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Monday, June 13, 2005
RAM ON
Paul McCartney
Ram
1971
Capitol Records
GOLDEN APPLES
The Country Teasers
Destroy All Human Life
1999
Fat Possum
Frank Kogan once summarized dub as, essentially, music without a center. In almost every form of music — be it pop, classical or polka — there is a fulcrum on which a song's elements rest: a melody, beat or phrase (lyrical or musical), to name three common examples. Dub, however, is a film negative of its original, and since dub producers frequently recalibrate other musicians' work, there isn't that precious sensation of ownership that comes with creation. Thus, the component that might have served as a narrative arc in an original might become, in a dub version, a flirt, backdrop or absent altogether.
So much of the joy in dub listening comes from that denial of structure or the hook that roped you in to begin with. Many of my favorite dub tracks — like King Tubby's "Alphabet," for example — open with melancholy melodies that disappear after a couplet, only to be replaced by the indifferent warbles of deep bass, drums that ricochet like stray rounds and the occasional major-chord burst. That initial vocal hook might return if you're lucky, but it just as easily might not. That propensity toward self-denial is very lower class in its understanding of life's cruelties: life can be here one day and, if the fates are to be believed (and they always are), gone another.
So what does this have to do with Paul McCartney and some band you've never heard of? Not much, really, except that: a) I wanted to explain why dub is so important to me and b) both songs would make tremendous dub tracks. McCartney's "Ram On," from the excellent 1971 album Ram, is almost dub to begin with: even when the keyboard and muted trumpet arrive, there is still a feeling of absence that goes beyond Paul's apathetic tone and the pasta-thin strum of a lonely mandolin.
My "Ram On" dub side would isolate McCartney's vocals and mandolin, bend and echo them until they're strangers even unto themselves; twist his cry of "soon" into a trail of o's tripping over themselves toward an unknown, infinite non-end; splice the handclaps so that they gather and disperse like thunderstorms; release the slight mandolin chugs in bursts startling with their ferocity; harness the song's isolated core and refocus every element inward, as if they're analyzing themselves into total self-obsession. The orbit's tug would be inescapable.
It's that orbiting sense that draws me to the Country Teasers' "Golden Apples." The Teasers are a (mostly) UK band who play art-punk as viewed through a honky-tonk's smoke-crusted glass, and their distrust of the plainly beautiful often causes them to mask their shockingly regular stumbles into the sublime with self-deflating ugliness. It's the act of a rock band uncomfortable with rock careerism or even rock music itself. (For more on this topic, check out my Seattle Weekly piece on their friends the A Frames, a band with a similar worldview.)
Though it features Wallers singing of a man who cannot walk because he "has trays instead of feet," "Golden Apples" is very much a grounded song: its looping guitar riff tethers it to a great history of circular hooks, from the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time" to Matthew Dear's "Dog Days." But as tightly wound as "Golden Apples" is, there's also a strong sense that one good prod would send it off its axis, and with each loop the rotation would drift farther out, as if carried by the tides, washing it up on dub's shaky shores. The guitar then stretches like elastic, snapping when pulled too firmly and exploding not like a mushroom cloud, but a pane of glass, shards lodged into the rhythm, inflicting a permanent hitch to the gait as regular as menopause. And from there, it limps forever onward — toward what we shall never know.
posted by Yancey
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