Dinosaur Jr.'s You're Living All Over Me by Attfield Nick

Author:Attfield, Nick [Attfield, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781441199799
Publisher: Continuum US
Published: 2011-05-07T16:00:00+00:00

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So perhaps, on reflection, teeth is the wrong metaphor. Teeth are all too similar, a uniform row. And gumbo isn’t much better. What springs more appropriately to mind is, funnily enough, Maura Jasper’s back cover design for YLAOM. This is a blurry photograph of a forest clearing, colored in livid red and green only. Something has happened here. Little bits of tree are strewn around everywhere, and the only discernable objects besides are a post with a sign hanging on top and, in the foreground, a human hand.

“I got that [photograph],” she recalls, “from a book called ‘Investigations of Death’ … it was a plane crash, and they were trying to identify the body parts.” The book she is referring to, I assume, is Spitz and Fisher’s notorious Medicolegal Investigation of Death (First edition, 1973), a kind of primer for forensic pathologists, its photos described by one reviewer as “detailed, well-produced, and quite revolting.”3 And revolting they are, but oddly fitting for the songs on this record, even if Maura certainly didn’t mean it in such a specific way. You’re Living All Over Me, the music of discombobulation. Medicolegal Investigation of Rock, by J Mascis?

I put this particular observation to J, or at least something a couple of degrees less gross and elaborate. I had thought that he would just shrug off the whole thing as a hallmark of what lots of people were doing throughout the seventies and eighties, that is, expressing sheer boredom with standard structures, chopping them up, and frankensteining them all back together into an alternative. If that were the case, it would be an old story in music history, a dialogue with the presumed mainstream that can result in some interesting efforts. Some of Sonic Youth’s detuned guitar intros (Candle, Brave Men Run), as beautiful as anything you will ever hear, are countered by the heavy-handed riffs that follow them; Kurt Cobain’s early song Spank Thru pivots suddenly from a cornball parody of a love song (“… and the flowers sing in D minor”) into a dirty grunge number that can only be about masturbation. And, more knowing still, the pseudo-art rockers Pavement, who would sometimes signpost the components of their songs as they went along (“And they’re coming to the chorus now,” sings Stephen Malkmus in the build-up to the chorus of Gold Soundz).

J says two things. One of them is two words: “Black Sabbath.” This is no surprise. J has sometimes cited them as his favorite band, and, if you listen to his preferred album of theirs, Sabotage (1975), you’ll hear epics built up from all kinds of bits and pieces – the six-and-a-half minute Symptom of the Universe springs to mind, a meandering succession of electric sections that closes with a soulful hippie acoustic stretch, Ozzy really reaching for those high notes. Perhaps, in fact, this provides another good way to think about some of Dinosaur’s music – much like Hüsker Dü’s, a peculiar and self-contradictory mixture that cuts hardcore speed across the ponderous structures of seventies prog-influenced rock.

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