Têtes Noires, The New American Dream

As a rabid devotee to the music of '80s Minneapolis, I'm not sure how it took me so long to acquaint myself with Têtes Noires. Thankfully, writer Jim DeRogatis endorsed them on Sound Opinions, and I've been enjoying Têtes Noires ever since.



"Têtes noires" is French for "black heads," named for the band's hair color, and they released three indie-label studio albums over five years of touring*. Their second album, American Dream*, was recently remixed and reissued as The New American Dream, and I can't get enough of it. Years before anyone was called a riot grrrl, this irreverent sextet was reimagining punk rock (new wave? folk rock? help) with keyboards, violin, non-drum kit percussion, acoustic guitars, hand claps and up to six-part harmonies. The music is often upbeat, sung in cheerful voices locked in skintight harmonies graced by brash, subversive lyrics. 

It's rare to hear authentic punk music that you could put on a mix tape for your parents, which makes The New American Dream more dangerous than your brother's hardcore. Têtes Noires is the kind of band that can charm you into lowering your guard before landing one upside your head ("Recipe for Love," "Pretty Boy,") in a good way. The social commentary is sharp without being preachy, and relevant 30 years on ("Peace, Piece by Piece," "American Dream,") while the musicianship sounds tight but uninhibited. As songs like "True Love," "Moonie" and "Family Ties" earworm their way through me for hours on end while I struggle to catch up to them, I'm reminded of Ralph Ellison's quote about masking in Shadow and Act.

"It is in the American grain. Benjamin Franklin, the practical scientist, skilled statesman and sophisticated lover, allowed the French to mistake him for Rousseau’s Natural Man. Hemingway poses as a non-literary sportsman, Faulkner a farmer; Abe Lincoln allowed himself to be taken for a simple country lawyer—until the chips were down. America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of aggression as well as for defense, when we are projecting the future and preserving the past. In short, the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals."

*Apparently their boisterous shows would sometime include a cover of Motörhead's "We Are the Road Crew". If anyone has a recording of this, please send it to me.
*Released in 1984, the same year as Purple Rain, Zen Arcade and Let It Be. What was in the Minneapolis water?

Megadeth, "I Ain't Superstitious"

"The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance, whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion."
--Ralph Ellison

Queen, "The Invisible Man"

Somehow I missed the Ralph Ellison birth centennial at the start of this month, now being celebrated in New York with an exhibit of his personal record collection at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Ellison's jazz affinity runs deep enough to fill at least one book (Living with Music) and more scholarly essays than anyone can count, but the only song I could think of when my 11th grade English teacher assigned him was by Queen.



Queen's 80s work is underrated. Sure, the albums were spotty, but they always were (listen to A Night at the Opera lately?), and Queen's Broadway-rock singles adapted to those heinous 80s rock production trends better than, say, Black Sabbath or KISS. While the music video is hopelessly stuck in the 80s, complete with the band cast as video game characters, the song itself sounds surprisingly industrial for a group of middle-aged guys in 1989, dreaming up EDM while Avicii was still in a womb. If the Freddie Mercury's verses and Brian May's main progression sound familiar, it's because they're ripped from "Ghostbusters" and "Undercover of the Night," respectively. But the kids can't tell. He's the Invisible Man.