SPARKS WILL FLY WHEN THE WHISTLE BLOWS [226]

Looking through a second-hand shop, I bought a copy of Grace Jones’s 1985 album “Slave to the Rhythm” – the title track is a brilliant, lushly orchestrated song, and Jean-Paul Goude’s cut-and-paste cover, comically elongating Jones’s hair and mouth, is iconic. I was already aware that the album reworks the same song in different ways, but looking up further details later revealed something that left me feeling dissatisfied – the CD copy I bought was an abridged version, nine minutes shorter than the original release.

I thought it would be easy, these days, to find the album on Spotify, or iTunes, or Amazon, to stream or download, but it was nowhere (at least, in the UK) – the title track is on Spotify, but as part of a 1980s best-of compilation, and not listed alongside Grace Jones’s other albums. Therefore, if I wanted to hear the album as originally intended, I would have to buy the vinyl LP, or track down the original US release on CD, from 1987. I saw one copy listed on Amazon as “dispatched from USA,” but did not state version it was – fortunately, it was the right one.

“Slave to the Rhythm” was a concept album produced by Trevor Horn, assisted by Stephen Lipson, and the song was written by them alongside Bruce Woolley and Simon Barlow... yet it couldn’t be more about its singer if it tried, and is credited as such: “Breath, Blood and Voice: Grace Jones.” Knowing this project was originally announced as Horn’s next collaboration with the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood, before being recorded by Jones while taking a break from her new film career, doesn’t sound right – I thought Jones had written it.

The two versions of the album I have are as follows: the 1987 CD release by Island Records, (catalogue number 422-842 612-2), and the UK reissue as part of the “Island Masters” series, from 1989-90 (IMCD 65). Both albums have eight tracks, with the nine-minute reduction coming from cutting sections out of almost all the songs. This is done by mostly excising the spoken-word content of the album: fitting the album’s subtitle, “A Biography,” Grace Jones is interviewed by music journalists Paul Morley, formerly of the “NME,” and Capital Radio’s Paul Cooke. Morley asks the more searching questions, and Cooke says to Jones, “I’m sure a lot of people expect you to be very intimidating, but I think you’re great fun” – an enduring image from British television is Grace Jones slapping the TV interviewer Russell Harty for turning his back on her to talk to someone else.

The songs themselves were produced at the rate of once a week, cutting up Jones’s performance into different ways. The lyrics are brief and pointed - “Work all day / As men who know / Wheels must turn / To keep the flow” – almost designed to be cut and pasted in any order. The track closest to the single release known as “Slave to the Rhythm” is actually titled “Ladies and Gentlemen: Grace Jones” on the album, and has the most complete performance of the lyrics. A rockier version, “Jones the Rhythm,” also released as a single, cuts the first verse, but features a spoken introduction by the actor Ian McShane, taken from Jean-Paul Goude’s biography “Jungle Fever” – McShane also reads from this on the track “The Frog and the Princess,” talking about using Jones as “the ideal vehicle for my work” – Jones does not feature on this track herself. In contrast, “Operattack” is only Jones’s voice, sampled and contorted through all the “work to the rhythm / dance to the rhythm” sections, punctuated by a wail of “SLAVE!”   

The tracks were produced at the rate of one a week, and the cost of studio time, and use of an orchestra, was pushed to $385,000 – that may be the equivalent of $926,000 in 2020, but many rappers’ videos have larger budgets. I do not know if the album came as a result of deciding to release all versions as one collection, instead of having to choose one for a single, or if the interviews and spoken sections were used to create a theme. What I do know is that Grace Jones, both as a performer and a personality, could carry a more conceptually challenging work like this, and make it a commercial success too, without having the pressure of breaking the mould with every album, which was expected of David Bowie.

In short, the “Island Masters” removes most of the spoken sections, some of them being printed as liner notes, alongside the album credits – Paul Morley and Paul Cooke are no longer credited for their contribution, as they are no longer heard, and Ian McShane’s sections are cut back. One track, “The Crossing (Ooh The Action...),” is turned into an instrumental by the cuts. Perhaps this is to make the reissue more successful commercially, by making it sound more like a regular album. There does exist an album titled, “Highlights from Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds,” which makes the original sound like it was similar in scale to Wagner’s Ring cycle, but hacking away much of Richard Burton’s narration makes the “Highlights” version weaker. Every word on “Slave to the Rhythm” is about Grace Jones, even if it not her saying them.

