Kangaroo?

Kangaroo?
Studio album by The Red Crayola with Art & Language
Released	June 1981
Recorded	Summer 1980
Studio	Studio 80, London
Label	Rough Trade
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Track listing

Side A

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Kangaroo?"	1:35
2.	"Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, Part I"	2:55
3.	"Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, Part II"	4:47
4.	"Marches No's 23, 24, 25"	2:28
5.	"Born to Win (Transactional Analysis With Gestalt Experiments)"	1:21
6.	"Keep All Your Friends"	2:11
7.	"The Milkmaid"	1:57
8.	"The Principles of Party Organisation"	2:38

Side B

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Prisoner's Model"	1:56
2.	"The Mistakes of Trotsky"	3:14
3.	"1917"	1:15
4.	"The Tractor Driver"	2:36
5.	"Plekhanov"	3:13
6.	"An Old Man's Dream"	2:27
7.	"If She Loves You"	4:29

Background

In the mid 1970's, Mayo Thompson produced a handful of musical collaborations with the Conceptual Art collective Art & Language (of which he was also a member). Thompson provided the music and Art & Language provided the words. (Michael Baldwin and Philip Pilkington wrote the lyrics to Corrected Slogans and Mel Ramsden wrote the lyrics to Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors.) Art & Language as a collective largely disbanded in 1977 but Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden decided to continue the project as a duo. In the late 1970's, much of Art & Language's work was focused on appropriating and subverting political iconography. They began painting their Portraits of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock in 1979.

After leaving Art & Language, Thompson returned to the music industry first by producing recording sessions for the British independent record label Rough Trade in 1978. Though he worked for Rough Trade, the first Red Crayola material of the 70's was released by Radar Records. This was because Radar already had plans to reissue the Red Crayola's two 60's records, so Thompson made a deal with Radar to release the Red Crayola's new material: a single, Wives in Orbit and the Red Crayola's third album, Soldier-Talk. However, Radar declined to release the group's next single, Micro-Chips & Fish and it was eventually released by Rough Trade.

In December 1979, the zine Vague 2 reported that Thompson and Gina Birch of the Raincoats were "writing material for a new album at the moment—working title 'Oh the Frontier." Thompson had worked with The Raincoat earlier in the year when he co-produced their first single and their first album.

Recording (1980)

The Red Crayola played their first show of the year on May 1, 1980.

In summer 1980, Geoff Travis of Rough Trade stated that The Red Crayola were currently recording a new album. Thompson later stated that they finished Kangaroo? just before his first tour with Pere Ubu. (Ubu's "The Art of Walking tour" began on July 18, 1980.)

In June 1980, some of Art & Language's Lenin paintings were featured in a Belgian exhibition titled Kunst in Europa na '68. At the exhibition, Thompson filmed a music video featuring some of the newly recorded songs.

"The Mistakes of Trotsky" was included on the first Rough Trade New Releases sampler cassette in June 1980.

On July 26, 1980, Thompson stated that the band had recently recorded two singles; one of which would be released soon. These were likely "Born in Flames" and "Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock Parts I & II". The latter was never released as a single, but Born in Flames was released on July 25, 1980. This single was the first release that credited both The Red Crayola and Art & Language. (Corrected Slogans was designated as such retroactively when it was reissued in 1982.)

At the end of November, Music Week stated that an album from The Red Crayola was "due shortly."

Mayo Thompson performing Kangaroo? in Germany

Release (1981)

In January 1981, "The Milkmaid" was included on the compilation C81 by Rough Trade and NME.

Thompson played guitar on Pere Ubu's tours from the middle of February to the end of March.

In April 1981, The Red Crayola recorded two songs in both English and German for upcoming single: "Ratman, the Weightwatcher" and "Future Pilots".

"An Old Man's Dream" appeared on Rough Trade New Releases 5 in April and "Kangaroo?" and "Keep All Your Friends" appeared on Rough Trade New Releases 6 in May.

