It sounds familiar
But it doesn't sound the same
It sounds familiar
It's just oblivion miles away
-- Men Without Hats, "Mother's Opinion."
THESIS STATEMENT: Men
Without Hats are one of the most underrated, and overlooked musical acts
of the 1980s. Their music was cerebral, angry, funny, sometimes sad,
and then later emotional, sweet, witty, and-- amazingly enough, with Pop
Goes The World, simultaneously very light and fun and extremely dark
and bleak. But more about Pop Goes The World, later.
AMPLIFICATION/RESTATEMENT
OF THESIS: Men Without Hats managed to sit exactly on the border
between intellectual art-music and pure pop bliss. Eventually, most
bands either land on one side of the fence or another-- even the bands
that start out wanting to straddle the border. Even "accessible art
bands" usually end up either becoming art bands, or just making forgettable
pop music-- and when art bands decide to settle with pop music, it's almost
always forgettable. But not Men Without Hats. They had it both
ways. And it is, probably, for this reason, that they are mostly
forgotten. Or when they are remembered they're mindlessly relegated
to the world of techno-kitsch-- and sometimes even by an electronica /
dance-pop culture that should really know better. (But, ah well,
that's their problem. I guess.) In short, Men Without Hats
are too poppy for the so-called "intellectuals," and too smart and intellectual
for the pop music crowd who want their hits to be fast, lean, mindless,
and disposable. And, while Men Without Hats are fast and lean, they
are anything but mindless and disposable.
STRATEGY OF DISCOURSE:
Loose, sloppy, and confused.
CLARIFICATION: I'm
going to be talking, mostly, about the first four Men Without Hats albums,
in this little essay. They are:
Freeways,
Rhythm Of Youth,
Folk Of The 80s (Part
III),
and, last but definitely
not least,
the utterly astonishing
Pop
Goes The World.
The other two Men Without
Hats albums, I really won't be talking about. They are: The Adventures
Of Women And Men Without Hate In The 21st Century, and Sideways.
The
Adventures... is good, but not as good as previous efforts. They're
leaning a bit too heavily on their pop side on Adventures.
And, while there are a few excellent tracks on it-- "In the 21st Century"
and "Here Come The 90s," are brilliant and the "21st Century Safety Dance"
is cool-- for the most part it's just sort of mediocre. (And why
some singleminded idiots want to call the damn thing The Adventures
Of Women And Men Without HATS In The 21st Century utterly escapes me.
But, that's another story....) And Sideways is a weird and
alienating departure from electronics into the world of grunge-- or maybe
it'd be better to call it garage pop-- that prefigures Moby's Animal
Rights experiment by about 5 years. However, Moby does it better.
But the Men were there first.
And, I won't be talking
at all about Ivan's solo album The Spell, except to say-- right
here, in fact-- that it does mark the beginnings of a return to form.
QUESTION: "But, why should I care?"
ANSWER:
At this point, I should
just grab a cd and give it to you and say:
"Just listen to this.
Keep in mind where we are in the world, right now, and where we've been
for the past 10 years, and listen to this. Listen to both the music
and the lyrics." But, I can't really say that to you, what with me
being just a bunch of words on a page (or screen-- same thing)-- and you
(chances are) being some anonymous someone I've never met-- and will never,
ever meet-- way over there, in some undisclosed location of the planet,
reading this right now. (And, chances are, if I do know you,
you've probably already have heard some version of the speech I'm about
to give anyway, so, if I do know you, I've probably given you a
cd and said "Listen to this..." etc.). Anyway:
Since I can't do any that
stuff up there I've just gotta do the best I can, here, right now.
And so:
THE MUSIC:
It's all pretty much solid,
accessible, up-tempo techno-pop stuff, with a few experimental flourishes
here and there. Ultimately, the music wouldn't be remarkable except
for the perfect precision with which it's played. Each note is exactly
where it should be, nothing is off-- and nothing is wasted. There
is no fat in any of the songs.