If it is not clear enough that I consider the original version of “Slave to the Rhythm” to be the full, proper, correct version, it is the most avoidable aspect of the “Island Masters” reissue – the spelling errors. The final track is given the title “Ladies and Gentleman: Grace Jones”, and Stephen Lipson is credited as Steven Lipson, while the Synclavier, an early sampling synthesiser used throughout the album, is confused with fish eggs: “The synclaviar was used extensively during the compilation of this biography: acknowledgement to New England Digital.” The Synclavier would later be overrun by computers like the Commodore Amiga 1000 and the Atari ST, but that’s beside the point.

WE DO OUR BEST, WE TRY TO PLEASE [163]

Fifty years have now passed since the release of “Philosophy of the World,” the first album by The Shaggs. Fifty years have also passed since it started being described as one of the worst records ever made: the most often repeated critique, from a review in “Rolling Stone,” described the group of three sisters as sounding like “lobotomised Trapp family singers,” while their playing is described as amateur at best, incompetent at worst.

I first came across the album from a video online, describing it in terms of being “so bad it’s good.” With musical taste being entirely subjective, I needed to listen for myself. What I heard conjured up words like “naïve,” “nervous,” “charming,” “claustrophobic” and “insightful.” The Shaggs sound like a typical 1960s American garage band, but one that was caught on record before they were ready to play in public.

Discussing the music of The Shaggs in 2019 is entirely bound up with the story of the Wiggin family: Dorothy on vocals and lead guitar, Betty on vocals and rhythm guitar, Helen on drums, and Austin as the Svengali father that took them out of school, giving them music and singing lessons, because his mother, a palm reader, predicted he would marry a woman with strawberry blond hair, have two daughters before she died, and that his daughters would become a popular music group. The Shaggs, named after both shaggy dogs and the “Shag” hairstyle they were all given (later known as the “Rachel”), became a band because their father had a mission, not through their own ambition, and despite eventually achieving some success performing in the area around their town of Fremont, New Hampshire, they disbanded upon the death of Austin Wiggin in 1975, their claustrophobic career now able to end.

Knowing The Shaggs’ backstory makes listening to “Philosophy of the World,” made because Austin decided it was time for them to record an album, more difficult than it should be. It is not possible to recreate the conditions under which the album first became known. Only a thousand copies were printed, before the label owner absconded with nine hundred copies and the money paid to him, leaving the rest to be picked up as, essentially, found objects, with no other context than the record sleeve, picturing the band in front of a green curtain, and liner notes (written by Austin) proclaiming the band are “real, pure, and unaffected by outside influences.” Noted fans include Frank Zappa, Terry Adams of the band NRBQ, and Kurt Cobain.

After discussing the album’s reputation, I can finally enjoy the music by itself. All twelve tracks were written by Dorothy Wiggin, and their titles reveal a kind of teenage grasping for meaning: “Philosophy of the World,” “Things I Wonder,” “Why Do I Feel?,” “What Should I Do?” and “Who Are Parents?” The lyrics themselves are simple and straightforward: “There are many things I wonder / There are many things I don’t / It seems as though the things I wonder most / Are the things I never find out.” This does not mean that the lyrics can’t also be playful: “My companion is with me / Wherever I go, it goes too / My Companion is with me / No matter what I do.” There can be frivolous songs, about Halloween or a sports car, but another will aim for depth: “But then there’s times when you are very different / I just don’t understand / How a minute you can be so mean / The next minute so grand.”

The music written to these lyrics is jangly, played in a similar style across all twelve tracks. Dorothy and Betty almost always sing the same melody, with no harmonising, and Helen’s drumming either leads or follows the guitars. The band plays in time, but the time varies. Regardless, the rhythm is there, the melody is there, the chords are there. There is also a knowing eye fixed straight on their father: while “Who Are Parents?” states, “Parents are the ones who really care... Parents are the ones who are always there,” the title track also makes clear, “There will always be someone who disagrees / We do our best, we try to please / But we’re like the rest, we are never at ease.”