The Red Crayola's first album on Rough Trade, Kangaroo?, was released in June 1981. Music Week: "Rough Trade has backed the latest album by Red Krayola, Kangaroo? (ROUGH 19), with heavy promotion and a European tour. The LP, made in collaboration with radical art group Art & Language, who did the lyrics and sleeve design, has licensing deals in Germany, Italy, Australia and France and was simultaneously released in the US on Rough Trade."

The Red Crayola's single An Old Man's Dream (featuring two album cuts) was released around the same time as the album.

The group performed live throughout June 1981 in London and Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

A cassette version of Kangaroo? was released in July which included the songs on the Born in Flames single.

The group's German single Rattenmensch/Gewichtswächter was released sometime later in 1981.

With Thompson again, Pere Ubu began recording their next album Song of the Bailing Man in August and toured again in December.

Aftermath (1982)

In 1982, Art & Language published an article explaining some of the ideas and lyrics on the album titled Kangaroo?: Some Songs by Art & Language and the Red Crayola.

In late 1982, it was reported that Kangaroo? had 15,000 sales worldwide—a disappointing commercial performance.

Thompson revived the Red Crayola again with a new line-up in Fall 1982 for Black Snakes.

Further reading: Alex Parrish's zine Keep All Your Friends about The Red Crayola's Rough Trade era

See also: Shows/1980, Shows/1981

Personnel

The Red Crayola

• Mayo Thompson — vocals, guitar
• Gina Birch — vocals
• Lora Logic — vocals, saxophone
• Ben Annesley — bass
• Epic Soundtracks — drums
• Allen Ravenstine — synthesizer

Technical

• Adam Kidron - producer
• Epic Soundtracks - producer
• Lora Logic - producer
• Mayo Thompson - producer
• Geoff Travis - production co-coordinator
• Tim Thompson - assistant engineer, mixing

Cover art

The cover is a painting by Art & Language. The artwork is an "ironic reference to the work of Georg Baselitz." Additionally, the kangaroo "also evokes the absurdist truism that from the perspective of the British Isles, the denizens of the antipodes must all be upside down."

Posters

• 
  UK poster
• 
  German poster
• 
  American poster

Promo items

• 
  Kangaroo button
• 
  Kangaroo t-shirt

Paintings

Art & Language exhibited their original paintings for Kangaroo? in Australia's Milani Gallery in 2019.

• 
  LP Cover Painting for Kangaroo?, 1981
• 
  Badge Design for Kangaroo?, 1981
• 
  T-shirt Design for Kangaroo?, 1981
• 
  T-Shirt Design for Kangaroo?, 1981
• 
  Poster Design for Kangaroo?, 1981

A red version also appeared in Art & Language's Homes from Homes II, 2001. "The little picture in Homes from Homes II refers to the cover-design made by Art & Language for the LP, which shows an inverted kangaroo in the style of Baselitz. More specifically, it is derived from the design for a lapel-button originally produced to advertise the LP." Art & Language hung this painting next to "Akt" from Baselitz's Akt und Adler (1978).

• 
  Homes from Homes II detail, 2001
• 
  Georg Baselitz, "Akt" of Akt und Adler, 1978

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2010

Kangaroo?, we took some of the material that was on Corrected Slogans and covered it with the lineup that I was working with then: Gina Birch, Epic Soundtracks, Lora Logic, and Ravenstine. That was perhaps the idea of trying to take those songs and do slightly more finished versions of ‘em with people who play music for a living? And also there was an idea — punk had died, and things seemed to be open again to the very idea of pop in general, and those were pop mixes, pop approaches. When I say ‘pop’ I just mean that they traded in guitar, bass, and drums, the usual [form] which one associates with the idea of popular music. But I think of all music as popular music, really. I mean, anything that’s played in public is popular music. Folk music is a little exceptional, sometimes. Depends on the neighborhood.

Mayo Thompson, 2006

I think they’d [Art & Language] missed us writing songs together, and they liked the idea that they’d made this record [Corrected Slogans], and began to appreciate the differences it made to their own practice and their own discourse. Something that art has had to face up to is that people who like art also like other forms of culture and other ways of doing things. There were people who admired Art & Language for their art, but who also liked the music. [...] The philosophical premise of the record was socialist-realist. It was a “what if …?” record. What if there was a record that took this idea seriously? What does socialist music sound like today? But ultimately it was a miscalculation. If it was a strategy to reshape the language and revolutionise the times, it failed signally.

