Under-rated band: Wussy

My listening hasn't been taking me to many critically dismissed works recently, so I've decided to redefine the word "under-rated" for this post. Instead of an album rated below its worth, today I'm going to look at a band that has not been rated by enough critics at all: it's been under-rated (note the hypen). Critics who have taken the time to listen to and review Wussy's albums (specifically Franklin Soults and Robert Christgau) have generally rated them highly, but no one else seems to have heard of them at all.

Wussy's second record, Left For Dead, garnered 2 whole mentions in the 2007 Pazz and Jop Poll for a 636th place finish. And their third, eponymous album made it all the way to 109th place, with 11 mentions in 2009. I can't seem to get access to the full results to the 2005 P&J poll, but I'd be shocked if their first record, Funeral Dress, got mentioned even once on that poll. Allmusic gives their generic 3 star review to Funeral Dress and Wussy, and doesn't even bother to review Left for Dead.

Yes, I know, everyone has their pet band that know one's ever heard of, but I swear - you should really listen to Wussy.

With dueling vocalists Chuck Cheaver (whiny, little range, but somehow powerful) and Lisa Walker (beautiful, quirky, reminds me of Jenny Lewis) they call to mind Richard and Linda Thompson (a comparison I swear I hit on independently of Christgau), but the music sounds more like 90s grunge that has been freed (finally) from its angsty, teen-male origins and put to use purely for its dynamic possibilities: check out the primordially simple guitar lines and the Nirvana-like way the distorted guitars come in on "Soak it Up" (available in a crappy live version here, but seriously - download it), or "Airborne," both on Funeral Dress.
But there's a lot more to it than post- or retro-grunge. For example, there's a distinct alt-country strain in tracks like "Crooked," (check out the awesome harmonica intro), and good old-fashioned pop-rock on tracks like "Happiness Bleeds," from Wussy. Most of all, regardless of the prevailing musical style, all three albums are filled with 11-12 3 minute pop songs full of catchy hooks ("I never thought I'd drive this far without a gun"; "I wish my head had a tap/and I wish my mind had drain/so I could shunt my fears away"); crunching, intertwining guitars; and offbeat melodies. Plus they've got some of the coolest album covers around.

I'd argue that Funeral Dress and Left for Dead, in particular, are major artistic statements--far better than such critical and commerical smashes of the later 00s as (to pick a couple random examples) The White Stripes or (shudder) LCD Soundsystem. But at the very least, Wussy is a band that deserves a lot more attention.

The Bilking of Beatles fans

I've been listening to the new remasters of the Beatles albums, trying to find a single reason for their existence. The single biggest feature distinguishing these CDs from the 1987 releases is the stereo mixes of the first four albums. But of course anyone who ponied up for the two Capitol Albums box sets (or semi-legally downloaded them) already has the stereo mixes of these songs. (Parenthetically - what the hell happened to that Capitol Albums series? There are still a number of Capitol albums they never put out on CD: Yesterday and Today - probably the best set Capitol put together; Revolver; Hey Jude; The Beatles Christmas Album; At the Hollywood Bowl. In fact, some of those albums are more interesting than the ones they did put out. Oh well - end of parenthesis).

Basically, these "remastered" CDs are a bit louder, a bit bassier, and have "corrected" a few of the quirkier "mistakes" from the 1987 CDs (my favorite is the incorrectly timed fade of the double tracking on Eleanor Rigby - good thing I've got the original CD). So basically, Capitol Records has now tried to sell consumers largely the same exact music on the same format three different times in the last 20 years. Meanwhile The Beatles Christmas Album and At the Hollywood Bowl remain out of print, not to mention countless albums and songs by less "worthy" artists in the Capitol archives (just for starters, where's Joy of Cooking, The Go-Betweens 1978-1990, George Clinton You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish, or The Raspberries Starting Over?)

I guess they know that Beatles fans can be duped into buying anything.

Underrated Albums: Born Again by Randy Newman

The Reviews
The New Rolling Stone Album Guide: "Born Again went for nasty laughs, peaking with the hysterical 'It's Money that I Love' and the achingly sad 'Ghosts'" (p. 581) (3.5/5 stars)

Allmusic: "Born Again is the weakest non-soundtrack album of Randy Newman's career"
"Born Again was packed full of losers and misfits for whom Newman's contempt was unmistakable. . . . stunningly unsubtle" (2.5/5 stars)

Robert Christgau: "Hence, the content comprises ever more intricate convolutions of bad taste; rather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and me-decade assholes the way he once made you think about rednecks and slave traders and high school belles, he makes you think about how he feels about them. Which just isn't as interesting." (B+)

Musichound - no review - 2.5/5 stars

The Music

Since the above critiques focus almost entirely on the lyrical content of Born Again, I thought it might be interesting to start instead with the music.