(And also, the complaint--
by some-- that the music is a little too tailored to the mindless repetition
of the dancefloor, is sheer baloney. I mean, how many 3-to-4-minute
techno songs do people really dance to, both these days and way back in
the beginnings of the scene? I mean, seriously, 3-to-4 minutes is
hardly enough time to even work up a sweat at a club. Even back in
the early days, the stuff people were dancing to more often than not were
the remixes on the all 12'' singles-- songs that were 5-to-10 minutes long.
3-to-4 minutes is a radio single, not a club hit. Get with it.)
And so, the music is lean
and precise-- no flab-- and each repetition is exactly where it should
be, and no song lasts too long. And the precision of the music isn't
all due to computers and sequencing-- although some of it definitely is
(but do keep in mind you can still screw up sequencing-- I've heard that
done). Even the naturalistic instruments that show up, guitars, flutes,
etc. are well orchestrated. And, again, employed with lean precision.
Even at it's most ornate (Pop Goes The World), no element is wasted
in this music.
The lead singer's voice--
his name is Ivan Doroschuk-- is clipped and cool-- very deadpan-- but also,
sometimes he seems amused-- like he's in on a joke, like he knows something
you don't know. Occasionally, he gives a strange yelp. He seems
to have some sort of indefinable accent. At times he seems British,
and at others, vaguely Eastern European. Occasionally, even French.
Truth is, he's a Canadian Francophone Ukrainian. This may account
for the strangeness of his vocal delivery.
And Ivan's deadpan delivery
always works in his favour. When he wants to be cool and detached,
he's cool and detached. But when he wants to be emotional, he comes
off as haunted. Sometimes he sounds like he's keeping his guard up,
like he doesn't want to let all the sadness and anger show-- but little
bits of it begins to slip through the cracks.
Also, when he wants to,
he can also sound obsessive and paranoid.
And on Pop Goes The World
he even manages to seem happy. But even when Ivan seems happy, he
also seems slightly sad.
THE ALBUMS:
Freeways: It's
2 eps put together, and it makes a nice little unit. Side One (subtitled
"Folk of The 80s") is the Folk Of The 80s ep, containing 4 cool
dissections of postmodern life entitled "Modern(e) Dancing," "Utter Space,"
"Antarctica," and "Security (Everybody Feels Better With)." The lyrics
are witty, paranoid, and pessimistic, and the songs are danceable.
Most of the Men's main themes are here: the alienation of modern life,
paranoia, a search for some sort of meaning and release. The phrase
"modern dance," or "modern(e) dancing," or "dansé moderne" will
show up in other songs, signaling an obsession with the act of "dancing"
as an abstract form of play / escapism. Do people dance simply to
socialize and have fun, or is it deeper than that? Maybe it's a way
to escape the real world, to hide and shirk responsibility. But maybe
it's also a way to create a protective bunker around yourself to keep yourself
safe from the horrors of the 20th century. Or is dancing a symbol
of some sort of youth we're always on the verge of losing, but never truly
letting go of? It's actually all these things, and more.
Side Two contains 4 versions
of "Freeways" in three languages (making it, of course, the Freeways
ep). There's English, French, and German. However, the last
version of "Freeways," with its lyrics alternating in those aforementioned
three languages brings things together, ties everything up into one master
narrative. It's like an international updating of Kraftwerk's hit
"Autobahn," and, in my opinion, much more interesting. By placing
4 versions of "Freeways" on one side of an album, Ivan brings the same
sort of obsessive eye to the act of driving that J.G. Ballard brings to
the car accident in his novel Crash. And the music, as always,
is very precise, clean, and even witty in places.
All four "Freeways" flawlessly
evoke the feeling of an endless drive down a concrete megahighway.
And the Freeways
album is Men Without Hats at their most Kraftwerkian-- but they're still
functioning in a very personal, idiosyncratic mode.
Just to let you know, though,
I'm talking about the version of Freeways that's on cassette.