Art & Language, 2001

Composed in the early years of the Thatcher government, Art & Language's lyrics were jammed uncomfortably between a sort of Adorno-ish desire to 'improve' the lyrics of pop songs—to give them a political and intellectual edge—and (for want of a better way to keep the comparison going) a Benjamin-like interest in the prospect of a relatively wide distribution. But to say this may be to sterilise the memory of the project. The discomfort was calculated. The musical performance and the lyrics were engaged in an uneasy detente. The latter enjoy a fairly high degree of unfeasibility as words for pop songs, which gives them a certain power to refract or otherwise distort the former. The desire for 'improvement' was therefore to desire to produce something unfeasible. The project required the organisation of a series of collisions and the performances—by professional punk musicians—were an instructive record of the damage as much as an overcoming thereof.

Reviews

New Musical Express

May 30, 1981

Lynn Hanna

When your songs have titles like A Portrait of VI Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock or Born to Win (Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments), you need a strong sense of humour to avoid sounding pedantic. Mayo Thompson, leading light of the Red Crayola with Art & Language, has recently been working with Pere Ubu, a group whose essential absurdity is both funny and provoking. The same aims underlie 'Kangaroo?' latest release by the Red Crayola.

According to the press release the 15 tracks "represent and reproduce various monstrocities; the grotesque certainties of artistic and political cultures." It goes on to state that "the sources of contradiction in the bourgeois world are not to be discredited by unambiguous, unironic, alternatives, but rather in discursive complexity and didactic absurdity."

'Kangaroo?' states its intent in the title track, an allegory of Captain Cook's discovery of the kangaroo set to music that springs about with the odd charm of the animal itself. "No one knew what the creature was/Some men went ashore because/Animals must have a name/The truth emerged much later when/The aborigines told those who'd come to stay/That Kangaroo meant what did you say?"

'A Portrait of V I Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock' is two parts, the first a critique of the rebellious American action painter operating in a capitalist system.

The second is a sarcastic look at Lenin, determinism and the attitudes that have led to the Soviet attempt to castrate art by harnessing it to the service of the State.

The cure-all self-help palliatives of modern psychology come under attack in 'Born to win (transactional analysis with Gestalt Experiments)' where an unctuous accent explains a method of abolishing losers that is represented as the state religion of California.

The idyllically pastoral 'Milkmaid', already available on the Rough Trade cassette, and 'the Tractor Drivers' pictured staring up from the field at a jet stream in the sky, both assert the dignity of labour and the inner beauty of honest toil which matches up to an idea of progress as calculatingly optimistic as a Russian propaganda poster.

By contrast 'Marches No 23 24 and 25' set to a comic toy soldier melody, is an illustration of the savage moral one-upmanship of the kind of conservatism which our present PM epitomises.

A fascination with the history of the Russian revolution and the contradiction between early idealism and the realities of the so called Communist states run through 'The Mistakes of Trotsky' the instrumental '1917' and 'Plekhanov' and if there is a discernable personal stance beneath many of the songs, it's loosely Marxist idea of the importance of economics in social and political understanding.

The LP's contrasting ideas are set in a warm, mocking music with an elastic, airy structure that leaves plenty of space for its many tangents and surprises. Aided particularly by Lora Logic's winsome, jazzy voice, the sound is versatile, evocative and cheerfully accessible.

Smash Hits

June 11, 1981

Ian Birch

[...] The Au Pairs are kindergarten material compared to "Kangaroo?" (Rough Trade) by no less than The Red Crayola with Art & Language.

RCWA&L is made up of Rough Trade diehards — like Epic Soundtracks (one of Swell Maps), synthesiser wizard Allen Ravenstine (of Pere Ubu), Lora Logic (Essential Logic) and Mayo Thompson (who is the Red Crayola).

