Does Humour Belong In Music?

Actually the Wildbunch track HASNT been attacked yet per se, though it's been taken as a novelty track in the reviews I've read - but I hear something open-to-attack in it.

I hate a sense of humor in music if it's not incredibly dark.

i didn't know daft punk had any novelty/humour aspects, i had considered it a straight serious album. some of the other things youve mentioned work on the audience understanding the context

DP don't have humour aspects (though it's a quite light-hearted album), but certainly the guitar-solo and 80s-influenced tracks were received as tracks which had novelty aspects. Certainly saying Discovery is a "straight serious" album seems to miss out some of its most powerful qualities, but maybe that's because those adjectives seem to have been co-opted by the likes of Starsailor. They are the act my musings are least applicable to though.

As for understanding the context - I'm not sure. I mean I think with the bootlegs I understand TOO MUCH of the context, it's a real burden, and with WK I don't really understand the context at all.

Humour and jokes are present in some of the best music: Frank Zappa, The Fugs, Devo, Man Or Astroman, The Cramps.

Absolutely humour belongs in music. I'd be hard-pressed to think of any artist of any worth who hasn't made lots of jokes in their music.

Like anything though, humour is not in and of itself an absolute good or bad: it depends how it's used.

I think I described the Wildbunch as "goofy" because when I saw them the singer had about 25 t-shirts on, each with a different "funny" slogan and he'd take a shirt off after each song. It was goofy, not awful or anything but kind of silly and absurd.

Actually I wrote this thread before I saw you called them goofy Fritz, there was just something in his voice which made me think they would be called that.

I'm sure "King Tim III" by Fatback Band and "Rappers delight" were considered as novelty records back in the Seventies.

At the NME Carling tour gig (when Andrew WK blew away an audience of Lostprophet fans), a friend turned to me and said "It's brilliant up the front, you can see, they don't really take it seriously at all". Which is mental, because what is there to take seriously about Andrew WK? He plays party music about partying, and it works on exactly that level. He isn't as pumped up as the hair-metal of days gone by, but that's because he has understands the landscape: this stuff isn't remotely fashionable these days, but Jesus, it sounds great. And people enjoy it on that level, and he enjoys them enjoying it. That really is all there is.

Daft Punk, on the other hand, still hide behind this "it's just ironic, isn't it?" fig leaf, which is why they must die.

All IMHO, of course

Yeah totally - in fact almost the only rap records which charted in Britain for quite a while WERE the novelty/comedy/cash-in ones. But you say "considered" novelty records - I suspect that yes everyone including the Fatback Band considered King Tim III a novelty record, or at least a fast-buck craze record. So the queston is, what does the future growth of hip-hop mean - that it WASN'T one, or that novelty records can have huge seismic pop consequences?

(See also "Autobahn")

how does 'novelty' work in music - not in the sense of something new but in the sense of a joke within the music to be got?

I think a joke is a good analogy for new music in a more general sense - like slang, it's something that people either get or they don't - it serves as an indicator of being an insider, of having the same right reference points.

Music that is meant to speak directly to a particular subculture (some hip hop, The Streets maybe) will use musical and linguistic in- jokes to make it clear who their intended audience is and to reward that audience's self-awareness.

Not heard any Andrew WK, but am astonished that anyone would describe the other records you mention as gimmicky or silly. They are fun, however, and thank goodness for that.

More interesting question, perhaps: does satire belong in music? (Again, my answer = yes. Stan Freberg is GRATE.)

I think part of the problem Jeff is that "gimmick" and "silly" are very loaded words, they tend to work critically as justifying-words (this is silly therefore I dont like it) rather than as descriptive- words (here is the silliness and you can make your own decision as to whether you like it or not).

Music CRITICISM w/out a 'sense of humour' is much worse than a rec w/out a 'sense of humour'.

everybody gets in the door with gimmicks, it's just after they've been around for awhile that we forget that we only let them in because we thought they were zany goofballs. every major musical movement has had a wacky hairstyle (the ultimate in-joke on squares) as an adjunct if not central component.

b-b-but you say you half-agree with said critics, Tom, and add that these records are "dismissable, teetering on the edge of being a joke". IMHO that is completely wrong. What they do is simply put the spotlight on the associative elements latent in nearly all music (but esp. pop). Either you relate to these elements, or you don't. That's what makes you smile (or recoil).

