Edge of the Middle of the Road; wrong & terrible music treated with the kind of respect it doesn’t deserve

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There’s a place, where whilst cruising down the highway of life that everything just feels better. It’s a comfortable ride, smoother, easier, and more economical.

This is not that place.

We’re operating a little further out, closer to the shoulder, a place riddled with potholes, loose rocks and hard bitchumen, where fewer cars travel. It’s a little greasier out here, and at any moment the wheel can be wrenched from your clutches and the car could go careering out of control down a nondescript a dirt track into a hitherto unknown musical utopia, or alternatively you might just drive straight off a cliff.

Welcome to the edge of the middle of the road.

Many records are terrible. Totally misguided, just benign imitations of whatever genre or musician is currently popular, albeit with all the soul, imagination and song writing ability sucked out. Or they might just be folk music – which is probably worse. For this writer the fingernails on chalkboard come from witty observational folk music, you know the kind, the faux self depreciating tales of the joys, perils, and learning moments in the quirky absurdity of modern life. Yet even within this dim and dire world you can occasionally strike gold – yet I’m not for one moment going to deny that the process of panning for it doesn’t draw blood.

I’d like to introduce Christine Lavin, she’s a New York based folk singer, who’s had a long and quite successful music career, recording from the early 80’s until 2009, though I believe at the age of 64 she still performs live. I have her third album, 1986’s Beau Woes and other problems of modern life (Rounder Records), where she sings about the perils of being in love with a man who loves to camp, and an office crush with the twist that she’s on the ground floor, he’s on the 37th. How ever will they meet?

It’s word heavy, admittedly quite clever rhymy poetry put to an acoustic guitar in thrall of the vocals, and you could see how many would find this kind of observational lightness charming and clever, relishing her unique and quirky take on modern life.

However it makes me want to slice my ears off.


Yet ultimately it’s the quirk that saves her, because it leads to experimentation, and most importantly it leads to her putting down her acoustic guitar. To the sound of an insistent ticking clock she gets all Laurie Anderson, close mic’d with a rhyming prose poem called ‘Biological Time Bomb,’ where she comes up with an ingenious plan to circumvent nature’s inbuilt insistency that all women should procreate. I love the minimal sounds in this track. She never reaches for any other instrumentation, just some periodic hand clapping and finger clicking. It comes off like she’s almost rapping, with heavily delayed backing vocals. She also uses the word “aspirated” which is pretty impressive. It’s funny, clever, wry, honest and somehow just a little bit mischievous in her attempts to subvert an inherent human drive. If truth be told it’s actually no different from the rest of her album, yet somehow by shelving the guitar it prevents the bile from rising – perhaps because it no longer feels so slavishly wedded to genre.

Similarly Meg Christian loves her stories, loves her learning moments and her acoustic guitar. She’s similarly quirky, and similarly honest, yet she’s working with a lot more instrumentation such as Autoharp, melodica, bass, violins, fender Rhodes, hammered dulcimer, harpsichord, and percussion. Structures are elongated, songs slow down start up, and instruments swell and dissipate, again in thrall to the earnest sonorous vocals. Christian doesn’t pull away from the hard stuff, a feminist songwriter; on 1977’s Face The Music (Olivia Records) she tackles race, class, regret, and lesbianism.


Again it’s the quirk that saves her, a live take, growling into the mic to the hysteria of her audience before intoning somewhat moronically “Here come the lesbians,” like we’re victims in a horror film. “Aaaarh aaargh aaargh don’t look in the closest,” she growls and again the audience erupts. The song is ‘Leaping Lesbians,’ and it’s the reason I bought the album. It’s an incredible way to subvert prejudice, and when she gets all crazy voice, and inspires the audience to join her it’s sheer genius.

Judy Small is from Coffs Harbour NSW. In 1984 she put out her private press opus Ladies & Gems (Crafty Maid Music). Her music is definitely working within the same lineage as the above artists, a feminist singer songwriter observing a patriarchal modern society, though her vocals have a richer more classical quality and much of it comes across as a bitterness borne from lived experience. Her music is driven by acoustic guitar, evocative stories about a newspaper seller, or a crazy lady who talks to herself in the street. Yet there’s a great acapella piece, ‘Bridget Evans,’ about a nuclear campaigner who left her family to continue the fight, and the hypocritical sexism at play. But even better is ‘A Song For the Roly-Poly People,’ which over fingers clicking and either handclaps or a snare drum Small offers a near militaristic rap about how the roly-poly people, who don’t conform to societies vision of an acceptable weight have more to offer than the way they look. “They try to tell us what to eat/They try to tell us what to wear/They try to tell us how to live” she offers. It comes across as a plea for understanding and again without the ubiquitous acoustic guitar it feels like something new, something different. Recently, having released 12 albums she retired from music. She is now a Judge of the Federal Circuit Court.

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Bob is the features editor of Cyclic Defrost. He is also evil. You should not trust the opinions of evil people.

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