Am I the only living human who thinks The Fall is the best band to ever come out of England, including the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Flock of Seagulls? Yes, I fear I am. Mark E. Smith, Hip Priest, has been making an inscrutable but irresistible noise since the late seventies, and who cares if you can’t even get close to wrapping your mind around what he’s singing about? It’s very important, I think, to Mark E. Smith, and that’s all you need to know, I think.
Smith has put out approximately 1,000 albums, and plenty more if you count the live ones, because he has things he just has to tell us, even if we have no idea what they are. I gave up trying to parse his lyrics long ago, and now content myself with simply sitting back and enjoying the genius that has brought us “Free Range,” “Cruiser’s Creek,” “Cab It Up,” “Rebellious Jukebox,” “New Face in Hell,” “Them From Sparta F.C.,” “Totally Wired,” “The Classical,” and “Rowche Rumble,” just to mention a few of the hundreds of Fall tunes I love so much. (Hundreds! And how many Beatles’ songs do I love? Ten at tops, and maybe less than that.)
One of my many Fall faves is “Slates, Slags, Etc.” off 1981’s “Slates” EP. Per usual I have no idea what he’s going on about, but the song is a hard-driving example of The Fall in percussion overdrive—a repetitive droning riff over which Smith sings, “Right here’s the definitive rant/Slates drive me bats/Therefore I say hey slates give me a break” at which the guitar comes squealing in and Smith goes off on male slates and slags (neither term is complimentary).
Is it homophobic? I hope not, but honestly haven’t the slightest. I do know there’s no way not to get caught up in the song’s barbaric drive, with its pounding percussion, squealing and heavily distorted guitar feedback, and bass line that is close (but not really close) to the gargantuan one The Fall employs on the battering ram that is “Blindness.”
It was David Byrne who told us all to stop making sense, but Smith who was doing it long before Byrne turned it into an aesthetic and will probably be doing it long after Byrne is gone. “Male slags in creaky pants and scrubbed hands/Kill jokes, join bands” means nothing to me, but I love the way Smith has of adding an “a” to the ends of his lines, just as I do the way the backing vocalists jump in to laugh and in general add their two pence.
Smith, as usual, is in declamatory mode, which makes him sound like a prophet, but a prophet of what? His inscrutable lyrics have always been impossible to decipher, so that his “Too much freedom for a small brain machine” and “Let’s get on to the valley of weights/The valley of weights was a valley/Where everybody wore weights” are guaranteed to leave you scratching your head. To say nothing of “Smoke cigarettes/Make pins out of your whims/Break your balls/Male cunts.” The song descends into chaos towards the end, with Smith letting out one of rock’s great screams while the guitar squeals and feeds back and hurts your brain in a good way until the fadeout.
No, I stand by my opinion. The Fall is England’s greatest musical export, and I won’t be convinced otherwise. That they’ve never broken through in a big way in the U.S. has never failed to befuddle me. I defy you to listen to “Rowche Rumble,” to pick one song out of hundreds, and not be drawn in by its manic primitivism. Or “Theme From Sparta F.C.,” the best song ever written about a sports team, with its great opening lines, “Come on I will show you how I will change/When you give me something to slaughter.” The “New Big Prinz” goes on to sing about how he lives on blood, and his lack of popularity here in America is nothing less than a bloody disgrace. Long live The Hip Priest!