I think it all comes down to whether I think the jokes are good or not. For instance, Eminem's "Stan" is one of the unfunniest novelty singles *ever.*

Hmm, you might be right about the associative elements - more explanation maybe? But I still think there's something in what I'm saying. Another illustration:

In the 80s I was very into the Smiths. What happened if you were into the Smiths is that people would say "Why do you want to listen to that? It's just miserable.". And 90% of Smiths fans I knew would have a practised response, "There's a lot of black humour in it", disarming the original criticism by reversing it. And gradually it became a kind of tenet that the Smiths were a band with a lot of black humour. But at the same time the Smiths WERE also a band that played with miserabilism and sometimes even wallowed in it, and in order to understand why I liked them so much I had to understand the balance there.

A similar thing has I feel happened with Daft Punk. "It's ironic and stupid" is the criticism, so we've all got very good at saying, "No it's not, it's a serious and moving record.", and this is true but it's a serious and moving record in part BECAUSE it uses uncharacteristic or 'dated' or discarded noises, because it flirts with obsolescence (a better word in this case than 'dismissability'). Similarly practically everyone I talked to who heard the Streets single back last year was using words like novelty record, or comedy record, or funny or stupid even as they were saying yes, I love it.

(I suppose what I'm saying is that critics lose out on a lot of potential response to records by insisting they be good in straightforward ways.)

I think people object more to art they like being characterized as one-dimensional than they object to it being characterized as dumb and gimmicky. cf. 'the smiths are actually dark humoured' & 'daft punk are actually moving' are counter-arguments emphasize greater depth.

jokes: no. humour: certainly

reel big fish -^hungry like the wolf^ is currently ripping my stitches oot. danger!high voltage is ace.

the main main reason i hate frank zappa is because i don't find him remotely funny: all the jokes seem a. really obvious, or b. poorly observed, or c. badly delivered...

daft punk are very smart and witty, which makes me happy, and yes, i think there's a considerable emotional intelligence at work, which i get a lot out of: i don't really understand the "ironic/figleaf" line of attack, unless the figleaf is being used to disguise its direct seriousness, because oblioque is more powerful and has its own point to make (a la noel coward, to use a possibly silly analogy)

can i change that last paragraph to "daft punk make me happy", which is true? and you can ignore the rest of what i wrote, which is just blah blah blah, cuz i haven't thought very hard about them at all

for a long i only liked humor in music in the same way as melissa. then i sorta got over it. it seems a real dead end, pleasure-wise.

graham hit it best, jokes no, humor yes. "jokes" are so hard to pull off in music, and they invariably require lyrics, making them even more susceptible to being terrible. i prefer my humor in an all over variety. (like chocolate magic shell, hiding the soft, creamy emotional goodness inside.)

I read this whole thread confused. Well more confused than usual. I'm not sure I understand my own responces.

I like novelty records.

Apart from the ones I don't like. Novelty records I don't like I really detest.

Novelty records / novelty anything I like - a lot of silly 70s pop instrumentals like 'The Crunch', 'Popcorn'. 'Magic Fly' etc I can listen to over and over - stuff I dislike, just seems deperate the 'Im mad bonkers me' of your Dave Lee Travis, Noel Edmunds - stuff like Blur circa Parklife or The Streets.

I feels like dealing with drunk people when you are sober - I suppose there seems little point in trying get too worried about not seeing the drunken joke when you've been sticking to the soda water all night.

A lot of my favourite music makes me laugh. Louis Prima's vocals are almost always funny. So are Pulp's lyrics. And everything about Little Richard. And lots of the best country (Bobby Bare in particular). Skits are standard practice on hip hop albums (though they're rarely funny). Then again, Al Green was rarely cracking jokes, and there aren't a lot of comedy farting noises on Miles Davis records. I think, for me, there's nothing that fails as disastrously as failed comedy. Failed drama is dull, but failed comedy is painfully bad. I think this means that bad comedy records are the worst, and that comedy can age badly. Novelty, an oddly closely linked notion in music, ages even more badly, of course.

