It’s pretty surprising but one of the most significant albums I’ve ever listened to was “Goodbye Jumbo” by World Party. No, it’s not a great album by any means. But it came along at a time when “alternative music” was on the rise. It came along when there was a rebellion growing against music becoming too corporate and manufactured. In my last post, I said that you had to live through the popular music scene of the early 1990s in order to understand what “alternative music” was about. You had to live in a world where the main staple of popular music served up to you was sanitised and scrubbed off of rough edges, or else it was long haired poseurs.
In many ways, this characterisation is unfair. The people behind hair metal are dedicated professionals who – in spite of their willingness to take the same old ideas and repeat them over and over again – work very hard on perfecting their instrumental prowesses. And there was also New Jack Swing, which I didn’t have as much respect for back then as I do now. They were living in the shadows of decades of black excellence. They had to walk in the footsteps of the Motown gang, the Phil Spector gang, Jimi, Sly, Stevie, Marvin, Curtis, P Funk, Michael and Prince, and had to get used to the shittiness of having to switch to 808s and Fairlights.
And add to that, I was growing up in Singapore. I think there was a lot of classic rock that didn’t make it to the radio, because of how conservative the government was during the 60s and 70s. So “Goodbye Jumbo” was my first real taste of classic rock, and probably was one of many other bands in the 90s to revive classic rock: there were also the Stone Roses, Matthew Sweet, at least half of Britpop and grunge, which is basically a Black Sabbath and punk mash-up.
Not surprisingly, “Goodbye Jumbo” was about the 60s and the hippie era. I suppose, in hindsight, that that was the closest thing we might know to living in an earthly Eden. I don’t really know what hippiedom is like, but it might be just nothing more than a denial of reality. The hope and joy is real, but there was this thing about freedom from want and desires and the drudgery of everyday life which just doesn’t seem realistic now. None of them really bothered my teenage mind too much. The hippies embraced environmental causes as much as they embraced the car and the freedom of the road. (And charmingly they don’t seem too bothered that there’s a contradiction.)
More importantly, though, a lot of the album was pretty derivative. There were snatches of “Baby Please Don’t Go” by Them, and “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones. And it sounded too much like what you might come up with in the 60s. Still, even though it was not a great album, it was pretty good. And my ears hadn’t yet been primed by the classic rock canon, that I could go and nitpick anything that borrowed or stole from this or that. I could appreciate the album for what it was, which was a joyous love letter to life…. sorda. It’s a good album, and yet it’s not that special.
But back in the day, it was special for me, because many of the ideas seemed so fresh to me that I hadn’t realised that they were repeated over and over. That only came later, especially when I started hearing the records that were ripped off by World Party.
I thought of “Goodbye Jumbo” when I listened to Mitski’s new single, “Heat Lightning” and within a few seconds, I was thinking, “oh man she nicked this and that from “Venus in Furs”. Which is not entirely fair, because it was just the droning and the Moe Tucker style drumming. But “Venus in Furs” is a very distinctive song, so that stood out.
So I wonder if something has been lost since I was a naive listener to “Goodbye Jumbo”. Maybe there aren’t that many ideas in pop music. After all, this is a medium that prides itself on what it can achieve with “three chords”. But seriously, what can you achieve with 3 chords? So after a certain point, everything you listen to will start to remind you of something else you listened to. And is something lost when you start judging everything snappily?
And I went to check – as I had suspected, Mitski was not yet born when “Goodbye Jumbo” was released (although she was already an embryo at that point). Just impresses upon me that things move quickly.
Music Composition 