Hip-hop tracks great as expected. (I think I’ve heard Tes on his own stuff and not been as impressed, but then being a Funkstorung sound-generator is very different from being a real MC.) Sensitive crooner Enik, who gets three full tracks to himself, irritates profoundly, except when occasionally he doesn’t. If there’s anyone who likes Funkstorung consistently no matter what they’re doing, I imagine they’ll consider this a huge triumph, since the oscillation between hip-hop and ambient (always assumed that was deLuca and Fakesch, respectively) is still present, except with a new destabilization that implies the two might meet in the middle sometime.

Also, best album packaging I’ve seen in a very long time; pretty much all of the 11 (!) optional panels for use as cover art look good.

Reading the liner notes while the album started I was taken aback by the praise heaped on “Rhiannon”. Okay, so I gathered it was some song Stevie Nicks wrote before she joined Fleetwood Mac and people liked it. Couldn’t have been as epochal as all that if I’d never heard it. Except when it came on I realized I had, of course; my best recollection is that every time I heard it I thought it was by the Eagles, despite knowing that the Eagles didn’t have a female singer.

I think some of my grudging respect for the Eagles is related to actual Eagles songs, or at least their relatives (like Sarah Dougher’s cover of “Take It To The Limit”). Could be wrong, though. Sneaky Eagles.

i. on collecting
ii. on Sartre and wanting what you don’t want
iii. some bad luck with record stores
iv. Hot Rats

I. ON COLLECTING

I’ve been numbering these both by where they came in Zappa’s career and what order I heard them in because it seems useful for context, but also because it’s cute. (That’s also a good reason NOT to…) Big matching sets have some appeal I fall prey to but can’t fully explain; if I drew up axioms for my aesthetic experiences I’d have to include it in its own right, even though ‘collectibility’ rarely pertains to the actual art in question. (You can’t hear a new song on the radio and say, “I like it… it sounds collectible!”)

I can suppress the urge to act on collectorist whims when they’re clearly almost all that’s at stake (reissues with one extra track, for example). Most of the time, though, they aren’t so simple. And when a purchase decision gets complicated I’d rather not worry whether I’m unduly swayed by collectorism for the same reason I’d rather not worry whether I’m spending too much money — offered the luxury of not worrying, who worries?

And yet I hate having more CDs than I have time to get to know. I can’t buy a Frank Zappa album without thinking of it as a step toward owning them all, even though I don’t PLAN to (it doesn’t seem, at the moment, that I’d get much out of the orchestral records) and even though I have mixed feelings about the prospect.

II. ON SARTRE, AND WANTING WHAT YOU DON’T WANT

(Not sure if this is in Sartre, or just something I figured out for myself around when the section in Being & Nothingness on “bad faith” semi-permanently changed my life.) You can both want something and not want it at the same time. You can’t simultaneously prefer something and its absence to each other, and you can’t simultaneously intend to do something and not to do it (at least, not in the way I use those words) but for any reasonable concept of desire, it seems to me, you can want any number of things that aren’t all compatible with each other.

These days I often face uncertain music purchases with some trepidation. Wanting to buy something but also not to buy it leaves me irritated with myself. It’s not the internal conflict, it’s the grounds; the decision comes down to weighing acquisitiveness against guilt and the fear of making it impossible to catch up on my listening. So then I wonder what I’m doing in a record store at all if I can’t — and I can’t — make a decision based on the music…

Exploring a decades-old ouevre raises a similar question: how much do I shop around, and if I’m going to prowl used record stores, how attached am I to getting exactly the Zappa I wanted instead of what I can find cheaply? Zappa discs cost more than the indie stuff I usually go for; holding one in my hand, pleasantly sure that I do want to own it but wondering whether I should wait until I find it cheaper, has given me a fatigue that obscures more interesting questions like, has listening to little except Frank Zappa for the past three weeks permanently scarred me or what?

III. SOME BAD LUCK WITH RECORD STORES

Fears notwithstanding, I checked out almost every used record store in my area to see if they had any Zappa a few weeks ago. I’ve gotten good at guessing, for other records, which shops might have them, but my Zappa radar, starting from scratch as I was, needed help.