Rufus Thomas, if I remember correctly, was a stand-up before a singer, and blended the two for years. Nobody seemed to take his singing any less seriously. A far cry from Mike Yarwood, I think it's fair to say.

Key point: Humor+novelty=not the same thing at all

Humor+novelty=not the same thing at all

but they are so often conflated when it comes to music that there must be some granule of truth to it.

Maybe humor is sometimes employed as a trojan horse to sneak in huge developments that we wouldn't be ready for if we had to take them seriously (eg the moog on Popcorn, Rapper's Delight era early hip hop).

1. Lyrical humour

"Everybody asks your name They say we're all the same And now it's 'Nice one! Geezer!' That's as far as the conversation went"

(Pulp - Sorted for E's and Wizz)

If you cant get away with it as Jarvis has frequently done so brilliantly, go for it, but you run the risk of coming across as smug, patronising or plain unfunny e.g. the Smiths, Blur and the Divine Comedy.

2. Humour in the old sense of the word

Sometimes I like melancholic music, sometimes sanguine, sometimes choleric and sometimes - what's the other one? Balance is the key.

3. Humour as in "funny" samples/retro sounds

Whatever turns you on provided it's not incest or genocide (i.e. things that don't turn ME on!). Daft Punk using retro sounds isn't really funny ha ha IMHO, but there you go. I'm sure we all find a lot of music funny that wasn't intended to be and vice versa.

I don't know, is Rapper's Delight meant to be funny? It's been a while since I listened to it, but I can't say I've ever thought about it as a particularly humorous record. Or early hip-hop in general. I mean, I get your point, but to me it illustrates my point, ho ho: maybe it did take a kind of novelty record to usher in hip-hop, but that novelty record wasn't trying to be humorous in the make-you- laugh sense.

yum yum eat em up!!

Emo is music with zero humor, right?

Humour- hell yeah, the dumber the better. They dont expect to be taken seriously so why should you get your knickers in a twist- to save your intellectual cred? If Dylan can pull the piss out of himself...

In keeping with the subject of the thread, I will laugh good naturedly at the italics gaffe.

"I don't know, is Rapper's Delight meant to be funny? ... but that novelty record wasn't trying to be humorous in the make-you- laugh sense."

have you ever went over a friends house to eat and the food just aint no good
i mean the macaroni's soggy the peas are mushed and the chicken tastes like wood
so you try to play it off like you think you can by sayin that youre full
and then your friend says momma he's just being polite he aint finished uh uh that's bull
so your heart starts pumpin and you think of a lie and you say that you already ate
and your friend says man there's plenty of food so you pile some more on your plate
while the stinky foods steamin your mind starts to dreamin
of the moment that it's time to leave and then you look at your plate
and your chickens slowly rotting into something that looks like cheese
oh so you say that's it i got to leave this place
i dont care what these people think im just sittin here makin myself nauseous
with this ugly food that stinks


not to mention the whole "he may be very sexy or even cute flying through the air in a blue and red suit" bit

"super-sperm!"

Ah crap, sorry about my ital mishap.

Merzbow really makes me laugh sometimes. Like his hilarious "Tony Williams Deathspace" cut. Namechecks a virtuoso drummer, yet his track's drumbeat sounds utterly simple.

Riding the line between having a sense of humour and abject novelty can be fairly fine, and Toronto has had a few bands that have come down straddling that line: Moxy Fruvous stands as one example where the novelty value was just too high, too cutesy, and they were never ever really able to come back from two novelty tracks in a row ("King of Spain" and "My Baby Likes a Bunch of Authors")...even when they tried to write straight material no one would take them seriously. On the other hand, Rheostatics have a really dark vein running through their work, which is funny but often in a really malicious or weird way--upshot: still critics darlings despite a number of songs that would probably be novelty numbers when done by anyone else. The band that plays most deftly with that line is probably Barenaked Ladies-- they've been both serious and completely silly, and actually managed to overcome the "pure novelty" tag. Not that I really like their stuff all that much. Someone upthread mentioned dark humour, and I guess I must agree, because the Rheos are the only ones I can listen to.

