Pitching a Fit (Vol. 1, No. 3)

Welcome back to Pitching a Fit, a series of posts for which I’m going through Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums lists decade by decade. For this installment, we’ve reached numbers 90 - 86 on the Best of the ‘70s list…

I’m a little daunted by the task of commenting on Fela Kuti’s Zombie. The title refers not to Night of the Living Dead type ghouls but rather the armed forces of Kuti’s native Nigeria; this album, with its furiously busy rhythms and melodies, apparently functioned as such a scathing rebuke that Kuti’s compound was raided by 1000 Nigerian soldiers, who destroyed his equipment and tapes and murdered his mother, nearly doing the same to Kuti himself.

All of this makes me feel a little silly as I try to judge the music on its own merits. This is a collection of four tracks, each of them nearly a quarter of an hour, and the songs take you on sonic journeys—it takes about six minutes of the title track before any lyrics kick in, at which point the metaphor announces itself: Nigerian soldiers are zombies, marching mindlessly, doing only what they’re told. It’s a bracing concept for a song and the music is as powerful as the story behind it.

The album is certainly capital-G Great, delivering funk and jazz with a vengeance—the sort of thing I don’t typically love, but the story here makes the music more than compelling. Apparently Kuti was essentially a cult leader, with multiple dozen wives at a certain point. This is all thrilling history that lends itself to thrilling listening, and I’m really glad I had the excuse to discover it.

The next album is one I’ve had cause to discover before—one track off the 1978 LP Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, “Gut Feeling”, was featured in The Life Aquatic, so I’ve had a vague awareness of this album going back over 20 years, but I’ve never bothered with the record as a whole. It turns out “Gut Feeling” is a pretty good representative track, with the balance of the album operating on a similarly high-powered guitar rock wavelength. The cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is a true curio, as stripped back as the original is powerful, calling to mind the question of why Devo bothered covering this one. But maybe that’s a question best directed at producer Brian Eno, reemerging on this list after making an appearance with his own album at number 100. Apparently the band was resistant to Brian’s ideas—they had a sound in their heads and they wanted to stick to it, and it’s hard to blame them, though as someone who tries to trust collaborators, it does cause me frustration by proxy. If the album is a satisfying listen, who’s to say who was right?

From Devo we pivot to Giorgio Moroder and From Here to Eternity, another album released in the Star Wars-defined year of 1977. I tend to use that movie as a sort of mental yardstick between “the past” and “modernity” so it’s striking to hear something that sounds so club-ready coming out that same year. Like Lucas, Moroder moved the needle of pop culture into alignment with his own vision, and if the album has a foot in disco, it has another in the EDM of right now. It’s easy to let this one drift into background noise, but it rewards you when you dial in—it’s an impressive trick to reward both passive and active listening, but Moroder achieves it. He also achieves some pretty remarkable vocoder effects, rendering his own voice as something robotic and eerie, even when the effect is familiar from decades of use. I’d known Moroder’s name for years based on his work writing for movies, but I’m happy I got a chance to experience his pop side, too.

Brian Eno makes another appearance on the list with Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure, the group’s second album and Eno’s last as a member. The album kicks off with a blast of dance pop, “Do the Strand”, that immediately put me in a Rocky Horror mindset—it’s “a danceable solution to teenage revolution” as the lyrics put it, and if that sounds a little meaningless, apparently the band considered lyrics an afterthought on at least some tracks. Words were written deliberately on “Beauty Queen”, a track with a balance of delicacy and driving intensity that pretty well sums up my vague understanding of Roxy Music’s whole thing. “Editions of You”, meanwhile, has a hard charging guitar part that calls Devo back to my mind (which makes sense considering Eno’s association with both acts), only for “In Every Dream a Heartache” to offer something Pink Floyd-esque with its uncomfortable synths. Things get paranoid with the stalker anthem “The Bogus Man”, which features some of the freakier sax playing I’ve heard since starting this exercise, all underscored by a light and breathy vocal, and then “Grey Lagoons” offers some pure listening joy. If these guys were smart enough to subvert expectations when they cared to, they were also smart enough to cater to the listener when they were in the mood. If anything, the closing (and titular) track feels like a bit of a letdown after the “Grey Lagoons” peak—it’s a smart and cerebral song, but more of a thinker than the one that comes before. If a lot of the albums I’ve sampled from this list feel like variations on a theme, this one seems to shift with every new track, and it’s an exciting listen for at least that reason if nothing else.

For the final entry on today’s writeup, we finally hit an album I already know and love. Joni Mitchell’s Blue is one of my go-to comfort albums, and has been going back about fifteen years—I was trading music at a friend’s house when that friend’s dad walked through and said, “Ethan’s listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue? He must be very much in love.” I was, that much was true, but I’ve never quite grasped this as a hopeless romantic’s record. If anything, Blue features one of the most heart-aching songs I’ve ever loved, “River”, a song that almost hurts too much for me to enjoy. “All I Want” causes no such problems, offering one of the strongest album openers in my regular rotation, and things flow in a steady, achingly gorgeous direction from there. “He’s the warmest chord I ever heard,” Mitchell sings of her lover on “My Old Man”, and the piano part supporting the line is almost mind-bendingly beautiful. That mode alternates with a sort of folk bubbliness across the album, and Mitchell proves herself equally adept at both. It almost feels like she’s showing off, but the music is too enchanting to feel anything but sincere. If anything it’s shocking this one was made in 1971 given how timeless it feels. Mitchell has commented on how raw and unguarded the album is, with specific biographical details dotting the lyrics, and that may account for some of the power I detect. I remain very much in love with the person I was very much in love with when I discovered this album, so maybe that accounts for my ongoing affection for Joni Mitchell’s Blue. But I don’t think so. It’s just that good.

Up next time: Wire, Harry Nilsson, the Stooges, George Harrison, and David Bowie