With such toe-tapping titles as "Born to Win (Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiment)" and "A Portrait of V. I. Lenin In The Style of Jackson Pollock", you can imagine the politics here come straight out of those ridiculous seminars held in the TV series of "The History Man".

It's egghead obscurity gone mad, although the production tries to make the experiments as accessible as possible and Mayo tries to inject some humour. But what's the point? Who but like-minded people are going to buy the LP, let alone listen to it and even enjoy it?

Adventuring into Basketry

1981

Laura Logic has got it. Siouxsie had it. Alison Statton had it. Now Laura Logic has got it. She is currently one sixth of The Red Crayola, along with two Ubu's, an ex-Map, a Raincoat and Ben Annesley (?).

This album is wonderful. It shows politically inclined lyricism can make its point and be FUN!! Mayo Thompson's eclectic ideas behind songs like the title track, 'Prisoner's Model' and 'The Tractor Driver' combine ideally with the disjointed musical antics of the musicians.

"They say it's art killed Pollock

As if that could be.

In fact he missed a bend

And drove his Ford into a tree."

('A Portrait Of V.I.Lenin In The Style Of Jackson Pollock Part I')

Excellent couplets like the above are scattered throughout the album, these observations and the dainty/faintly jazz-tinged wanderings of the music providing a balance for some particularly cumbersome song titles. Kangaroo? Certainly.

Future Days

1981

Rough Trade are probably one of the leading proponents of what I'd dub 'anti-mood music': that is, its of such a nature that I'm never quite sure when's the time to listen to it. I have records which match up to the way I may feel at a given moment, and are suitable for certain situations as well. As a result with many of the labels bands it merits a special effort and concentration when listening in order to appreciate the complexity in the music. The degrees of 'difficulty' inherent in the labels product is typified by the Raincoats on one co-ordinate, and Red Crayola on another. [...]

Looking at the lyrics on the back of the cover of 'Kangaroo' you could be excused for lapsing into a Julie Burchill-style harangue against 'Marx and Muesli Set', so commonly found in the households which buy Rough Trade records perhaps? That aside Red Crayola's aim is to urge us to 'forget the contradictions of the present and contemplate what you cannot help feeling'. Using Art & Language (in its organisational and substantive forms) their search for 'the reflection of contingency' brings to mind the fine work of the late-lamented Henry Cow, and happily as the record reveals, something of the humour of Carla Bley.

Thats an important element here as similar projects are often heavy-handed and ultimately tedious. So you can appreciate the irony of exhibitions of prisoners art being subsidised by multi-nationals, the Leninist distortion of language whereby a defeat becomes a 'phase', and best of all that Jackson Pollock was'nt killed by the narrow mindedness of the Art world but by his missing a bend and driving into a tree!

There are several other social/political points scored, but the songs represent convulsions of various sorts - they are not the convulsions of the performers.

Stereoplay

September 1981

René Mauchel

Merkwürdig klang die Musik von Red Crayola immer — schon 1966, als die Band im amerikanischen Underground auftauchte, ebenso wie 1979, als sie Gitarrist und Gründer Mayo Thompson in England neu formierte. Merkwürdig wirkt auch das neue Album „Kangaroo?“. Der Titelsong erklärt beispielsweise, warum das australische Beuteltier eben Känguruh heißt. Weitere poetische und anspruchsvolle Texte behandeln Persönlichkeiten und Probleme der russischen Revolution. Die Musik jedoch steckt voller Widersprüche. Sie offenbart einerseits Kunstattitüden, kokettiert aber auch mit naivem Dilettantismus. Sie gibt sich avantgardistisch, schrammt aber oft hart am Kitsch entlang, wenn triviales Material durch eingeblendete Geräuschfetzen nur schwach relativiert wird. Mayo Thompson unternimmt hier eine riskante Gratwanderung, bei der er manchmal strauchelt und abrutscht.