Pop music is so formulaic as a concept – two guitars, bass and drums, three chords, two verses, chorus, middle-eight and so on – that it is not no surprising that anyone can do it, whether the result is polished or not. Its presentation as an album, with printed vinyl, cover and liner notes, is using the form to add credibility, owing to Austin Wiggin paying to access the record-making process. If The Shaggs had appeared in 2019, the process would be so much easier: YouTube videos, an account on Bandcamp, self-releasing their songs via iTunes. If it was fifteen years before, they would have a MySpace page. If it was 1976, the year after the band broke up, they could have looked on as the punk aesthetic led to people picking up instruments and performing even quicker than they could ever have done, had they wanted to in the first place.

I cannot say that “Philosophy of the World” is a bad album, or even a technically inept album. Enough of the pop music formula is broken by The Shaggs that you are compelled to stay with them. Alright, other people can perform better, or write better songs, but they made an album, and you have not, even if it is far easier for you to make one than it had been for them.

The following fifty years redeemed the band – a 1982 release of later recordings, titled “Shaggs’ Own Thing,” was less successful, because their continued improvement as a band, and their sounding more confident, made them sound more conventional than before. The master recordings of “Philosophy of the World” were rediscovered by Dorothy Wiggin in 1988, leading to their re-release by a major record label, RCA. Dorothy released an album of new songs in 2013, titled “Ready! Get! Go!” – “Banana Bike” is a particularly good song. The Dot Wiggin Band, which continues to this day, also performs Shaggs covers from the original sheet music, idiosyncratic drums, jangly guitars and all – of course they knew what they were doing.

WE’D LIKE TO KNOW A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOU FOR OUR FILES [43]

I suppose I shouldn’t be at all surprised about what I read on Facebook, given the measures being currently rolled out to combat “fake news” articles, but what surprised me more was an advertisement that appeared in the middle of the long procession of updates from family members and work colleagues. Somehow, Facebook’s data and algorithms suggested I read an article, first published by “The New York Times” in October 2016, titled “Is It OK to Find Sexual Satisfaction Outside Your Marriage?” The article turned out to be the from the newspaper’s problem page, which also answered a query about smoking after beginning a new health insurance policy.

I certainly didn’t need to read it – it’s not a case of, “she doth protest too much,” I’m just not married, and I don’t smoke – but it made me wonder what it was about me, or my associates, that made Facebook suggest this to me. An algorithm is not “artificial intelligence,” in which case it would have known better, but all it had to go on is the information we had all been feeding into it.

Later the same day, my thumb clicked on the wrong “Maps” app on my phone, clicking on the app provided with the phone, and not the better one I usually use. Somehow, without me never having asked it, the app had plotted my usual journey to and from work, even down to marking the two ends of the line as, “Work” and “Home.”

We had this coming. Tesco Clubcard, the supermarket loyalty card launched nationwide in 1995, may be the first time most people had come across the idea of “Big Data,” where the data being collected was so large, so complex, that the ways of storing and reading through it had to change. The results, however, caused Lord McLaurin, a Tesco executive, to declare, “What scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years.”

We rely on “Big Data” to anticipate our needs, demands, and wishes. What that means, however, is that companies can no longer be in a position to guess what people might need. Tesco has expanded enormously over the twenty years since Clubcard began because it knows exactly what it needs to buy – it is a business that no longer needs to anticipate demand, in the same manner as Facebook, Google, Apple, and so on.

However, in the rush to accept the more convenient future that Big Data can bring, we often rush past the Terms & Conditions to press the “Accept” button, something I am also guilty of doing, in the name of convenience. Would we be less accepting to give away our information if we took the time to read through the T&Cs? R. Sikoryak has created “Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel,” a 94-page comic adaptation of the Apple iTunes Terms and Conditions but, with this being unauthorised, is it against Apple’s business plans to make their conditions more entertaining to read? Does it no longer matter? I have a good idea for Netflix’s next big show.