Nick Young:Listened to: MP3
For some bands finding a sound that instantly enables listeners to identify as “quintessential (fill in the blank)” just comes naturally. When the Strokes released their incendiary debut album “Is This It” in 2001, they confidently oozed sex and frustration from every aching pore so well and with such reckless abandon it’s as though Julian Casablancas and company burst forth from their mothers’ wombs already angsty and horny as Hell. In short, they were born to make records.
Fellow New York City rockers Interpol exuded the same vigorous innate certainty on their 2002 debut “Turn On The Bright Lights.” Their unique breed of disaffected intensity is most apparent on their suffocated single “Obstacle 1,” a song the band revealed during a WKQX Radio interview was written after watching a news report about a model’s untimely death. However, though the lyrical content belongs strictly to them, I have a hard time believing the song would exist at all without Television’s colossally influential 1977 LP “Marquee Moon.”
To listen to both songs back to back is to experience a startling revelation: “Obstacle 1” is basically “Marquee Moon’s” eponymous title played at double speed (as if Interpol covered the song and released it at 45 RPM instead of the expected 33 RPM speed). I mean this not as a negative criticism. Quite the contrary actually- I believe imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery. Both songs are great in their ways. Still, “Marquee Moon” does have one advantage over its darkened 21st century reimagining:
It came first.
Television’s debut came at an absolutely perfect time in music history. The album broke conventions of what a punk record or a rock record could sound like. The end product can’t be lumped into either genre. “Moon” takes the spirit of both sources and, as Ian Curtis once apathetically wailed on Joy Division’s “Disorder,” loses the feeling.
Current Indie artists such as the Mae Shi and Girls have found a way to harness the soul-consuming numbness that Television once so gracefully evoked and have brought it into our time. I could easily imagine Girls frontman Christopher Owens croon “the world was so thin between my bones and my skin,” a lyric from “Marquee Moon’s” second track, “Venus,” sung with cool, atrophic indifference by Television lead singer Tom Verlaine.
His voice has aged quite well since the years it haunted CBGB’s in the era of the Velvet Underground- most likely because anyone growing up today (or in any other time for that matter) learns at some point that it pays impassive. Jim Jones of the Diplomats / Def Jam’s Blakroc really hit the mark when he rapped, “It don’t bother you, it don’t bother.” I think Verlaine would agree. Hey, whatever works right?
Television best conveys the universal human struggle to remain aloof on the album’s eponymous ten-minute centerpiece when Verlaine describes a chance meeting with a ragged, rail-riding hobo who sounds like he’s the physical embodiment of the drifter, “the poor boy whose story is seldom told,” in Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer.” The derelict instructions seem simple at first. The complexity of his words is entirely reliant on how you interpret them:
“Look here junior- don’t you be so happy, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be so sad.”
Does ‘junior’ find this comforting or unsettling? Will he embrace life in all of its gloriously maddening uncertainty? I have an idea of how he interpreted it, but so do you. It’s not really about how the vagabond’s attempt at consolation affect Verlaine- I’m sure he’s thought it over plenty. It’s about what the lyric means to you, the listener. You can either appreciate it for what it is or you can complain about his diction as he spins his tale.* Personally, I think everybody should listen to this album at least once. If it’s not your thing, at least there are still four hundred and ninety-six other records I can recommend during this insane online odyssey of ours.
*That’s actually a lyric from “Marquee Moon’s” third track, “Friction.”
-Nick
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Mike Natale:
Listened to: MP3
I must admit, I knew nothing of Television before listening to this album, aside to the fact that when Jeff Buckley’s debut album Grace was released, one reviewer suggested that the album’s “shimmery, dynamic style suggests careful study of Tom Verliane, who, I later discovered, is the lead singer and guitarist for the band. So, since Buckley is a personal idol of mine (I know that sounds biased, but everyone has a bias, especially because what you draw from art depends on what you bring to it. I just choose to wear my bias on my sleeve) I was excited to check the album out. I was told repeatedly it was a major force in the post-punk movement, and thereby a major influence to modern alternative rock.
