Sunday, July 13, 2014

Gary Mullholland on Pere Ubu's Non-Alignment Pact

 
I just got Gary Mulholland's two excellent books This Is Uncool and Fear of Music. I can't recommend them highly enough. They're two overviews of the best singles and albums released since Punk and Disco. Mulholland is able to articulate things you felt about the favourite records in your collection without ever being able to put it into words. Here he is on Pere Ubu in the latter boo and one track of an album that helped me see the world in a different way almost thirty years ago .
 
'Track one side one of the debut album by Ohio's pre-punk avant-garage inventors Pere Ubu. It's called 'Non-Alignment Pact and it should be a rock standard like 'Stairway To Heaven' and it packs a metaphorical punch on the subject of 'Women are a foreign land'  that even Costello might envy. There's a precipitous bass harmonic , and an idiot Chuck Berry geetar rip, and then a headlong charge down an alleyway that still smells of Iggy & the Stooges. Then a voice'... huh ... a voice. The wail of a big baby trying to be Ray Charles. And it demands, with comic futility, 'I wanna make a deal with you girl and get it signed by the heads of state ... It's my Non-Alignment Pact ... Sign it!' The big baby's running out of time so he tries emotional blackmail: ' I can see the world in flames. It's all because of you / or your thousand other names.' He lists a few of those thousand other names , ending, of course, with that all American beach-babe Barbara Ann. And just in case she doesn't yet understand that his desire for her is gonna fry the whole wide world, he thrusts that pen at her like it's a red hot poker. 'It's all because of you girl! Sign my Non-Alignment Pact ,' and you know she's standing there grinning, shaking her head, reaching for the box of matches in the pocket of her hip-hugger jeans.'

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