33 rebellions per minute
"a weird-looking hollow box with lots of lights on it flashing"
2001
Atom + His Package, REDEFINING MUSIC
I mostly accept that my friends are as apolitical (a side-effect) as they are whimsical (a trait I select for). It's probably for the best: whatever satisfactions political discussion may give me, it does tend to remind me of things that make me unhappy, which is kind of the opposite of the purpose of having friends. But they've probably all heard my rant about one particular government program I advocate, one of which life gives me all the unwanted reminders I need. Happily for my credibility, I was advocating this program back in high school, long before I suspected that I would ever be a personal victim of its absence. In short form, I believe that the government should replace most welfare by providing a job to anyone who wants one; that the jobs should come with transportation, flexible hours, and perhaps reduced hours for the parents of young children; that the jobs provided should pay something reasonable (say, $7 to $9/hr, depending on local cost of living, and increasing automatically with inflation). I see no shortage of useful programs the government could embark on with these laborers, tasks that will never be performed as a result of free-market capitalism: reforestation, the creation of electric rail systems, the provision of nursing and teacher aides who aren't running frantically off their feet. I'm all for entrepeneurship, and the popular ideal would still, of course, be work in the capitalist system; but private companies would be forced to make their jobs appealing enough to entice workers away from this socialized sector. No one would be forced to take or keep a private sector job they hated. No one would starve or lose a home because they couldn’t find even a hateful job.
To me, this should be an idea that most people should go “Yeah! Right on!” at, as a visceral reaction. It is, actually, a conservative and American idea: everyone should have the right to work their way to a good (or decent at least) life. Instead, the people I present it to tend suddenly to become detail-oriented policy wonks. Their questions are usually intelligent and challenging: some examples and my rough-draft answers include
- How would these programs avoid degenerating into mindless workfare: “We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us”, in the standard Soviet joke?
Two precautions would be absolutely necessary. Managers would need to be assigned goals, purposeful goals rather than arbitrary numbers to be met with arbitrary cheats; and managers would need a power, scaled to their teams’ meeting of these goals, to deny wages or give bonuses to slacking or achieving workers. I don’t personally have the managerial expertise to design the system for you, but good managers should be able to run an imperfect system that’s no less fair or motivating than most of the private workplaces I’ve worked at. And after all, a workfare system that occasionally fails and treats some poor people unfairly is better than the present non-system which treats almost all of the would-be workfare recipients unfairly. - Wouldn’t this program be inflationary?
At first, yes. But far less than you’d assume. Inflation occurs when more money chases the _same_ amount of goods. Whereas by paying living wages to the unemployed and unhappily employed, my program would send more money in pursuit of _more_ goods – food or medicine or housing that aren’t currently purchased at all. - What if, instead of improving working conditions and salary to keep workers in the private sector, corporations simply moved their jobs overseas?
This might not be a serious problem. For one thing, many private sector jobs are still ones that need to take place where they do. For another, teams of researchers and experimenters have tried very hard to find evidence for the assumption that lower salaries and worse worker treatment increases profit, but the evidence is non-existent, and some evidence suggests that better-paid, better-treated workers produce _more_ profit. But if necessary, the U.S. should resort to tariffs against nations which persist in ignoring worker rights. I don’t like tariffs, but it can fairly be noted that the U.S., Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, China, and other rapidly modernizing economies of the 20th century grew fastest when protected by tariffs, and that those which later adopted freer trade policies quickly adapted to slower growth or (in Latin America and Africa) to a reversal of tariff-protected progress. The British Empire was built on tariffs and regulated trade, then declined and collapsed after David Ricardo’s free-trade theories became policy. So dogma on free trade seems inappropriate, especially in support of “economic growth” that often amounts, in the 3rd world, to industrial slavery. - How would you pay for such a huge program?
Ooh, a toughie, because even with cautious assumptions about how many workers would use such a jobs program, it would almost certainly cost more than the military budget. Within a few years, zero unemployment would lead to large savings in crime prevention, jails, and health costs (as people with money can afford nutrition and preventative medicine), while reforestation would raise money through more productive agriculture, less catastrophic weather damage, and fewer economic losses due to worker illness. But some sort of tax would certainly be required. I’d start with a 0.5% tax on all currency trades, recommended as an economic stabilizer by several Nobel Prize-winners in Economics, and I’d probably boost the income tax substantially on those who can afford it. Or, protect the environment by taxing the emission of greenhouse gases.