Wasn’t much to learn, as it turns out: basically, I found nothing. The best-ofs Strictly Commercial and Cheep Thrills turned up, as did some non-canonical live albums and every so often a studio record that I’d been warned belonged solidly in the bottom tier. As such, I gave up without getting to the tiny, aging, jazz- and vinyl-centered record store a block past my second-choice workday-lunch sandwich shop. Why bother? I’d gone there before, in the grip of various manias that they never helped me with (though I think once I bought a recent Aztec Camera album out of their dollar bin).

This Monday I went out for a sandwich and decided I might as well try Stereo Jack’s. I think not wanting to go back to work had as much to do with it as hoping for a good score. To my joy and dismay, I found a bin full of sealed ‘95-reissue Zappa CDs for $8 each, an impeccably discreet notch on their spines offering the only explanation.

It stung because three of them were things I’d found downtown for a dollar or two below the usual retail price that weekend and bought, figuring that was the best I’d do. I don’t mean to dwell on it; in retrospect it’s almost unjustifiable — I’m lucky to be able to buy this many records at all, and the bin contained as many actual bargains as missed ones. But disappointment is disappointment.

Salvation from an unexpected place: I only had enough money in my pocket to buy a few of the cheap discs anyway. And I realized that despite collectorism and greed and fear and regret, I knew without much reflection what priority I ascribed to each of them. This was a new thing. So, finally:

IV. HOT RATS

My impression now is that Zappa worked prolifically, but not compulsively. If anything, he worried too much about posterity, rerecording drum tracks on old records (not that I’ve heard these revisions; maybe they’re great! but he must have had better things to do) and reportedly assembling the live You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore compilations with an eye toward making people who only liked his older stuff listen to recent material he thought they underrated.

I don’t know how much effort he put into making each release distinctive, though. In my experience most songs from one record could just as easily have been on the previous or next one. The cover art usually consists of Frank with or without a band, or else a densely detailed cartoon which probably looked good in the vinyl era.

Hot Rats is different. The cover shows Zappa rising out of a pool, like a cross between Kilroy and the girl from The Ring. The red and purple color scheme is hot, albeit in a subterranean way, and the scene looks grimy, but the title printed in stark sans-serif underneath the picture reveals nothing. It’s a gripping and foreboding cover, all the more so coming from someone as rarely-intense as Zappa.

Plus its reputation preceded it: Zappa’s great jazz album, thus quite possibly accessible only to people who live in drained swimming pools, given how little I understand about jazz.

I therefore decided I would listen to it until I got it or got tired. Results: some of each. After a few repetitions, each of the six tracks felt distinct to me, but I just couldn’t glom onto any expressive power the playing might have had. It only took once through Rumours before I got a sense of what Fleetwood Mac must have meant to their fans, how the album sounded when it first came out, and why anyone cared that Clinton used “Don’t Stop” as his campaign theme song. None of that’s happened with Hot Rats nor promises to. I’ll move on.

Back to the beginning: my 12th Zappa album, his second. Also my first new Zappa after a self-imposed cooling-down period last week.

This seems more like later Zappa than the other two canonical early Mothers albums. I played Freak Out! and …Money again, lest I only be fooled by familiarity (of course it sounds more like late Zappa now that I’ve heard late Zappa) and my impression stayed the same. Freak Out! has tons of mundane songs and some weirdness of a type I don’t think recurred much (”Help, I’m A Rock”) while Money gives the impression of being constructed *entirely* from between-song noises. Free is dense.

But man, for someone who avowedly hated trendiness in pop music, Zappa sure lived in the present. These early discs sound like the 60s; as the 70s opened he began soloing heavily on his guitar and played with prog and fusion; around 1980 he glossed up and went for pop radio, with (according to all reports) an eventual descent into total fascination with synthesizers. The man stayed about as far from pop trends as Casey Kasem.

I tend to snap up records very quickly; it used to be that a month or two of my life — periods in which identifiable other things happened to me — would be colored by my slow exposure to some musician that I was getting into at the time. Now, except with shelf-filling artists like Frank Zappa, it happens between breaths. I still remember some life events by their relationship to musical discoveries, but only “just before” or “just after”, not “during”.

