Pitching a Fit (Vol. 1, No. 5)
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 80 - 76 on the Best of the ‘70s list…
Our last installment ended with a David Bowie album, and this installment begins with one, 1971’s Hunky Dory. I’ve made a habit of noting where Wes Anderson plucked tracks for The Life Aquatic and far be it from me to stop now: here we have not just the closing credits track, “Queen Bitch”, but also “Life on Mars?”, a song that lends itself to a transcendent moment in the movie, and one that makes any average moment of listening feel like it transcends space and time. Those strings and piano chords drive me into the stratosphere every time I listen, which is fairly often. Hearing it right on the heels of Ziggy Stardust, it’s hard not to see the album as less cohesive than what was to come, though Pitchfork gives the slight edge in quality to Hunky Dory. This feels like a deliberately more sketchy album than the concept album that followed, and I won’t pretend it gripped me as much as Ziggy did. But with tracks deliberately calling out other luminaries of the era (“Andy Warhol” is followed immediately by “Song for Bob Dylan”) it’s a time capsule if nothing else, and a totally diverting one.
Up next we have a distinction: the first album so far to send me running to Genius Lyrics. The record in question is Randy Newman’s Sail Away, the opening, titular track for which carried such clear heft that I had to read along—there’s a sonic weight to Randy’s inherently goofball vocals as he croons about what it means to be American, at least in the words of a theoretical slave trader. It’s a song with a venomous bite, one that swoons and surges at the same time. Beyond that, the songs on the first side are pretty straightforward—“Last Night I Had a Dream” describes a bad dream; “He Gives Us All His Love” describes God in all His glory as Randy sees it; I could go on. There’s a hint of a wry twinkle every time the singer opens his mouth, but something like “Old Man” could be easily mistaken for one of Newman’s Pixar tracks of decades later. The second side is more openly satirical (“Political Science” is the jauntiest tune you’ll ever hear about dropping “the big one” while “Burn On” is a tribute to Cleveland’s flaming Cuyahoga River), and I’m not sure which mode I prefer—there’s something winning about the sincerity, but something more immediately engaging about the pricklier material. The closing track, “God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind)”, feels like something of a pair with “He Gives Us All His Love”, and it’s a punchy response; where the earlier track is a slim and simple tribute, this one is uglier—funnier, certainly, but hardly pleasant. It’s a glum and gloomy note on which to end an album.
If Randy Newman left things on a down note, Fela Kuti livens them right back up with the title track off the two-track Expensive Shit. This is my second encounter with Kuti after his album Zombie a few days ago. The “shit” in question is apparently pretty literal—after the police planted a joint on him, Kuti ate it, forcing the officers to await a valuable bowel movement (I guess Kuti managed some kind of fecal bait-and-switch and got off scot free). The title track is almost fifteen minutes long, and it takes its time exploring the progression before the words come in, those words being more variations on a theme than conventional songwriting. The second half is devoted to “Water No Get Enemy”, another exercise in chords, and a groovy, exciting one at that. This is an album to sink into, riding the wave into the musical ether, and I’m glad to have spent a little more time in Kuti’s company.
After a brief break, we have more David Bowie to contend with as Aladdin Sane joins the list at number 77. This time I go in without any preexisting affection for any of the songs, most of which were apparently written while Bowie traveled America on the Ziggy Stardust tour. This album represents Bowie’s response to the American response to the glam movement in the UK—he saw the New York Dolls in concert, which felt like a direct answer to his contemporaries’ work, and he decided to answer them back. This all puts me in mind of Velvet Goldmine, a movie that imagines a version of Bowie not just being influenced by proto-punk but getting psychosexually wrapped up therein. Due to this being an album of response rather than restatement, it’s got a lot of styles working under one umbrella, notably experimental keyboard parts from Mike Garson. It feels more cohesive than Hunky Dory, a solid and sturdy rock album, but I can’t say any songs jumped out at me the way the best tracks on Ziggy Stardust did. Maybe I'm taking Bowie for granted after getting hit by three albums in two days; I imagine my response might be warmer if Aladdin Sane was tucked a little further down the ranked list. As is, I probably risk underselling a clearly great album, but so be it.
It’s strange to get this deep into the listening project only to encounter a song that’s not just familiar but completely ubiquitous. But that’s what happened with the second track off Blondie’s Parallel Lines: the riff kicked in and I was flooded by associations with “One Way Or Another”. It’s impossible to just hear this track as the second song on a great album, it sticks out too much through use and overuse. It’s a shame to be jerked out of the flow so profoundly given that the opening track, “Hanging On the Telephone”, had ensnared me in the strange, punky, synthy sound of Blondie. I could settle back in on the far side of “One Way Or Another”, and enjoy apparently the worst-behaved, least-skilled musicians the producer, Mike Chapman, had ever worked with, the group’s studio behavior reportedly alternating between drug abuse and verbal/physical assault. If the recording process was rough and rowdy, it all came together into a cohesively rough, appealingly rowdy end product. “Heart of Glass”, coming a few tracks from the end, is almost as overplayed as “One Way Or Another”, and it’s hard not to be once again jerked out of the flow, but that's hardly the album’s fault. It’s tough to quite know how to classify this one, but maybe the point is that it just sounds like Blondie, and that Blondie sounds pretty good.
Up next time: Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Van Halen, King Crimson, and James Brown