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Imp of the Perverse: The new Bobby Conn album is the perfect soundtrack to the end of the world
04.08.2020
01:06 pm
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I’ve been intending to write a long post about Bobby Conn here on Dangerous Minds for the past year. I’ve thought about Bobby Conn a lot in recent months, but never actually sat down and started typing any of it out until today. There’s a brand new Bobby Conn album, Recovery, and this is what finally gave me a deadline. It’s EASILY “the album of the pandemic,” but we’ll get to that, and why, later.

I present to you that Bobby Conn is the greatest marginal cult artist in America today. That a talent this brilliant has not been nationally heralded and respected widely is unforgivable. 

A bit more than two years ago I myself had little more awareness of “Chicago’s favorite Christian entertainer,” than the widely circulated and very puzzling YouTube clip of Bobby Conn performing “Never Get Ahead” on what is obviously a local cable access program for young viewers. Many of you reading this have no doubt seen this clip, which dates from the late 90s, as it’s had several bouts of being a viral video since YouTube first launched in 2005, and maybe even before that. Apparently it’s also been shown several times on MTV Europe as something along the lines of “the worst music video ever made.” (Because of this Bobby Conn is better known, and has a much bigger fanbase, in Europe than in America.)

One day, it was in Spring of 2018, for no reason I suddenly had “Never Get Ahead” playing in my head and I dialed up that video and watched it again. And then I watched it again, and again, marvelling at its uncomfortable brilliance and thought “I gotta look into what this guy is all about.” It wasn’t that it was a good song—it’s great—but more that I found the whole thing so very, very confounding and I wanted to know more. On the basis of this one piece of evidence, “confusion,” frankly, seemed the obvious reaction that most people would have when confronted by this scraggly little crackhead emoting like a demonic Al Jolson covering a Jackson 5 song and dancing his ass off while young children and early teen onlookers clap and awkwardly dance around him.
 

 
One detail of this video that I especially appreciate is how none of the kids are like “What is going on here? Who is this weirdo?” but are apparently quite genuinely enthusiastic about the flaming creature who’s just landed in their midst. The entire thing is unwholesome, but also a masterpiece of the vaguely sinister. Note that the X-rated lyrics were toned down for this appearance. (Here’s the original song.)

What did the rest of Bobby Conn’s music sound like, I wondered? I took the plunge and ordered his entire catalog from Amazon. There were five studio albums, a live CD and a few EPs. I didn’t pay more than $2 for any of them. The postage for each was more than it cost. It took me about nine or ten further months until I grabbed one off the pile and started listening in the car. The car was the perfect place to listen to Bobby Conn and give the music my full attention. Not a good soundtrack for multitasking, that’s for sure. I’ve listened to all of them in the car, for weeks, before listening inside. It was a winning strategy for me at least. The key thing is that you need both repeat listens—it won’t sink in on the first play for most people—and to pay close attention, because it’s music with a lot of tiny moving parts.

I began at the beginning with his self-titled 1997 debut Bobby Conn. This album is sometimes described as “no wave” or “post rock” and that’s not entirely offbase, but it’s also got the mutant pop/disco/soul “hit” of “Never Get Ahead” (a song metaphorically equating a male prostitute sucking off old men to getting ahead in the corporate world), the heavy metal bludgeoning that comes with “The Sportsman,” and “Who’s The Paul? #16,” a 13-minute-long musique concrète assemblage comprised of slowed down and layered snatches of Paul McCartney songs. “Axis ‘67 (Parts 1&3)” explains how Conn believes he is, or might be, the Antichrist prophesied in the Book of Revelation. And you can dance to it. It’s an album that’s impossible to pigeonhole, and that has no obvious influences other than the Jackson 5 (and maybe the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but don’t let that put you off). After a few back to back listens, I had a feeling I was going to become a big Bobby Conn fan. What an incredibly strong, and unique, but preposterously odd way to present yourself to the world. How much of it he was serious about and how much of it was purely a theatrical persona ala Ziggy Stardust was difficult to say. There was a very straight-faced quality about it all, knowing, arch and dripping with multiple layers of venomous irony.