I’m lazy, though, and if I can’t find records near me it might take a while. I first heard Bob Hillman two and a half years ago, the same night I met someone I would soon fall in love with. I came home from that concert and ordered his second album immediately. Liked it, stuck this one (his first) on my ‘to buy’ list and, apparently, forgot just how long it had been there until idly browsing half.com recently.

If any part of this might be interesting to people other than me, here’s why: Hillman (now as before) sounds like Freedy Johnston to me, only much better. I dig that, since I’ve always wanted to like more by Johnston than “Bad Reputation”, but just don’t. But… but! the other time in the past few months I had one of these serious time-flies musical-correlation shocks, it was with Freedy Johnston. Do I find gravelly/nasal folksingers so compelling and timeless that I am shocked to find that time still passes when I’m not listening to their music?

Or, like, what?

Wotta mess. Zappa’s wife takes pains in the liner notes to say that he’d always conceived this as a four-LP set; the most coherent historical analysis I’ve found on the web suggests otherwise.

As far as I’m concerned, the pacing goes so beautifully for about the first half, and so poorly thereafter, that it could well be the result of someone trying to weave a monster epic out of a fixed set of prior materials. (I’ve made way too many mix CDs that looked that way… I had 80 minutes of great music to start with but no matter what I did the second half sounded lumpy.) The point where, at the end of what would have been side A of LP 1, we first hear real lyrics, this HUGE light bulb above my head: damn, those tracks weren’t just lyric-less by default, they were BUILDING to something…

The shoe drops during “Punky’s Whips”, second of the four long pieces each anchoring an LP-size chunk of Laether. It’s a joke, okay fine. It’s a bad joke, okay okay fine. It’s a bad joke and it’s too long okay okay OKAY but the album’s overall pacing would have survived anyway had Zappa made his mistakes boldly and fearlessly, as he often did. But no, “Punky” has a thin, awkward feel. Had it sounded like the band were so jazzed from a high-energy show that this served as interlude or combination cool-down/warm-up I think it could have gotten past me (and maybe in its original context on Zappa In New York, it does).

I think “Titties And Beer” has some of the same problems, but it’s only five minutes long and by that point (LP 4, side A) I’d drifted. The final stunt, “The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary”, sounded pretty good, except that ending two and a half hours of music with a self-contained 20-minute suite is like showing a cartoon after the feature… “Peccary” ends, it seals itself off okay, and then suddenly in retrospect it feels like the rest of the album ended twenty minutes ago and you missed it.

(Two notes: I didn’t know the word “peccary”; thought at first he meant “pessary”. Couldn’t tell if the similarity had anything to do with the song’s plot. Second, the album’s title has an a-umlaut in it; everyone else seems to agree that the best way to write that in the US alphabet is “Lather”, but since a-umlaut is sometimes written “ae” in some other places and the title is a pun on “leather”, I find “Laether” compelling.)

Major label debut. If you don’t know the band, or are one of those ‘fidelity’ fetishists who only likes 69 Love Songs, you won’t find this especially illuminating. Good record, though. Now you know.

Everyone else can keep reading. I’m going easy on specific song details because the record doesn’t come out for another month and I, at least, always like to be surprised by individual songs when I hear a beloved musician’s new thing.

Stylistically i. has the scatteredness of 69LS without the veil of professed universality. I always thought Merritt’s claim to have hit every possible style of music only made 69LS weaker, turning jokes like “Punk Rock Love” pretentious or snide. So its fine with me for i. to be a mixed bag if it’s okay with Merritt that the musical choices have to justify themselves one by one.

I hope the instrumentation is not, as some people have suggested, a play for mainstream success, because I think the only people to whom these arrangements will sound mild are Magnetic Fields fans; the ukelele has as much power to annoy as ever. Maybe more now that it’s obviously not going away. At the same time, Merritt gives every impression of wanting to curb many of his idiosyncracies, starting with the rerecorded “I Don’t Believe You” (smoothed out, slowed down).

I don’t know whether I’m mistaking cause and effect here, but it seems like Merritt’s desire to reconcile casting his net wide with beating his distancing devices into ploughshares has led him over time to squeeze as much eclecticism as he can out of existing song forms instead of making his own. He borrows roles more comfortably on i. than 69LS but I’m not convinced that playing chameleon can take him where he’s trying to go.