The fact that my friends, a smart and good-natured audience, have refused to become converts to the idea might be due to their finding my answers to these questions inadequate. Quite possibly. What I really suspect, though, from my own experience handling odd new ideas, is that the problem lies in the sheer number of questions they’ve asked. Surely, they’re thinking, he seems to be improvising a lot. If it was really a good idea he wouldn’t have had to defend it so hard; if it was a really good idea it wouldn’t seem so radical. Isn’t that kind of change risky?
The problem, of course, is in which ideas get subjected to a barrage of questions and which don’t. Say I were to propose, as a change-bringing troublemaker, “We ought to create a system in which everyone has to scramble for a chance to work for a living. People who cannot independently find work, regardless of the reason for their failure, will beg for charity or die; people temporarily without work would rely entirely on their own devices to find it, even while social scorn and role confusion leaves them prone to severe depression. The question of which jobs are worth doing should be decided on the basis of which jobs can produce products for sale. All jobs should be managed so as to produce the largest possible gap between the value of the products produced and the amount of money paid to the workers. To keep the system stable, an appointed government official – call him the ‘Federal Reserve Chairman’, say – would be in charge of guaranteeing that a minimum of 1/10 of the job-seeking population would be unable to find full-time work”. I don't think anyone would tolerate _that_ ridiculous system. Except that we do, because it was handed to us.
There is no ideology, in music, as importantly stupid as the belief that people must struggle and earn (often by a ritualized process of sucking up) the right to give their labor away at bargain prices. But that doesn’t mean there are no irrational litmus tests for songwriters. The most comparable and bothersome is the assumption that songs are about large emotions. Think about it: virtually every song on the radio is about love, heartbreak, lust, anger, or self-hate. Detours exist for friendship, hero-worship, existential doubt, status anxiety, forgiveness, and proclamations that the heart of rock and roll is still beating; you shouldn’t have any trouble naming a few songs each about those. But even these songs tend to be couched in generalities. The Spice Girls’ rules for friendship in “Wannabee” are mostly sensible, but you couldn’t draw even the dot outline of a person from them; Don Henley’s “Forgiveness” is alright as pop wisdom, but it’s hardly clear what transgression the song refers to. Pop songs exist to be stolen liberally for the diary outbursts of the largest possible population. Bands that sing about peaches or blue canary nightlights can expect, even if they luck into the popular eye, a couple of minor hits, a following of social outcasts, and the continued threat of their record label refusing to release their next album.
The problem with this rule is that it excludes as irrelevant the large majority of people’s experiences. You can’t just write intelligently about your life and expect to be taken seriously: no, you must go out, struggle, and earn the kind of life that is deemed songworthy. Atom, whose real name I might look up sometime, writes in the eleven non-cover songs on REDEFINING MUSIC about
- A guy he knows who has a great sense of humor but for some reason doesn’t show it around Atom
- Having a good hand in cards
- Hearing a great chorus at a concert and wishing he’d written it first
- People who use their Anarchy tattoos as an excuse to be thieving irresponsible dickheads
- Being stuck working with older versions of the same sorts of people you disliked in high school
- A friend who used to have a really cool band
- Biking for fun, then using exercise as an excuse to replenish calories with junk food
- Being awkward at a party and suspecting he’s already passed up an important romantic opportunity
- Wanting to challenge racism without being denounced as “Politically Correct”
- Wondering if it’s better to die before your friends or after
- Maps and giving/receiving directions
In fairness, REDEFINING also sounds like novelty music. Atom’s voice is tuneful but boyish, nasal, and whiny. His songs are mostly built from cheap, trebly, fast-paced synthesizer parts that haven’t been in vogue since Squeeze’s “Cool for Cats” and “Slap and Tickle”, two decades ago, though Barcelona and Magnetic Fields keep the style active. Even the fuzz-guitars sound like toys, the occasional girl vocals from Aliza Rabinowitz sound wispy and pre-pubescent, and the melodies bob happily somewhere between the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, the Dead Milkmen, They Might Be Giants, and Weezer. The verse/chorus transitions are the most amateurishly patched-together mismatches since TMBG’s debut, and least TMBG’s seemed intentional, for comic effect. Song structures are jury-rigged and contorted to let Atom flit among three different perspectives in “Anarchy Means I Litter”, or to let him meet an objection he suddenly thought of, debate-like, in the midst of “If You Own the Washington Redskins, You’re a Cock”. Three dignified acoustic-guitar songs by the Mountain Goats – another band name that disguises one too-bright soloist, John Darnielle of Iowa – are reworked into wind-up punk (“Seed Song”), rumbling piano with beatbox (“Going to Georgia”), and a synthetic bass attack like a smiling Linkin Park (“Alpha Desperation March”). And I fear that even the lowest common Whitney Houston loyalist would spot the grammar and meter issues in the quatrain “I like sports, so there are some things/ I force myself to miss/ Like I never met an athlete I like/ and hockey in Texas”.
