H E A R__I T

"Private Eyes"
Towa Tei
(704k)

- - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Are female vocalists writing more interesting music and lyrics than men these days? Discuss in the Music area of Table Talk

- - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Buju Banton
Inna Heights
VP Records
(03/12/98)

James Iha
Let it Come Down
Virgin
(03/11/98)

The Bobby Fuller Four
Never to Be Forgotten
Del-Fi
(03/10/98)

Cheri Knight
The Northeast Kingdom
E-squared
(03/09/98)

Madonna
Ray of Light
Maverick/Warner Bros.
(03/06/98)

- - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
MUSIC ARCHIVES

- - - - - - - -

V O W E L L

Sound Salvation
By Sarah Vowell
Marilyn Hanson
When the antichrist arrives, he won't be a goth rocker -- he'll be a three-headed blond
(03/06/98)

- - - - - - - -

I N T E R V I E W

Strange angel
By David Bowman
An interview with Kristin Hersch
(03/02/98)

As one third of Deee-Lite, Towa Tei helped bring club culture to the masses. Deee-Lite's music melded perfectly with the early '90s Manhattan world of drag queens, disco divas and the piles of '70s ephemera that savvy teenagers recycled with a wink and a sneer. Deee-Lite's kitsch always seemed more celebratory than ironic, though, owing much to Lady Miss Kier's firecracker energy.

But now that Towa Tei is a solo artist, his music is soulless. It's pop without passion, a slightly underground version of the synthesized sludge that pumps out of the speakers at bad nightclubs and on dance music radio. His new album, "Sound Museum," is almost too scattered to write about as a whole, but what predominates are predictable beats, generic female power vocals and uninspired concepts.

In a recent article in Harper's magazine, Baffler editor Thomas Frank presented his formulation for the stages of irony in pop music. "By the mid-1990s, such [kitsch] strategies had reduced the young ironist's alternatives to only two: Uncover some virgin block of kitsch to faux-appropriate, or take ironic appreciation of the bad to the next level by claiming that his love of the lowbrow article in question is as heartfelt and genuine and un-ironic as that felt for it by the demographic for whom it was originally made."

Tei does both on track 9, a cover of Hall and Oates' "Private Eyes," backed by sedate lounge music. Having exhausted the '70s with Deee-Lite, Tei moves on to the '80s, but the gesture feels stale and obvious. Instead of sampling '80s music and turning it into something entertaining or interesting, he lays it bare and expects his listeners to pretend to like it. In a way, it's a watered-down and petty version of Duchamp signing a urinal and declaring it art.

Lately, acid jazz has gotten a bad rap as the muzak of the techno world, and with two exceptions, the other songs on "Sound Museum" do nothing to dispel that idea. Of the two songs that succeed, one does so on musical merits alone. "BMT," which features rappers Biz Markie and Mos Def, is a rousing, rolling, addictively catchy track. The song's fluid rhymes are layered counter-intuitively over tinny synthesizer fuzz, and the result is fresh, innovative and deliciously propulsive.

"Sound Museum's" other interesting song is "GBI," a track so self-consciously mechanical that it's tempting to read all kinds of profound social insights into it. It begins with the exact same sample as Deee-Lite's "Groove Is in the Heart," but instead of that song's luscious, ecstatic vibe, "GBI" features Kylie Minogue (remember her?) singing as a typeface -- German Bold Italic, to be exact. It seems like a small bit of brilliance to create a song with a typeface as a narrator, like some kind of comment on the coldness and distance of computer-mediated relationships, especially when it's compared to the warmth and excitement of "Groove Is in the Heart." At least, I'd like to think that was what Tei was trying to say by using the same bit of music twice. Listening to the rest of the album, though, I fear that he just couldn't come up with a newer, unexploited sample.
SALON | March 13, 1998