Wordy, White, and Pretentious

April 2nd, 2007 by paul

With the help of two loans, one from Kristie's dad, and one from the father of a friend of Pam's (what was he thinking?!), we were able to scrape together enough money to record and press our first record, which we titled, aptly enough, "The Information Society." The recording cost around $600.00, and the manufacturing of 1000 copies cost around $1000.00 more. It was the first time we'd ever been in a recording studio, and we felt very important and groovy.

Since we didn't have enough material to fill an album, we decided upon our five best songs, which were called, respectively: Bacchanale, Fall in Line, Growing Up with Shiva, Get Up Away From That Thing, and Can You Live (as Fast as Me?). We were still very pretentious. Bacchanale was an instrumental which I'd written in my "electronic-music-as-Dionysiac-tribal-experience" phase. This was a full ten years before the rave kids, with the assistance of Ecstasy, began climbing on that band wagon, I might add. I can remember fantasizing about huge concerts in which the first few drumbeats of Bacchanale were enough to send the vast crowd into an ecstatic sufi-like whirling trance.

Fall in Line was a rudimentary pop song with lyrics that addressed our Bohemian disapproval of television and tie-in marketing. Sample lyrics: "I read the book / I saw the film / I heard the song / Now I live the life." Since neither Kurt nor I could really complete an entire song at this point, I turned the bridges over to him, and this is what he came up with: "You come from across the Sea / And you shudder when you listen to me." For some reason, it never occurred to us that these lyrics were perhaps more true than we knew.

Growing Up with Shiva was our anti-nuke song, equating The Bomb with the Hindu god of destruction. It also included the one and only time I actually attempted to rap. Keep in mind, this was 1983, when even early rap stars like Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow were just getting started. However, that doesn't change the fact that my rapping was absolutely awful–wordy, white, and pretentious. Growing Up with Shiva was our first little hit, though, and as we sat in a pizza joint in downtown Minneapolis we had the first experience of hearing our music on the radio when KFAI, the low-power public radio station played it on a Friday night.

Get Up Away From That Thing was another anti-television diatribe, based loosely on James Brown's Get Up Offa That Thing. It's funny–for a group of kids who frequently stayed up until 3:00 AM to catch reruns of Kung Fu, we certainly affected a distaste for pop culture. But the simultaneous immersion in, and disgust with, popular culture was a theme that would be played out pretty much non-stop throughout our short career. Towards the end, though, all the affectations were gone, and we really did despise the monster we'd helped create and were wallowing in. In the end section of the song, where JB did his standard trick of listing all his best cities and saying, "I'm coming!", we used the occasion to list all the shopping malls in Minneapolis. We also made some snide comments about "partying" and "drinking beer," which helped to further endear us to the local music scene.

Can You Live (As Fast As Me) was yet another modern-life-in-the-information-age-type screed. Sample lyrics: "I believe in the power of rock and roll / And I believe that Exxon will save my soul." That's a pretty good line, actually.

On the back of the record I included a small essay that perfectly encapsulates the hilariously sincere, adolescent nature of the undertaking. Here it is in full:

"In an age of video wallpaper and aural anesthesia, music has become a prostitute. No longer is it a gift from the gods; it has become a pacifier, a tranquilizer, and a tool. A tool to protect us from loneliness, to entice us to buy, and to keep us from seeing how bad things have really become. At one time, music was a vital experience. It was physical, emotional, almost religious. But today music is just one more device used by the Sun King called civilization to control itself."

Oh my. Can you tell I was a Humanities major? What I forgot to add was, "And so we're gonna register our extreme anti-consumerist tendencies by trying really hard to make lots of money in the music business." At least I had the decency to give a "Special Thanks" to my bank-robbing buddy Todd on the back cover. Of course the mysterious Erich Zahn is listed as Executive Producer.

One local paper reviewed the disc with two words: "Wordy much?"

Out of the thousand copies that we pressed, we sold maybe a hundred. We sent off consignments to big name indie distributors like Important and Dutch East Indies, and never heard from them again. One local distributor, when we were coming to retrieve our unsold stock, actually said: "Yeah, I'd appreciate it if you would get ââ?¬Ë?em the hell outta here."

For some reason, it never occurred to us to use the records as demos. In fact, the whole idea of getting "signed" to a record label seemed never to have appeared in our brains at all at this point. We kept playing shows every month or two, somehow expecting to be "discovered," like in the old movies.

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