Kid Rock - Devil Without a Cause (1998)

I must admit it's been a while since I dug this one out. It's the whole hanging out with Donald deal which bothers me, although realistically the aforementioned hanging out with Donald is only the latest idiocy in a career founded on the same, and I doubt that anyone was surprised. Kid Rock's whole schtick is that he's a bit of an arsehole, and so Devil Without a Cause is largely about boozing and shagging until your liver explodes and your knob falls off, then doing it again whilst listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd turned up to eleven. I haven't looked too closely for fear of what I might find, but I expect he doesn't have much time for what I'm sure he terms political correctness, and I really, really wish he hadn't had such a hard-on for the Confederate flag; but then I like the music I like because it's music that I like rather than because every last opinion held by the artist synchronises perfectly with my own, and I'm probably going to hang onto those Kate Bush albums even though she's just outed herself as a massive fan of Theresa May. I draw the line at where the thought crimes of the artist are so overpowering as to infect my perception of the music.

MC Ren rapping about killing whitey doesn't bother me because it's obvious he was simply having a bad day, plus it's funny and you can see where he was coming from. I can still just about listen to Death in June with a peg over my nose, although they sound somewhat comical on this side of the millennium. I wish I'd never found out about Beck being a Scientologist. Skrewdriver, on the other hand, helpfully recorded music which was already shite thus saving the rest of us any need to debate whether it's possible to enjoy the stick 'em in a boat and send 'em back song without condoning the message, such as it is.

Maintaining a set of rules about what you will allow yourself to enjoy is a waste of time, so selections probably have to be made on a case to case basis extrapolated mostly from gut reaction; and I guess it must take a lot to stir my gut to righteous indignation.

The fact of my having felt the need to write those three paragraphs probably relates to why Kid Rock enjoys playing the arsehole, not to mention that he was never going to get to hang out with the cool kids or NME readers, regardless of his serious yet routinely overlooked credentials. So he's a white rapper, or was, but I guess we're all over that one by now. His flow belongs clearly to that sing-songy old school cornball style which is otherwise fine if we're digging out old Run DMC records or banging on about the tediously studied authenticity of Ugly Duckling; and while Kid's descent into autotuned stadium country has been appalling but probably inevitable, he's nevertheless paid dues and was once something of a whizz on the two record players - as we rap types call them; and Devil Without a Cause is unfortunately a fucking great album - not merely better than you expected, but one of those discs which glues itself into the player and stays there.

If he's an arsehole, he's the best arsehole he can possibly be on this record; and the music effortlessly weds pounding boom bap to Led Zep riffing and the kind of Skynyrd-isms which turn even the most urbane of us all misty eyed and countrified - not least on Black Chick, White Guy which just plain tears your heart out; and Welcome 2 the Party gets under your skin like nothing since the wholesale borrowing of Good Times by Chic. It's a populist album in the broadest sense, just like those early rap records before we got all uptight and snooty about it; and it's a populist album aimed squarely at people who maybe didn't make it to college, and who maybe don't have much going for them, and who probably won't respond too well when you sneer and suggest they might do better to listen to someone less sexist, J-Live for example. It's low rent, but there's a generous spirit here, and it's inclusive and probably doesn't really care if you voted for Hillary providing you're not going to be a dick about it.

While Kid Rock may be a dick who has been occasionally known to hang out with Ted Nugent, close inspection reveals him to be an otherwise decent guy in most senses that count, or at least some way from being your archetypal Republican shithead. Similarly this album almost certainly isn't what you may believe it to be, even if it does spend a lot of time belching in your face and then chuckling over how upset you are. It will probably be at least another hundred years before Devil achieves the sort of recognition it probably deserves, so don't whine about never having got the memo.

Athletico Spizz 80 - Do A Runner (1980)

Hearing Where's Captain Kirk? on the radio in the evenings  probably constituted my first awareness of it being possible for music to be wonderful without troubling the mainstream top forty or ending up introduced to pop picking telly viewers by a flared kiddy fiddler. Prior to the two or three spins it took for the song to sink in, I'm not sure I was even aware of there having been music other than stuff which had been on Top of the Pops at some point. Spizz, who by then had expanded to Athletico Spizz 80, featured in a double-page spread in my first ever issue of Sounds music paper, which I bought having become increasingly frustrated with the some of the hopeless shite receiving coverage in Smash Hits. The Sounds feature was illustrated by, if I remember correctly, team Spizz leaping athletically around a basketball court in what would eventually be recognised as skateboarding gear, and it made me think of Devo, another fairly recent discovery for me.

