn’t come to America on the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria, and they ain’t going back on them, neither. When Cap’n George is at the helm, you know you’re going to ride in outrageous style to your repatriation. The Mothership takes off in the middle of a concert in Detroit and lands in the middle of a Yoruba fertility dance. The scenery changes ever so slightly, but the song remains the same.

This repatriation theme dovetails nicely with a semiotic breakdown of the dual meaning of “funk”. The musical definition is apparent — it is that which moves, irresistible, an ineluctable conclusion of motion (“dedicated to the preservation of the motion of hips”), and of course it’s always On The One. The other usage of the term refers to the smell of funk — earthy musk, the purple smell of global vagina, the source of jazz in sweat, saxophone jism, the smell of spontaneity and origination, funk giving birth to funk, the fertile rhythms of the song cycle life and death, conception and birth in dirt and secretions, the visceral funk of sweat and sex, pussy rotation, the stank thang, the glory of juices in vapor reacting at base level in the gut, gut bass thumping spleen… in all fertility awareness the funk figures as smell, cosmic progenation, funk of dame nature in labor harmonizing with funk of loose booty boarding the Mothership, the smell that leaves us “standing on the verge of gettin’ it on.”

So when I say that the Mothership represented a vehicle of repatriation, I don’t mean that P-Funk were Zionists — quite the opposite — they took all the cheese America had to offer and ran with it, taking the fashions and technology of the day to their ultimate, preposterous conclusions, amplifying the aesthetics of the 70s into a throbbing, fish-eyed cartoon of itself, and in so doing glorified American culture and their role in its continuing evolution.

Thus, as platform shoes were becoming merely popular, P-Funk was giving us the amplified version, wearing knee-high silver boots with nine-inch heels (“hoofs decked out for atomic toe-jam action”) back when Gene Simmons was still playing air guitar in his mother’s bathroom mirror. When the revitalizing puissance of pyramid power began to take hold in the collective consciousness, P-Funk gave us a stage show that included a Claes Oldenberg-like floppy pyramid (what could be funkier than a soft monolith?) When A Clockwork Orange brought the cod-piece to our attention, Clinton had to wear one the size of a loaf of Wonder Bread, covered in rabbit fur, natch. When the boxy virility of the Cadillac trickled down to the working class as a symbol of status and cool, George Clinton began arriving on stage in a likewise soft-n-floppy silver lame’ roadster, the engine compartment of which opened like coffin doors to reveal George in full funkateer regalia, dripping in feathers and ermine, ready to rise from the dead and do it to you in your earhole.

No, it was not a question of repatriation. P-Funk’s brand of black freedom was not Malcolm X’s. Returning P-Funk to Africa would have been like returning Ling-Ling the Panda to China. The Mothership, as a symbol of the P-Funk gestalt, took funkateers out of the disco-dominated dance scene which smelled clean and felt rigid, and returned them to the belly of the cosmos, where it smells skanky and feels rubbery. The Mothership symbolized the possibility of a spiritual, not a physical, return to blood and to roots, to the swirling gasses and dust of galactic conception, to the smell of freshly plucked wild yams, amorphous and still covered in the funk of the earth; of a return to a cut-loose, stink-up-the- place, get your ya-ya’s out, freak on down the road domain where “Funk is its own reward”.

P-Funk seemed to believe that music wasn’t so much something that you made with your instruments as it was something that you caught with them, as if funk was out there in the form of an ambient residual energy left over from the big bang. It was as if their basses and horns were finely tuned, specialized antennae dialing into cosmic leftovers. Funk became a unifying presence — the godhead as manifest to anyone willing to laugh and boogie at the same time. “One nation under a groove, gettin’ down just for the funk of it.”

Despite all of their self-inflatulatory bravadaccio, P-Funk were nevertheless unflaggingly humble before the great unnameable face of the big cookie. Such humility is a necessary underpinning to any sincere encounter with or metaphysical proclamation on the nature of mind- universe. Without it, they would come off as self- serious charlatans, wielders of the scepter of pompousness. But their cosmology combines the best of the principles of the world’s great gnosticisms. The sense of undifferentiated cosmic unity inherent in Buddhism, the paradox, humor, and dance of Sufism, the ecological implications of quantum mechanics via the implicate order of the universe’s interconnectedness, and the surrealism of psychedelic awareness. “We’re just a biological speculation, sittin’ here vibratin’, and we don’t know what we’re vibratin’ about.”

“Everything is on The One y’all, can you get to that?”

When The One comes down, and bulbs of sweat pop from Star Child’s brow, and the bass thumpasaurus slaps its cosmic tail against a lighted dance floor, every boo-tay in the house meets its neighbor as hineys mash together in plush synchronicity. Being “On The One” means never having to call your choreographer, because he would only mess things up. The unity of the dance is given unto the dancers…it is not their responsibility to keep in step, but their priviledge to have “The One” channeled through the band’s antennae and onto the dance floor. Even if you have no intention of dancing, your protons are going to go ahead without you. It can’t be helped.

But “The One” is of course also the cosmic one, the unified field of awareness, or in Hindu terminology, Shiva, the dance itself. Funk is like the carrier wave which is channeled through the eye of the floppy pyramid, through Clinton’s multicolored dreads and through sunglasses that could shame Elton John. Throwing down on The One with every coil of DNA at their disposal, flopping plasma braids, flopping groove lines like fish out of water funking on deck, they did for togetherness what disco could only dream. P- Funk was the “us” to disco’s “me”. The ego wasn’t the thing… the thing was the funk. To strut and to partake, not just to strut. The “partaking of” was the reason that P-Funk had the essence of religion when disco did not. It was a “participation in”, and the crowd could be as bad-ass as the band. By coming to jam along, you were taking sacrament, not stage. There were no John Travoltas because Travolta had the moves but none of the soul. P-Funk was all soul, although even they couldn’t begin to tell you what soul was. “What is soul? I don’t know! Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes… Soul is a joint rolled in toilet paper… ” But whatever it is, they had it because they were it, and they were it because they partook of it.

And this is why disco was so often soulless: it didn’t stink! Disco has no smell because it is clean, a product of the deodorant movement, revelling in crystal clear white polyester, cocaine, and mirrored balls, in perfumes that mask and repress the funk in its carnal primality. Sure there is sex in disco, but it is nude, not naked, without clothes, but never exposed. It relies on the veneer of soaps on the body as much as it relies musically on the whitewashed veneer of danceability. Beats without The Beat. The sweat is not integral to the music, as it is in funk, in jazz.

Colonel Tom wiped Elvis’ forehead after each song; the sweat was there because Elvis worked, to be sure, but its presence was denied in the classic Victorian tradition by way of its immediate elimination from the stage. For P-Funk, sweat was the nectar of the scene, was the oil that lubed the gears of the galactic funk machine, funk is “Cosmic Slop”.

Rather than deny its grip, P-Funk wallowed in the aroma, celebrated it, acknowledged its putrefying stupefaction quotient as part of the equation. Witness this celebratory testimonial to the deep and effervescent mojo of a (presumably) just-danced-in pair of panties from the grind/groove “Funky Woman”: “She threw them in the air (funky woman), the air said this ain’t fair! She hung them on the line (funky woman), the line it start to cryin’…” While these accolades may sound at first more like insults, the ineluctable wisdom of Star Child scripture must be perpetually borne in mind: “And all that is good — is funky.”

