Crocodile, Tues Nov 20, $15/$18.
The Fall played its first show when I was two years old, and I first heard the band when I was 20. Now, at 28, I have my first chance to see the band live. This is not a moment to take lightly: The Fall's members are the human agents of chaos on Earth. Their music is pure perversion of music itself; a cancellation of beauty and meaning by something grotesque and random and inscrutable. Just the presence of the Fall's music in the world is destructive, and the sheer abundance of it is unholy. The Fall's work destroys the two human fundaments, language and music. The Fall is anti-matter, the ultimate heretical evidence.
Following the suggestion of Pavement from any of its many interviews in the wake of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, I persuaded a friend to let me borrow the one Fall CD he owned but had never listened to: The Frenz Experiment. At first listen, it was repulsive and practically unlistenable. But I was spurred on by the sheer difficulty of the experience, and a few surprising vocal tics that Steve Malkmus had clearly assimilated into his own band's music. For the entire autumn of that year, I walked to classes, anywhere really, with my headphones on, engaged in a brain-wide battle with this impossible music. Mark E. Smith's voice was so nagging and defiantly out of tune, and his lyrics almost violently obscure, it was a true musical struggle. For the first two weeks, I grappled with it, trying to argue with it.
I can still remember standing in Schmidt Hall at UW, next in line to talk to a secretary who held the fate of my scholastic life in her hands, and realizing that I was unable to take my headphones off. I had been invaded, overcome, conquered. I had entered a labyrinth of roughened, wicked desires and arcane declarations, and the next few months were not mine to determine: They belonged to the Fall. I don't pretend to understand what the fuck Smith is talking about in "Carry Bag Man" or "Bremen Nacht," but neither can I ignore the songs in favor of more scrutable music.
Finally, the album released me--but only to go out and find other Fall records to wonder at. I have no idea how the Fall fits into the lives of other music listeners, at least here in the U.S. By itself the band is a seminal branch of punk music, and it has influenced dozens of bands. The Fall has about 80 official albums, probably another 80 live albums, reissues, or unofficial collections, and an untold number of seven-inch releases. In fact, the releases are as unruly and disrespectful of the rules of music as the songs are: songs are repeated across albums, sometimes in variations, sometimes not.
The Twenty-Seven Points, the album that I next stumbled across, is a two-CD set of live takes, dressing-room joke-telling, onstage dia- logue between Mark E. Smith and his own pre-recorded voice, narratives related over music, a cover of the Other Half's "Mr. Pharmacist," and other completely bizarre songs and snippets, all wrecked and beatified by Mark E. Smith's malevolent genius and sneering vocals-uh.
Hell yes, genius. Once sensitized to the band, nothing is ever the same at all. The span of the Fall's work, from early straight-up punk noise like Bend Sinister to "electronic-influenced" albums like Extricate, and on to the current weirdness that is The Marshall Suite, swallows most other music whole. I now own 14 Fall albums and a half-dozen singles (a mere fraction of the total) and am still compelled to haunt the band's bins at every music shop I visit. In English record stores, there are whole walls of the Fall's albums, though I never saw anyone even glance at those racks.
Never mind that: The Brits know how to pay respect. Music historians and other culture barons may sniff at the endurance of the Fall, claiming to have been there and gotten over it. I refuse. The Fall cannot truly be gotten over, under, or around. At the band's most horrid and difficult, it's at the heart of all punk's bastardy and ruthlessness. The Fall has no right to exist, and the fact that it thrives on can only be taken to mean that we deserve it.