The Big Bubble
Four-Sided Triangle
The Big Bubble is “Part Four of the Mole Trilogy.”[1] (Rumor hath it that Part Three will eventually be released; but will that be after Parts Five, Six, Seven…?) It’s also The Residents’ E-mulation of a four-man pop band that’s shaking up both Chubs and Moles. The story resumes “several decades after the great war. The survivors of the two cultures lived side-by-side in uneasy peace […] Many Moles and Chubs had blended socially, so mixed marriages were common. Their offsprings were referred to as ‘cross.’ In response to this, a Zinkenite movement by traditional Moles, or ‘Mohelmot,’ had surfaced to encourage the establishment of a new Mohelmot nation. Kula Bocca, a cross and an influential Zinkenite official, decided that the movement needed the energy, passion, and, above all, the naivete of youth. He hired a local band to play for a rally at Elmwurst, and although they were not very good, the band immediately captured the heart of the crowd with a single song, ‘Cry for the Fire.’”
The song clicked because lead vocalist Ramsey Whiten sang part of it “in the original language of the Mohelmot, which had been outlawed since the war. Few in the audience can understand what the singer was saying, but everyone immediately grasped that a deep link was being established with their past.” Seeking to further the band’s impact on the public, Kula Bocca got a chub entrepreneur to release their first album, The Big Bubble – “the first time that the Mohelmot language had ever been recorded.”
In light of The Residents’ long-standing contempt for the cult of stardom, it’s not surprising that The Big Bubble’s cultural hero appears to be a near-cretinous dipstick. (Yes, he’s even beginning to drool a little in one of the photos.) In the album’s opener, “Sorry,” Ramsey’s voice weaves and stumbles with all the classic Big Moose ‘duh…’ inflections – in part, he’s apologizing for being such a Mortimer Snerd. You can hear the insecurity and ignorance (and dumbness?) in that voice; also a pathetic earnestness, an all-thumbs clumsiness so classically Chub as to suggest that Ramsey is a cross rather than pure Mole. In his English-language singing, particularly here and in “The Big Bubble,” Ramsey sounds the most emphatically doltish. But chops-wise, he has nothing to apologize for, especially in “Sorry.” The song is a wild Jekyll-&-Hyde dialogue, alternating the contrite doof’s “Sorry, I’m sorry,” with a vicious, knife-twisting “Sorry, Daddy, worked out this way,” until the duet disintegrates into distant howls. “Gotta Gotta Get” goes even further, splitting Ramsey into two singers who seem to be violently arguing. The pay-off for Ramsey’s double-jointed vocal cords comes with “Hop a Little,” Bubble’s first plunge into Mohelmot: slipping into the ancient tongue, he mutates from geek to authoritative tribal elder.
The Mohelmot singing is clearly rooted in Eskimo’s Angakok vocals (and in the ethnological research for that album). But Ramsey isn’t a retread of Eskimo or Mark of the Mole. In “Cry for the Fire,” his Mohelmot is calm, even playful; he comes off like an aged, folk-singing storyteller in “Vinegar”; for “Gotta Gotta Get,” he’s a bellowing seer of visions. His most ferocious arias – in “Hop a Little” and “Kula Bocca Says So” are actually kinda creepy, because the illusion of another culture’s language is so vivid and persuasive. We aren’t told how Ramsey picked up Mohelmot – maybe he learned it from a pure Mole grandparent. But there’s no feeling of tradition or community when it erupts into his songs, only a disturbing schizophrenic quality, as though bits of a past life were leaking into this one, or as if he were possessed and talking in tongues.
The full vocal range of The Big Bubble is unprecedented in The Residents’ music – their singer went way beyond himself in these sessions. Even his fabrication of James Brown was, and the last analysis, a technical feat. Dredging up Ramsey was a genuine breakthrough.
As his name suggests, Ramsey Whiten is a photo negative of James – whose singing isn’t always intelligible either. But everyone knows what James means. He and his audience share a social and cultural framework that keeps him from becoming incoherent. Ramsey has far less commonality with any of his audiences, Mole, Chub, or cross. You and I, therefore, should be even further out in the cold – and indeed, this album has baffled its share of listeners.[2] But Ramsey is a virtuosic distillation of the ideas that shaped Meet The Residents: His autism is more interesting and original than most singers’ expertise – more of a technical accomplishment too. The stuff you’re told to think of as unintelligible, amateurish, or even imbecilic can contain some profound surprises – but you have to stop living on borrowed ideas, and actually listen, if you’re ever going to spot them. And The Big Bubble contains some of the most amazing nuggets of beauty and humor and intelligence and feeling in The Residents’ music.
