Saturday, August 1, 2009

When bad music achieves greatness

By 2009, the idea of the music business being in some kind of tailspin is what I call a blinding flash of duh, the kind of "water is, y'know, all wet and stuff" observation that most of us stopped making a long time ago.

Uh huh. CDs aren't selling. There's so much music that outright sucks, that it's hard to find the stuff that doesn't; it's like trying to find hidden Spanish doubloons among the chozzerai at Jim Denio's Farmer's Market.

That said, there's a lot of great music still getting made. Musicians don't stop being creative just because no one wants to spend $17.99 for the latest Hoobastank CD, or Chris Daughtry, or whoever this week's big foist is at what used to be called album-oriented rock radio. It's just that the distribution machine is broken, and the big labels are signing very little of worth, while giving the least-qualified people on earth the ability to push their garbage on the rest of us.

Case in point: Warner Bros. Records, once arguably the greatest of major labels, has, in the past few years, signed celebutard Paris Hilton, and now is rumored to have inked custom-label deals with odious gossip assclown Mario "Perez Hilton" Lavandeira Jr. and MTV's The Hills' twittish prick Spencer Pratt, the latter of which will no doubt sign his wife, the spectacularly untalented blonde celebutard Heidi Montag. Rumor has it Pratt's imprint also will release the debut album slash train wreck of the spectacularly untalented and zaftig tochis'd celebutard Kim Kardashian. That's a swirling vortex of suck. And, no, The Onion isn't running Warner Bros. now, even if it looks that way.

But that's a rant for a different time, when I feel like shooting listless and rotting carp in a barrel.

Besides, if I want to listen to "bad" music, why listen to Simon Cowell-approved junk, or Mouseketeer star turns, when there are so many great sides of exquisite awfulness available? Of course, the ones I'm talking about are the product of those "send us your poems and we'll turn them into hit records" ads that ran in the back of magazines in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Compilations like Beat of the Traps and Makers of Smooth Music turned people onto these unlikely gems of pop music wonder back in the 1990s, and I've never gotten tired of them.

The first one I remember hearing was an outright prank, the result of Los Angeles (now Santa Rosa) singer John Trubee sending a song mill a poem called "Stevie Wonder's Penis." What came back in the mail was a record titled "Peace & Love" by Ramsey Kerney, a hack-job country ditty with some tired cowpoke singing "A blind man's penis is erect because he's blind" before stumbling off into a ramble about UFOs. Understandably, it became an underground hit in L.A. in the 1980s.

Once I got hooked on songpoem records, I fell into a rabbit hole where performers like Rodney Keith Eskelin (aka Rod Keith, Rodd Rogers, et al.) Gene Marshall, Bobbi Blake and others were huge stars, and rightly so. Yeah, the arrangements can be hackneyed, and the lyrics are outright hilarious, and we're generally not talking about the kind of passion Sam Cooke mustered with the Soul Stirrers here, although there are some exceptions.

Perhaps I shouldn't sully your appreciation of hearing these brilliant creations for the first time with my critical observations. So I won't, except to say that I envy anyone hearing "Get Down and Wiggle It a Little," or "Your Body Is Making Eyes at Me," or "We Are the Men Counting Sheep, or "She Knows How to Do the Do Dee Do" for the first time. The great free-form radio station WFMU has archived several albums of songpoem greatness on its blog site, which you can download here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. At this writing, there are six compilations containing 175 cuts of songpoem weird goodness; I'll add links if and when WFMU puts new compilations up. (On edit: another volume with 27 additional cuts of songpoem greatness has been added).

So, if you're tired of what you're hearing elsewhere, go to those links and download to your heart's content, and put 'em on your iPod or whatever you use to listen to music. I try to listen to them when I'm away from traffic, like on the bike trail, because you never know when you'll burst into laughter.

And laughter is a very good thing.

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