half-penny thoughts — 05jan26

I’m probably overlooking quite a few artists, but it sure seems like the vast majority of them these days are very serious about their music.

That’s not to say that I didn’t listen to and work with musicians in the past who were very serious about their music, but it seemed there were more folks in earlier eras who were a lot less serious about it. Or, they were serious musician who leaned into satire instead of saying things like, “We are artistes, not baboons. Go away and baboon elsewhere.”

As it happens when I sometimes surf YouTube on the television, I run into old music videos from when I was young. I look forward to some of the accidental (re)discoveries like Nina Haugen, a performer I woefully underappreciated as a kid. Sometimes watch a video leaves me wondering what I thought was so great about the song/video/artist back in the day. Occasionally, I see something that gets my brain thinking.

While skimming through old videos, I came across Punk Rock Girl by The Dead Milkmen. It goes, as they say in one of their other songs, a little like this:

We went to the Philly Pizza Company
And ordered some hot tea
The waitress said, "Well, no
We only have it iced"
So, we jumped up on the table
And shouted, "Anarchy!"
And someone played a Beach Boys song
On the jukebox
It was "'California Dreamin'"
So, we started screamin'
"On such a winter's day"

The song, like most from The Dead Milkmen, is both satiric and purposefully silly. Too silly for many people. But I digress…

I have this affection for bands like The Milkmen. Slightly crass, mostly silly, oftimes stupid. I like the kind of bands that might know music theory (in reality or just by intuition), but for the most part can’t be bothered to take themselves too seriously. Oftentimes, they are those “one-take” bands that accept the first take of a song when they record, flaws and all. And yes, they rarely do overdubs.

They Might Be Giants went through a period where they were just absurd most of the time. No one can tell me that The Violent Femmes should be taken seriously. Or most of the early Wonder Stuff (“Don’t me love or none of that stuff because/It’s yer money I’m after, baby”). Going back earlier? Lizzy Borden by the Chad Mitchell Trio, Alice’s Restaurant or The Motorcycle Song by Arlo Guthrie.

I like schlocky, absurd, satirical music as much as I like the dark morose stuff out there.

Do you have any guilty secret bands that are pure dork? Are there many modern acts that really make their name on being kind of serious silly that you can think of? I’m stuck on Garfunkel and Oats (they made a comedy career out of satire, so not a great example), and a handful of one-song acts — but nothing really leaps out at me. I wonder if digital recording has taken away some of the charm of being a not-quite-comedic band. When you make an album of outtakes that are not quite awful, why not release that? Studios cost money and, by the way… Tape’s rolling…

Thoughts?