Brian Setzer Orchesta - Dirty Boogie

Man I don’t know what to do with the Brian Setzer Orchestra.

                I love Brian Setzer. Or, at any rate, I love the Stray Cats. They pretty much set the tone for modern Rockabilly, as discussed in my entry on Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. After the breakup of the Cats, Setzer spent the 80s doing solo work that I would be interested in looking up. By 1990 Setzer joined that bizarre shift within the Rockabilly subculture towards swing. Given his influence within the genre it is worth asking whether he was the chicken or the egg in this move. His own statements along the lines are that he had always wanted to front a big band with a rock guitar. This would certainly support the Setzer-led hypothesis, as would the relatively early 1990 foundation date. On the other hand most commentators credit the shift to the Royal Crown Review, which was founded in 1989. So is Setzer a bandwagon jumper? It is worth recalling that, while he founded the Cats in New York playing 50s retro, they only solidified their sound and style after moving to England to merge into the just-starting Teddy Boy revival. With the swing revival his orchestra was not the first band, but they were hardly late entries.

I think something needs to be said here in favor of bandwagon jumping. In life we achieve nothing by ourselves. Artistic statements usually need movements to make their point, since individual artists can never hash an idea out with all its angles. Our culture trains us to suspect groupthink and desire to make our own impact, but I think the most influential people in any artistic group is often the second or third entry, who realizes the genius of what is being said by the first entrant, and begins to chew on it and realize its parameters and implications.

I always seem to end up referencing the Clash, but hey, they are my favorite band. They were also not the first punk band. not even the second, and Shane MacGowan has made numerous statements along the lines that he always considered Joe Strummer a bandwagon jumper. That the rest of the Pogues hired Joe to replace him after his alcoholism made him inherently unstable had nothing to do with this assertion, I am sure. Anyway, despite not being first, I think the Clash made some of the most serious contributions to the punk sound. By broadening the subculture's horizons into reggae and world music they ultimately gave it legs far beyond the art-school rejection it was up to that point.

                So there is a lot about the history and structure of this album to dislike. It came out nearly simultaneously with the infamous Gap commercial, and the album’s first single happened to be a cover of the song featured in the commercial. Thus the two served to culturally cross-subsidize each other, the ubiquity of the commercial serving to popularize the cover, and visa versa. As such, the album is largely to blame for the mainstreaming of swing, and its subsequent spectacular shark jump. This was certainly helped by the album’s Teflon-smooth production values and arrangements tighter than Kate Winslet’s rectum. The album is also largely covers. Seven of the thirteen album tracks are covers. I hate musicians who don’t write their own music. One of these covers prominently features a duet with post-Tragic Kingdom era Gwen Stefani. Ew.

                But the album is just really good. Sure, that is because it is largely someone else’s writing, but in the swing (or jump blues) era, that kind of musical trading was extremely common. In fact, it is worth discussing if the current obsession with artists writing their own music in the indie scene isn’t contributing to the lack of quality in pop music. In traditional music scenes, including jazz, blues, and pop until very recently, this kind of constant trading created a firmament of creativity and trading ideas. Economically, musicians were poorly compensated, so writing music for someone else to perform was a good way to increase one’s revenues. Nowadays writing one’s own music means one gets a bigger portion of the profits, leading to those who write for others being perceived as mercenary, inauthentic, or not good enough to make it on one’s own.

This doesn’t mean I am about to stop holding non-writers in contempt. But in this case it is probably forgivable or even appropriate. After all, Setzer did the arrangements, and given the size of the band this is probably more important anyway. And the arrangements here are spectacularly energetic and solid. There are no dull moments here and the arrangements are such that the album feels to the listener like it was all written by the same hand. This album level coherence is something I value highly. Even the Stefani duet is well done. Somehow.

So I don’t know. There’s a lot of background here that is discomforting, and assaults the sense of authenticity that I so value in pop music. But the album is just way too much fun to discount. If you haven’t heard it yet, or have only heard “Jump Jive and Wail,” I would certainly recommend checking this out. Now that all the hoopla surrounding the Swing Revival has largely faded out, we can appreciate this as a really fun album with absolutely no dead wood. Go find it somewhere, I’m sure someone is still trying to get rid of a copy.