Let’s illuminate the point further with an analogy to biker consciousness. To deodorize the funk would have been tantamount to stripping the Harley-Davidson of its characteristic irregular heartbeat. Harleys appeal to some bikers for just this reason: they are machines that rumble in a time zone of non-euclidean geometry, whose engines sound like free-jazz drummers. Hondas are efficient, but they lack that stochastic quality; the rhythm of their internal combustions can be predicted. Disco and funk have a similarly parallel relationship to one another. Disco sacrifices the pulse of the earth, a pulse which stinks of life, in exchange for the efficiency of the drum machine or the metronomic drummer. Because it is of the earth, funk’s wave is not predictable like disco’s or house music’s — it is elastic, organic, unpredictable and gooey. Funky music smells funky because it is a secretion, and not a form of logic.

So P-Funk has returned to claim the secret of the pyramids, partyin’ on the Mothership, gettin’ down in 3-D, to save a dyin’ world from its funkless fate. How were P-Funk accorded this special priviledge? According to the liner notes from Standing on the Verge of Getting It On:

On the Eighth Day, the Cosmic Strumpet of Mother Nature was spawned to envelope this Third Planet in FUNKADELICAL VIBRATIONS. And she birthed Apostles Ra, Hendrix, Stone, and CLINTON to preserve all funkiness of man unto eternity… But! Fraudulent forces of obnoxious JIVATION grew; Sun Ra strobed back to Saturn to await his next Reincarnation, Jimi was forced back into his basic atoms; Sly was co-opted into a jester monolith and… only seedling GEORGE remained! As it came to be, he did indeed begat FUNKADELIC to restore Order Within the Universe. And, nourished from the pamgrierian mammaristic melonpaps of Mother Nature, the followers of FUNKADELIA multiplied incessantly!

Mother Nature gave us the funk because she loves us, and here is where Clinton and Nietzsche rub booties. Compare: “What is done out of love always occur beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche). “The concept of FUNKATIZATION was declared a Universal Law by Mother Nature, and therefore exempt from control by the Forces of Good, and those of Evil” (Clinton). So to be in love is to be in funk is to retain our natural state, i.e. to remain beyond the possibility of valuation. But, alas, we live in a world far removed from the benificence of perpetual love and funk — we live in a world where humans pit themselves over and above Nature, and thereby incur the bummer of the Placebo Syndrome. It is thus our responsibility to evangelize on behalf of nature, that is, to bring an awareness of the funk we were born in back to the world. The squirm of a rubbery bass line and the generous application of the Bop Gun’s stroboscopic, pulchritudinous salve to the scabbed and Placebo- pocked Nose Zone has the potential to bring us to a utopia of funk beyond what Nietzsche calls “valuation” and what Clinton calls “exploitive jivation.”

Funkadelia is upon thee!…Verily, those soulfulifically jaded swashbucklers of agitproptic burnbabydom have descended from the Original Galaxy Ghetto to cleanse thy wayward souls through music worthy of the immortals themselves!…that what shall penetrate thine ears shall truly be a gas!…For the truth is the way, and Funkadelic is verily the truth! Awake not, and earth remains as this solar system’s space strumpet…sour milk from the breast of Mother Nature!…The ass thou pimpest shall be your own! Cease all manner of exploitive jivation!

If Clinton sounds some kind of intergalactic messenger, or a prophet sent to us from the beyond, or a reincarnated shaman, that’s because he is. And he’s not the first to visit upon us a similar wisdom. He considers himself to have been spawned by the Cosmic Strumpet, along with Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and Sun Ra, in what must have been a furious blast of raw funk — the Trans- African continuum rupturing at the seams, spewing these messengers in a single time-cycle into our life-stream for reasons outlined in Clinton’s copious testament. Among his fellow emmissaries, he seems to have the most in common with Sun Ra, although Ra has been more subtle in the delivery of his message (perhaps he was allowed this because he, for the most part, addressed the generation previous to Clinton’s — a generation not already jaded by rock-and-roll bombast, machine-gun television, and the socio-politics of LSD). Both Clinton and Ra prescribed “Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy”, both preached the origin of funk in the furthest recesses of the galaxy, both employed kinekaleidoscopic theater in their shows, fusing outrageous entertainment unabashedly with the most profound of philosophies / cosmologies. “Sun Ra? Yeah, he’s out to lunch all right — same place I eat at!,” Clinton has remarked.

As if raw funk wasn’t enough, Clinton’s lyrics and profuse liner notes also took on social, political, economic, and environmental issues. The core of his message paralleled hippy ideology (by the mid-70s a dwindling phenomenon), but transcended it in virtue of its ability to laugh at itself. His style was simultaneously insane and right on.

The cover of America Eats its is a good example of the manner in which P-Funk takes the material America has to offer and turns it inside out. The fold-out cover depicts a dollar bill, accurately rendered in most details. The signicance of the “One”s at each of the dollar bill’s four corners is not to be overlooked, and these are unaltered. However, the eagle in the Great Seal is clutching not branches of laurel and a fistful of arrows, but a hypodermic needle and an apparently kwashiorkor-emaciated child.

In the center stands Miss Liberty herself, eyes bloodshot, vampire fangs gripping the bloody arm of one of the children she cradles. Another child has half of its skull lopped off. The brain has been removed, presumably cannibalized by our most esteemed icon. The very fact that the cover is layed out as a dollar bill invokes Funkadelic’s feelings about money — that it can play the roles of both creator and destroyer… but mostly destroyer. While one track (called “Funky Dollar Bill”) paints money as a grave threat in the wrong hands: “It’ll buy a war / It can save a land / It pollutes the air / In the name of wealth / It will buy a life / But not true life / The kind of life / Where the soul is lost”, another track (“Eulogy and Light”) re-writes the Lord’s Prayer as sarcastic honorarium: “Our Father, who art on Wall St., hallowed be thy butt… Forgive us our goofs, as we rob from each other… Thou maketh me to sell dope to small children… Thy destruction and thy power, they comfort me… My Cadillac and my pinky ring, they restore me to thee… And yay, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of poverty, I must feel their envy… For I am high, loaded, and all those other goodies… They go on with the Good God Big Buck.”

In a paeon to the plight of the psychically brutalized veteran returning from Vietnam, “March to the Witch’s Castle” describes the nightmare of readjustment after the happiest day in 13 years (Feb. 12, 1973 — the day of the signing of the treaty which was supposed to have ended the war… but didn’t). “Father, help him to understand that when his loved one remarried, she truly believed that he was dead, and would never return…Smile upon us, father, for we are weak, very weak.” A rare moment of dead seriousness in response to that which can bear no humor. America truly was the Witch’s Castle to returning soldiers. This was not a hyperbolically extended metaphor, but a direct and piercing picture of what was.

A somewhat more playful, but no less disarming protrait of the psychic investment in war is heard in Funkadelic’s own “Revolution #9″ a ten- minute, lyric-free sonic landscape called “Wars of Armageddon”. Through the interplay of the long, slow-funk dirge, guitar screaming over the top, and an endless litany of disjointed sound effects (seemingly lifted right off one of those great sound effects records of the period), from low-ing cows to groaning orgasms to cuckoo-ing Swiss clocks, one can hear the collective psychosis, furious dementia, and the crumbling of sensible structure that accompanies the approach of demise, personal or public (and aren’t they one another’s crutches?). As for what kind of Armageddon Clinton is invoking here, we can only speculate. It could be Vietnam, or it could be our self-pimped biological demise (“The cathetic mumruffians of madness continue to hasten total biological Armageddon for the ‘benefit’ of consumerism…”)

What is protest but a bowl of lame-duck pudding without suggested alternatives? “Chocolate City” is full of them, namely, recomendations on how to take over Washington, D.C.: “Yeah, they’re still calling it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition too,” and suggestions on how to fill the new cabinet: “Mr. Stevie Wonder, Secretary of Fine Arts, and Miss Aretha Franklin, the First Lady.” If Funkateers were running Chocolate City (“Hey, we didn’t get our 40 acres and a mule, but we did get you, C.C.”), would Watergate and Vietnam never have happened?