So let me where my bias on my sleeve again. I dislike “alternative rock”. Don’t get me wrong, I dig Radiohead and some others, but it’s frustrating how every music act today is alternative. Everybody who listens to some music, be it the black clothing clad emo kids, the screaming, roaring death-core, metal-core, math-core, I-have-low-self-confidence-and-feel-the-need-to-fit-in-core toolbags, the tonue-so-far-in-their-cheek-it’s-piercing-through Weezer fans, or the hipster indie rock college radio “I listen to bands nobody’s ever heard of, and loudly criticize anything remotely popular so that makes me cool” douche bags, everybody seems to think they’re rebelling against the “mainstream”. But when you ask them to point out this “mainstream” music, they just point fingers at each other. It would seem that Jonas Brothers fans are the only true rebels these days.
But the true struggle I have with “alternative rock”, primarily the college radio brand, is that it’s become so about not succumbing to the musical mainstream that it stops being musical. Any one who feels the need can front an “indie” band, and while the instrumentalists get better and better, the “singers” seem to just worsen with time.
I realize these first three paragraphs were a rant against today’s music scene, but I thought it only fair to inform you of the melodic battlefield I’ve walked through to finally get to Marquee Moon, today’s album.
The first three tracks of the album failed to impress me initially. I thought “Great, here’s another ‘alternative rock’ band.” But then I realized. This album came out in 1977. Like the MC5 nearly ten years before them, Television was way ahead of it’s time. So, while today those first three tracks may seem nothing special, you have to put yourself into the context in which they were composed, and you’ll truly appreciate them for what they are. You may not enjoy them, but you’ll appreciate them.
It is the fourth track on the album where the genius truly begins. The 10 minute epic title track is equal parts Pink Floyd and Patti Smith. It boggles the mind to imagine a 10 minute track being released as a single, and even more shocking is the discovery that it actually had some success. But all this surprise disappears when you hear the track, which seems to go in a million different sonic directions, while never once ceasing to be an honest outcry from Verliane, who’s guitar virtuosity is in full effect. I’m not sure if Verlaine had even heard Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, but this track could be an English-language demo from it.
The next track, Elevation, can only be described as what happens when a Talking Heads track sleeps with Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. Since it’s not as musically ambitious as the previous track, it’s able to pack all that energy into the melody, unleashing a powerhouse of strumming and vocals.
While Marquee Moon may be the most musically dynamic song on the album, I was most impressed by the track Guiding Light for being so…well, normal. Guiding Light could very easily be a Kelly Clarkson ballad. Albeit that may be a bit of a stretch, but it can’t be denied that this track has a very classic sound to it, which is unexpected when one listens to the rest of the album, and reminds me of the first time one hears Here Comes Your Man by The Pixies on Doolittle. Guiding Light caused me to admire Verlaine more, for understanding that good music is good music, and that rebellion shouldn’t be an artists sole goal.
After Prove It, another track equal in force and compositional prowess, comes Torn Curtain, the album’s final track (unless one listens to Little Johnny Jewel (Parts 1 & 2) on the CD version) The chorus of Torn Curtain has that powerful, finale nature that reminds me of the finale of Godspell. For the record, I love Godspell. I’d hate to compare Marquee Moon yet again to Histoire de Melody Nelson, as the two are extraordinarily different albums as a whole, but Torn Curtain does have that same closing satisfaction one gets from Cargo Culte on the aforementioned Gainsbourg album. Torn Curtain leaves one with a sense of completion or closure upon finishing Marquee Moon, but that by no means should encourage you to take the album off your record player. Though I’ve only listened to the album twice so far, I can just feel that this is one of those albums that gets better each time you listen to it. For anyone who is a music lover, Marquee Moon is definitely worth a listen, and to imagine any “indie” music fans that haven’t heard this is like picturing Green Day fans who’ve never heard the Sex Pistols. You know they exist, but when you finally meet one, it take everything in you not to smack your forehead with the palm of your hand.
One more fun fact: Tom Verlaine was in discussion with Jeff Buckley to produce his second album. He produced the original sessions. Yeah, I now have the utmost respect for Verlaine.
-Mike
So, thanks for reading, and see you all tomorrow for #154: The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest.
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