California

October 1981

"Down with socialist realism! Long live socialist ambiguity!" That might be the slogan of Red Crayola, a floating crap game of London avant-garde pop musicians led by Texas expatriate Mayo Thompson, which is now working with a conceptual art collective called Art & Language. Their Kangaroo? (Rough Trade US) is, so far as I can tell, a concept album about the betrayal of revolutionary and bourgeois hopes by (probably respectively) Soviet communism and American capitalism. It's also extremely funny and unexpectedly stirring: Mayo Thompson reading a prospectus for correct vanguard practice against a buoyant chorus of "And we will be fed/Breakfast in bed/And served by a fat millionaire" or, in "Born to Win (Transactional Analysis with Gestalt Experiments)," hysterically declaiming "the Geistesgeschichte of California"—sounds much better than it reads—is plainly a delight. The real reason to listen to Kangaroo?, though, is Lora Logic's singing. Sixteen-year-old saxophonist for the pioneering London punk band X-ray Spex in 1977, Lora is all over the record. Though too skeptical and self-willed for any political movement, she attacks the songs with gleeful fervor. Her most personal moments come on "An Old Man's Dream" (available as a Rough Trade import single), her most implacable on "Marches 23, 24, and 25"—in which she assaults the hegemony of the free market with all the bite and bile of George Grosz's cartoon Germany, a Winter's Tale. But Grosz never had half Lora's charm.

Boston Phoenix

October 13, 1981

Howard Litwak

Red Crayola wouldn't have been anyone's bet to survive the '60s. Veterans of International Artists, the same lysergic-inspired Texas indy for whom legendary burnouts the 13th Floor Elevators also recorded, Red Crayola helped define psychedelic music. In fact, the first psychedelic cover I remember seeing was for Red Crayola's 1967 release, The Parable of Arable Land, a purple haze of phantasmagoria. And the music? A sprawling noisy caterwauling that was a poor man's equivalent of the "Help, I'm a Rock" part of the Mothers of Invention's Feak Out. Later for Sgt. Pepper — what I call acid rock.

Of course, strictly speaking, Red Crayola didn't survive the '60s; leader Mayo Thompson did. Don't really know what Thompson did during most of the apsychedelic era, but a couple of years ago, he resurfaced, in London, as part of the Rough Trade scene, in particular working with the Raincoats and Pere Ubu. Red Crayola was reborn with the appearance of Micro Chips, a maxi-single that appealingly blended late '60s guitar with the eccentric texture so popular among the postpunk avant-garde. Appealing, but in no way indicative of what was to come. Imagine, if you will, Essential Logic mixed with the Incredible String Band mixing with Gong and leavened by John Cale, and you begin to get the idea of Kangaroo? (Rough Trade), Red Crayola's new album. Of course, such a combination is not to everybody's taste. Kangaroo? owes nothing to contemporary trends in rock: no gnarled funk, no reggae bounce, no bombast, no new-wavish cleverness, no sexual directness, no minimalism, no rapper's delights. It owes its lilt, instead, to the element of openhearted goofiness in the psychedelic tradition, the most compelling illustrations yet of the links between acid-heads and post-punks. Take a song like "Keep All Your Friends," it begins with a jaunty chorus, straight out of Eno, singing "And we will be fed/Breakfast in Bed/And served/By a fat millionaire." A molasses-slow voice reminiscent of the Incredible String Band points out that "A contradiction/Is the norm for breaking:/... Dialectically." Lora Logic, the wunderkind who helped make X-Ray Spex' "Oh Bondage, Up Yours" one of the most enduring of punk singles, follows with a high-pitched quaver: "It's not the social content/It's always the political form." A straight 4/4 breaks out, and on and on it goes, a symphony of fluttering vocals, skipping intervals, weird bleatings and rumblings, tensile bass lines (courtesy Gina Birch of the Raincoats), odd song structures, open spaces, lines without meter. Let's just say the kinds of things old-timers would have called "spacy" back when space was still in style.

