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.

The Set-up

In my bedroom, we have a small Panasonic CD "stereo", an all-inclusive AM/FM receiver with a CD player and a nifty remote control. (I don't think the am/fm have actually ever been used, but since it belongs to my wife, as a gift from her former boyfriend, it is part of a life that precedes me, and therefore has an unknown history, which most certainly adds to its mystique.) I'm sure this thing cost $300 a few years ago, and I could get a new one right now for $50, so it has aged with the depreciation usually saved for foreign cars. (This thing has paid for itself and now actually pays for me to use it, strangely enough....)

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"Le Panasonique", as I like to call it, is perched peacefully atop the dresser, to the left of the bed (if you are lying in it, to the right if you are walking into the room), centered perfectly in the middle of the wall, to the right of the door to the hall, about 2 feet below the mirror that I look into and use to make faces at myself about the music I'm listening to. (I've discovered that I make up a pretty loyal audience...) The speakers aren't part of the unit, which is awkward if you need to move the thing, but convenient for my static usage -- you can stretch them out on either side, which we do, so that the stereo is in the exact center from each of the speakers, which stand about 10" high. Since I work from home in the adjacent bedroom, and I like the way this cheap bedroom "stereo" sounds, I usually take one of the speakers down from the dresser and place it on the floor in the doorway, and face it out so that when I go into the next room, I can hear the music I have decided to play aloud on the stereo.

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Of course, this setup produces two challenges: 1) That I hear the majority of the music out of one speaker when I'm not in the bedroom (and I'm never in the bedroom except for to sleep or to change clothes or fold laundry; I am certainly never in the bedroom solely to listen to music), and; 2) That I have to predict the volume the music needs to be in order that I can hear it in the next room. "La Panasonique" is notoriously unpredictable -- its sound is generally soft, with smoothed, patisserie-ized corners around every noise that it utters (this is a bedroom device, after all, and in the bedroom, we should have music on only when the lights are low and something "bedroom" is going to happen) -- and it takes the dynamics of jazz or classical music a bit too seriously, as if "quiet" means "silent" and "lively" means "the devil went down to somwhere else". So, I always listen to "La Panasonique" too loud, and I curse myself for not learning to be more patient with the impetuousness of sound. Of course, half the time, I can't tell what is going on, because someone on the record is taking a saxophone solo, and since the solo is coming of the speaker in the bedroom, and I'm in the hall, with my ears attuned to the speaker on the floor pointing into the hall, I actually have the volume just right enough to know what I'm missing.

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Now, because new records are the means through which I and my foreshortened sense of the future stave off the inevitable, I hoard them greedily like canned goods in my backyard bomb shelter; I always have at least 25 CD's that I have bought but not yet listened to. (The day I realized I could buy CD's and "save them for later" was a day I believed, for at least an hour, that I had mastered time, like the guy on the Twilight Zone who finds a stopwatch that, when he presses it, stops everything around him, but not him). And these future shares sit in a $1 wire Ikea CD rack on the dresser, between the space of "La Panasonique's" mothership and the traveling speaker. I christen all new CD's on "La Panasonique", such that when I first hear them, it's on one speaker from the other room. (Now, I could bring them into the 2nd bedroom with me, where I work, and play them on my laptop using Itunes, but Itunes is for "tracks" or "files", and while a CD player is certainly not the purist media that a turntable is, it at least factors in the "album" as a default medium of expression!) But I find this "mis-listening" a delight, as the first time I hear a new record, I invariably miss 50% of it. So I'm already forced to relisten, and to factor in my relistening upon first listen, so I can let everything happen to me whilst I listen -- without concerning myself with remembering anything at all of what I hear. And because the music is loud enough to fill the apartment, I can actually think, for a moment, that that record, via the medium of "La Panasonique", is a message from another time and place, from a memory I don't yet have, that becomes part of that space between doorway and hall and room and me. It's an ineffable present, this set-up, for which I am buying a memory at the price of space, estranged, and, yet, wonderfully strange.

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None of the above is within the music I listen to, but it is an effective framing device -- or, possibly, an elaborate method of simplifying my perception such that there is only the moment where I hear something arising in the hall, coming towards me from the other room.