The vinyl release only has one version of the "Freeways" song-- the English
one-- and, frankly, this greatly lessens its impact. Also, the Freeways
compilation was released after the success of
Rhythm of Youth and
Folk
of The 80s (part III), causing many people to believe it's the 3rd
Men Without Hats album, when in fact it's really some of their earliest
stuff.
Anyway, moving on:
Rhythm of Youth:
There's more to this album
than "The Safety Dance." And there's more to "The Safety Dance" than
a cheezy video where Ivan flails around like pretentious mediaeval fruit
and dances with a midget. Although that is a part of it, too.
Sad to say.
And, yeah, the video is
irritating, but the song is infectious. Some might also say irritating,
as well. But:
"The SAFETY Dance."
Think about that for a minute.
What does this phrase really mean?
A desire for safety-- naturally.
And you look for safety whenever you're faced with some sort of danger,
whether real or imagined.
So, there's danger.
But, what sort of danger?
The danger is never really
made clear. But it still seems to be ever-present. A kind of
creeping menace that permeates "modern(e)" life. And with danger
comes fear. And it doesn't really have to be fear of a nuclear war--
although you can read "The Safety Dance" as some kind of reaction to nuclear
war paranoia-- and some have-- but it could be a fear of something else.
But it's never really defined. But, it's everywhere. This feeling
of fear.
So, what do you do to escape
this fear?
In the world of "The Safety
Dance" (and the world of Men Without Hats) there is no escape. All
there is, is dancing. Club culture. A chance to let down your
hair and just party. But the party is shallow, temporary-- even though
there is, through the act of dancing, a half-formed desire for some
kind of revolution. But the revolution is just a revolution into
escapism. A kind of tuning in and dropping out. And, unfortunately,
ignoring this vague omnipresent danger doesn't make it go away.
And, so, the narrator of
"The Safety Dance" is obsessed with dancing. And people who don't
dance... well... they're just non-entities ("'cause your friends don't
dance & if they don't dance / they're no friends of mine"). The
politics of this song is double-edged, because while there is some sort
of implied political (or social) movement, a mass culture (because every
group of people doing the exact same thing forms a mass culture, and every
type of mass culture is a type of political movement), it is still just
a culture of dance, of play. And while there is a political motion
at work, it's still not pro-active. It's a repetitious group activity.
But it still does provide
a type of solace, a type of temporary safety against an unbeatable foe.
And there's more I can say
about this song, but I just don't have the space, here.
(For example, check out
the line "everybody look at your hands." This line seems utterly
nonsensical until you think of the dance culture "The Safety Dance" is
commenting on, and then it makes sense. The "hands" line seems
to be a reference to some sort of early form of "vogueing," that weird
pose-dance where everybody freezes in place. And because when you
vogue, the idea behind your freezing is to mimic well known photographs
of famous celebrities, hand position becomes very important-- or at least
that's what I've been told. And vogueing is something Madonna would
eventually pick up on almost a decade later-- and then milk into nausea.
So, the "Safety Dance" is
a type of vogueing. And so, safety-- or at least a temporary escapism--
can be found in mimicking the media, or whatever public figures you choose
to identify with.)
The bottom line is "The
Safety Dance" is both a critique and celebration of the very club culture
Men Without Hats seems to court. It is neither totally positive,
nor totally negative. It is situated between. And the critique
hidden in "The Safety Dance" expands into a more global metaphor: all the
little pointless things we do every day to try and forget the tensions
of work, school, or the perpetual wars overseas and at home are "safety
dances." They're meaningless, fun, and yet necessary routines that
keep us shut off from the horror of the world in order to keep us sane.
And these "safety dances" can take all any form, from obsessing with tv,
to going to the bar, to vague, unfocused political activism, and much more.
But there's more to Rhythm
Of Youth than just this one song:
(Just a few highlights,
here, now.)
"Ban The Game." The
album's prologue. Piano and vocals. About 40- seconds long.
