33 rebellions per minute
"Justify soft spots by any means"
2000
Paper Chase, YOUNG BODIES HEAL QUICKLY, YOU KNOW
One of Thespark.com’s more intriguing interactive notions is The Gender Test, in which Thespark attempts to guess whether you’re male or female on the basis of your answers to a number of psychological questions. “Psychological” does not include, for example, “do you have a penis?”; questions instead ask whether you’d rather be rich or famous, whether you’d prefer your bedroom’s walls to be blue or white, which came first the chicken or the egg, and whether clams are alive. I assume the first edition of the test had a guessing algorithm as to which answers were more male or female, but by now they’ve tested hundreds of thousands of people and asked them, at the end, to fess up honestly their actual sex, so that the test can be refined and make its guesses with actual data. It has yet to mislabel any of my friends or me, and it’s kind of fun, so if you want to try it, go there now. Because I discovered one of the test’s secrets through trial and error, and I’m about to spoil things by explaining it.
Go on. I’ll wait.
The majority of the predictive weight, in a test of forty questions, is in just two of them, by themselves enough to turn a guess of “Female (80% likelihood)” to “Male (80% likelihood)”. One is a pictorial question, two cartoon monkeys shown: one standing firmly on a branch in a posture that vaguely resembles the deference rituals before bad-movie karate matches, one jumping kamikaze-style in midair: “Who will win?”. The other is a true/false: “In a certain light, nuclear war would be exciting”. Most guys, including me, pick the midair monkey to win and answer the nuclear war question correctly (“true”). Most girls, including the very cute one I’ve moved in with, answer both questions wrongly. Since none of the other questions bear the same gender-line divisiveness, any decent algorithm will treat them as mere shading around the basic two.
Paper Chase’s YOUNG BODIES debut is, according to the promo material, “For Fans Of: Modest Mouse, Slint, Fugazi”, and whatever the comparison’s accuracy, those all-male bands make exactly the kinds of music that imply a belief that hurtling through space and blowing things up is cool. So in different ways do Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Megadeth, and even Dan Bern; unlike Marilyn Crispell, Carla Bley, Pat Benatar, or Jewel. Yes, I’ll give you Courtney Love, or Ani DiFranco’s early albums, on the side of reckless explosions; Thespark.com deduced me as male with mere 80% confidence, the same as for my basketball-playing Hooters-attending friend Tom. Maybe a third divisive question would help. I’m reading a novel I feel like plugging anyway -- Amy Herrick’s At the Sign of the Naked Waiter, a surreal coming-of-age picaresque written in a tone more typical of a wise children’s novel -- and in it, the protagonist’s mad-scientist older brother denounces her belief in the central importance of love. “(We’re here) to search and understand, to stick our noses into the secrets of the universe, to figure out where time came from and where it goes, how we arrived here on this ball of dirt and why we can’t stop ourselves from laying waste to all its treasures. Love, I think, is merely an engine to keep us going”. Question 41: is that true or false?
A “false” answer wouldn’t be very decisive; most people would pick “false”. What I do theorize -- and what keeps Courtney and Ani in the category of at least potential females -- is that almost all “true” answers would be men. The Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Linus Torvald computer geek; the Isaac Asimov 500-book-writing polymath who never leaves his apartment: I’m happy to have you argue with counter-examples, but these sure look to me, and to common culture, like male types. Female folk and blues singers are almost as common as male ones; the sound-sculpting theorists who make dubiously listenable avant-garde or “post-rock” electronic musics guaranteed to leave them groupie-free are overwhelmingly men. Lyric writers tend to either write in emotional clichés, or to be introspective by nature, but it’s John (not Jane) Linnell who writes educational ditties about mammals and solar radiation and James K. Polk, it’s Chris (male) Cutler, not Christine Cutler, who writes about communist theory and architecture and quarks, it’s a bunch of guys in Slayer who write about how the world is put together and all the anatomically fascinating ways of ripping it apart and making it bleed. Lindsay Cooper, a female associated with the avant Rock In Opposition explorations of Henry Cow, has written entire concept albums around abstruse stories, but those too are usually the territory of undersocialized male whiz-kids with hobbit obsessions. Thought Industry’s first three albums -- brutal and abrupt and convoluted suites full of weird titles and puzzling epigrams, built around dense poetry too busy linking a thousand phenomena to afford to light the connections with complete noun-verb phrases, thrown into the world without a hint of how to seek an audience beyond the Kalamazoo that OUTER SPACE IS JUST A MARTINI AWAY’s plot may or may not have blown up -- would seem the definitive male albums, and indeed all four band members are male.
