Issue 7: Five Wacky English Proletariat Idiots: The Fall's "Grotesque" / "YIPPEE but it's Jazz": The Unlikely History
Mark E. Smith's finest. / You won't believe how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The Fall are a tricky band to write about. Why? I'm tempted to just say "because they're The Fall," but you deserve a more detailed explanation.
Let's use the example of the song above, "New Face in Hell," released on the 1980 album Grotesque (After the Gramme). On the surface, it seems to be an acerbic rant about… something??? over out-of-tune guitars and kazoo. The interlocking, muddy guitars are recorded cheaply, with a ton of audio bleeding. Frontman Mark E. Smith's voice cracks as he goes about four half steps above his range on every chorus, accompanied by an even further out of tune kazoo solo. The whole thing has a vibe somewhere between lo-fi live punk and drunken rambling.
Yet new facts emerge when we look at the lyric sheet. Instead of paranoid rambling, it becomes clear this is a story; in fact, a very well-defined one. It details a "wireless enthusiast" who intercepts a top-secret government transmission and goes next door to his redneck neighbor to share the information, but finds him assassinated, and is promptly arrested and framed for his murder by "the same government he and his now-dead neighbor voted for." How Kafkaesque! All of this is ranted in a heavy, nasal Manchester accent. The juxtaposition between the literary seriousness of the story, the flippancy of the way it's delivered, and the muddiness of the sound under all the other instruments create The Fall's signature sound.
Expanding outward, Grotesque (After the Gramme) is a whole album of songs in this insubordinate vein. "The NWRA" describes a working-class North English rebellion against the rest of the UK, with its leader, Joe Totale, donning pre-Roman traditional tribal ceremonial garb, but the rebellion is co-opted by a corrupt corporate executive referred to only as Tony. "Pay Your Rates" is a twisted update of the Beatles' "Taxman," threatening to send the non-taxpaying listener to the "debtor's retreat estate" government housing projects. "English Scheme" sarcastically pits working-class social climbers against middle-class social climbers, with a bizarrely catchy chorus to boot.
This is not to say that Mr. Smith was in any imaginable way socially progressive. He may have been conscious of certain societal issues, but he was just an old curmudgeon at heart (never mind that he was like 25 in 1980). I mean, he was a Brexit guy for fuck's sake. At its core, The Fall was all about him (he was famously quoted as saying "If it's me and your granny on bongos, it's The Fall"), and he was really about being a hater - mocking and criticizing others for varied reasons.
Other than the government and big business, another favorite target of Fall songs was the music industry and the people associated with it, absolutely excoriated in "C'n'C-S Mithering." The whole thing is one long semi-improvised rant that pulls from everything from 19th-century peasant movements to poorly spelled convenience store advertisements, all on the same theme. ("A circle of low IQ's… They say I rip off Johnny Rotten! They only strike for more pay! They say, 'See yah mate!' 'Yeah, see yah mate!' 'See yah mate! Yeah, see yah mate!'"...) This song also provides the title for this article. In context, it's a bit obtuse, but seems to describe the Fall themselves as viewed by big American music executives, later joking that to the American mind, idealistic British musicians with their first taste of corporate money "act like peasants with free milk."
A few songs take less acerbic routes, but even the ballads are weird. "Gramme Friday," a murky, bluesy tune, is an ode to methamphetamine, building up to bizarre imagery of an island of the stuff floating in the Irish Sea (or at least that's what I think he means by "Fastnet" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastnet_Lighthouse). The narrator of "In the Park" equates a random bit of foliage in a park with a couch he recently had sex on. The title character of the gothic "Impression of J. Temperance" creates a hideous dog-like homunculus through unknowable means.
One throughline many critics have noticed is an urban-fantasy theme, with surrealistic or supernatural happenings being incorporated into many songs. This is not strongly emphasized on Grotesque (After the Gramme), but other Fall tracks, like "Wings" from Perverted By Language (1983), are basically full-on short stories, and engaging ones, too - once you give up on trying to decipher Mark E. Smith's accent and go read the lyric sheet.
The Castle Records reissue of the album on streaming services also includes two of the group's greatest singles ever, "Totally Wired" and "How I Wrote Elastic Man." They're a bit more commercial (i.e. less yapping, more hooks) and not connected to the lyrical themes of the album (well, "Totally Wired" could be seen as related to "Gramme Friday" if you squint), but they're excellent songs that are musically a tad more palatable than most of the album tracks, so give them a spin. There's also "City Hobgoblins," a track that's locked in many regions seemingly due to copyright issues; a big chunk of Perverted By Language also suffers this issue. Rather unfortunate, but Youtube is your friend. I could take or leave the final bonus track on this issue, a 7-minute "self-interview" recorded in the same lo-fi as everything else.
Overall, I would give Grotesque a very high score in lyrics, a decent score in musicality (it ain't pretty, but it works), and a high score in overall atmosphere-building.
