Workers' Playtime
The Make-Up Has Big Ideological Fun
by Eric Allen Hatch
http://www.citypaper.com/music/story.asp?id=8373

The FBI's main tactic for assuaging subversive groups in America is to co-opt the movement by benefacting rogue or moronic organizations that approximate the real one. So whenever you see an original idea being torn asunder by a misappropriation of that idea by other parties, it's possible to assume without being too paranoid that the FBI is behind it."

Ian Svenonius is serious. Mostly. It would seem.

He is parked in a corner booth in the E-Level bar on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, a few hours before a performance by his band the Make-Up. "Divide-and-conquer tactics are designed by savvy people in pentagonal buildings in Northern Virginia to drive wedges between aligned teen coalitions that might threaten the established order," Svenonius says. Tactics such as criticizing the Make-Up and its assimilation of gospel music? "Yeah, these moronic semiotics, obsessing about the origins of certain rhythms. . . . We're not putting anyone out of work."

Svenonius has elsewhere expressed disappointment with the way other music acts have cannibalized the blistering sound and propaganda tactics of his best-remembered band, the Nation of Ulysses. Ulysses' manifestos about youth, rebellion, and an anti-parent culture were cashed in on by countless WHFS poseurs and MTV vidiots during the early-90s "punk" explosion, a fact that understandably embittered Svenonius and his fellow Ulysses expatriates. The Make-Up formed in the hope of synthesizing a new musical form out of gospel, French ye-ye pop, and its own hardcore-punk background--a musical form that, in its originality and inclusiveness, would be impossible to co-opt.

So Svenonius isn't pulling this FBI talk out of his ass, although he surely could. Over the course of an interview Svenonius demonstrates a mastery of two distinct modes of speech: casualspeak, a comforting patter (in the indie-rock vernacular) with which he fields questions about other bands, his family, and the travails of touring; and ideologyspeak, a verbose flow used to articulate the oddly compelling conspiracy theories and revisionist rock 'n' roll history that informs his latest band's approach to making music.

That band, the Make-Up, pushes listeners to polar extremes. With the joint release of a 30-minute "film on video" starring the Make-Up--director James Schneider's Blue Is Beautiful, sort of a poor man's Hard Day's Night--and the band's fourth album in two years, In Mass Mind, singer Svenonius, bassist Michelle Mae, drummer Steve Gamboa, and organist/guitarist James Canty stand together as an act alternatively loved and loathed in the indie-rock world.

The Make-Up's cathartic live shows and the heartfelt lo-fi burn of its early seven-inches made converts of many a curmudgeon. However, detractors have taken the band to task for its concentration on style, its appropriation of African-American cultural forms, and especially for Svenonius' Iggy Pop-meets-Prince falsetto delivery--one of rock's ultimate acquired tastes.

But even detractors will find music to love on the new album. All of the band members took on new instruments when the group solidified in early 1995 (Gamboa and Canty both played with Svenonius in Ulysses and the subsequent Cupid Car Club; Mae was in the Bikini Kill side-project the Frumpies), and In Mass Mind is the first Make-Up full-length that shows the band in tight control of those instruments. Gamboa pays firm, graceful tribute to the great soul drummers of the '70s, and Mae and Canty's lithe bass, guitar, and organ lines interlock gorgeously.

Whereas previous Make-Up records concentrated on live documentation, whether in the studio or in front of an audience, In Mass Mind is a more elaborate studio effort. "In the beginning we had 'sound vérité,' a sonic reaction to cinema vérité and real time," Svenonius says. "Now we're moving into more sound-historic production values, still lo-fi but more considered."

It shows. In Mass Mind will never be mistaken for a Beatles record, but it sounds positively lush in comparison to the band's sincere but rugged 1996 debut Destination: Love; Live! at Cold Rice. Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux (credited in the liner notes as "Adam and Eve") handled the production this time out, largely replacing the vulnerability of past albums with slowly mounting soul tension and punk release colliding with hard psychedelia. The old fragility is evident on the tender "Time Machine," the most naked loss ballad you're likely to hear all year. But on the up-tempo booty shaker "Drop the Needle," the ecstatic "Joy of Sound," and the rock- solid "Black Wire Pt. 2," the new, unstoppably tight Make-Up sound becomes evident. In Mass Mind possesses an odd timelessness--it could pass for the forgotten toils of a prescient '60s hard rock or '70s soul outfit. It is a tour de force, a delight for fans and a certain revelation to open-minded newcomers.

But a close reading of the subtexts of this latest document of the Make-Up's sound reveals something even more ambitious: One of the most cogently self-reflective acts in the history of rock 'n' roll is coming into its ideological own.

"In Mass Mind has a concept behind it," Svenonius says. The Make-Up's socialist take on 20th-century musical history sees musicians as workers, and delineates a trend toward the downsizing of the work force by industry leaders. "To maximize gain and minimize cost, the industry has pared down the workers from being, say, a symphony at the turn of the century, to being a smaller swing band, to being the bop band of the early '50s," he says. "In rock 'n' roll the amount of people involved in making the music was even smaller, but you still have a group effort. Techno is the last step in the Marxist dialectic towards total alienation from consumer and worker to the product."

Svenonius also says some rituals of punk rock--the black-painted, low-lit uglification of punk spaces; the absence of chairs in said spaces; the mythology of the hard-living, drug-addicted punk hero--accelerate this alienation. He also bemoans "the boss class' ability to generate the Top 40 before people buy it. To become a hit record, a song must be played over and over again on the radio, burned into people's minds. Pearl Jam proved that people will buy anything if they're told to, if they're forced to. The ownership of the airwaves is a very heavy thing."

So how does the Make-Up fit into this dire dialectic? As anyone who's attended one of the band's shows knows, Svenonius will bend over backward, will literally risk breaking his own bones, to elicit an audience response. Why struggle so frantically for an audience reaction when today's punk crowds are notoriously unresponsive to even their favorite bands? "It's all part of breaking down the secret barrier between the band and the audience. The reason we appropriate gospel music is because it's a congregational music. We're trying to invert the capitalist paradigm of downsizing by expanding the group to include everybody in the room."

Think about that for a minute: "everybody in the room." That's important. Svenonius' hope is that during each performance "holy moments" will occur wherein the audience joins him in song and dance, thereby literally becoming members of the band.

At most performances people opt not to respond on this level. But what other bands offer you this opportunity? How many times do you get a chance to transform the nature of a performance? To give the band members new levels of energy to feed off of? To actually become a performer? At Make-Up shows that crazy energy always hangs ripe in the air--even when no one decides to cash it in.

So how much of the Make-Up's gospel is cartoonish self-mythologizing, and how much is heartfelt? Hard to say. The Nation of Ulysses declared war against sleep for stealing away a third of our lives, but it's a good bet the members got their eight hours a night like everyone else. Part of all of this is simply the members of the Make-Up selling an image of themselves as subversive performers.

But it's also much more than that. Even if the FBI isn't interested in them (but remember, the Bureau was after John Lennon), the band is on to something when it asks its audience to think about dance music's capitalist implications and how the music industry manipulates the public's tastes through ownership of the airwaves.

On a more intimate level, the Make-Up's willingness to criticize the aesthetics of stylized boredom and self-destruction popularized by the punk infrastructure that supports it is crucial. The Make-Up wants music to be fun again, and that's positively heroic.