My mother-in-law won a copy of The Coasters’ Greatest Hits* last Christmas in a white-elephant exchange, and she re-gifted it to me in my stocking. I threw it on in all innocence just now, thinking it would contain anodyne 1950’s R&B. Of course it turned out instead to contain studio confections of the most premeditated kind. Thus false-footed, I misapprehended the album as en eerie artifact from the future:
I. Pre-irony resembles post-irony.
From my generational vantage, nothing is ever so disorienting as the deployment of humor that doesn’t depend upon irony.
I suppose it’s a common characteristic of novelty songs that they contain actors shouting commentary in funny voices, as with the well-known collaborations between Sonic Youth and Mel Blanc. Considering that I wrote my college comprehensive exams on the uses of romantic irony in German literature from 1790 to 1990, a little more romantic irony really shouldn’t surprise me. Even still, I thank god that Clarence “Frogman” Henry doesn’t follow me around all day yelling things like, “You call those shoes?” or “Tongue-tied, mister?”
III. Alien Technology
Advances in digital music production have been accompanied by the near-extinction of instrument-playing studio musicians. Digital simulation and manipulation have become banal, while actual musicianship has become a form of alien technology.
*Those who prefer the formulation “Gnu/Linux” to “Linux” will probably also prefer the formulation “Lieber/Stoller/Coasters” to “The Coasters”. I prefer the term “Gnu/Coasters,” and in particular the old, wooden style of gnu/coasters. Something about the rattling of gnu on a wooden track thrills my heart in a way that newfangled steel-track gnu/coasters can never do.