from
the Critical List July 17, 1987
The Young Fresh Fellows: The Men Who Loved
Music (Frontier). Given the 100 million really terrible things that can
happen to a person betwixt cushy cradle and crumbly grave, and given the many
things that do -- given, for that matter, the crumbly grave -- it seems pretty
clear to me that the one thing none of us can really afford to be without in
this world, this treacherous old tiger pit of a world, is a sense of humor. A
sense of humor is like a sense of proportion, but better. A sense of proportion
puts the lid on misery by allowing you to see your own particular troubles in
the light of someone else's worse ones -- I wept because I could not see,
until I met a man who had no head -- but a sense of humor actually
improves the quality of your already ending life. It allows you to eat
your own problems whole, burn the kernels for fuel, and blow the chaff out
your ears in assorted colors; it lets you make hay while the sun shines, and
while it doesn't. Laughter is the best medicine, says Reader's Digest,
says Norman Cousins. It oxygenates the blood, I read somewhere, which sounds
like a good thing, probably. Send in the clowns.
I don't really connect well
with gloom; it seems such a limited way of regarding the world, or
reacting to it. Suffering -- in private, or in art -- is only really interesting
to me when it leads to or at least posits something better than suffering;
otherwise it's just another case history. The Punk Rock Explosion opened
pop to all kinds of characters anxious to celebrate publicly their
self-immolation -- it gave them a sort of seal of approval, even, and various
cults of modish hopelessness took root in the dark late of such dour, doomed
anti-heroes as Sid Vicious, Ian Curtis and Darby Crash. None of those people
ever meant much or made much sense to me. My sympathies, as a Consumer of Art
(and, for that matter, a chooser of friends), lie rather with those who take it
for granted that Life Is Tough and are not paralyzed by its conditions (like
them or not); who take the world as it comes and work their will on it as they
may; who attempt to see beyond the end of their neuroses; and who, above all,
like a good joke once in a while, especially if it's at their own expense. I
like writers who can be funny.... A little bit of lightness is always
appreciated.
Now, this is, I'll be the first to avow, a
rather highfalutin manner in which to approach an album by Seattle's Young Fresh
Fellows, who are, after all, just a bunch of guys playing fairly trashy rock
& roll. But this new LP, like their couple of previous LP's, is
funny, and the fact that it's funny is one of the things I like about it. It's
what makes it more than all right. The songs deliver what the titles promise:
"Unimaginable Zero Summer," "I Got My Mojo Working (And I Thought You'd Like to
Know)", "Amy Grant," "Get Outta My Cave." As music qua music, it has a good
degree of charm, but it's a charm the band's extramusical charms -- the chummily
wiseacre attitude, the cleverly silly lyrical constructions -- make doubly
charming. This isn't the yocks-at-any-cost rock of Frank Zappa, or Al Yankovic
or even the actually witty Bonzo Dog Band; the laughs here are more of a
dividend, a function of the operation of the material, but not the reason for
it. This is first and foremost rock & roll, in the great and dangerous
tradition of the incidentally but purposefully hysterical Flaming Groovies, the
Replacements, the Cramps and the Hoodoo Gurus. The Coasters, even. It's all
about stuff as absolutely real and important as anything ever addressed by Ian
Curtis or Darby Crash, and more reasonable besides. "I Don't Let the Little
Things Get Me Down" goes one song; whether that is, as the liner notes ask,
"optimism in the face of adversity or a blatant disregard for reality" is really
beside the point. What matters is it works.
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Copyright Robert Lloyd © 1987 and 2000