Conn’s next album was 1998’s Rise Up!, an updating of the whole “protest music” concept for an apathetic generation not much interested in protesting anything. That this message was coming from a diminutive, falsetto-singing, apparently drug-addled rent boy with glitter eyeshadow, chipped painted fingernails and a shitty nylon tracksuit gave Rise Up! a particular “leper messiah” edge. Musically it was a massive step-up from the prior year’s effort—it was produced by Jim O’Rourke, who is all over the album—and marked the full-flowering of Conn’s musical collaboration with his future wife, violinist Julie Pomerleau, aka Monica BouBou. She’s on the first album but here takes a role that’s about equal to the name on the spine of the CD. He’s an amazingly inventive guitarist, as proven on his debut album, but with his “rock” prowess on that instrument augmented by her sophisticated strings and keyboards, there’s an immediately noticed slickness that Bobby Conn lacked. Here the sound becomes—all at once—a sleazy comingling of the essence of 70s and 80s AM radio hits, Prince, prog, riffy glam rock, Van der Graaf Generator and disco. A stand out track, the vicious “Baby Man,” tells the tale of a useless loser living off his girlfriend. It might be autobiographical, it might not be.
 

 
It could be accurately said that the Bobby Conn project was already in full bloom with Rise Up!, but the next album, 2001’s The Golden Age—also produced by Jim O’Rourke—is another big, huge jump up in quality. The lyrical fodder is still the same. Conn has said the album overall is about someone in his 30s still acting like he’s in his 20s, but paranoia, revolution, street drugs and male prostitutes (“I’ll be working on your street/ Missing half my teeth/ Give another gummy blowjob/ Get myself something good to eat.”) are still the dominant themes. The arrangements on this album are absolutely next level and it’s here that Conn and BouBou do something so unique and so perfectly realized that I can’t think of any other musical artist(s) who do this, or have done this particular thing, and done it so well.
 

 
What am I talking about? It’s how the music can smoothly shapeshift from a string-led Gainsbourg/Vannier-esque orchestrated passage to something that sounds like King Crimson (there’s often a strong hint of Robert Fripp in Conn’s guitar playing) and then have it change on a dime from there to a blaring horn section that sounds like it’s grafted straight from Frank Zappa’s Grand Wazoo album. For a few bars it will sound like Styx, then Arvo Part. Then it becomes alternately Prince-like, proggy, falsetto Chic disco-funk, and ends like an 80s power ballad.  This might, and often does, happen within the confines of just one song. In an interview, Conn described how the compositional structure of Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” had a big influence on his songwriting. Almost everything on the album is a suite of sorts. They pull this conceit off spectacularly well. The Golden Age is one of the most musically sophisticated pop albums I’ve ever heard, with some of the very finest musicianship, and it’s bursting with intelligence. I would easily rank it my favorite Bobby Conn release, and as one of my top favorite albums, period. Sadly this one isn’t on Tidal, but it is on Spotify. Start with The Golden Age. It’s probably worth mentioning that one day when I was playing it, my wife, who is 99% of the time totally indifferent—if not openly hostile—to what music I’m playing, asked me what I was listening to and added “This is absolutely beautiful.”

It is but it’s a lot other things, too. Here’s an excerpt from a quite informed Amazon review for The Golden Age by Bill Your ‘Free Form FM Print DJ.

If you grabbed your favorite 1970s and 1980s influences, wrote structured songs, and then both piled these influences both alongside and on top of the other, you would sound like Bobby Conn.

If what I just described sounds like an artsy mess, buy Golden Age and hear that Conn’s music is anything but. Take “Angels,” an early Golden Age track. Conn maintains a three or four chord structure through “Angels,” but breaks the arrangements down into tiny fragments. First the song sound like a basic guitar track, then classical sounding strings take over in the guitar’s place, then Conn’s voice takes “Angels” steering wheel. He can sound like Curtis Mayfield one second, Bryan Ferry the next, Tim (or for that matter Jeff) Buckley the next.