Wit doesn't have to imply that a record is a joke in itself. For me, The Would-be-Goods' Camera Loves Me sums it up perfectly

recent Matmos release -- dissection and re-deployment of supposedly self-indulgent surgery (cosmetic) and general squirmish surgical noise -- has got me lost

i have seen people sit and snigger to it, but (a) said people were in the know, context, trappings; "sample identification" was all part of the package or (b) just as dodgy imho post-pay "by the way did you know you've been listening to .." followed by audience reassuringly holding onto sensetive body parts in an almost completely gross exploitation/thrill/kill thing

take away these trappings -- don't tell anybody where/what and you get sniggers related to the onomatopoeiac/anthropomorphic "sqelch and gurgle" (or "snap, crackle and pop" if you like) resonance

so either way i'm left with a feeling that this is maybe part of the great UK dance-hall trad. (but they're American ok vaudeville) thing

so you can do naughty tickle things with samples -- take you almost into the skull drill terror-story -- but this is all a bit tee-hee for me, so is it humour ? (that I simply don't find funny ?) (feeling simply left out not distinguished anyotherway)

substitute other noises but noises with no associative connective qualities and is there anything of use ? i presume a pro-vote at least acknowledges the beat technique as "cutting edge" (ho, ho) ?

but once again what is the use of this music ? do you giggle as you dance, and if so is that cool ? or do you manoevre around personal experiences of your own medical history (eg dentists, brain surgery; close to the ears) and finally relax to the treatment ? reverse- catharsis ? primal it's-only-giggle-muzak therapy ?

does the dull distiction that these are plastic surgery sounds cf: surgery sounds keep Matmos from the exploitation/snuff finger ?

ok, am i meant to take this seriously, and if not, what, indeed how is/does "humour" really belong here ? or doesn't it ? isn't this just silly upon silly ? after all why did wire make it an album of the year ?

I've noticed that I seem to be laughing more while listening to purely insstrumental music than I have in the past. I have noticed this particularly with Sun Ra. On the track "Angels and Demons at Play" (from the album of the same title) there is some sort of simple percussion instrument, that sounds a little like a clave, which seems to be intentionally played at the "wrong" time, sometimes clearly ahead, sometimes clearly behind, the beat, seemingly trying to be wrong in as many different ways as possible. This often makes me laugh, especially when I am really paying attention. At the end of "When Angels Speak of Love" (the track from the album of the same name), a favorite of mine, the playing is inentionally a little dissonant or off-key or something, which isn't funny until the very end when there's an extra little flourish that seems to exagerrate that offness. On "Cosmo Enticement" (from "Out There a Minute") there is at the beginning what sounds like a conversation between what might be strummed piano strings and another instrument which I forget the identity of. I swear the strings are asking "What?" in this annoying tone which almost overlaps with whatever the other instrument is playing. This cracked me up when I first heard it that way, and still does much of the time.

It sems to me that I also find myself laughing when I listen to a certain genre, with a strong set of conventions, and something comes up in the music which seems perfectly apt according to those conventions. This is harder to explain, but for instance, in salsa, there may be a moment when the chorus comes in, or when the clave suddenly becomes clearly audible, and somehow I find it amusing because it is so perfectly in keeping with what it is supposed to be, if that makes any sense.

As a rule though, I don't seek out music that is humorous. At times a little uncomfortable with the idea, maybe because it highlights music's being dependent on a context of expectations, something that maybe I don't want to see because I am afraid it will somehow undermine music's emotional power for me? And yet, I know very well that it's so.

Humor in life: I enjoy humor that is intermingled with life. I don't like to try too hard, to strain at humor. I like it to just sort of emerge from whatever is happening.

www.electromancer.com/Artists/RoganWhitenails/

Cakey Boo Baby Monitor

oh zappa pre end of first album cycle feak-free-money-gravy is honest

meat-flesh-sandwich collage as slack anti-concept album ala white album a much needed break form primo creative burst

floeddie experiments with public taste his undoing, the beggining of the end of the end -- easy humour for people short of real humour in real life = most cynical exploitation

but then right from the start the targets were semi-obvious, but at least he went after deserving targets in the first place ('60s)

suddenly slovenly taker-artist "company man" circa '70 -- a wanker of the first order

or can you just not make an honest living telling it like it is (to the USA) ?

George! You're spouting ILM-speak!