King's X had bigger hits, but "Over My Head" is their signature tune: it's funky and catchy, everybody sings, Doug screams, and Ty plays a killer guitar solo, split into two parts by a breakdown that demonstrates how impossibly tight they were. Naturally, they left all that off their Greatest Hits album, opting for an inferior live version that demonstrates how impossibly long-winded Doug can get when you let him talk.
It won't embed, but you should really watch the video they made for this song. Notice that during the guitar solo, starting around 1:30, there are no apparent overdubs. (Of course you can hear that as well, but it's especially clear when you watch them play.) Even so, there's no loss of momentum or texture; Doug's ringing bass tone covers the riff, Jerry crashes the cymbals strategically, and you don't even miss Ty's chords. They played that way all the time; my high school classmate David, a guitarist, singled out that strict three-part texture as their most salient feature. It reminds me of those amazing Led Zeppelin live recordings where the sound remains huge, even during Jimmy's solos. Except with King's X, all three instrumentalists also had to sing.
About time! "Surfing In Babylon" is from Pajama Party's wonderful 1989 freestyle album Up All Night. It follows the monumental "Yo No Se" and pales in comparison--though really, MOST songs pale in comparison to "Yo No Se." "Surfing In Babylon" also has the distinction of not really being freestyle, but something closer to "rock." Not that you hear many "guitars" on the song; there's something like a distorted guitar on the chorus, but it cuts off so abruptly I suspect it's a synth. (The credits do say there's a rhythm guitar somewhere.) There's also a wailing electric guitar solo that may or may not be an actual guitar--we have no reason to believe otherwise. But anyway, even a synth guitar sound signifies Rock Music in the context of a freestyle album, so there you have it--this is PJ Party's rock song! As such, fans of the group have largely overlooked it. Listen and love here.
"[J]ust because disco lets the party be the main thing doesn't mean the terror's not there... [T]his is a song about a girl trying to get her friend to try something dangerous--heroin maybe, or lesbian sex. Or maybe just a cigarette. Guitars and strings add noisy ornamentation as the singer stands 'on the edge.' Her pal says 'jump in, the water's fine,' but as soon as the singer dives into iniquity, the friend disappears. Surfing in Babylon means playing with fire, and getting burned."
It's sort of an abstracted version of Decadent Babylon, a place we've seen before. Whatever "dangerous" thing the PJ Party girls are doing--we can imagine it's lesbian sex, if you want--it runs counter to the norms of what they perceive to be correct society. NOT Surfing In Babylon would mean--what?--falling in love and getting married. Eating dinner at the table with your family, playing a board game together, and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Filing your taxes correctly. This straw-society ignores all the intricacies and vagaries that color individual lives, but no doubt there are people who strive for just such a life, and people who strive to get as far away from that life as possible.
People like... rock stars! Maybe the most interesting thing about "Surfing" is that it posits the Babylon symbol as more a "rock" thing than a "disco" thing. Jim Klein, who produced the album and co-wrote the song with Peggy Sendars, must've made it sound like rock for SOME reason--he sure didn't make it sound like surf music! And a symbol like Babylon isn't endemic to the disco or freestyle genre, Boney M notwithstanding. A PJ fan on Amazon sez, "I know the title of this song sounds a little unusual, but it's a catchy pop song. It's not too bad at all." Whew!--I was expecting it to sound like Celtic Frost or Faster Pussycat. (The latter of whom did wear fabulous animal prints, much like PJ Party.) I'm guessing that for a lot of freestyle fans in the '80s--or at least in the context of their expectations for a freestyle album--rock music was also sort of a dangerous "other," the same as what Babylon represents in Western culture. Not that freestyle fans didn't dig rock, and not that freestyle didn't incorporate rock elements--or, indeed, rock harder than a lot of rock music of the time. But there's no question they were different, and that rock had more of a dangerous stigma.
(This song reminds me of another pop song that incorporates screaming guitar as a rock signifier: Amy Grant's "Good for Me," from 1991. In Amy's case, the rock guitar doesn't signify danger, but it still signifies an "other." It contrasts with the shiny synths that play the main riff, and within the context of the song, Amy is the synths and her husband is the squealing electric guitar. Or vice versa. The point is, they're different but good for one another.) (I wonder if this move, from rock guitar signifying "dangerous other" to rock guitar signifying simply "other," indicates that rock music became totally toothless from '89 to '91.) (And then Nirvana came along and saved us all.) (Or something.)
To recap: Pajama Party sang a song about Decadent Babylon, abstracted; they sort of made it sound like rock music, since that's where Babylon lives; and some yak co-opted the title for his blog. Two of these were great decisions; jury's still out on that last one.
