Records at Random, Vol. 76: Tom Tom Club Tom Tom Club

Tom Tom Club ‘Tom Tom Club’

When I was a little tyke my Mom made a habit of taking me out every once in a while for a special lunch at a cool bistro or pub. I assume it was as a reward for exemplary behavior or an exercise in teaching responsibility. I got to order “grown up” food and then she’d take me to the park or to see movie. Starting elementary school put the kibosh on all that, but when I was a teenager we reinstated our culinary outings. There was one specific restaurant we frequented that was notable for more than its food; they played the weirdest mix of music I’d yet heard in such a place!

I’d been fiddling around with DJing for a few years and had recently begun taking record collecting and crate-digging seriously. So I was surprised to hear joints I knew as club classics, breakbeat tracks, party jams or just sample fodder in general come on the restaurant radio. There were some not too unusual selections from the likes of Hall & Oates and Boz Scaggs, but what about stuff like Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, Sugar Hill-era Hip-Hop and what was to me one of the weirdest cuts to hear in a family dining establishment during the early ’90s, Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love?”

BohannonAfter hearing “Genius of Love” on more than one visit to the restaurant I had to stop and point it out to my Mom. It was just too bizarre to my still young mind to hear those familiar rubber-band synthesizers, the chicken-cluck guitars, the shuffly beats, that slippery bassline and the deadpan singing about incarceration, James Brown, Kurtis Blow, the Parliament/Funkadelic posse, Smokey Robinson, Bob Marley, Sly & Robbie, Bohannon and of course drugs, drugs, drugs (also the subject of another of the odd tunes on the restaurant’s playlist Laid Back’s “White Horse”) in that setting! She was as baffled as I, theorizing that, like herself, the restaurant owner was a disco rat back in the day and still had an ear for an eclectic selection of vintage dance music.

Not that long after I began hearing the song’s infectious groove everyfuckingwhere thanks to Mariah Carey who sampled it for her ultimately Puffy-remixed and Ol’ Dirty Bastard-assisted mega-hit “Fantasy.” But by that time the Hot 97-ification of radio had taken hold nation-wide, shiny suits were right around the corner, and phonograph culture was seeing its first infiltration by the mainstream since their short-lived infatuations with Disco and “breakdancing” in the late ’70s and early ’80s, so it wasn’t as big a deal to me. I owned the self-titled Tom Tom Club album on vinyl, and that was all that mattered to me. I couldn’t foresee a time when breakbeats would soundtrack television commercials and I’d listen to more music on a palm-sized gadget than a turntable.

Tina Weymouth and Chris FrantzFor a long time vinyl was the only format on which I had Tom Tom Club, the 1981 Sire Records debut from the band founded by husband and wife Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads, who played drums and provided bass and vocals respectively, which featured guitarist Adrien Belew and Weymouth’s sisters as chorus. It was a regular resident of my gig bag for years since both “Genius of Love” and “Wordy Rappinghood” were prime dance-mix fodder. But I didn’t have an MP3 rip or CD copy of it until recently, when it popped up in a party scene in the film Lars and the Real girl, which prompted m. Cody to say “put that on my iPod, I know you have it.” She knew I had the wax, but at her instigation I got myself a digi-repress as well.

So what inspired me to pull the old vinyl out and give it the Friday morning randomization? Well, when I blogged about Serengeti and Hi-Fidel’s Friday Night LP earlier this week I noted a likeness between the artwork for the album and that of the similarly sketchy art on the classic cover of Tom Tom Club. Right then and there I pulled that album out of a nearby stack of records, took a snapshot of the sleeve and said “I’ve got my Friday covered.” Being a lazy-ass I turned to the MP3s on my hard-drive this morning to soundtrack my typing up of this post. The 21st century iteration adds a cover of The Drifters‘ classic “Under the Boardwalk” not on the original vinyl and appends remixes or extended mixes of “Rappinghood…,” “Genius…” and “Lorelei” to the tracklist.

Martin HannettWe all know “Genius of Love” and the early crossover Rap/proto-Electro track “Wordy Rappinghood” are classics. But what about the rest? Songs like “Lorelei,” “As Above, So Below” and the largely instrumental “Booming and Zooming” stand out for mixing hard-edged Martin Hannett-esque Post-Punk and squishy synthetic Funk. There’s propulsive Funk-Punk a-la the Hannet-produced Bronx band ESG tempered with subtle Reggae vibes on “Loerelei.” There’s more Joy Division-esque dubbiness on “As Above, So Below,” which sounds like Trevor Horn producing a Stereolab-performed retrospective of the works of Bruce Haack and David Axelrod. And the tremulous “Booming and Zooming,” while musically simple is an experimental wonder vocally.

There’s also island-influenced world-music carnival-Rock on “L’Eléphant,” tribal drum-circle jamming on “Tom Tom Theme” and straightforward clap-a-long guitar-n-synth New Wave on “On, On, On, On.” But what strikes me more than anything is how the cold, monotone, almost chant-like choral vocals that decorate the record pre-figure the sound of contemporary acts with similarly trancey female harmonies such as the aforementioned Stereolab, CocoRosie, School of Seven Bells and Portishead. As a whole though it’s just the sort of avant-garde, artful Pop-influenced Post-Punk dance music you’d expect from a couple on a Caribbean vacation away from the Talking Heads.

These days I’m less likely to be found in a pub or a family restaurant and more likely to be listening to my own stash of eclectic music on the little gizmo in my pocket rather than whatever’s being pumped out of some establishment’s public address system. But at least when “Genius of Love” starts playing in my earbuds now I know why I’m hearing it, no matter where I am.

This entry was written by El Keter, posted on December 5, 2008 at 10:21 am, filed under Music and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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