Thought Industry are, it happens, the first comparison that YOUNG BODIES HEAL QUICKLY, YOU KNOW brings to my mind, right from the title and the subtitle “Pieces for Piano in the Key of R”. True, Paper Chase aren't heavy metal. Their time signatures are mostly 4/4, which resembles only the fourth T.I. album BLACK UMBRELLA. And John Congleton’s screech sounds more like Sand On Stars’ Jeff MacLeod, or like Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock cracking under interrogation, or like Steven Malkmus being castrated, than like Brent Oberlin’s bellow; Congleton’s voice makes you fear for Congleton, only secondarily for yourself. But YOUNG BODIES's few fiercely angular guitar solos should trigger lights of recognition in Thought Industry fans. There’s a spiritual kinship too in Paper Chase's disciplined drum machines, spasms hammered into art; the way their pianos clang like warnings or (more commonly) like the warning already came too late; the blurted, cryptic phrases; the bassoon solo that almost seems written in microtones; the way that even after we’ve heard a decade of soft-then-loud, Paper Chase’s loudnesses hit hard enough to bruise and suddenly enough that we don’t duck.
And there’s the thematic unity usually found only in classical music: the way even a second-time listener can easily notice the re-use, throughout the album, of phrases (“Anything can happen! Anything can go wrong!”, “Goddamn these hands”, “when the big one hits”) and sound-bites (most notably the ringing piano chords of “Neat: Manageable: Piles” and “When And If The Big One Hits”; and isn’t it odd how two chords can be enough to cue my memory for a different song, if in this case the chords are the same ones, in the same tone color, at the same time interval, as the first two chords of the Loud Family’s “Sister Sleep”?). YOUNG BODIES is measured in its pace, but in all other ways seems a classic geekboy case of reckless self-reference and showy implosion: an elaborate sand-castle built alone with arduously researched, historically accurate turrets, made with love to be shown off, complimented, and, at the happy climax, kicked into oblivion. If Tool liked the world as much as it hated its people, if Home had played with the world more schematically in their youth, if Modest Mouse knew their new perfectionism didn’t preclude banging on things, they too might have made such sounds.
There’s a problem with the dismissal of love as “merely the engine” en route to exploring the world and building new ones out of its odder corners, though. The problem is that if you want to know how Everything works, well, the engine is a big part of Everything. Some men avoid this problem, I suppose, but how often? Bill Gates was engaged on a very simple and self-contained program of world conquest for many years, but eventually it occurred to him that one element of the world was girls, and that some girls would be very easygoing about their man’s hygiene if he had 39 billion dollars; and once he had one girl to double his perspectives of the world with, he started noticing other human beings, also presumably with senses of pleasure and pain and need and loss, and he started endowing some admirable charity projects, first in the United States (including a large and well-designed scholarship program for urban blacks), then in poorer countries that started coming to his attention once he became able to look for them. Ani DiFranco was several albums into a classically male life of entrepeneurship, aggressive music, and political rabble-rousing, but as she herself explains the romantic-loss themes of DILATE, “I kinda got distracted”. I myself write as a geek intellectual dilettante, and when I started this column in early 1998 my experiences with love centered around written correspondence. But later, my reviews of Yes’s THE LADDER and Nina Gordon’s TONIGHT AND THE REST OF MY LIFE showed me realizing that even on an intellectual level there’s a whole lot you can’t learn without caring, to a formulaically irrational degree, about individual people. By now, June 2001, I owe y'all an apology for a three-month absence that’s occurred in part, though not mainly, because one individual girl can’t sleep if I’m typing, and I can no longer care more about throwing all my latest notions into essays to see which ones stick than I do about not making her miserable for a night. (Yes, I think there shall be good ways around that choice.)
Thought Industry’s BLACK UMBRELLA was the album where Brent Oberlin’s dizzying poetry was replaced by readable tales of alcoholism, romantic loss, and unstable responses thereto. The surprise, because it’s better disguised, is that Paper Chase’s Congleton seems to be erecting his mazes of “throw your body on the apparatus” and “allocate me R.A.M.” and “solder me like a wire that breathes” around similar themes. When you build your world like a concept album, rationality is supposed to be a defense: “I thought you said we had a deal!”, the narrator screams at an ex-lover. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you/ He looks at you, so I can’t look at you”, he tests as a new axiom. “Goddamn these hands, I let them touch you”; his diagnostic shows that the calculations were wrong, but where to get new parts?
I don’t know that trying to know everything is the purpose of humanity, but I'm a guy, and it is among my goals, recommended in part especially for being unattainable. It is a central irrationality of life that a life goal that can be filled instantly loses its use as a reason for survival, and we are built to survive. It can be a frustrating irrationality that in order to learn everything, we have to learn the irrational, and then try to build sensible systems around things that make no sense. Luckily, screeching and banging on things seems to help.
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