It's short, schizophrenic-seeming and cryptic. I don't want to talk
about it much, but it does set the mood for the rest of the album.
"I Got The Message."
A critique of marriage culture, of the act of purposely, robotically fitting
in, settling down, giving up your youth for something lesser, falling into
the traps of society: "they got this thing they call the rhythm of
life / it says to settle down & get a dog & a wife / & everybody's
doing it all over the land / et oui je ne comprends pas oh yes i don't
understand."
"The Great Ones Remember."
Cryptic and paranoid, "The Great Ones Remember" seems to be about unfocussed
anger, paranoia, and dread. Also a (failing) search for meaning and
hope, and a distrust of authority. Sort of a Fear And Trembling
for the '80s club set.
"Ideas For Walls."
A weird and witty song about architecture that quietly (or maybe bouncily)
recalls J.G. Ballard's obsession with the geometrical placement of corners,
hyperreality, and constructed environments, as well as functioning as a
metaphor for breaking through constricting mental spaces.
"I Like." An angry,
ironic dissection of the then emerging, now ubiquitous culture of the over-educated,
upper-middle-class, bored early 20s pseudointellectual pseudo-celebrity.
"I Like" is also the song that introduces Tony.
Now, I'm not really sure
who Tony is (he's more of a concept than a character) but he makes cameos
in the next two albums as well. His continual presence seems in some
way significant, so I'm including him, here, too. I think he might
be some sort of Everyman metaphor. Whoever he is, he seems to exist
only to be menaced. At first, he's taken away, and something is done
to him. And, next album, when he returns from wherever "they" took
him, he's extremely frightened, and slightly crazy. And, when he
shows up in Pop Goes The World (the most intellectual and emotional
of all the Men Without Hats albums) he's simply a reference.
Tony is a perfect Everyman. Moving from fear into the theoretical,
he becomes a metaphor for the West's slide through the 1980s into the 21st
Century.
Anyway, moving on:
Folk Of The 80s (Part
III) continues and concludes the loose trilogy begun with Freeways
and is quite possibly the most significant of the three. The tone
of the album is still dancy and witty, still playful, but the mood is darker.
Folk Of The 80s (Part
III) opens with "No Dancing," a short, desperate prologue. The
artificial safety of the Safety Dance no longer applies. There is
no safety, no solace, real or manufactured. "No Dancing" is reminiscent
of "Ban The Game," but angrier, lonelier, and more despairing.
From the prologue we go
to the bouncy and hyperkinetic "Unsatisfaction." Underneath its driving
rhythm (or maybe supported by it) are lyrics that are a cry for something--
anything-- real. Anything at all. Because postmodern life is
hollow and confusing, reality (or "answers") can never be pinned down.
And so all that's left is anxiety, a longing for truth, and then death.
Track 3, again, very uptempo:
"Where Do The Boys Go?" paints a picture of society wandering in circles,
singing endlessly for no reason whatsoever, losing control of its humanity
and culture. And everyone is caught in the circularity of song, endlessly
repeating meaningless tasks, heads "filled with things / that didn't matter
anyway."
And then: "Mother's
Opinion," a brooding, 8-minute techno-dirge where "Mother" knows best.
Mother is unchanging, an eternal provider and whore, completely in control.
Here, oblivion is "miles away," always kept distant by the monolithic Mother.
While there is a sense of safety in this song, Mother's idea of safety
is restrictive, smothering. Now, even longed-for safety turns into
crushing oppression.
Then "Eurotheme."
An instrumental that, while upbeat, echoes the generic loneliness of 80s
Europop. Synthesizers do have emotions, and most of them are
sad. This takes us to:
"Messiahs Die Young," where
the glory of messiahhood is rejected for fear of death. It's a song
about desperately trying to find happiness through giving up, a cry for
an anonymity that will never come. Maybe lyrically the happiest thing
on this album. But that's not saying much.