But that summary completely short-changes Atom’s talent. First of all, he writes indelible choruses. For me the ones that raced merrily through my head after only two listens were the foursquare Green Day/ Everclear stomp of “Undercover Funny”; the manic recitations of “so we sent him away!” that he re-interprets into “Seed Song”; “…Redskins”’s muscular leaning into “Rah Rah Rah for the Carolina Negroes with our beatbox cheers and our fake foam afros”; and the pretty lilt where Rabinowitz sings the chorus of “Upside Down From Here”. Most of the other choruses are just as suited for quick memory, be it the punk thrash of “Cross-Country Atom and His Package Tour Via Bicycle”, the light syncopations of “Trump”, or the discount grandeur of “Atari Track and Field/ New Controller Conspiracy”. Atom also deserves credit for genuinely inventive sound programming: I didn’t realize how many kinds of burbling a computer could emit. Even his vocals show skill, reigning the awkward speech patterns of his verses into (when appropriate) a gawky rhythmic flow, putting beat and pseudo-swagger into “With a fellow, I run a record label/ and its name is File 13/ He’s a talk dark Arkansassian motherfucker/ and I couldn’t say for sure if he actually likes me”. And when heavy emotions do crop up – the longing of "Atari...", or the averted suicide and rush of joy in “…Georgia” – they’re sung with the straightforward dignity of someone who’s never needed to exaggerate feeling just to write a song.
Nick Hornby’s narrator asks, in High Fidelity, whether people like songs about romantic failure because that’s what they live, or enact romantic failure because that’s what all the songs are about. The controlled experiment, of course, would randomly assign half the subjects to a life listening to pop radio as his narrator knows it (or to the more volatile equivalent of today), and half the subjects to a life listening to a pop radio centered on cheerful, curious reflections about whatever crosses the narrator’s head – a world where my friend Kurt, who misheard Nine Inch Nails’ “Happiness in Slavery” as “Happy with the Scenery”, would’ve been hearing correctly. We can’t perform this experiment, for a lot of obvious and banal reasons, but we also can’t because the supply of material doesn’t exist. Aside from Atom, Too Much Joy (his guitar-rock equivalent), Crash Test Dummies (the “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” band), Cindy Lee Berryhill (a folkie who musically channels Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson), and perhaps Moxy Fruvous, I don’t think Intelligent Mundanity exists as a songwriting style.
I don’t know whether Atom himself considers the Package a joke act – he seems to think of it as punk rock – but I’ve never heard him discussed without the context of “funny/ not funny”, without the presence or absence of a surprised pleasure that the songs outlive the “gags” so nicely. And true, his hyperactive version of Madonna's "Open Your Heart" is absolutely a joke, a funny one made immortal by the fact that it's a musical improvement on the original. But the implication I take from the discussions is that we haven’t learned, in a musical context, to tell the good-hearted moral inquiry of "...Redskins" or the storytelling eagerness of "Shopping Spree" from, say, Al Yankovic rapping on empty about the Flintstones. If the High Fidelity narrator is onto anything, and how could he not be, what kind of preparation for a good life is that?!?
If it really must come down to a misunderstood choice, though, I think I’d like to try having major-key synthesizers be the standard, and wounded bass grinds be the exception. I want lyricists in low-insight moods to do more songs about detachable penises or Japanese-speaking robots, and fewer about breakdowns or being ugly on the inside. Go ahead and list your least favorite joke-songs and argue with me, but remember to list your least favorite emotion songs, and compare. Of course NEVERMIND and LITTLE EARTHQUAKES are brilliant records, and of course there are times when they speak to us, to me, in ways the scattered low-key alertness of REDEFINING MUSIC couldn’t. But we teach ourselves to speak back by imitating what we hear.
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