Sadly, their message didn’t always get through to the pundits, and sometimes seemed to be swallowed up or obscured by the pageantry of the road show. In 1978, Bootsy Collins (master of the space bass) and Clinton were given a slap on the wrist by the Rod McGrew Scholarship Fund for Communicators with a Conscience, who apparently saw the group as a superficial glitter band, suggesting in no uncertain terms that the funkateers do something more ambitious with their popularity.

Direct attacks on the political machinery of the 70s crop up throughout the annals of the voluminous material P-Funk laid upon the earth. Nested deep within Sir Lleb’s “Funkstrom Chronicles of Orbitron, [4]“ a war is waged agaist the slime of 1974′s political landscape. In this prophetic account, Clinton eradicates Nixon, Agnew, and the entire pentagon.

And by the gods, the P.F.T. berserker machine descended to even lower depths to battle with blasphemous malodorfied legions of maggot-coloured honkiteers! Guarding their reeking nest, the PIT OF PENTAGON, the foam- flecked degenerates filled the air with watergate buggers and ensnarling webs of mysterian tape reels! But, before our strength…their agnewesque attack vexed but their own destruction!

Naturally, the hero is awarded when “The Cosmic Strumpet of Funkadelia gazed uponst my sweaty bod with arduous satisfaction.” However, in another display of final humility before the grace of TRIM in its eternal and universal manifestation (The Funk), he admits “I could handle it not!” Thus, able to take on the Pentagon but eternally humbled before the funk, the furthermucker (as critic Greg Tate calls Clinton) finds defeat in a penile shrivel before a yawning abyss of cosmic ‘tang. As a result, he is returned to some kind of karmic holding tank, banished to live inside this mortal coil with only a booty to wave in salute toward The One: “I would wait in limbo for precious eons to become; HOT, NASTY, AND LOOSE!”

Although the mythology P-Funk propound, live within, and gas on may sound at first like an overblown reel at an animation festival for phreaks, everything within it has its place in a coherent ideology. Sir Nose, Star Child, and Dr. Funkenstein are not just leftovers from The Wiz, but a troupe of cosmic thespians who play out very definite roles in a more-or-less cohesive vision of what things are, in the face of what they could be. That is, they fulfill the same function as the villains and saviours in any religion or mythology. The only thing that prevents them becoming a religion in the usual sense of the word is the same thing that divides other cults and religions: size. When a cult becomes large enough, it becomes a religion, or at least takes on religious proportions. If enough people had really taken the P-Funk message seriously, there is no reason the movement wouldn’t have grown from the status of a continually-beleagured fan club [5] and roving posse of fanatical funkateers to a fully-formed philosophy / pantheon / belief system that could have altered our spiritual landscape forever… or at the very least landed its own TV show.

Appendix: The P-Funk Cosmology-in-a-Nutshell

Dig: The secret of funk was placed inside the pyramids 5,000 years ago. If we had stayed tuned (To pyramid power? Connect this to the Chariots of the Gods melieu of the same era, and the visiting spacemen theme of P-Funk) to The One, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in. “Mother earth is pregnant for the third time. We all have knocked her up.” It took the arrival of Dr. Funkenstein to unearth the funk and usher its viral spread over the de-funkatized surface of the planet. The problem with earth is that it is devoid of funk, — earth is the “Unfunky UFO” — due to the unfunky operations of the white house, the pentagon, Nixon, businessmen and greed in general, and an overall lack of supergroovalisticprosifunkstica-tion. The symbol for the collective greed/war mentality is embodied by Sir Nose, D’Void of Funk (“I have always been D’Void of Funk, I shall continue to be D’Void of Funk…”), who relentlessly pimpifies the people “By sucking their brains until their ability to think was amputated…pimpifying their instincts until they were fat, horny, and strung out” in pursuit of “financial security or an eternal supply of TRIM,” the result being that “the very source of life energies on earth have become the castrated target of anile bamboozelry from homo sapiens’ rabid attempts to manipulate the omnipotent forces of nature.”

The ruthless whoring of Funkentelechy has brought mother nature to her knees, and we’re pinned beneath them. “The frenzied incipience of pimpification hath risen to the point of cosmicide.” In other words, we all have a bad case of the Placebo Syndrome, having traded in “the real thing” for a civilization comprised of cheap imitations, which is now crumbling around us. The Placebo Syndrome has given the body politic weak knees, which are doomed to give out from under us at any moment. We no longer feel the pulse, or smell the deep draughts of the Cosmic Slop which generates the funk. “When the signal is too weak, you’re in the syndrome.”

But hark! We do have booties and we do have boots, so let’s move ‘em! “When the syndrome is around, don’t let your guard down. All you got to do is go on a bump.” We have the strategic assistance of Star Child, who takes careful aim and shoots at Sir Nose (who inhabits the Nose Zone, or the Zone of Zero Funkativity) with his Bop Gun, funkatizing him in the luminescent sheen of its rays. In concert, guitarist Gary Shider flew over the crowd, wearing diapers of course, blasting at the crowd with a strobe light attached to a space-age rifle, “Chasing the Noses away,” which forces Sir Nose to “give up the funk” and dance. “We shall overcome…we got to shoot ‘em with the Bop Gun.” To gather the collective energies of the funkateers into a mobilized force, Uncle Jam’s Army was created to snuff out Sir Nose wherever he may lie.

Footnotes

1) P-Funk is shorthand for one group that recorded under two names: Parliament and Funkadelic. To generalize crudely in distinguishing them, Parliament’s music focused more or less on the dance floor, while Funkadelic had more of a psychedelic aspect. In general, Funkadelic were more serious than Parliament, but since most of the members were the same, there was a lot of crossover in style and message.

2) P-Funk’s stage shows were actually written by Clinton, costumed by Larry LeGaspi (who was also haberdasher to The Who, Kiss, Patti LaBelle, and The Wiz), and designed by Jules Fischer, who also created sets for the Stones, David Bowie, and Kiss.

3) These days, it’s not uncommon for the crowd to shout out, “Props! Props!” at P-Funk shows.

4) The ongoing, piece-meal, far-flung-yet-coherent narrative of P-Funk and its constituents’ journeys, battles, and rank-yet- pneumatic sexual jamborees which is excerpted as if from nowhere and reproduced chunk- wise in liner notes. Perhaps these Chronicles exist in their entirety somewhere; perhaps they’re the only remaining vestige of a long- forgotten transmission from Mothership Central — the Rosetta Stone of funk.

5) The fan club, “Uncle Jam’s Army,” asked in its solicitations whether members wanted to be “duplicated, xeroxed, multiplied or divided” — a phrasing which seems to ironically admit the danger of rampant clone-dom which lurks in organizing masses of people, i.e. the potential pitfalls of religiousification.

Copyright ©1994, Scot Hacker

The Onion, July 12, 2010

This week marks the 45th anniversary of one of the defining moments in American musical history, except there’s one little catch. Most of it probably never happened. This much we know is true: at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan “went electric” for the first time in a live performance, leaving some folk traditionalists like Pete Seeger less than impressed. But the legend goes way beyond that, implying that the shock of Dylan’s new sound provoked near-riotous anger along the lines of what Igor Stravinsky encountered at the 1913 Armory Show debut of The Rite of Spring. Todd Haynes’ 2007 movie of Dylan’s multiple personalities, I’m Not There, builds up the tallest parts of the tale, showing Jude Quinn, the Cate Blanchett character based on the too-cool-for-school electric Dylan circa 1965, enduring loud boos as the band machine-guns its way through a short electric set. The mild-mannered Seeger suddenly goes ballistic and tries to cut the amp wires with an ax.