After "Messiahs" comes "I
know Their Name" which hammers home the fact that everyone is a global
citizen now-- whether they want to be one or not. It's an obsessive
chant. Ivan recognizes a family from his past-- they're in the newspaper,
for some undisclosed reason-- and suddenly life is worth living.
Knowing someone famous is just as good as being famous, even if it's someone
in a meaningless local paper. It doesn't matter. You take what
you get. You try to be happy. In the end, the obsessiveness
of this song is wearing, and desperate, and paranoid, and ultimately sad.
Even though it's one on the most joyous, bouncy tracks on the whole album.
Then:
"Folk of The 80s."
Before Momus proclaimed
electronic music as the new folk, Men Without Hats did it in-- appropriately
enough-- 1984.
(But don't get me wrong--
and once again in *30* it's time to shamelessly kiss Momus's ass-- this
isn't to denigrate Momus in any way. Nick Currie's achievements are
awe-inspiring. I still stick by my claim that he is one of the--
very-- few bonafide geniuses working in music today. And I'm also
pretty sure he came up with his concept of techno-folk fusion independently.
And even if he didn't, so what? He codified the idea and put it into
practice in a way that Men Without Hats-- or anyone else for that matter--
never did. But:)
In a brilliant Ballardian
coup, Men Without Hats acknowledge that it's the buildings that matter,
now-- the city. The world of the city is the real world, and it's
the culture of the city, not the culture of the country that has priority.
The 1960s are over and we're all urbanites-- or at least the people who
matter are urbanites. "[T]he folk of the 80s is the folk of the cities
/ look how the county was the folk of the 60s." There was a place
for the "country," and that was the 1960s, but now we've moved beyond that
decade into something new, and we better acknowledge it. This is
a highly technological world-- in a way that even the '60s (which were
technological) weren't-- and, no matter how much certain Luddite factions
want to regress, there just is no going back.
By placing the idea of folk
culture into an urban setting, Ivan privileges the city over the country.
Folk culture isn't just a style of art or music-- that's always been an
incorrect usage of the term. Folk culture is the culture of the masses,
the culture possessed or produced by the majority of the people in a given
society. In the past, folk culture has been relegated to primitivism
because the majority of the people in any given society were primitives.
I mean, when you have a handful of kings and nobles composing symphony
orchestras and epic poetry, and hundreds of thousands (if not millions)
of peasants plunking simplistic tunes on lutes and singing about sheep,
the sheep and the lutes become the folk culture. However, if it had
ended up the other way around, that it was the peasants that were composing
for orchestras and writing epic poetry, and the empowered minority was
singing about sheep, the orchestras and the epics would be the "folk" culture
of that society. Therefore, if the majority of people are living
in cities, and are technological, that becomes the "folk" culture of that
society, and the culture of the "country" becomes the culture of minority.
By the same token, if in
the 1960s there occurred a mass uprising and the majority of the dominant
culture of the time began listening to acoustic ballads about politics
(like Bob Dylan, for example) and longing for a country life, then the
acoustic ballads (which people commonly and erroneously refer to as "folk"
music) and the longing for country life falls under the umbrella of "folk
culture." But when support for that behavior and / or aesthetic is
replaced by something else, that something else becomes the new "folk."
This is why, right now,
Pink or Janet Jackson are more true "folk artists" than Hayden or Richard
Thompson. (Hell, even Ani Difranco moved away from harshly plunking
on a detuned guitar into more interesting, experimental territories.)
And this is simply because more people buy Pink or Janet Jackson albums.
This means more people share the Pink or Janet Jackson aesthetics
at this current time, and that elevates them to the status of "folk" art.
"Folk" is determined by the number of people who relate to the art as opposed
to those who aren't interested in it.
And, so, the concept of
"folk" is culturally dependent and liquid. Different cultures have
different concepts of what the current "folk" art is. Therefore,
in the Western world, where most people are urbanized, the "folk" of the
80s is the "folk" of the city.
