Rather than just throw a YouTube video up into the air and see who catches it, I thought I’d perhaps go a bit more indepth this time.
If you’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, you have, no doubt seen his room:
See that poster on the wall to his right? That’s the band Cabaret Voltaire, and that’s who we’re going to be talking about today.
The Cabs started off as a three man unit, blending noise with dada and surrealist imagery. Three art school students – three smart kids with something to say. Tape loops, cut-ups, sampling – Cabaret Voltaire started it all. In true dadaist form, they basically started a tape recorder and started throwing everything including the kitchen sink in there until something came out that kind of resembled music.
Now music and rhythm and melody are very abstract terms. I’m sure you could personally define each of them like folks define pornography. “I don’t know, but I know it when I see it”. Or in the case of music and songs, you know each of the above terms when you hear it.
The first time I came across Cabaret Voltaire was through their second studio album, The Voice of America. This was in 1980, during the Reagan years, and it was very fashionable in the UK at the time to take some hard looks and even some potshots at the United States, especially after we elected a B movie actor as the leader of the free world. Voice of America is very much that kind of shot across the bow that the Cabs and other noise bands with a socio-political bent love. In this video for “This Is Entertainment”, we get lyrics, get get rhythm, we get a kind of melodic but disjointed sing-song.
It’s interesting to watch this video because you can see the seeds of so many different things to come that others would borrow from the Cabs and make their own. Political statement, McLuhan style statements on the dangers of TV, film, and other sources of information. And this is before the Internet became The Big Thing. Very visionary stuff, but due to the sounds and the music, very limiting and very much an acquired taste. But the beginnings were there.
Let’s jump forward three years, to their 1983 album, The Crackdown. Produced by Flood, from Sisters of Mercy fame, we still have rhythm, we still have sampling, we still have melody and a dancable beat, but Mallender and Kirk (the Cabs were now a twosome) learned lessons from disco, from house, from the rave scene. They’ve tightened up their act, gotten groovier, but the lyrical venom is still there.
Trust me, when I saw them in concert in 1985, this was very much ground breaking stuff. The music video was still in the cradle, but the Cabs, who had been playing with tape and film manipulation for years, were very much in the vanguard of the use of music videos to get their message across.
Now we come to the zenith of the Cabs career, their 1984 Micro Phonies album, the cover of which we see on Ferris’ bedroom wall. Pretty much right on the heels of The Crackdown, Micro Phonies is their most ‘commerical’ album, both in terms of listener friendliness and monetary success. They had several actual hits off the album, one which I’m sure you have heard in the dance clubs.
Again, we have the same subject matter, the same stance toward authority, religion, politics, but they have matured as musical artists without compromising their artistic integrity. Big difference there.
I wanted to feature them for just this reason. I read an article recently that said it took 10,000 hours to become an expert on something or to master a language, art form or hobby, and I think that Cabaret Voltaire are an embodiment of that principle.
Over the course of a few videos, over the course of six years, we see that with dilligent work, study, applying principles of the open market (give the people what they want) and a maturation of voice, you can retain creative and artistic freedom while allowing yourself the similar freedom to grow and mature and most importantly change as an artist.
If they just stayed with their Voice of America style, and didn’t listen and learn from the other things that were going on around them musically, the Cabs would have stayed three smart dudes with tape recorders in their parents garage. But instead, they listened, they learned, they realized that to reach a larger audience they had to adapt, but didn’t have to surrender.
Take a look at your world, take a look at your artistic projects.
What can you learn from the world around you?
How can you adapt and grow, but still retain your voice?
Interesting questions.