The standard sequel to the Newport saga, known in Dylanspeak as the Judas Incident, occurred in May 1966 during a show at Manchester, England’s Free Trade Hall. When Dylan appeared with his electric band, an audience heckler famously called him “Judas.” Dylan’s next words, while hiliarous, seem awkwardly tied to that insult: “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.”

The Dylan-goes-electric legend calls to mind Robin Williams’ old line that if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. As a next-generation teenager in Chicago, I found it hard to believe that in 1965, more than a few fossils could have gotten hot and bothered over Dylan playing a bit of amplified blues-rock. Even in his early acoustic phase, Dylan and many of his fans revered Muddy Waters, who started plugging in decades earlier, and T-Bone Walker, who sometimes played loud electric guitar tricks with his teeth while Jimi Hendrix was still a babe in diapers. The Band’s Robbie Robertson has said that in the Sixties, “going electric” was about as shocking as using a television.

Some context here: even at the height of his coolness, being Young Bob, despite a few perks, must have been a bit of a bum ride. People unaccustomed to nudity kept walking in and surrounding him with pencils and pens. He got a fraction of Mick Jagger’s or even Neil Diamond’s action, and his songs were too long and moody to be sung in sports arenas. All he really wanted to do was hop a freight train out of Hibbing, Minnesota, humming Jimmie Rodgers songs. Yet as soon as he started writing little ditties with titles like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” people started acting like he was some kind of protest singer. Go figure.

And then it started getting really weird. The ghost of electricity started howling in the bones of his face, planting messages in a dense, cryptic code. After that, he couldn’t utter a simple statement–for example, “jewels and binoculars hang from the head of a mule”–without having some smarty-pants Wittgenstein scholars turning him into their dissertation themes. When pressed to define himself for those well over thirty, he defined himself as well under thirty. But he probably felt prematurely senile.

Are the Newport and Judas legends of Dylan’s mid-youth fact or fiction? To paraphrase Pete Townshend, the simple things you see are all complicated. Pete Seeger did admit to telling the sound crew at Newport he would have liked to chop the wires with an ax. But I met Seeger once, and I personally doubt he’s used anything sharper than hedge trimmers in his life. One of the organizers of the 1965 Newport show, Bruce Jackson, recalled that the audience response to Dylan was largely favorable, despite the fact that his ragged electric pickup band barely had time to rehearse. Jackson attributes most of the unfavorable reaction not to Dylan, but to the bewildered emcee, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who had tried to keep Dylan to the same very short time limit as more obscure traditional acts. When a hostile audience wanted Bob back, the awkwardly goateed Yarrow awkwardly goaded Dylan to come back out with his acoustic guitar.

Now an English professor, Jackson cited the Newport myth in his book The Story is True, which surveys moments in American cultural history where the popular narrative is disconnected from what actually happened. The “Judas” story is partly myth as well. The heckler has been found, and he really was annoyed (mainly with the sound system drowning out the vocals). But Dylan’s “you’re a liar” response came after a lengthy interlude, and was almost certainly directed at yet another heckler. And that’s where we lose it: the other heckler’s comment is inaudible in the only known concert recordings.

Sadly, too much time has passed for the Warren Commission to investigate the two-hecklers theory. And don’t even think of asking Oliver Stone or Michael Moore. Since we’ll probably never know, you might as well make up your own favorite “second Dylan heckle” for May 1966. Here are my top five suggestions:

1. Bob, someday one of your songs will be used to sell women’s lingerie.
2. Bob, that poster-turning film gimmick for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” will later be used in birthday party invitations and corporate ad campaigns.
3. Bob, you will one day tell people you are a born-again Christian, and it will not be a joke.
4. Bob, in the future human communication will be reduced to a series of mechanical gestures known as posts, tweets, and skypes. “Posts” on a “website” called Right Wing Bob will repeat your most antisocial remarks and claim them as conservative political statements.
5. Bob, remember that Berkeley student, Greil Marcus, who keeps stalking you? If you don’t get a protective order before he makes it to graduate school, he will start writing books explaining how every little random thing you did in your twenties was a defining moment in American history. Go directly to your lawyer now.

All these things came true, of course. But at least Dylan could have plausibly denied all of them in May 1966. Fortunately, the actual Dylan is usually much funnier than most of the people who try to worship him even after he tried to scare them all off with albums like Self Portrait and Live at Budokan. The “real” Dylan–the song-and-dance man, the provocateur, the walking encyclopedia of American roots music–was amply on display a just few years ago, during his surprisingly genial hundred-episode gig as DJ for the Theme Time Radio Hour, whose loose format allowed him to craft inspired playlists on everything from cats and dogs to trains and body parts.

But Dylan’s radio shows had a secret weapon. Who was that mysterious caller who kept leaving DJ Dylan bizarre phone messages? Was it teenager trying to sound like a grizzled Delta bluesman? An aging drifter with too much time on his hands? Nope. The reliably hilarious call-in guy actually turned out to be America’s foremost collector of spray-painted macaroni art, Tom Waits. Below is a clip of Tom giving Bob his best shots on things like investment tips, marmalade, women’s feet, extinct birds, decapitated British bakers, and traditional Jewish curses. Dylan couldn’t have had a better sidekick for his ragged journey through his, and our, imaginary back pages.

Tom Waits phoning in messages to Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour”

T-Bone Walker, “Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong”

Bob Dylan, “I Don’t Believe You”

In his recent documentary Maradona, the equally eccentric Serbian director Emir Kusturica describes Maradona as the footballer’s equivalent of the Sex Pistols. But he’s more like a combination of Mozart and Iggy Pop: a contortionist savant driven by instinct, walking the line between genius and madness, aware that he is both a brilliant creator and a really big stooge. While these aren’t necessarily the qualities you’d want in a coach, they are sensational songwriter’s materials. Although Maradona is reportedly despondent over his team’s manhandling by Germany, here are reasons you shouldn’t cry for him, with accompanying soundtrack.

1. He’s still the King of Bongo.

Our Diego
Who art on earth
Hallowed be thy left foot
Thy magic come,
Thy goals be remembered.

The Church of Maradona

Soccer and music don’t always mix. For every goal-worthy performance—K’naan’s Marleyesque reworking of “Wavin’ Flag” from this year, or New Order’s suave “World in Motion” from 1990—two or three come out deserving red cards (for instance, the Village People’s 1994 musical partnership with the German national soccer team). But Maradona, despite his obvious faults, inspires fanatical devotion. He could fill an entire playlist with musical tributes, some of which verge on greatness.

Maradona is the subject of two songs written by Manu Chao, the wiry French/Spanish troubador responsible for politically charged albums such as Clandestino, as well as surreal classics like “Bongo Bong” and “King of Bongo.” The raucous “Santa Maradona,” recorded with Chao’s old Franco-punk band, Mano Negra, pays tribute to his hero even as it flips the bird to hero worship. “La Vida Tombola” (life is a lottery), from Chao’s latest La Radiolina album, mixes joy and melancholy as it traces the man’s journey from rags to riches to disgrace to partial redemption.

Manu Chao, “La Vida Tombola” (sung to Maradona)

2. Andrew Lloyd Webber will never write a bad musical about him.

Argentina has had a few well-known rock bands, including Los Fabulosos Cadillacs and Soda Stereo, who performed at Maradona’s wedding. But on an international scale, Maradona’s only serious celebrity rock-star competition is Eva Peron. Unlike poor Evita, however, Maradona has no likelihood of having his life turned into a horrid Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. How bad can his musicals get? Well, in a new production of Evita, Ricky Martin will play the role of Che Guevarra.

Maradona, who named one of his dogs Che, would never stand for this abuse. Moreover, Webber, a supporter of England’s conservative party, would never risk his middlebrow credentials on Maradona, whose popularity in the UK ranks somewhere between that of Napoleon and Osama bin Laden. It’s not just that Maradona scored the most famous illegal and legal goals in history to defeat England 24 years ago (respectively, the devious Hand of God goal and the brilliant Goal of the Century). It’s that Maradona viewed each of these as poetic justice that avenged the Falklands War and placed Argentina on the right side of history. You can argue the history, but it’s really hard to be on England’s side when listening to the amazing Atahualpa Yupanqui.

Atahualpa Yupanqui, “El Carrero”

3. He’s responsible for the modernization of Argentine tango.

I don’t mean that Maradona personally did this, of course. But in his memoir, Astor Piazzolla observed that he was indifferent about football until Maradona’s exciting play made him a “furious fan.” In 1986, the same year Maradona led Argentina to World Cup victory, Piazzolla released one of his most daring works, Tango Zero Hour. More than a coincidence?

Astor Piazzolla, “Tanguedia”

4. He’s Springsteen to those who weren’t born in the USA (or England).

Beneath Maradona’s shiny designer suits and fondness for luxury toilet seats is the soul of a populist rebel from humble origins who sometimes lets his big heart show. Just when you’re ready to dismiss him as just another hopelessly obnoxious rich guy, he can pull something that’s a bit more Joe Strummer or Bruce Springsteen than Johnny Rotten. Even as his own life was unraveling, Maradona helped jump-start the career of then-teenager Diego Forlan, this year’s Golden Ball winner from Uruguay, and helped pay medical bills for Forlan’s paralyzed sister.

Below is a clip of Maradona, still bloated and recovering from his drug-addicted wipeout, covering “La Mano de Dios” (that’s right, “The Hand of God”) by the late Argentine cuartero singer Rodrigo. At first he comes on like a train wreck, something like the over-the-hill boxer Robert DeNiro played near the end of Raging Bull. But by the time family members join him at the end, the clip transforms into something weirdly touching and hopeful.

Maradona singing Rodrigo’s “La Mano de Dios”

5. He’s a better metaphor for globalization than anything in Thomas Friedman’s laptop.

Maradona is missing from almost all of Franklin Foer’s fascinating 2004 book, How Soccer Explains the World. Foer, editor for the New Republic, uses soccer as the lens for fairly gentle criticism of Thomas Friedman-style flat-earth thinking about globalization. He portrays soccer as a surreal parallel world illuminating our own, in which rival teams in placid Glasgow re-enact a centuries-old holy war between Protestants and Catholics, Nigerian players lose their cool in the icy Ukraine, and Iranian women dress up as men to sneak into the world’s largest stadium. The global game, despite its liberalizing potential, still hasn’t come close to overcoming regional, ethnic and religious strife or the power of corrupt oligarchs.

Foer views the tolerant ethos of his favorite team, FC Barcelona, or Barça (which currently includes Maradona’s protégé, Lionel Messi), as a hopeful sign that patriotism and cosmopolitanism can be compatible. The World Cup victory of a graceful Spanish team, largely on the strength of its Catalans and Barça players, with assists from the Basques, might be viewed as supporting this hope. But even that is a bit of a stretch. The victory came just a day after protests in Barcelona over a Spanish court ruling on Catalan autonomy. Outside official circles, Catalonia has its own national team, as do the Basques. And the ethnic and economic divisions in Spain pale next to others in Europe, which pale in comparison to those in other continents.

If you had to pick a soundtrack for cosmopolitan nationalism, what would you choose? Barça’s unofficial theme song last year was…drumroll please…“Viva La Vida” by Coldplay–because nothing motivates athletes quite like moderately paced middle-of-the-road rock. That may be a bit harsh. Barcelona is one of my favorite cities. I admire its tolerant reputation and its team’s storied history (the soccer field was one of the few outlets available for Catalan expression during the bleak Franco years). I also have nothing against Coldplay’s signature song, or the half-dozen others that share its lilting melody. But I think the hopeful parts of Foer’s thesis may play a little too much like a Coldplay song—meticulously constructed and catchy, but lacking a willingness to push beyond the comfort zone at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Maradona, who is all about pushing beyond the comfort zone, inspires either revulsion or religious devotion (and yes, there’s a Church of Maradona with more than a hundred thousand members). While his fanatical devotees vary widely, many never got Tom Friedman’s memo about how the latest internationally-distributed gadgets will help level the playing field. They understandably would like to believe that every once in a while, they might have a turn to rule the world, if only for the length of a game. They want to believe David can still slay Goliath, even if it requires the Hand of God.

Scenes from the Church of Maradona

South Korean singers summon the hand of God in 2002

The Zeros, “Wild Weekend”

Last Thursday, the world lost a musical pioneer known for his childlike wonder. He sealed his reputation making joyful noise, yet also seemed doomed to tiptoe through fields of anguish and despair. The singer precisely captured his moment in time. But in his increasingly strange last decades, he seemed to come from another planet, so absorbed in his restless search for solace that his oddness overshadowed his moments of unalloyed pop brilliance.

I speak, of course, of Sky Saxon, singer and bassist for the psychedelic garage band innovators the Seeds. Los Angeles-based writer and radio host Ken Levine aptly described Saxon’s music as “a mix of hard rock, blues, peyote, and not sleeping for several weeks.” Overshadowed in his time by hitmakers like the Kingsmen and the Troggs, and later by the likes of Love and the Doors, he continued the trend even in death, passing away within hours of a better-known guy who fancied himself as the King of Pop. Saxon and the Seeds were inconsistent and erratic, and their most fertile period was short-lived. But at their best, they produced relentless mini-anthems filled with love and danger. “Pushin’ Too Hard,” my favorite of these, is as compelling as anything in the Jacksons’ catalogues, and meant more to me personally.

Sky Saxon was also known as Richard Marsh, a Mormon kid from Utah and former doo-wop bandleader who discovered he could make his voice sound like Mick Jagger swallowing gasoline. When he moved to California and formed the Seeds in the mid-Sixties, his new moniker fit nicely with a new band taking flight, first with the roar of proto-punk garage rock and later with the birdlike flight patterns of flower power. The Seeds discovered trippy keyboards before the Doors, and were unleashing raw power before the Stooges. They were their best at their simplest, exemplifying Woody Guthrie’s dictum that if you use more than two chords, you’re showing off. It’s fitting that Saxon’s final days were spent in Austin, stomping grounds for fellow psych-garage head cases both old (Roky Erickson) and new (the Black Angels).

If the Seeds were a movie, they would have been a grainy, no-budget independent film that lingers in the memory longer than last year’s big-budget Oscar winner. They were a little scary, but they played with heart. Saxon wound up ingesting too many of the Sixties’ finest pharmaceuticals and joining a spiritual cult, but he remained a charismatic and inspirational figure to musicians. The Seeds remained his signature group, and they were as seminal as the name implies. Muddy Waters loved the Seeds so much that he described them as “America’s own Rolling Stones,” and wrote the liner notes to one of Saxon’s lesser side projects, an attempt at garage/ blues fusion. Joey Ramone claimed that listening to the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard” inspired him to sing, and the Ramones later covered a second Seeds standard, “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.” I’m pretty sure the Ramones also took haircut tips from the Seeds.

The most heartfelt tribute I’ve seen to Saxon’s legacy came from Los Angeles native Nels Cline, whose genre-bending guitar work has found him collaborating with everyone from Charlie Haden to Mike Watt to Willie Nelson, fronting his own improvised music group, and playing lead for the fiery nineties roots-punk combo the Geraldine Fibbers on the way to his current lead duties with Wilco. In an obituary last week, Cline described Saxon as his first rock idol, not simply for the Seeds’ music, but for the charisma he exuded while appearing on TV programs with names like “Boss City” and “The Groovy Show.” Cline wrote that he “would stare in disbelief as he—clad in shiny satin Nehru shirts bedazzled with some gaudy brooch—would gyrate around lasciviously, holding the microphone in every cool way imaginable. He seemed from another planet.” Years later, Cline ran into an aging hippie at Trader Joe’s with an unmistakable style, and you can guess who it was. Saxon and Cline went on to play an improvised set, using the name Flower God Men and their Assistants. The flower god man has taken his final flight, but the thrill ride continues.

The Seeds, “Pushin’ Too Hard”

The Seeds, “Mr. Farmer”

If a deep, slow groove with big implications for globalization are your bag, all 10.5 minutes of “900 Million People Daily All Makin’ Love” should be required listening:

Warren Zevon, “Jesus Mentioned”

When Elvis left the building a generation ago at what seemed then the very advanced age of 42, I loved a few of his songs, but mainly considered him a bloated, Eskimo Pie-addicted man-cartoon that some kids’ parents liked. Only later did I discover what the fuss was about: the Memphis truck driver getting “real, real gone” in the magical Sun Sessions; the swaggering sex machine; the out-of-control mystery train that not even a dozen corny movies and a thousand prescriptions could completely derail. No wonder even Nixon cited Elvis as the explanation for the Bermuda triangle (“Elvis needs boats”).

This week, at the young, tender age of 50, another larger-than-life man-cartoon made an inglorious exit. Like Presley, Michael Jackson walked on water, first with his brilliance and later with his pills. And as with Elvis, I dismissed most of what he did long before he left. But MJ was an arresting presence even for those who, like me, did my best to ignore him. Elvis even seems an inadequate comparison for his stratospheric global reach. A closer comparison might be Howard Hughes, another man-child of erratic brilliance, whose master aviator’s soaring heights later gave way to reclusive paranoia and heartbreaking tailspin.

For now I will set aside the aspects of Michael Jackson’s life better left to the justice system and to his maker. As an admiring non-fan, I’ll count down five of his huge accomplishments:

1. He Liberated Eastern Europe from Communism.

Who do you think accomplished this, Reagan and Gorbachev? Please. The invasion of Afghanistan was bad enough, but the Kremlin’s most self-destructive act was its 1985 decision not to censor a vinyl version of Thriller. Long before MJ built a 35-foot statue of himself in Prague, his invisible gloved hand shook like a thousand Adam Smiths, securing our opportunity to visit McDonald’s in Vilnius.

Michael Jackson, HIStory Teaser

2. He Made Globalization Irreversible.

Don’t blame him for the shortcomings of NAFTA, GATT and world-beat fusion music. The new century would still be inconceivable without globalization, and MJ was its mascot. If there’s any doubt, listen to Caetano Veloso’s version of “Billie Jean.”

Caetano Veloso, “Billie Jean”

3. He Stopped Quincy Jones from Making Bad Solo Records.

Quincy Jones has a great ear for talent other than his own. Long ago, Q made five-martini bachelor pad classics like “Soul Bossa Nova,” which featured the amazing Rahsaan Roland Kirk. But by the late seventies, he’d spent far too much time making lame film soundtracks. Soon after Q started mentoring MJ, he woke up and started sailing the high seas of Eighties soul-funk cheese, producing bizarre period classics such as 1981’s The Dude, which even features a zany cover of a song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads sideman Chaz Jankel. The Dude abides.

Quincy Jones, “Soul Bossa Nova”

Soul Bossa Nova (Tema da Nike) – Quincy Jones

4. His Voice Was Better than Your Favorite Singer’s Voice.

Maybe that’s stretching it. Still, once you get beyond the tabloid crassness, Jackson had a voice so divinely inspired that comparisons are almost unfair. Production values and taste are things that can be questioned, and I’ve criticized those in most of his work. But his abilities were already astonishing by the time the J5 featured his preteen lead on “I Want You Back.”

Jackson Five, “I Want You Back”

5. He was Jackie Robinson in Aviator Glasses.

It’s hard to describe how segregated most of the pop mainstream was at the end of the seventies, with much of white America (including me) still in “Disco Sucks” mode and rap still emerging from the underground. Off the Wall and Thriller shattered that rigidity. If the path that followed has had some cracks in the pavement—like having to endure Fred Durst limply pretending to be funky—MJ still helped prepare the country and the planet for their multiracial future.

Indian version of “Thriller”

Funny videos

Last week, when Aretha Franklin put on her oversized bow hat and melted fire with her inaugural version of “America (My Country ‘Tis of Thee)”—Samuel Francis Smith’s 19th Century rewrite of a German rewrite of “God Save the Queen”—a piece of my heart held the memory of another queen of soul, one generation and half a world away, who met with a more tragic fate. Blessed with a voice of equally staggering power and beauty, Ros Sereysothea rose from poverty and illiteracy to become the most beloved singer in her native Cambodia during the sixties and early seventies. Thanks to the excellent Los Angeles combo Dengue Fever, discussed below, the music of Ros and her contemporaries is finally experiencing a rebirth on both sides of the Pacific.

Ros’s story carries a distinctive rock twist. Along with the cherub-faced godfather of Khmer soul, Sinn Sisamouth, a former Royal Court crooner turned unlikely garage rocker, and the more playful female vocalist Pan Ron, who makes me think of Martha Reeves, Ros meshed Khmer music with the range of Western sounds that made their way across the Pacific during wartime—everything from Motown and classic R&B to surf, psychedelic and garage rock. Eastern sounds from Bangkok to Bollywood also entered the mix. The resulting Khmer rock underground was like nothing else heard before or since. A track like Ros’s “Chnam Oun 16” (translated as “I’m 16” or “Sweet 16”) virtually defies description, but to me it sounds a bit like an even more intense Asha Bhosle performing an upbeat Aretha number, backed by the 13th Floor Elevators. The song sounds so alive that it seems to mock death itself for its weakness and cowardice.

Ros Sereysothea, “Chnam Oun 16″

As John Swain captured in his Indochina memoir River of Time, Khmer rock’s seminal figures remained upstarts in their heyday; even Ros and Sinn scrounged for cassette sale revenue and never reached the upper echelons of Cambodia’s economic elite. But their musical revolution came to an abrupt end after April 1975, when Pol Pot’s forces overrode Cambodia. Few of the leading Khmer musicians survived the genocide. Sinn Sisamouth was sent to a work camp and executed. Pan Ron disappeared. Ros Sereysothea’s demise remains the subject of conjecture, but Greg Cahill’s short film about her life, The Golden Voice, concludes that after her discovery in a slave labor camp, she was forced to sing pro-Khmer Rouge songs and marry one of Pol Pot’s henchmen, who later had her killed. In another account, she died from malnutrition in a Phnom Penh hospital weeks before the Vietnamese invasion ousted Pol Pot. Either way, this achingly beautiful and surprisingly rocking music—which often paired melancholy sentiments with sparkling melodies—virtually disappeared, preserved only because fans risked lives and livelihoods hiding priceless cassette tapes. The musical history of a generation went undercover in the face of what Hannah Arendt, commenting on a different genocide, termed “the banality of evil”: ordinary people following orders confiscated and destroyed the tapes, even as they were silently humming these same songs under their breath.

