A Few Of My Favorite Things

Seven Inches Is Sometimes Enough (Five Indispensable 45s)

by Nik Rainey

Note: Most of these singles are rare and exorbitantly priced, so for you cheapskates out there, the titles in parentheses at the end are albums where these songs can also be found.

1. Pere Ubu “Heart of Darkness/Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (Hearthen, 1975) – And lo, from the twisted wreckage of Rocket From The Tombs came a rough but immaculate beast, and that beast was art-punk. Don’t be put off by Ubu’s present status as aging, cutesy quirkoids – in their mid-’70s prime, they excelled at the kind of paranoid flinch from the modern world that fellow Ohioans Devo would soon turn into a deadpan joke. The A-side lifts a bass figure from Can’s “Yoo Doo Right” to bolster David Thomas’ double-tracked Conrad-via-Kafka alienation burbles (“Maybe I’m nothin’ but a shadow on the wall”). The B-side, a permanent fixture on my all-time top ten, takes it even further, with the late Peter Laughner emitting a repetitive guitar figure as cold and foreboding as a Civil Defense warning and Thomas in the bomb bay of a nightmare Messerschmitt, calmly preparing for apocalypse now. The horror. The horror. (Terminal Tower: An Archival Collection [Rough Trade, 1988])

2. Mission of Burma “Academy Fight Song/Max Ernst” (Ace of Hearts, 1980) – A platter that has passed into legend. No Martin Swope tape manipulations yet, but anthemic pop songs are rarely as tightly-wound and angular as these. