The Big Boys from Brazil

July 29, 2007... If you've ever wondered why Afterbirth isn't focused on any one genre or era of music, it's because Spin gets bored easily. Spin likes to mix things up a bit, to put a little cream in his coffee, if you know what he means. Apparently, Spin also likes to refer to himself in the third person...

Anyhoo, you'd be hard pressed to find a band that mixed things up more than Austin's mighty, mighty Big Boys. Consider side one of their crushing 1982 EP, Fun, Fun, Fun, which starts with a scratchy post-punk number, follows that up with a blazing fifty-second thrasher, and closes with a faithful cover of Kool and the Gang's funk classic "Hollywood Swinging," complete with horns. But this post ain't about the Big Boys. It's about Chico Science and Nação Zumbi, who kinda remind me of the Big Boys in a vague sorta way.

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi, or CSNZ for short, hailed from the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil. Along with mundo livre s/a and others, CSNZ were the originators and primary exponents of a style of music they called mangue bit. In practice, mangue bit (pronounced "MAN-ghee beat") was a varied thing, but its essence was an attempt to make music with modern technology--the "bit" referred to is a computing term--all the while acknowledging local traditions: "mangue" is the Portuguese word for mangrove (swamp), Recife's natural environment.

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi - Manguetown

Though their music was modern, drawing heavily from American funk, psychedelic rock (Jimi Hendrix), heavy metal (Metallica), and hip-hop, CSNZ incorporated the local musical traditions of northeastern Brazil into their music, as well. It could be as superficial as sampling forró master Jackson do Pandeiro at the start of one song, or as tightly integrated as writing another song entirely in the baião style, but performing it with a distorted bass guitar and mixing it with studio trickery.

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi - Baião Ambiental

But the local musical tradition most acknowledged by CSNZ was Carnaval, nordestino style... You see, in Rio de Janeiro samba schools play samba for Carnaval, but in Recife, in Recife nações (nations) play maracatú. It's a distinct style of music. So CSNZ featured five (!) percussionists, each playing an instrument typical of the local Carnaval music of the northeast: alfaias (i.e. primitive-ass bass drums), agogôs (i.e. fancy-ass cowbells), and caixas (i.e. snare-ass snare drums).

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi - Rios, Pontes e Overdrives

The peculiar history of northeastern Brazil made its way in to CSNZ's message, as well. The band's name is a reference not only to the nações of the Recife Carnaval, but to the short-lived, independent nation of Palmares, founded by runaway slaves in northeastern Brazil, and led by the runaway slave, Zumbi, during the 17th century. It is of Zumbi and other populist revolutionaries--Lampião from Brazil, Zapata from Mexico, Sandino from Nicaragua, and the Black Panthers--that Chico Science sings the praises in the song "Monólogo ao Pé do Ouvido." In the poorest region of a poor country, where one third of the homes do not have regular access to potable water or sewerage, it's a message that has a lot of resonance.

Not surprisingly, in a country where one half the population insists that it is "white," while the other half acknowledges that it "may not be exactly 100% white," and where the relationship between economic status and skin colour is fairly close, the issues of race and racial equality, made their way into the band's lyrics, as well.

Chico Science and Nação Zumbi - Etnia

In the end, it's really of Sly and the Family Stone that CSNZ remind me most: a bi- or non- racial band, blurring the line between "white music" and "black music," with a leader rocking shades and some serious-ass sideburns.

Chico Science (left) and Sly Stewart

Chico Science died in a car crash in 1997. Nação Zumbi soldier on still. I haven't heard anything they've released since Chico Science's death, but I understand that some people quite like it.

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Sleeping Dogs from Outa-Space

July 8, 2007... I wrote this piece in April, then learned from Model Citizen ... Zero Discipline that the band doesn't appreciate bloggers posting their songs, so I ditched the fucker. Here it is anyway, featuring songs by other bands I am reminded of when listening to this band. Enjoy!

*****

Hamilton, Ontario. Steel mills, slag heaps. A place where you can walk from donut shop to donut shop in a downpour and not get wet. Resolutely blue collar, and not the sort of place you'd expect to nurture an against-the-grain, avant garage band during the polyester era.