To put it briefly, if one completely ignores the lyrics, the music on Born Again is as catchy, varied, and beautiful as any album in Newman's body of work. Balancing rockers like "It's Money That I Love" (the piano line of which Allmusic is good enough to compliment), and the pitch-perfect ELO-ism of "Story of a Rock and Roll Band," with such tender melodic gems as "Pretty Boy," "Ghosts," and "Half a Man," Born Again is a worthy musical successor to 12 Songs and Good Old Boys.

At the same time, the arrangements and production on this album are the best of his career, with the possible exception of Good Old Boys: subtler and less fussy than Trouble in Paradise, Little Criminals, and Bad Love, but fuller and more powerful than 12 Songs and Sail Away.

The Lyrics

So what about those lyrics? Once again, I'm going to look at things a bit backwards by starting with the last song on the album, "Pants." Here are the lyrics in their entirety:

Gonna take off my pants (x4)
And your mama can't stop me (x2)
And the police can't stop me
No one can stop me
Gonna do it right now (x2)
I'm gonna take off my pants
Gonna take off my pants
And your teachers can't stop me
And your priests can't stop me
And your firemen can't stop me
And the President can't stop me
Will you take off my pants? (x2)

de gustibus and all that, but to me this is minimalist humor to rival "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?". Working our way backwards, even Allmusic admits that "'William Brown' is a lovely vignette that wouldn't have been out of place on 12 Songs." Similarly, Rolling Stone agrees that "Ghosts" is "achingly sad." And we can probably ignore "Spies" (not too many secret agents out there to get offended). But that still leaves us with seven songs that fall into the complaint about "nasty laughs" and open "contempt," songs in which Newman takes on transsexuality, greed, love and marriage, corporate employees, metrosexuals, and of course ELO.

First of all, let's all agree that "The Story of a Rock and Roll Band," as hilarious as it is, isn't nasty enough toward ELO. Second, let's remember that the writer of "Rednecks," "Sail Away," and "Short People" clearly likes his humor, like his men, black. What then, is the problem? Rolling Stone's "nasty" and Allmusic's "contempt" are rather unhelpful since they equally describe Newman's other, more widely praised albums. More insightful is Christgau, who says that he had trouble with Born Again because "Newman never pinned down the distance between himself and the creeps he wrote his first-person songs about." This seems to be getting somewhere: "Sail Away" is a clear indictment of slave traders because the narrator is obviously not Newman, but "Half a Man" is more complicated because it isn't clear whether Newman is criticizing the homophobic narrator (presumably a "good" position) or the transgender title character (presumably a "nasty" position).

I would argue, however, that this ambiguity over the distance between Newman and his narrators has been at the heart of practically ever important Newman song before or since Born Again: it is the key to the transgressive power of "I Love LA," for instance, in which this listener, for one, has never been able to decide how much Newman really does love LA and how much he hates the narrator of the song. So too with the whole of Good Old Boys, in which we are encouraged to sympathize with southern racists while still finding their racism distasteful.

But the ambiguity of "I Love LA" is relatively harmless (who cares whether or not he likes the city of Los Angeles?), and the morality of Good Old Boys straightforward (racism is evil, racists maybe not). What makes Born Again different is not a different approach, but different topics. When the wife in "They Just Got Married" dies and the husband remarries for money, it is somehow more shocking than the slave trade because it is so much more ordinary. Is Newman actually in favor of marrying for money? Is he a homophobe? Does he hate Jeff Lynne personally?

Maybe - I don't know Randy Newman. Which is kind of the point. Why do we care so much what Randy Newman the human being (or even the lyricist) thinks about all of this? Primarily, I would argue, because we are uncomfortable with the idea that we might be singing along with, and therefore implicitly supporting, a bigoted or hateful point of view. But our discomfort has always been part of the point for Newman--we're supposed to think about these lyrics, not just assume that we know better than the narrators. In some ways, then, Born Again, because it has so thoroughly resisted easy explicaton, is Newman's most successful lyrical foray. It challenges his listeners to think for themselves more than any other album.