Since Surfing in Babylon has allotted blog space to Satanists and metaphorical Satanists, it's time we offer the Christian rock community a forum for rebuttal. First up: White Heart, from their excellent excellent '89 album Freedom, this is "Bye Bye Babylon":
As you might expect from Christian rockers, White Heart give us a little sermon-in-song. In verse one they look back at historical Babylon; in verse two they apply the lessons of Babylon to today's world. (Steve Taylor will do something similar below, only more subtly and less well.) Interestingly enough, the 'Heart's take on Babylon isn't particularly Biblical, except for its Judeo-Christian bias. That is, they don't focus on the Exile or on any other specific Biblical texts; Babylon is just a big impressive civilization that didn't worship God, and today lies in ruins. If this song was your only frame of reference, you'd never know that Babylon enslaved the Israelites. White Heart's Babylon could just as well be Assyria or the Persian Empire, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the song.
Well.... maybe a BIT of difference, for two reasons:
2. Since Babylon is the Bible's second-most-mentioned ancient civilization--right behind Israel--White Heart's Christian fans can more immediately relate to the image. White Heart are sort of exploiting the free-lunch symbolic associations we already give Babylon, thanks to the fact that John the Revelator and his prophetic predecessors imbued the place with oppositional symbolic meaning centuries ago. They did the work so White Heart wouldn't have to.
What's White Heart's main takeaway message? "Don't be Babylon!" (Did I get that right, guys?) Though again, it's not QUITE what you'd expect. They're ambivalently didactic with their advice. Here's verse two:
"Rocket ride through time and space, It's 2088-- They're diggin' around in the dust of what we've done. Now people study me, I'm a part of history; Oh, did we leave them another Babylon? Is there evidence of spiritual revival, Or did we leave a land of broken idols?"
They're not pulling a Pat Robertson, saying "If we worship idols, we'll be destroyed." In White Heart's theology, you get destroyed regardless of who you worship. (And apparently, America will be dust by 2088. Good times.) But wait: then they sing this in the chorus:
"If God is not our strength and song It's good-bye Babylon!"
Unless I'm misreading them, White Heart seem confused about providence, about causality and their own Deuteronomic convictions. (Whatever the case, "Bye Bye Babylon" is certainly more coherent than Cryoshell's song of the same name.) I could very well be misreading the White Hearts; doing so makes them sound SO much more reasonable. An alternate reading might say that if God IS our strength and song, the future people sifting through our dust will be fellow Americans; whereas if God is NOT our strength and song, America will lie in ruins and when the Chinese finally arrive to collect on their debt, they'll be in for a very big surprise.
This theme, of Babylon as Dead Civilization, is fairly common. It notably appears in Celtic Frost's "Babylon Fell" ('87), which we'll get to someday.
Next up is Steve Taylor's "Babylon," from his '87 album I Predict 1990. "Babylon"'s not very good; Steve's often sarcastic and funny, or at least catchy, and this song is none of the above. (Other songs on 1990 include "Since I Gave Up Hope I Feel a Lot Better" and the brilliantly titled, apparently controversial "I Blew Up the Clinic Real Good," about an ice cream man who's an anti-abortion zealot for financial reasons.)
Taylor's Babylon seems to depict a Hebrew child of the Exile, torn between the lure of Babylon's worldly expertise ("Come and learn," she beckons) and the promise of something better from "the heavens." Does this not parallel our contemporary life? Aren't we torn between vicissitudes of science and faith? Do we not dance around with light sources both spot and torch, if you believe the very dated video?
According to both Taylor and White Heart, Babylon has walls and idols, and they could very well be the same place. Both Babylons seem nice from a worldly point of view--White Heart's offers "strength and security, comfort and safety", while Taylor's has learning, or something. Taylor's seems more negative because his narrator is in the final throes of disillusionment, but the two are still compatible--you could imagine Steve Taylor showing up in White Heart's song to wave his light sources around. Most importantly to their meaning, both songs see Babylon in contemporary America, and both say God provides more than what Babylon's got to offer. If you confuse your country with God, you do so at your peril--which is a refreshing lesson to hear from Christians, especially if you've been watching too much Fox News.
This song hit #13 in 1989, which makes me realize that 1989 was a different time, man. It's hard to envision a powerpop song with weird words and complex changes hitting that high today, or even getting any radio play outside Triple-A stations. Which is not to demean today's pop charts, because there's certainly plenty of great stuff and weird stuff that hits--it just doesn't sound anything like this. (Or like the Beatles, in other words.) I wonder when this sort of song was "phased off" the charts? (One thing in common with today, though: the drums on the single are entirely programmed!)
"No Myth" seems to be the definitive example of a debut song off a debut album that represents the peak of an artist's career. There were a couple other good songs on March, but otherwise it was all downhill from here for Mr. Penn! (It's a pretty high peak to start from, though.) The other definitive example might be Quarterflash's "Harden My Heart":
