Utopia: Pop Topic of Pure Unimportance

What to make of Todd Rundgren's Utopia? Certainly not a whole blogspot, but perhaps a stop on the blog, a blinded blip spot upon the screen saver of popped-out sounds....

(For specific context you can read about Utopia on Wikipedia, and the information is in good enough order for me to leave most embellishments aside for now. Yet, can't resist this, a quick synopsis:

"Todd Rundgren and Utopia -- 70's - 80's. Assignment: describe "who" "they" were. Rundgren was/is a unique producer, singer, lead guitarist, songwriter, front man, composer, bandleader, and all other kinds of things. He made a great living producing records for rock bands -- Meat Loaf, XTC, The New York Dolls -- and making solo records of all musical sorts on the side. And on the side of THAT (like an extra order of bacon (or something)) he had a band called Utopia, which included a bunch of no-names (to the general public -- Moogy Klingman, anyone?) -- these guys were respected professionals in the biz, but this wasn't a supergroup. They originally started as a snazzed up progressive-rock-art band (3 keyboardists on their first record!) with ineffable ideas/technique, without the internal/external seriousness of Important Bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer or Yes. As time went on (and it did go on!), Utopia became a very minor and curious pop band, really not like anything else, but also sounding like a perfect pop band, but also not like anything else, while also sounding conspicuously like everything else, such that no one could notice them unless they intended to notice them, meaning that they would have had to have known to notice them..."

I'll start near, but not completely, at the beginning, with this: a live performance of "Sunburst Finish", from the 1977 RA album.

Sunburst Finish, live, is kinda goofy -- the dress and hair and audience, the drab colors and ragged costumes, as if this is a performance of abstract musical theater, the context of which is forbidden to all of us looking historically at the screen. But the performance is incredibly agile, ambi- and multi- dextrous. A melody is sung over a too-many-notes-in-one-space, laughably relaxed and complex riff, the singing shared equally by three men whose voices, while of not the same caliber or quality, can each easily carry the melody safely across shifting rhythmic sands. While a few pop bands have had multiple singers -- the Eagles, Kiss, The Beatles, CSNY, Fleetwood Mac all come lovingly to mind  -- usually songs are "owned" by a singer or a voice, and that "ownership" creates the "meaning" and "message" of the song -- i.e, a "Paul Stanley song", or a "John Lennon song". But in this Utopia track, all three singers are the messengers. Later, they harmonize over what sounds like a ship sliding into the edge of the sea with an orange sun leading them onward, towards deeper waters of wizardry. Todd Rundgren has the "best" voice, so he takes the lead at the end before a disseminating a knuckle-clutch-the-highest-note guitar solo into the heart of a screaming orange jubilee sun....

But back to the singing over the initial riff -- it's the gaudiness of the act, combined with the hum-drum-iness of its execution, that gets me. Keep in mind that the "heyday" of musical prowess in rock and roll was really the 70's. I don't mean that "bands were better musicians then" (What a preposterous thing to even think to think. Who's going to publish the double-blind studies on that?), but more that this was a time when Rock music was claiming a musical legitimacy and complexity as a "part" of its identity and self definition. (Even the Ultimate American himself, "Uncle Ted" Nugent, had songs in odd time signatures as a sign of pure capitalist, sold-out-arena solidarity...) And part of this ultimate effort towards legitimacy was to flaunt, to brag, to expose, to shout one's prowess into the name of the heavens as a way of claiming one was there, that one had come, seen, laid waste to, politicized...

With that as contextual backdrop, relisten and relook at the riff and the singing in this clip: it's quite concentrated, yet totally casual, and nearly haphazard, in its delivery. And that's what Utopia brought to this 70's bombast, even a smile when Rundgren takes a high note and sleepily mangles it like Peter Brady. This is high art rock on the silliness of Spinal Tap stonehenge stages, made more normal by the homemade custom of cloth-cut, space-ape-aged costumes.

Utopia are totally unimportant. As they intend to be. Which makes the ease with which the difficulty of the musical task is accomplished as imperfectly astonishing as it ought to be for us outsiders.

(As a quick aside, RA's entire second side is a monstrous piece of Art Rock Storytelling entitled "Singring and the Glass Guitar." (Was it once intended to be "Sigmund and the Glass Cigar"?) In it, each member has their "own song" where they each solo (guitar, keyboards, bass, drums) and end each of their solos with a thematic section that they then all overlap in the song's epic denoument. Art Rock Fairy-Story Arche-Type in deed.)

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Somehow, it's 1984. We ended all up in here, synthesized and drum-machinated on our way to an empty heaven, where pleasure could only be the perfect automaticized autonomy -- and so does Utopia with their Oblivion album, where "Crybaby" (audio) meets "Crybaby" (video). (Nice irony, asymmetrical serendipity -- the video on YouTube has no audio, and the audio no video, so you've gotta double-window it to experience it in sequence -- chalk it up to the unimportance of a band no one even knew to know was there). This track's a sublimated sliver of 80's art-pop synthesis; a proto 2001 Space Odyssey with primitive future man as the monkey, and the video screen revealing his loss of total meaning, of a universe emptied of everything but pouting models with "hearts of leather and steel / who take self defense and turn it into art..." Everyone ends up crying, because isn't that what rock music is for? Crying voices, crying models, crying drums, screaming/crying guitar -- which is what this song fades with, just as 1977 faded from its art, so does 1984 fade with its identical art....

It is as if from the start, by being the side project of a musician whose solo career itself was a side project to the act of producing other artists, this replicating of reality, which is the replication of one style by another, shows the true dis-empowerment of meaning everything. Of the meaning that means unimportance.