Simply Saucer formed in Hamilton in the early 1970s, a noisy, repetitive, Velvet Underground-influenced jam band, whose songs were leavened with wah-wah freak-outs, space-age sound effects, and comic book lyrics about Eva Braun, masochism and the terrifying future.

The Velvet Underground - I'm Waiting for the Man

Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power

The band gigged around town and made some lo-fi recordings, but were generally ignored. Eventually, they shook their sci-fi and jamming fixations and wrote a bunch of more concise, poppier songs, two of which, "She's A Dog" b/w "I Can Change My Mind," were released as a single in 1978.

Then they disappeared.

A decade later, a compilation of Simply Saucer's earliest, spaciest recordings was released under the title Cyborgs Revisited. Obscurantists around the world took note. Another decade passed and Sonic Unyon re-released the album with nine extra tracks from the band's later, more varied, but sixties garage influenced period.

The Monkees - (I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone

Syd Barrett - If It's in You

The Replacements - I Will Dare

Cyborgs Revisited is a record of bravery in the face of hostility, or at least of persistence in the face of indifference. It is a record of a time and place that history had forgotten. I'm glad it's in my collection. If you like the songs I've posted here, there might be a place for it in your collection, too.

The Who - Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere

P.S. I saw Simply Saucer perform in April. It was the third-and-a-half gig they'd done since reuniting in September. They weren't horrible, exactly, but they were sloppy, and they played with a lot less energy than I was hoping for. I guess it's harder to sing with conviction about being "cyanide over" Eva Braun at age fifty than it is at age eighteen...

For more about Simply Saucer, check out this and that.

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Lost in Tarnslation

July 5, 2007... Rock 'n' Roll is an American music. Like the Blues and Jazz before it, Rock grew out of circumstances specific to the United States of America. Un-Americans can dabble in Rock 'n' Roll, but they'll never really "get" it. This is why, despite decades of effort, British "Rock" is still so effete. This is also why Lul's first LP, Inside Little Oral Annie, is so intriguing.

Lul - Runstan Run

Lul was a rock group active in Holland during the late 1980s and early 1990s. They took the name of their band from the Dutch slang for "prick," and the name of their first LP from the title of a porno flick. (Prick inside Little Oral Annie. Geddit?)

Holland is, of course, the country that foisted Golden Earring on the world. It's a weird place. And that goes double for Friesland, the McDonalds theme park in northern Holland that served as Lul's base of operations.

Lul and friends at Friesland

One of the intriguing things about Inside Little Oral Annie is that it has so few obvious musical reference points. True, the group thanks every band they've ever liked in their liner notes, and some, like Wire and Pere Ubu, more than once. But Lul doesn't really sound like any of them. They allude to fIREHOSE in the lyrics to "New Band," and the guitarist cops licks from King Crimson here and there, but that's it. Other than that, Lul sounds like Lul.

And that's where the whole thing about Un-Americans not "getting" Rock comes in. I mean, listen to "Jessepee Starmaker," a 59-second Bohemian Rhapsody as performed by lobotomites. No red-blooded American would write a song like this.

Lul - Jessepee Starmaker

Lul - Camburist Baby

No red-blooded American would write a song called "Camburist Baby," either. In fact, no one but Lul would write a song called "Camburist Baby," because Lul invented the phrase. Go ahead, G**gle "camburist." You'll see that every one of the handful of references to the word is on a page about Lul, and that none of them shed any light on what exactly a camburist might be. I suspect that, as with the identity of the Robert Volta referred to in the song "Robert Volta," only MOG knows.

Lul - Robert Volta

Yet the intrigue doesn't end there. The lyrics on Inside Little Oral Annie contain repeated uses of the Depression-era euphemisms Hoover Flags (i.e. empty pockets) and Hoovervilles (i.e. shantytowns). But Americans weren't thinking or writing about these things anymore in 1988. Nobody was. Except Lul.

I will leave you with the album's final song, whose inscrutable lyrics ("the insect beamer?") are reproduced below. What more can I say than thank MOG for language barriers!

Lul - Carpet Man

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