Bad company

The best of the worst

The funniest scene in Voltaire’s Candide is the one where we meet Count Pococurante, a nobleman who’s surrounded himself with grand cultural artifacts and turns his nose up at all of them anyway. Candide is sympathetic: “Is there not pleasure in criticizing, in finding faults where other men think they see beauty?”

“That is to say,” replies his companion Martin, “that there is pleasure in not being pleased.”

There is, actually. Good music is a wonderful thing, but very, very bad albums can be wonderful too — if they fail as art, they say more about the cultural climate that gave them birth. Take, for instance, Bill Comeau’s Gentle Revolution, which I discovered recently in an antiques store in Cleveland. Its cover is a gatefold with a blown-up fuzzy photograph of semi-dressed young people frolicking by a swimming hole that’s unmistakably the one on Max Yasgur’s farm, overlaid with the artist’s name and the title (in a sort of “Listen to the Flower People” font), the label name (Avant Garde), and, on the back, a wretched hippie poem (“Some wonder day/All the/WORDS/Come to live/And a whole new day/Opens/In a cascading/Of/Rainbow rhymes”).

 I had two thoughts: 1) This is clearly the product of somebody who went to Woodstock and had his mind comprehensively blown; and 2) This is seriously going to suck, and I need it anyway. Good thing it’s only three dollars.

It doesn’t disappoint on either count. Inside, there’s a photograph of a seated Woodstock crowd and a 1969 copyright notice (which means that Comeau went to the festival in mid August and got his recording career underway by the end of the year). The half-dozen original songs are unadulterated hippy-dippy — anyone capable of writing “If children ruled the world/There’d be no fighting anymore” is clearly unfamiliar with actual children. Comeau also croons fumbly, earnest covers of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” “Both Sides Now,” and Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” apparently under the impression that he could bring them to a broader audience, along with a groovied-up version of “Eleanor Rigby.”

Still, Gentle Revolution’s very awfulness is backhandedly revelatory. Woodstock is usually remembered as the culmination of the ’60s counterculture; Comeau’s reaction to it, this zeal of the kind that comes only from a fresh convert, suggests that Woodstock was also a beginning for some. And even as he struggles for the high notes of “Both Sides Now,” he reminds us how that archetypal patchouli anthem once struck people as shockingly beautiful and original.

There are a few reliable signs of a fascinating awful recording, such as the presence of Alec Costandinos, the producer who was responsible for both Sphinx’s Judas Iscariot, Simon Peter (a 40-minute disco epic about the betrayal of Christ) and Love and Kisses’ “How Much, How Much I Love You” (the stupidest disco song ever, which is saying a lot). His career lowlight, though, may be 1978’s Romeo & Juliet, which is credited to Alec R. Costandinos and the Symphonic Orchestra. Never mind the painstakingly cliché’d rhythms and storm-the-gates string and brass arrangements, or the robust wankiness of the guitar solo in the second of its five “acts”; the real wonder here is the lyrics. The album starts out as a setting of Shakespearean verse — sung in harmony by a brace of disco divas — and rapidly devolves into the likes of “Oh, Juliet, I love you/Couldn’t live my life without you.”

Dreadful, yes — but when you think about it as a product of its time and culture instead of as music, it’s a lot more interesting. Costandinos’s Romeo & Juliet is disco screaming out for cultural legitimacy: it’s an album-length suite instead of a pop song, and its text says, “Look at me, I’m classical.” Even if you’d never heard disco before, you’d still be able to say that Romeo & Juliet was probably representative of a much larger genre; that that genre faced a backlash from people who thought it was cheap and dumb; and that when it tried to overcome that backlash, it fell into the trap of arguing on its opponents’ terms.

This kind of analysis even works for terrible contemporary recordings, and they don’t come much more terrible than Set It Off, the Interscope debut from Shuvel. Like Comeau’s record and Costandinos’s, it’s utterly of its genre, in this case rap metal, and the packaging gives it away (austere gun-metal gray, and a band name that’s a phonetic misspelling of Shovel). It’s an 18th-generation photocopy, a totally derivative barrage of minor-key barre chords and macho bluster, unleavened by anything like Korn’s agonized fragility or Limp Bizkit’s sneaky hooks. But it will tell bargain-bin hunters in 20 or 30 years more about our historical moment than it can tell us. There’s no reason to waste time listening to it now — just stick it in a time capsule and wait until it can bring somebody the pleasure of not being pleased.

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