My favorite parts: One song that sounds like a Charm Of The Highway Strip stray makes me grin whenever I hear it; I can accept this might be a retro/stodgy/closed-minded kind of enjoyment and will try not to stake my opinion of other songs on whether they someday delight me the same way, but it makes me happy. Two other songs develop a particular kind of pastiche that was either not found on 69LS or was handled so flimsily that I don’t remember it, and since I think Stephin does it well I hope he does it more… then there are the two songs that nearly make me cry, the most-stylized track on the album and the least-. I’ll write more about them when the record’s commercially available.

Mirah’s second collaboration/time-filler since her last ‘real’ album. Billed as covers of kinda sorta not-exactly protest songs, an idea that Mirah’s occasional outward-looking songs like “Monument” had me prepared to love.

The mix strikes me as all wrong, however. Black Cat Orchestra’s usual gig is writing and playing new scores for old silent films. Whether they’d be good at that, I can’t say; their parts don’t sound live, exactly, but they sound like they were engineered to simulate a live performance in a room with mediocre acoustics. Mirah’s voice sinks below the waves most of the time, and she sounds as though she sang these songs louder than she usually would, even if her voice is mixed quietly. Her voice loses most of its expressive power when she projects.

But is that the whole problem? She does a new version of “Monument” with the BCO here and (in my humble, hesitant opinion) scuttles it by varying the melody to no great purpose. I know very few of the songs here — heard Leonard Cohen’s “Story Of Isaac” once or twice, and I know “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” but only from the Pet Shop Boys — so at the end of one listen I can’t decide whether to trust what my untutored ears tell me about the mix, or to conclude instead that despite her other skills Mirah might not be a talented reinterpreter, even when it comes to her own old songs.

The years have not been kind to this album. What was forgivably predictable about it during the second big wave of ‘alternative’ rock has gotten dated, and what was groundbreaking about it has become emo cliche. The proto-stalker lyrics of “No One Else” sit particularly badly with me now, though I kinda remember having the same problem in 1994. (I have a funny story about that, but it’ll have to wait for the deluxe reissue of Pinkerton.)

And yet its high points haven’t changed. Listening to “Undone” and “Say It Ain’t So” I was reminded that while transmuting desperation and powerlessness into defiance has been a fashionable pastime for most of rock’s history — only the means and the clothes change — actual desperation and powerlessness themselves haven’t been. Weezer did a hard thing better than anyone could have expected; most people with nothing left to lose, contrary to popular opinion, just give up. You don’t get the feeling that rock was going to save the young band here, either. I guess it’s open to interpretation whether it did.

Bonus tracks: half live/demo/alt-mix versions of songs you already have, not worthless but missable. The other seven seem at least as good as the weaker album tracks (”Surf Wax America”, I’m looking at you) and one just wouldn’t stop reminding me of Boyracer. Too bad their perverse charm meant they never had to get better if they didn’t want to.

I applaud the efforts of people like Anna Oxygen, Tracy + The Plastics and The Prima Donnas to create a retroactive communal hallucination of the 80s in which everything was harsh and incomprehensible but decorated in attractive colors. For one thing, I usually like the sound, and for another, it illuminates the approach of, say, Radiohead, whose fantasies about contemporary life would be harder to mistake for commentary if they were writing about, I don’t know, the 1940s or Zaire.

However.

Oxygen opens one song with “One plus one in the algebra mouth”, a lyric that does what it does so concisely as not to need support… I mean, start a song like that and the only reason to keep writing is so that you look like you’re following through on your ideas. (Oxygen’s habitually-jumpy song structures suggest that takes effort.)

Anyway, the line after that is “derivative of twenty-four”. The derivative of 24 is zero; it’s not that that would never come up in math, but it’s not interesting. Can’t help concluding that Anna Oxygen remembers the word ‘derivative’ but not what it means (uh, mathematically) and is just using math as a symbol of itself. Forgetting that you don’t understand something which seems evocative to you is maybe the biggest danger when you go grape-stomping in history’s dumpster, so since I like the project as a whole you’d think I’d be willing to give out passes on this… and yet I flinch every time I hear the line. Maybe next time.