I was listening to the Mahavishnu Orchestra the other day and saying to myself, “Boy these guys sure do play great and they have really spacy album titles like Visions of the Emerald Beyond and listening to them could just make me a more spiritual person.” And then I thought, “Fuck this shit, I think I’ll listen to Flipper.” Because the San Francisco band didn’t give a shit about musicianship and were anything but spiritually uplifting. In fact, they thought life is a horrible joke as they made clean on “Ha Ha Ha” with its sarcastic line “Isn’t life a blast?” Shove that up your emerald beyond.
Like their compatriots in Northern Virginia’s No Trend, Flipper set out to fuck with the thrashers who showed up at hardcore shows in their respective hometowns in expectation of loud hard and fast only music, only to be subjected to the musical equivalent of industrial sludge. Their music was not amenable to moshing. It was more likely to induce paralysis. This did not make many of the people in their audiences happy. Giving the people what they don’t want rarely does.
1982’s debut Album—Generic Flipper is the band’s best; it has a slew of serious bummers on it but it—and the band itself—will best be remembered for “Sex Bomb,” which could well be the best song in human history, because there’s no way you can’t sing along. And singing along is easy because the song only has five words. That beats “Louie Louie” by a long shot. Your average coma victim can sing along. Your baby sister who hasn’t spoken a word yet can sing along. Your dog can sing along. Your cat could along but it has its dignity to think about it. And its pummeling repetitive riff could go on forever. You almost certainly don’t want it to go on forever, but how often do you run into a perpetual motion machine?
But those of us looking for more Flipper than what you’ll find on Album—Generic Flipper and its 1984 follow-up Gone Fishin’ will want to own the band’s 1988 compilation Sex Bomb Baby, it consists mostly of B Sides and live tracks not on their 1984 live LP Blowin’ Chunks, so unless you own the singles and collect Flipper esoterica, odds are you’ve never laid ears on them. And who doesn’t want more Flipper? They sound like earth-moving machinery! That hates life! Imagine that! Malevolent machines that don’t want you to be happy because you’re human! It’s like something straight out of science fiction!
First the bad news. The version of “Sex Bomb” on the compilation doesn’t measure up to the original on Album—Generic Flipper. The mad saxophone is gone, for instance. But even stripped down to its bare bones, “Sex Bomb” is still a primal force of nature, that simple riff repeating itself over and over again, anchored by a throbbing bass line that will still be there, hanging in the nuclear dust accompanying the end of the world.
The remainder of the songs on Sex Bomb Baby are, for the most part, just swell. “Love Canal” is Black Sabbath slowed to a deliberately annoying crawl. On “Ha Ha Ha” Public Image Ltd meets Syd Barrett; Flipper’s romantic idea of sex runs to “He said come on baby/ And I’ll show you a good time/ So they went on down/ To one of those cheap motels/ And they got all squishy and wet.”
The shambolic live “Falling” is methadone set to music and explains why Flipper drove the hardcore crowd to the brink of violence, as vocalist Will Shatter notes at the beginning of the feedback screech that is “Ever.” “Anybody hits me with a beer can,” he says, “I’m gonna kill them.” He then baits the crowd, saying, “This is such a nice show, and now we’re causing all these problems you violent bunch of creeps, come on this is rock and roll, this is the punk Woodstock…” And he goes on in a similar vein until he announces show’s over and says, “You blew it.”
Things get really strange on “Get Away,” which could—Jesus wept—almost pass as a pop song if it weren’t for the lyrics. “Earthworm” tunnels its way extremely slowly through your central nervous system. Very few people would voluntarily choose to listen to this song, and the same goes for “The Game’s Got a Price” which might almost pass the tolerance test if it weren’t for the cheapo distorted alien vocals.
The live “Lowrider” almost swings while Shatter once again takes on its audience: “God you guys are fucking boring…, maybe not you two, but the rest of you standing there like a bunch of dolts… why don’t you do something like at least try to kill each other… that’s better…”
My personal favorite on Sex Bomb Baby is “Brainwash,” which goes:
Okay, like
S-see there was this…
And… Wh-and then there wa–an–
Never mind
Forget it
You wouldn’t understand anyway
The song then stops, the exact lyric is repeated, the song stops again, and on and on it goes on for almost seven minutes, starting and stopping until you’re sure you’ll go mad if they do it just one more time. And they do.
Flipper were the perfect example of meta-punk—if hardcore was a rebellion against society, Flipper was a critique of the hardcore rebellion and a cancer from within—they were making fun of punkers to their faces. A few bands strayed into similar territory, but none were as scathing, vitriolic, on target—or funny—as Flipper.
Like most musical genres, hardcore took itself very, very seriously; and like most it was in need of artists whose chief outlook on their contemporaries—and life itself—was one of adamantine disgust. The Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran wrote, “Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal—less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.” Talk about your kindred spirits.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