There is a difference, though, between what Thompsons might have done in the '60s and what he's doing now, and you probably noticed it in the lyrics. Red Crayola's lyrics move beyond irony and out into a cultivated brand of looniness. They deal, insofar as they can be puzzled out, with betrayal of dreams both Soviet and American. But that's only a guess, as this sampling of lines should indicate:

From "A Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, Part I": "They say it's art killed Pollock — As if that could be/In fact he missed a bend/And drove his Ford into a tree."

From "Part II": "Lenin: If you think culture's revolution,/Stick it up your arse."

From "Prisoner's Model": "Thanks to the Academy/And praise to the oil company;/The heaven of liberality/Is aesthetic penology."

These lines don't scan, they don't swing, and they certainly don't make rational sense, but that's acid damage for you. Which, in this context, is a compliment: listening to the goofy sense of time and accent with which the various singers invest the lyrics while following them on a lyric sheet almost makes Kangaroo? a Brechtian experience.

Without a lyric sheet, listening is still a downright pleasure. The liner notes thank "Blood" Ulmer, and sure enough, at least four songs ("Lenin, Part I," "Prisoner's Model," "The Tractor Driver," and "If She Loves You") sound as if they were based on the kind of riff Ulmer would play if he'd never discovered harmolodics: trebly, churning, and multidirectional. Logic's voice is terribly unimpressive, but her singing is consistently invigorating: skipping stones across water on "Marches Numbers 23, 24 and 25," floating through space on "An Old Man's Dream," quavering through "The Milkmaid." Her saxophone playing, which shades delicately throughout is heard to particularly good advantage on "If She Loves You," a kind of screwball shuffle with an on-the-beat ensemble figure punched up by Logic. "The Mistakes of Trotsky" is a jaunty waltz-time piece of incoherence, "Plekhanov" a romantic trio of piano/sax/vocal, "The Milkmaid" a chirruping cycle of tone colors and odd harmonies; there's not a song on Kangaroo? without a subtle hook.

I don't want to oversell. Kangaroo? is a small album, an unimportant album, an album of no commercial potential. But it is also an album that never puts its foot wrong, one in which each song contributes to the overall exotic texture. It is self-conscious in the way only a totally unselfconscious record can be: it takes everything seriously, and nothing. In a high art context, its rumblings, bleeps, exotic harmonies, and dislocation between melody and lyrics would be called Public Imagine, Ltd.; in a psychedelic context, it's a high.

October 20, 1981

Hello, what's this? Old Texas '60s proto-punk and psychedelic veteran Mayo Thompson combining forces with several post-punk British stalwarts for a record that mixes Essential Logic with the Incredible String Band, adds elements of Gong-style art rock and leavens everything with John Cale grit? Something like that. The music is a stew of fluttering voices, weird bleatings and rumblings, tensile bass lines, odd song structures, open spaces, and lines without meter, but less watery and faster moving than the current run of Rough Trade product. Lora Logic may be the secret star here; her saxophone punches in many of the subtle hooks scattered through Kangaroo? and her singing is vigorous and committed (as opposed to Thompson's acid-victim mumbles). The lyrics are mostly amusing or provocative non sequiturs, so like many psychedelic classics, Kangaroo? depends on its improbable mood to convince the listener that genuine knowledge is at work. Those in the quirky camp should be able to accept Red Crayola's argument — it's never cute or pushy. More together than Thompson's legendary band of space-cadets ever hoped to be.

OP Magazine

Winter 1981

S. Peters

This band always was pretty impenetrable, and I think I've figured out why. Their lyrics (good ones) are just bursting with big words. Really big ones. The message is fine, but try fitting all those syllables into a 4/4 beat or a catchy melody. Listen closely and you'll catch them singing faster and faster to fit all those words into the song. It all sounds a bit clumsy in a cute sort of way. Lora Logic's singing is always an asset. The Red Crayola is to rock today what Henry Cow was in the '70s...except H. Cow just used weird time signatures to make their words fit the music better, and they weren't as witty with their politics. Here we have tunes like "A Portrait of V.I. Lenin," and "The Principles of Party Organization," or "The Mistakes of Trotsky." Good clean fun for the proletariat. The only problem is that the big words will probably go right over the heads of most working class people, especially in America, where the working class wear hard-hats and have flags tattooed on their chests (and I bet they make wild generalizations, too...Ed.) So, if you have a big vocabulary, lean towards socialism, and like kinda weird records with a sense of humor...Well, this is the record for you.