And Ivan is angry, desperate,
tired, all but given up. He's been swallowed by meaningless fashion.
He's paranoid. He's even wearing plaid ("I wear a construction /
Lumberjacking shirt / And I don't really like it / But the effect seems
to work / With all of my friends now / It's the uniform of today / And
I can't get away now / So I just want to say / That the folk of the 80s..."--
Ivan seems to've predicted that plaid would be the in thing almost a full
decade before the world was swallowed up by grunge fashion).
And the folk of the '80s
has consumed him, and everyone else, like The Blob. And he's part
of the world of the city, now-- we all are-- and even if we don't live
in the city, we still define ourselves by the city's absence-- and
you can't grow a beard without being called a hippy. And you can't
cut your beard without being called a hippy. No matter what you do--
show any emotion or follow any culture other than the current trend-- you're
put down-- and you're called a hippy. It's silly line and an absurd
concept, but it's also the fashionable derogatory catch phrase of the hour--
even now. Back in the 1980s sentiments about hippies seemed kind
of weird, but witty and angry-- but now there's even more resonance to
Ivan's words. Suddenly they conjure up images of Eric Cartman going
"Goddamn hippy," or of rednecks and businessmen mocking scruffy and patchouli-soaked
G8 protesters.
And after all, isn't there
some sort of validity in directing a mixture of anger, and world-weary
cynicism towards the neo-hippies of today (as opposed to the neo-hippies
of the 1980s)? I mean, after all, the 1960s did betray themselves
and turning from their ideals of peace and change into the drug, rape,
and murder-soaked '70s, and then from there into the hypercorporate, Reaganomic
/ Thatcherian '80s. Almost any '60s veteran who hasn't chemically
burned out his or her higher brain functions will tell you that most of
the social changes of the time were already in the works, and that the
mass protests started out honest and altruistic and then degenerated into
Roman orgy free-for-alls, and that most of the time the 1960s was a grimy,
filthy nightmare filled with overdoses, venereal disease, mental collapse,
and horror. Most people who remember the 1960s with any sort of lucidity
will tell you that the positive spirit of change and progress was actually
over after a couple of years, and that the rest was a slow slide into self-parody
and naive, sheep-like lethargy and drug-gobbling.
And, but, now, "it's not
that you don't want to work / It's just that you're lazy." And, you're
going insane. And, you can change your mind and your life at a drop
of a hat, become another person overnight because, hell, that's what's
fashionable now-- identity is malleable and decentred. And change
is hip-- which of course renders it meaningless.
And Tony is here, too.
Folk hero of the '80s. He's a door-to-door salesmen who resurfaces
after hiding in a bomb shelter. Now he's selling parachutes because
"there's always a war." And, everywhere you turn, bombs are falling.
And running from them is futile.
You can't dance, you can't
run, you can't hide. You're trapped.
And when the bombs finally
explode (and the sound of the "bombs" on this track is cheezy, artificial,
simulated, kind of clichéd, actually-- which could work against
the power of the song, or not. It's kind of hard to say) we're led
into the last track of Folk Of The 80s (Part III):
"I Sing Last / Not For Tears."
All the artifice is gone, now. The dust has cleared and all that's
left is Ivan with a piano. And the song's lyrics are a call to action.
You're given a choice, to conform or "step out of line." But the
lyrics are littered with fatalism. Progress (or, "the steps"-- echoing
again a dance motif found in "Where Do The Boys Go," The Safety Dance,"
and "Modern(e) Dancing," among others) leads "Right back to zero / Or not
far," and "The children are learning / Much faster than we / Soon they'll
be older / But then again, so will we." Time progresses whether we
want it to or not. We're all outstripped by the next generation.
So, ultimately, is there really even much point in trying?
Maybe, somehow somebody
will manage to change something and there will finally be a return to the
real. Maybe. But it's unlikely.
But you still have to try,
right?
Or at least pretend to.
Next: Doing our parts....