Nuggets of revolution too, and I’m not talking just as aesthetics – The Residents have also invested Ramsey with a punkish nihilism so close to their hearts. “There are no rules,” he sings like a triumphant schoolboy in “Go Where You Wanna Go.” As long as you’re in the shit, you might as well stir it up. The catch is, certain people must be left alone… Kula Bocca and his Zinkenites want to break down the door of every unhappy home in that convulsive nation – and Ramsey is letting them use his head as a battering ram.
In their own way this band is as dangerous as the scientist of Mark of the Mole. Which may be why the one cut without Ramsey’s singing is an expression of sheer dread. “Fear for the Future” describes just that, a lumbering, monolithic 1984 grimness. There’s a hollow sense of defeat and foreboding in “Fear”‘s inevitable repetitions and cavernous glissandi; its slow croaking pulse and leaden timbres. The few times the music threatens to get too shrill or impassioned, it’s squelched by a short, dissonant organ chord. The piano, however, does become more variegated after the second squelching – including a lovely, oddly nostalgic effect in a brief rippling digression.
Drums In The Deep South
Ramsey is also the band’s drummer, and his playing is as unexpected and seizure-like as his Mohelmot singing. (“Gotta Gotta Get” puts the two together into a fiendish grand mal.) In most rock music, the constant presence (and monotonous playing) of the drums undercuts their power; they’re an up from which there’s nowhere to go but down. But only a few of The Big Bubble cuts include drumming – and always after you’ve stopped wondering if you’ll be hearing any drums at all. By using the drums sparingly, The Residents make them a powerful tool for shifting gears in the songs. In “Vinegar” and “Sorry,” they come in with a driving rock sound; “Die-Stay-Go” and “Cry for the Fire” take a steadier, dirge-like beat. Either way, the effect can be electrifying.
And “Kula Bocca Says So” is where the sparks leap the highest. It’s the strongest cut on the album, and if any one thing puts it over the top, it’s the climactic entrance of the drums. The Residents build to that moment beautifully, starting with quick-tempoed, strident synthesizer strings and Ramsey’s even-more strident evocations of Kula Bocca. But as he begins to oscillate back and forth between English and Mohelmot, a simple tune is heard, first on piano and then in the strings as well. Ramsey even coughs up the words for it, in between Mohelmot outbursts: “‘Cause you know that it doesn’t go home.” The theme is built into a tremendous finale, with piano and strings joined by wordless backing vocals, stinging guitars, and oh those drums.
The emotional intensity of “Kula Bocca Says So” has an added pathos in light of Ramsey’s being duped and manipulated by the politico. (Taking advantage of Mohelmot’s illegality, Kula Bocca arranged for Ramsey to be arrested, “to stir up sympathy for the Zinkenite movement […] the resulting riot and public outcry forced his release three days later.”) Of course, it’s debatable just how much of a patsy Ramsey is. This song implies that the Moles might as well have Kula Bocca as anyone else, “‘cause you know that it doesn’t go home, I say, that you know that it doesn’t go home.” Nothing anybody can say or do will put things back the way they were, will give back home to a displaced people. So what if some cross says do this or do that? As Ramsey observes in “Die-Stay-Go,” “They die if they stay, they die if they go.” As social commentaries, Mark of the Mole and The Tunes of Two Cities are relentlessly grim. For The Big Bubble, The Residents developed a new way of singing what’s on their minds. But they haven’t changed their minds – nothing has happened to encourage any optimism as they unfold their massive fable of class and race warfare.
FOOTNOTES
1. This quote, and the storyline quotes that follow, are taken from the album’s liner notes.
2. A “gurgling mess of grunts and whinnies,” says The Village Voice (11 February 1986, p. 66); “silly […] yammering,” says The New York Times (15 January 1986, p. C20). Both comments, by the way, were provoked by The Residents’ arrival in NYC for their 13th-Anniversary show – can’t expect the newspapers to take time off from writing about important records to review a Residents disk, now can you?
Links to:
SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Essay, part 8
SONIC TRANSPORTS: The Residents Contents
SONIC TRANSPORTS: Contents
For more on The Residents, see:
Film Review: The Eyes Scream
Film Review: Triple Trouble
Music Book: Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music, Second Edition
Music Lecture: My Experiences of Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music
Music: SFCR Radio Show #7, Postmodernism, part 4: Three Contemporary Masters
Music: SFCR Radio Show #26, Surrealism in 20th-Century American Music
Music: SFCR Radio Show #27, 20th-Century Music on the March
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 