Melody Maker

Excerpt

... an intriguing album with overtly intellectual lyrics that tackle everything from the modern American artist Jackson Pollock to Lenin, Trotsky, Plekhanov and gestalt experiments with a sly humour that finds a mirror in the controlled madness of the music.

Sounds

Excerpt

I'd be very surprised if Thompson was serious about these windy Left-wing persemantics. I'm no Roland Barthes, but that inability to distinguish sums up this album's mystifying nature.

Spin Alternative Record Guide

1995

Byron Coley

With Thompson now trilling like Ubu's David Thomas, Red Crayola came together again for the Kangaroo? LP which is rhetorically dense in a way that makes me think of Slapp Happy or Lindsay Cooper. It is interesting, but it seems sort of brittle and too intellectual for its own good.

Robert Christgau's Record Guide: The '80s

Robert Christgau

What the hell is it with radio anyway? A great concept album elucidating Marxist aesthetics and does AOR give it a shot? Nah — all we get is Stevie Nicks and AC/DC. So take my word for it. Not only could John Berger have written "A Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock" — "They say it's art killed Pollock / As if that could be / In fact he missed the bend / And drove his Ford into a tree" — but he'd approve of the triumphant pseudo-operatic warble with which Lora Logic stretches out that last word (and no, Berger doesn't like the Essential Logic album either). Also instructive are "The Milkmaid" and "The Tractor Driver," twin parodies of capitalist idealism and socialist realism. And the Au Pairs and the Gang of Four are directed to the side-closers, both of which are dubious about romantic love and one of which is entitled "The Principles of Party Organisation." Does it rock? No much. Does it work? You bet. A-

Map

Summer 2006

Neil Cooper

[...] With the new supergroup loose-fit enough already, A&L stuck to writing duties for the era-defining 1981 album, Kangaroo? ‘I think they’d missed us writing songs together, and they liked the idea that they’d made this record, and began to appreciate the differences it made to their own practice and their own discourse. Something that art has had to face up to is that people who like art also like other forms of culture and other ways of doing things. There were people who admired Art & Language for their art, but who also liked the music.’

The painting on the cover of the 1981 Red Crayola/Art & Language album Kangaroo? was based on a painting by the German expressionist Georg Baselitz. By depicting the eponymous marsupial inverted, it suggested the world really had turned upside down. Its tracks boasted titles such as ‘The Principles Of Party Organisation’ and ‘The Mistakes Of Trotsky’ and—given the militant climate of the times—its clattering, junkyard-Brechtian cacophony sounded like a manifesto. For sure, in the album’s accompanying booklet, each set of lyrics came complete with a short commentary. ‘The philosophical premise of the record,’ Thompson points out, ‘was socialist-realist. It was a “what if …?” record. What if there was a record that took this idea seriously? What does socialist music sound like today? But ultimately it was a miscalculation. If it was a strategy to reshape the language and revolutionise the times, it failed signally.’

While ‘Prisoner’s Model’ was a pithy assault on officialdom’s patronising embrace of art therapy for prison inmates, ‘Portrait of VI Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock Parts I and II’ was part of a much bigger Art & Language project, which included an essay published the previous year. The single, ‘An Old Man’s Dream’, was based on a German poem by Max Horkheimer, which concerns Freudian psycho-analysis in a bourgeois state. Despite this, it was a girly swoon of a song and Thompson was convinced it would make Top of the Pops . Then again, as an arch commercialist raised on doo-wop as much as Duchamp, why wouldn’t he?

‘Pop songs are really free-standing things,’ Thompson points out, ‘and they can be surrounded by other things which are unlike them. Life’s a jukebox. Programme it. Have fun. Whereas in art, it’s much more tendentious in respect of the way meanings work. If you insist on pointing to the instability of certain kinds of functions, you’ve gotta do a lot of work to prove it.’ [...]