Sinn Sisamouth, “Ma Pi Noak”

Pan Ron, “Rom Ago Ago”

After the click-through: Dengue Fever and the renaissance of Khmer rock and roll.

Part Two: Dengue Fever and the Khmer Rock Renaissance

For years, the golden age of Khmer rock remained virtually unknown in the west. The occasional exceptions included Parallel World’s 1996 Cambodian Rocks anthology (first released without any artist or track information), and the several classic tracks that appeared in the soundtrack to the 2002 film City of Ghosts. But the music’s renaissance is largely due to Dengue Fever, whose uncharacteristically mellow Khmer language cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” was featured in City of Ghosts. The band has one of the more improbable histories in recent memory. Ethan Holtzman, a California-based keyboardist, traveled to Cambodia in the 1990s, and while his traveling companion was contracting dengue fever, he was filling his backpack with classic Khmer cassettes. Inspired to form a band performing Cambodian rock covers, he recruited several stellar musicians, including his brother Zac, the former Dieselhead guitarist who should have won last month’s battle of the beards. Traversing the karaoke clubs of Long Beach, California’s Little Phnom Penh, they became entranced by a beguiling young singer, Chhom Nimol, who had already become a teenage sensation back in Cambodia. Incredibly, they persuaded her to join the band, which has progressed from a Cambodian covers-only format to equally impressive original material that brings in everything from homegrown California psych-pop to Ethiopian jazz.

If you simply listened to Dengue Fever’s hilarious 2008 ode to troubled transcontinental romance, “Tiger Phone Card,” you might think that Dengue Fever was merely a really good international novelty act. But as shown on most of the recent Venus on Earth album, the band deserves better than to be consigned to the “world music” ghetto. A rock band every bit as much as Radiohead or TV on the Radio, Dengue Fever serves as a reminder that, due to the prominent American R&B and rock influence, the lost years of Cambodian rock are also a lost part of our own collective memory deserving of rebirth.

John Pirozzi, the director whose film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong chronicles Dengue Fever’s surreally rewarding 2005 tour in Cambodia, is working on a broader movie called Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten on the lost history of Cambodian rock and roll. Four volumes of Cambodian Rocks reissues are available on the Khmer Rocks label, and a wealth of Khmer rock classics are also available on YouTube and elsewhere on the net. These efforts bear witness to the stunning musical contributions of a strife-torn country, intertwined with our own tangled war-torn history, deserving recognition for something richer and grander than killing fields and donut shops. Rather than retreating in the face of evil, past or present, we have the opportunity to become educated about our country’s complex history in southeast Asia, while also cranking up the volume and letting freedom ring.

Dengue Fever, “Tiger Phone Card”

Dengue Fever, “Sleepwalking Through the Mekong”

Dengue Fever, “Seeing Hands”

Dengue Fever, “I’m 16″

Facial outgrowth isn’t always a sign of greatness, or vice-versa. Patchy-faced Bob Dylan and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy have sometimes dabbled in facial hair, but these are not beardly men; you might as well put a spoiler on a Volvo station wagon. Nobody knows that better than Tweedy himself, the author of “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard” (“things got pretty weird, and I grew Bob Dylan’s beard”). And beardrevue.com gave a major thumbs down to Stuck Between Stations favorite Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), ranking him three points below the composite band score assigned to current beard icons the Fleet Foxes. Explaining the Captain’s lowly 5.9 ranking, the site noted: “His lip ferret was merely average. And his poet’s beard was never much more than the obligatory mark of a mad musical genius.”

At the outset, I have disqualified Devendra Banhart, because that would be too easy, like naming Jesus on a list of famous sandal-wearers. This list is for beard-growers, and I have it on good authority that Devendra was born bearded to traveling circus performers from Caracas. Here are my rankings in this year’s Battle of the Beards:

• Kyp Malone, TV on the Radio (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.5)

The guitarist-singer from Brooklyn’s innovative art rockers-turned-mutant funkateers had this year’s beard competition all sewn up. But, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Kyp has now trimmed his beard.

TV on the Radio, “Dancing Choose”

• Jim James, My Morning Jacket (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 7.0)

James’ Kentucky combo may well rank as the most hirsute band of the past decade. But he’s docked two notches here, because his Prince falsetto on this year’s Evil Urges is less convincing than that of Spoon‘s Britt Daniel, and worse, he has reportedly switched to a mustache.

My Morning Jacket, “Wordless Chorus”

More beards after the click-through

• Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 8.0)

He’s in his twenties, but looks and sounds like he woke up in a sleeping bag in Golden Gate Park in 1967. You could do far worse.

Fleet Foxes, “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song”

• Ben Bridwell, Band of Horses (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 8.3)

While nothing’s shocking here, he delivers reliably well-rounded whiskers and melodies.

Band of Horses, “Funeral”

• Will Oldham, Palace/ Palace Brothers/ Bonnie Prince Billy (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 9.0)

Finding religion in the palace of sin, he’s all shaggy perfection as he explores the missing link between Gram Parsons and Rasputin.

Palace Brothers, “You Will Miss Me When I Burn”

• Steve Earle (Sanders-Hudson Rating: 9.2)

A flowing beard, a good appetite and a strong sense of justice helped save the life of this former self-destructive gunslinger, and he’s been a national treasure ever since.

Steve Earle, “Christmastime in Washington”

Blowing away any remaining generational snobbery, I randomly discovered a recipe for Monterey Jack muffins on an intermittently updated music blog called Half a Person, whose sixteen year-old author, Nina, says she “likes music and long walks on the beach.” Nina’s accompanying “Muffin Mix” seemed uncannily close to home:

Stay Positive- The Hold Steady
Two Halves- My Morning Jacket
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
The Sons of Cain- Ted Leo
Eraser- No Age
Sequestered in Memphis- The Hold Steady
Alex Chilton- The Replacements
I’m Amazed- My Morning Jacket
Constructive Summer- The Hold Steady
Sheila Take a Bow- The Smiths
A Little Bit of Feel Good- Jamie Lidell

This is how close I live to the Muffin Mix: Swap Bon Iver and Tinariwen for No Age and Jamie Lidell, and you would come very close to my own heavy rotation for the same week. Nor is Nina a guitar-rock one trick pony; her latest post displays precocious taste in rap both new (Nas, Lupe Fiasco, Lil’ Wayne) and prehistoric (De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest). And I doubt I’ll read a better review of Mamma Mia than the following from Nina: “I now have every ABBA song simultaneously stuck in my head. It was charming at first, but now I’m just feeling suicidal.” Nina’s hall-of-fame post thus far, however, is intriguingly titled “Sorry I Accosted You”, where she summons her teenage fortitude to defend Radiohead’s honor (details after the click-through).

Smiths, “Half a Person”

Replacements, “Alex Chilton”

When Nina and her friend were in line to buy summer books at Barnes and Noble, an unsuspecting couple were poised to buy a copy of The Best of Radiohead, which Nina correctly identifies as “EMI’s plan of revenge after Radiohead left their label to give away In Rainbows.” In prose worthy of a sober Lester Bangs, Nina recounts the following:

“Oh, Radiohead!” said the man, picking up a copy.
“They’re great,” replied his girlfriend tracing her finger down the back
track listing.

I fretted. “These people can’t purchase this sham of an album! Radiohead wouldn’t want that!” I thought. So, I did what any partially insane teen would do.

“You can’t buy that!” I said abruptly.

The couple stared at me blankly. I stared back. “Um. EMI, Radiohead’s old label, released it without permission. Radiohead, uh, doesn’t want people to buy it,” I stammered. The couple stared at me blankly.

