In January, I talked a little bit about how I shop for music:
I tend to be an opportunistic shopper. I like to go through the used or discount bin at a physical shop, but this can be time-consuming. When I shop online, I tend to go hunting for one particular album (usually on Discogs), and then look for interesting items from the same seller, since most of them give you a break on shipping if you order multiple items.
This can lead to some unexpected favorites and treasures, but it can also fill your collection with stuff that didn’t make it past a first listen. Now and then, I try to go through and get rid of CDs that don’t “spark joy,” but before I dump them, I usually give potential trade-ins one last listen to see if there is something to love about them that I just missed the first time.
Fishbone
Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe - 1993
In those dark days before I had internet, I had heard people talking about Fishbone, but I never took the leap and bought any of their records. Money was scarce, and this wasn’t a band that fit the local radio formats, so I didn’t know much about them. I did like the one song that made it onto the Say Anything soundtrack, “Skankin’ to the Beat”:
Fast forward to last year, and behold, I ran across Give a Monkey… in the local used CD shop on Bandera and Huebner Roads, so I grabbed it. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting; they didn’t pull out a ska number until “Unyielding Conditioning.” That’s probably why, after a first listen, I forgot about the album for a while.
But, putting this back into my headphones with no expectations, I found more to relate to than on my first listen. Those first few metal-heavy tracks compare favorably to some of the grunge bands that were blowing up in 1993. I swear I heard shades of early Rage Against the Machine, and some Alice in Chains in the harmonies, which made me wonder why this band didn’t catch on at the time.
I remember the early 90s as a time for consciousness-raising ideas, and the trend towards deeper, more introspective lyrics opened opportunities for bands to be more expressive and wear their social justice politics on their flannel sleeves. Since the members of Fishbone are Black, though, they could tap directly into topics that angsty white suburban garage bands couldn’t.
And I respect their passion and their defiance even more because their demands for justice and respect don’t cross the line into violence:
No I won’t give into hatred
And I’ll never stop dreaming
And I’ll love
Oh I’ll love
Till my very last breath
Is taken away~ “Black Flowers”
But…
As a whole, Give a Monkey… has some fatal flaws. Those first few tracks are strong: two grunge/metal powerhouses, a rock ballad (“Black Flowers”), and some smoky ska make for a good start. But then the styles shift into more funk and what most critics call “free jazz” — but what I hear is closer to a mix of Parliament and Frank Zappa.
That doesn’t sound bad when I put it that way, but what put me off was the 5-minute track “The Warmth of Your Breath,” which consists mainly of the band scream-chanting:
May your dog’s colon be familiar
With the warmth of your breath
It’s kooky and gonzo, and if it were two minutes shorter… or had a core idea that was clever enough… it might not have overstayed its welcome. You can judge for yourself:
There are some strong moments in the back half of the album. I enjoyed “They All Have Abandoned Their Hopes,” which was is even more relevant now as a critique of the police state than it was in 1993. We should have probably taken this message even more seriously than a lot of us did back then:
Death to the corporate
The yuppie scum cloud up the earth
Shine people shine
And never abandon your turf
But even the stronger songs suffer from length and repetitive structures.
Fishbone is on Bandcamp, so you can preview Give a Monkey… there, or you can listen to their whole discography going back to 1985! (Just don’t expect to find “Skankin’ to the Beat” there.)
In the end, I am on the fence about keeping this one on the shelf. If you give it a listen, or know it already, let me know what you would do!
And if you like this “Junk or Gem” idea, like/share/etc. …and next time, I might pull out an obscure jazz/funk record that I thought would be a bigger hit with me.