Verdict: 4 stars - Recommended
The Unlikely History of "Yippee but it's Jazz"
To understand this particular rendition of this tune, we must understand the original(s), which it's rather far removed from.
This polite little fellow in the thumbnail is an early ancestor in its lineage, but there's a whole lot more going on.
Carl Sagan once said that "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Accordingly, let's go as far back as we can in search of the origins of… whatever this is. I dug pretty far.
Let's take a look at the chart.
World history and history of music: We'll come back to these in a moment.
Original "Yippee" audio: The originator of this specific video is the widely spread original audio of an unidentified German boy who is so joyous that his mother lets him stay up past his bedtime while drinking Coke and playing Fortnite that he sings a little improvised song about it, capping it off with a "YIPPEE!"
The world history behind this is actually pretty interesting, if you think about it. Once a hated enemy of the US in both World Wars, Germany, now part of NATO, is far enough into the American sphere of influence that a representative from the nation (so to speak) is more excited than anything to get to participate in a US-developed game while consuming a US-invented product. This is connected to the wider cultural success the US has had over time - with a thriving entertainment industry and international hegemony, American culture and the English language have been spread all over the globe.
"tbh": Originating from an obscure Twitter post, the drawing of the big-eyed creature shown above was first made and named in 2021, and languished in obscurity for about a year until it was first associated with the "Yippee" audio in mid-2022. (Its connection to world history? Twitter, just like anything else, is the result of specific historical circumstances, in this case the rise of Silicon Valley and the Internet. Hey, it's in the history textbooks.)
"Autism Creature": This 2022 phenomenon cast the aforementioned creature as a sort of "spokesperson for autism," as well as general social awkwardness (certainly not in an offensive way - in fact, the whole thing was primarily driven by actual autistic people, many of whom see the neutral expression with sympathetic eyes as strongly evocative of their own tendency to outwardly express less emotion. Another aspect in favor is that it's perceived as being 'by and for' actual autistic people, unlike other symbols such as the puzzle piece, which are often developed by morally questionable/ unrepresentative organizations like Autism Speaks). The "tbh" creature, now strongly associated with the "Yippee" audio, was used in memes and posts such as this one:
And this one:
It was also associated with confetti, as shown here:
The popularity of all these memes led to "YIPPEE but it's jazz," a playful jazz arrangement of the "Yippee" audio complete with pictures of the creature on all instruments, which has racked up well over 2 million views at time of writing.
Let's go back to understand the jazz foundation this video rests on.
Jazz, just like "tbh," was developed under a very specific set of historical circumstances this thing is very far removed from. Originating in the 1910s in New Orleans among an extremely diverse melting pot of influences - most importantly the city’s Black brass band tradition, but also traces of blues, ragtime, holdover West African rhythmic ideas, Sousa-style marching bands, Latin music, and whatever else they could find - it spread to New York City by the '20s, where it quickly became one of the most important American (specifically, African-American) cultural exports in history. A 1950’s version of the little German boy from the "Yippee" audio would probably still be excited about Coca-Cola, but instead of Fortnite, he would be listening to American jazz on the radio.
Anyway, after that, it had an absolutely bizarre history, going through a succession of subgenres influenced by material as far apart as European avant-garde classical and cheesy '70s radio-rock. (This is a gross oversimplification; for a good collection of interesting primary sources, check out Robert Walser’s Keeping Time (1998), ISBN 978-0199765775.)
But the type of jazz happening in the "Yippee" video bears almost no relation to the disreputable, funky underground club music of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. This is "Berklee"/conservatory jazz - in no uncertain terms, the kind played by art students who approach the genre from a solely academic viewpoint instead of really engaging with its soul. The dead giveaway is the synth keys sound - classic jazz synth has a lot more low-end and sense of rhythm, as demonstrated in the video below. The bassline is also clearly written for an electric bass, not a stand-up, but more importantly, it has an excessively clean tone and is brought too far into the foreground with distracting complexity. This is the music of Adam Neely and his ilk - well, absolutely no shade to Adam Neely, who is excellent in every other regard, but it's played with a little less feeling and swing than you might find in a less privileged band.
However, every kind of music has somewhere it fits, and this video is exactly where this kind of stuff fits. The light, bouncy playfulness actually goes great with the high-pitched vox - the deep groove of the Herbie Hancock tune above would be inappropriately serious for such an atmosphere. It's perfectly suited to backing up the equally playful, un-serious concept.
More history goes into random bullshit like this than you could even imagine. I haven't even covered the perplexing migration of "tbh" from Twitter to Tumblr back to Twitter, the specific circumstances surrounding modern jazz's transformation into the aforementioned jive-ass conservatory material, or my own disastrous attempts to sing the whole thing two octaves down. But I hope this was an enlightening read!