The Red Krayola with Art & Language — Baby and Child Care

Recorded in 1984 and released this year. Bought this on a flyer, based on a review in a local weekly entertainment rag. Playing now. Here's a review from Dusted, an online mag, that's better than what I could write. Audio samples here:
 
http://www.dragcity.com/products/baby-and-child-care
 
Review: 
 
The songs lurch into frame in the jerk-and-slide rhythms of highly theoretical funk, the slap-and-pop bass tightly conjoined to syncopated drums, a wild ID of a saxophone squalling in unruly abandon over top, and Mayo Thompson, warbling and cooing disjointedly through it all. Dr. Spock, who unwittingly supplied the lyrics to Baby and Child Care, probably thought he’d seen all that medicine and psychology could throw at him. But he never had a kid like this: an offspring of outsider funk and conceptual art and developmental psychology that, unsurprisingly, slipped through the cracks in 1984 and, even now, is odd and offputting enough to warrant serious what-the-****-ness, jaded as we all are.
 
Baby and Child Care is the neglected sibling of a string of three albums Mayo Thompson made in the late 1970s and 1980s with the avant garde theorists of Art + Language: Corrected Slogans (1976), Kangaroo? (1981) and Black Snakes (1983). After reading half a dozen gallery catalogs and interviews, I’m still not entirely clear on what Art + Language was doing, but critique as an art in itself seems to have been an element. Beyond that, I’ll punt. Jon Dale’s description of Art + Language/Red Krayola output in his 2010 review of Five American Portraits is so good – and so relevant here – that I’m just going to lift a paragraph (thanks Jon!) to provide a little context.

“By shackling Marxist dialectic and art-historical commentary to rude, crabby post-punk music, Thompson created music that conducted itself with a perpetual question mark over its head. Nothing you think you understand, it seemed to say, makes any sense here. It was a very rigorous music performed with a strange ‘off-the-cuff’-ness that was permanently surprised by the recombinations and juxtapositions it coughed up. In line with the best post-punk, you could hear the musicians thinking as they played—and in some cases, you could hear them wondering what the hell was going on.”

Same music, same band, same general disjointed sound, but this time, for whatever reason, the words are adapted (by Art + Language’s Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) from Dr. Benjamin Spock’s foundational child care reference. It’s an interesting reference. The book, first published in 1946, is still one of the kindest, most rational discussions of human development on the “new mom and dad” bookshelf. It was the book that told young mothers to trust their instincts. It was the one that said it was okay to let your kid find his own rhythm for sleeping and eating. If you ever had a kid, you’ve probably got a copy somewhere in paperback, and the spine is probably broken from overuse.
 
The question, really, is why the combination? Why would Art + Language be interested in Doctor Spock? Why would Mayo Thompson spend time and energy and recording dollars making music about child care? A few purely speculative ideas occur to me as I’m listening to the album.
 
First, there’s the fact that Red Krayola is a band that doesn’t like rules, and Dr. Spock was a physician that didn’t care much for them either. You don’t think of the godfather of pediatric medicine as much of an anarchist, but in his own way, he was a bomb thrower.
 
Consider, for instance, the cut “At Best There’s a Lot of Hard Work and Deprivation” and think, for a minute, of a physician in the mid-1940s penning these unsentimental words, “A child is carnivals and zoos for years” or “Children keep parents from theater trips” or “A baby’s lowering expectations.” Remember that in the 1940s, nearly all child-rearing work was done by women, and as such, didn’t count and was hopelessly idealized. Spock had no patience for the roses and fairies view of bringing up children. Mayo Thompson has a similarly unromanticized view of…well, everything.
 
But the other thing, which is harder to get at, is the shared tension between the rational and the chaotic. Spock was a scientist working in a messy childish world of unformed personalities and unbridled needs. Thompson is, similarly, a brainy, intellectually rigorous guy, toiling in the decadent fringes of rock and roll. So in his hands, “No! No! No! Trust Yourself” turns Spock’s clinical description of a rebellious toddler into something springy and rhythmic and insouciant (“She was known to never comply, ran around her mother in rings”). The bass, excellent everywhere, is wonderfully bouncy and flexible here; you picture it rebounding off the walls in exuberant chaos like a tennis ball in a glass factory. And Thompson comes most alive when he’s voicing the toddler. “No, no, no,” he warbles, though a loose scrim of stutter funk; it’s a pretty good imitation of two-year-old unreason. Is he on the side of Spock’s calm explanatory text or the screaming baby? Surely the latter. But not entirely.
 
Maybe the final element that brought Spock and Mayo Thompson together was subject matter. Because when you think about it, everything Spock describes – from nascent sexual development, to rage at mom and dad, to nihilistic destruction — is the bread and butter of rock and roll. He’s just looking at it from a different angle, and that, to a guy like Thompson, must have been irresistible.
 
Jennifer Kelly