“Um.Ok,” said the male with a forced chuckle, placing the album back on the rack. “Why is this nervous girl with braces yelling at me about Radiohead?” he was probably thinking. My friend Victoria looked at me with an amused smile. I turned around and walked away. Mission accomplished.

My apologies for accosting you, friendly couple. But you really shouldn’t buy the album.”

Nina’s little vignette actually gives me hope for the future, because it’s a story only a real fan could tell and it’s free of the cool distance that too often accompanies music writing. I’ve also been there before. As a partially insane teen, I came close to accosting someone at Chicago’s Wax Trax records who was on the verge of buying Squeeze, an album by a Lou Reed-less version of the “Velvet Underground” fronted by bassist Doug Yule. In retrospect, Squeeze wasn’t terrible, and it’s not as if cranky old Lou Reed needed the money; it’s just that something viscerally bothered me about allowing that record to be purchased on false pretenses. I cared enough about what the Velvets had done for me that I didn’t mind looking like a nutcase trying to defend their honor.

Years from now, when Nina is old enough to be me, I hope she stays positive, finds new and adventurous ways to mix her muffins, and never lets her enthusiasm molder. If I’m still around, I’ll still be listening.

Radiohead, “House of Cards”

Moldy Peaches, “Anyone Else But You”

Remember the bad old days of yore, making mix tapes for yourself and friends, mistakenly believing you could re-use the same cassette over and over again ad nauseum ’til the ferrous oxide particles started to dissolve or flake off? Somewhere between the time you first slid off the shrink-wrap and the time the tape inevitably got stuck between the capstan and pinch roller, leaving 17 seconds of that unreplaceable Minutemen live bootleg tangled up like a knot of dried tagliatelle pasta, there was the “print through/partial overdub” period, when traces of audio from previous recordings or adjacent layers of tape would appear as ghostly traces on the current recording.

The effect was mostly annoying, but also sometimes mystical. Rhythms might accidentally match up, or serve as counterweights to one another. Sometimes you’d think you’d proven finally and conclusively that T. Rex and Marmalade really were involved in a mutual back-masking cabal. But mostly it just sounded weird. In a good way.

After the jump: Backyardigans and Evan Lurie, The Wizard of Floyd, Dali’s paranoia-critical method, and the sonic layering of Solveig Slettahjell.

II) Evan Lurie and God Knows What

Five-year-old Miles was deeply zoned in a Backyardigans video game featuring a predictably groovy Evan Lurie musical soundtrack (Lounge Lizard John Lurie‘s little brother Evan Lurie scores the music for Backyardigans). Knowing Backyardigans tracks can sometimes have a lot going on at once, I didn’t bat an eye when I first heard what sounded like a second, unrelated layer going on in the background. But after a few seconds, it became clear that the second layer of music was completely unrelated to the first. Realizing that iTunes must be chugging away in the background, I suggested that maybe we should turn it off. “No daddy! I like it this way!” Whoa. What to my ears sounded dissonant and distracting, he was digging. Solving his little spy puzzle, accompanied by simultaneous doses of Lurie and god-knows-what shuffling through the background rotation.

n.b.: This was the same toddler/punk who recently reacted to his first exposure to the genius of Harry Partch by saying the music “Sounds like space chimps driving a broken car.” Had I broken his musical brain by exposing him to too much avant stuff too early in life? Was he genetically wired to like challenging music? Or was he finding synchronicities in the two soundtracks that I wasn’t tuned into?

But the more I listened, the more I was struck by the sonic coincidences; moments of musical timing that came together purely by accident, complimenting one another rather than conflicting. Either he was oblivious to the strangeness of the layering and just didn’t want to be bothered, or he was truly digging on the confluence.

III) Dark Side of the Rainbow

Try this (no, really — try this): Cue up a CD of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and immediately hit the pause button. Simultaneously cue up a DVD of the Wizard of Oz on the TV. Keep your TV’s sound muted. When the black-and-white MGM lion roars the first time, un-pause the CD. Sit back, torch a doob or brush up on your mycology if you must, and let the audio/visual coincidences mount. Some accounts say there as many as 100 noticeable moments where the technically unrelated media streams appear to line up perfectly. Impossible coincidence? Mass hallucination? Mystical multimedia kismet?

The phenomenon is called, alternatively: Dark Side of the Rainbow, The Wizard of Floyd, or Dark Side of Oz. A decade or so ago, a handful of Stuck writers and their significants gave it a shot. We didn’t find all 100, but the match-ups were pretty striking.

What’s going on here? Floyd vehemently deny any intentional connection, but your brain insists otherwise. Salvador Dali had a name for this tendency of the mind (and used it to great advantage): The Paranoia Critical Method:

It was defined by Dalí himself as “irrational knowledge” based on a “delirium of interpretation. As a matter of fact, all of us have practiced the Paranoid Critical Method when gazing at stucco on a wall, or clouds in the sky, and seeing different shapes and visages therein. Dali, though not a true paranoid, was able to simulate a paranoid state, without the use of drugs…

In other words, it’s the same thing iPod users do when they insist that Shuffle mode is not actually random, but is rather capable of “sensing” what songs would work well back-to-back, or even capable of reading their minds. Apple engineers insist that random mode is as random as a computer can get, but our brains tell us otherwise. We’re really good at finding coincidence where there is none. Making connections is what we do. Our brains will scramble like hell to map the un-mappable, connect the un-connectable, and to draw false (but pleasing) meaning from perceived confluences. We’re a trip, man.

IV) Solveig Slettahjell != iPod Malfunction

So there’s all this wispy stuff out there – tendrils of information intertwining in our minds. For the most part we do a good job of filtering out the stuff we’re not paying attention to, and focusing on what we want to hear. But every now and then, improbable textures collide in mid-air and transform themselves into some kind of freaky new whole.

I’m not sure what made me pick up Solveig Slettahjell’s Good Rain. Slettahjell is a lovely Scandinavian jazz singer with a sliver of Bjork in her face and voice (but isn’t that true of all beautiful Scandinavians?), sans swan dress. And another sliver of Norah Jones. Maybe it was the name of her backup band that got me: “The Slow Motion Quintet.” Oooh, I loves me my slow motion – this must be good!

Truth is, I hadn’t given the record much of a listen since coming into it six months ago. Then, while pounding my way through the daily bike commute home a few days ago with the iPod in shuffle mode, I started to hear what sounded like a print-through effect rolling through one of her tracks. My first thought was that something had gone terribly wrong with the iPod. Sultry vocal jazz in one ear, back-masked synth warbles in the other. A rhythm section working contrapuntally to the cadence. Felt like I was simultaneously hearing laid-back Scandinavian vocal jazz, Bohemian drums, and left-field electronica all at once. And yet, all of the pieces somehow fit. I assumed that these disparate sounds couldn’t be thrown together intentionally – that I was actually hearing multiple sound sources at once, and was merely having a paranoia-critical moment. Had to stop both the bike and track to make sure I wasn’t hearing audio from an external source.

I wasn’t.

The track was composed this way – but my expectations of her style* had fooled my brain into thinking that she was too “straight” to get all experimental on my ass, and that I must therefore be hearing something else.

Like tooth imprints on a corndog, these fly-away particles of meaning drill deep into the imagination of humans, looking for love in all the wrong places. The brain truly is great.

* Most of Slettahjell’s stuff isn’t like this; the record is lovely, but don’t buy it assuming you’ll get an ear-load of experimental sonic layering. There’s a bit of it going on, but the Slow Motion Quintet is pretty restrained, with the exception of this song.