Where does this leave us? We've got some great, well-produced music, tied to complicated, dark lyrics that push us to question our own assumptions and make up our own minds. That sounds like pretty much the definition of a great album to me.

The Edges of Greatness

In my posts on underrated albums, I've been talking a lot about how critics fall into the trap of pigeonholing an artist into a particular style, and thus miss great music that doesn't fit the artist's designated style. Today I want to talk about the other side of the coin--albums that are not so much overrated, as they are, at least seemingly, superfluous to an artist's catalog, often because they hew too closely to their standard style. The trouble with this category of albums is that it is incredibly subjective, much more so than simply deciding whether an album is any good or not. Because once you've decided an album is good, you still have to figure out how and when to listen to it in the real world--in other words, how useful it is.

It might be helpful to start with an example. I love the Rolling Stones. There are at least ten Stones albums that, for me, are absolutely essential, and which I listen to all the time (in roughly descending order: Exile on Main St., Let it Bleed, Some Girls, Their Satanic Majesties Request, Sticky Fingers, Between the Buttons, Beggar's Banquet, Out of Our Heads, England's Newest Hit Makers, and Now!).

But then, what do I do with great albums like December's Children, 12 x 5, Aftermath, Tattoo You, Dirty Work, and A Bigger Bang? In practice, what I've done is purchased 3 of those 6 (December, Aftermath, and Tattoo You), but I rarely listen to them. We could argue about my selection of Stones albums, but that's not really the point right now. The point is, that for me, all 16 of the above listed albums are somewhere between great and perfect in terms of quality, but in my personal listening habits, I've made a somewhat arbitrary cutoff between them. Why? If I were to pit December's Children against a minor, non-Stones, album in my collection--let's say Sandanista! by the Clash--it might depend on the day of the week, but I would almost certainly tell you that the Stones record is objectively superior. It's got "Get Off of My Cloud," "The Singer Not the Song," some amazing covers, and it is a fabulous slice of gritty blues-rock; Sandanista! is great, but it is messy, meandering and takes way too damn long to play. But. I've put Sandanista! in my CD player many many times more often than Decemeber's Children.

So what's going on here? In this particular case, the pleasures that I find in Sandanista!--its sprawl, its crazy dub experiments, its more relaxed feel--are very particular to that record. Whereas, if I want mid-60s blues-powered Stones, I'm just much more likely to reach for Out of Our Heads or Now! More generally, I think the issue is that everyone has a different tolerance level for a particular artist or style of music. Once you've got a certain number of Stones albums in your rotation, you just don't need any more--unless of course, they turn around and do something radically new and change your perception of their music (as I argued about Their Satanic Majesties Request).

To take a different example, I have a friend who needs to have pretty much every Prince album ever recorded (some 30 or so studio albums, plus who knows how much bootleg and live material). He knows that some are much better than others, but he gets off on them all, and they are all useful to him. For myself, I have a pretty high tolerance for Prince (probably 12 or so albums) but great as they are, have no personal use for Prince, Diamonds and Pearls, or the Black Album (and I still haven't made up my mind about his most recent albums). You, the reader, may have different needs--maybe you just need Purple Rain and Sign O the Times, and you've got your Prince fix taken care of. All three of us probably agree that there are more than 2 great Prince albums--I might even be coaxed into saying that there are more than 12--but each of us has a vastly different need for Prince in our lives.

The reason I think this is worth talking about is that I think it opens up a completely different way of thinking about the way albums get rated or talked about. Most reviewers, and many fans, are interested primarily with whether an album is good or not--that is, whether it merits 4 or 5 stars, or an A, or whatever rating you give to good albums. But what I'm trying to argue is that once you've sorted out all the good albums--the albums that you subjectively think are worth listening to--you still have a problem: what to buy and what to listen to.

I don't think there is any way of codifying this into a new critical category (5 stars, but superfluous; 4 stars, essential, etc.)--as I said, it's a much more highly subjective decision than determining which albums are great in the first place. But I think it's an interesting (and possibly important) concept for listeners to be aware of. I know I, for one, often feel guilty about all the great albums I let linger on my shelves (why don't I listen to Aftermath more?). By looking at albums in terms of their utility rather than their artistic greatness, I think we can get better perspective on how and why we listen to what we do in the first place.