I've never quite stopped thinking of Devo where Spizz are concerned, which isn't to imply any sort of influence of one on the other, only that Spizz seemed to be the English expression of whatever had caused Devo. There seemed to be a shared sense of humour, a similar love of retrofuturism; and of course both bands have been regarded as faintly ludicrous novelty acts by those for whom anything with less testosterone than Ted Nugent may as well be Pinky & Perky. I have no strong recollection of how Do A Runner was greeted by the music press back then but suspect it may have been a general scratching of the head, as typified by an unusually Partridge-esque David Hepworth asking, 'It seems to me that the album sees Spizz going in a lot more serious direction than the singles previously had done. What do you think about that?' on the wireless back in August, 1980, to which Spizz himself responded:

Well, I don't know about that. Singles are supposed to be fun, pokey, short, snappy things and albums are just a whole wider range of what someone can do with a recorded piece, and that's what it is. It's basically a collection of all the songs which we didn't want to see disappear without reaching vinyl. We wanted to get all these out on record before they disappeared because we thought they were worth it and we didn't want to lose them, or to get tired or get old before they got to vinyl.

The notion of Spizz as a novelty act - as differentiated from simply a band or bands with a sense of humour - most likely stems from the success of Where's Captain Kirk?, doubtless fortified by later Trekkie-pleasing songs such as Spock's Missing and Five Year Mission; but it's a warped vision, as is obvious even from a quick ear cast in the general direction of the aforementioned fun, pokey, short, and snappy singles - not least the magnificent No Room which still makes most other records of that year sound shit, to be quite honest. Similarly, Do A Runner hardly constitutes frowning modernist essays from a former circus entertainer, what with the wilfully ludicrous Clocks Are Big and the general spirit of the thing, and - for fuck's sake - how could we ever have forgotten?:

Nuclear scientist producing plutonium,
Nasty little substance that we can't controlleum.

I suspect it's simply that we like a little more narrative consistency in our rock ascendencies, and Do A Runner was always at a serious tangent to a bloke jumping on stage with a guitar at some punk gig and making stuff up. It is equivalent, I suppose, to a new John Otway album sounding like Tangerine Dream; not that this does, but it's hard to miss the eight-minute pseudo-krautrock instrumental of Airships, or the weirdly angular Beefheartisms of Intimate, Rhythm Inside and others; except I suspect most of this material simply evolved out of the combination of these five people being in the band that year, and these being five people with no real interest in simply chugging out a few standards.

Do A Runner wasn't really quite like anything I'd heard back in 1980, and it still sounds reasonably unique thirty-five years later. I know Spizz did okay and is still remembered, but what with this one and Spiky Dream Flowers, I still don't quite get why he wasn't much, much bigger. I suppose someone will eventually dig this out and be able to listen to it without thinking of William Shatner, maybe even appreciate it for it's own very considerable merits. Maybe that person will turn out to have been me.

Soundgarden - Superunknown (1994)

I'm not quite sure why but I didn't really get this one until I moved to America. Black Hole Sun always sounded astonishing, and is surely one of the greatest singles ever recorded, but initial impressions of the rest comprised mainly guitar solos and a long-haired man in silver trousers stood screaming yeaaaaaaah baby from the top of a speaker cabinet the size of Ted Nugent's rock 'n' roll shack out yonder. It may as well have been Guns 'n' Roses - and please note the correct punctuation of their name whilst we're here.

Then I moved to Texas, gave Superunknown another couple of spins and it all began to make sense. It's not so much that they were ever just another generic band of dudes rocking out in black leather, but that their strengths are subtle, elements you may not notice immediately, or at least I didn't. Black Hole Sun, for example, you could describe as a really bad acid trip given that it's the sort of description which tends to emerge from the Kafkaesque process of writing about music, but actually it's not really like that at all. It might be better to describe Black Hole Sun as an acid trip going somewhere you would rather it didn't go - if we can momentarily ignore the room-dwelling elephant of such descriptions being essentially ludicrous. What I mean to say is that Black Hole Sun, like much of this album, conveys a range of quite subtle emotions. It's nothing extreme in the sense of Killing Joke or whoever.

The more I listen to this, the more it occurs to me that Soundgarden are, or at least were, pretty much a psychedelic band in the vague tradition of Cream and related Woodstocky types. They make with that characteristic seasick psychedelic notation, the slight sense of disorientation and invocation of coming up on some substance or other whilst melting in a chair staring at your foot. There's an element of early Black Sabbath even, maybe without quite such a bad vibe, although still bordering on dark, like it could all plummet into brown acid hell at any moment; and it works because they eschew the more twee excesses of psychedelia, the boss-eyed claims of having just seen a pixie in the garden despite everyone knowing full well that you're talking out of your arse - or bollocks about third eyes having been opened for that matter. Superunknown is, I suppose, biker psychedelia, more pragmatic, more grizzled, and more inclined to shut up when it has nothing it wants to say, allowing the music to speak for itself; and the music is fucking beautiful, near symphonic in its detail and lightness of touch once you've heard past the walls of overdrive and fuzz.

This has possibly been my purplest ever testimony to a record, but fuck it - Superunknown is worth it.