But Conn’s mastery hear is not wearing a lot of musical hats in ambitious suites. If I wanted that, I’d take out any good—or awful—70s progressive rock album and play the mandatory side long track.

NO! What makes Conn so compelling is that the songs work as songs—just like the Beatles or Brian Wilson or Steely Dan (and yeah, he references those guys too.) He is a master at screwing the tiny parts of his tracks together so each supports the other and makes a cogent, 3-5 minute rock and roll song

Not that you are going to absorb it, or even be able to process it right away. There is A LOT going on in each of his songs, and you have to play the numbers a few times and A) listen attentively—i suggest a notepad and a protractor or B)-keep playing it on a casual basis until it gets into your head, where it is going to stay for a long time.

Verdict = truth. Bobby Conn’s songs, as complex and as complicated as they are, tend to be serious earworms.

Conn released an album about every three years, then there was a gap of five years, and ultimately of eight years. All of them are super strong albums. There’s no such thing as a “bad” Bobby Conn song. Like with Momus or Luke Haines, some songs just stand out more than others, but they’re all good and of a consistently high quality. Sadly, I see little to indicate that any of these dazzling albums sold more than a perfunctory number of copies. I know of but two other Bobby Conn fans, one who told me that when he’d seen Conn play live there might’ve been more people onstage than in the audience. Aside from the “Never Get Ahead” clip, none of his YouTube videos have racked up a significant number of views. Spotify tells you exactly how many listeners an artist gets and it’s the same story there. It must be depressing as fuck to be this talented and also to still remain fairly obscure after decades of trying. I think the pervy prostitute persona and the multiple levels of irony might confuse, or repel a lot of people, but for fuck’s sake, this character is INSPIRED. The songs make more sense and are much more interesting coming from “Bobby Conn” the same way “Five Years” made more sense coming from Ziggy Stardust. (David Bowie himself was a Bobby Conn fan and invited him to perform in London when he curated the Meltdown Festival in 2002.)

I was worried that maybe he’d stopped making music. From 2012 to 2020, there was no Bobby Conn album, just the unjustly ignored “Hollow Men” single. I’d only just discovered one of the greatest unheralded American musicians of my generation, he had to make more albums, if only JUST FOR ME!

When I got the press release about a new Bobby Conn album a couple of weeks ago, I (literally) said “FUCK YEAH!” It wasn’t just the best “rock” news I’d gotten in quite a while, it was great news to get especially now, as we’re all hunkered down in this pandemic. Immersing myself in a NEW Bobby Conn album became my most important, soon-to-be-gratified short term goal.

But before I get to that, let me backup first and call your attention to the jaw-dropping music video for “Hollow Men,” directed by the notorious Bruce LaBruce. This is a work of high art, if you ask me, and I urge you to watch it with the volume up loudly and giving it your full and undivided attention.
 

   
Amazing, right? Not everyone’s going to pick up on the T.S. Eliot and Lohengrin references, of course, but others will. It really doesn’t matter and should have no bearing on your enjoyment of the piece if you do or don’t. This is one of the best Bobby Conn songs, not just in eight years, but ever. Coupled with the video, it’s the very quintessence of his art. (And let me remind the reader that when I say “his” I mean to include Pomerleau/BouBou’s contributions, which are significant.) Interesting to note that the druggy male hustler persona of “early” Bobby Conn has now been updated as a middle-aged pervert.

Much more Bobby Conn after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.08.2020
01:06 pm
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Bobby Conn: Never Get Ahead
07.21.2009
06:40 pm
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Bobby Conn isn’t just a genius. He’s a midwestern genius. His albums (like “The Homeland,” with the Glass Gypsies) are some of the best protest music that came out of the Bush years, and he’s still going strong. The man is a one-man culture destroyer that apparently they’ve never let out of the gate because he’s too dangerous. They keep him penned up in Chicago somewhere and I, for one, believe the man is criminally overlooked and that they should let him loose.

He is, however, apparently famous enough to make this list of bands that can make your children gay. It’s actually a great checklist. Apparently Morton Subotnick makes you gay, too!

Posted by Jason Louv
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07.21.2009
06:40 pm
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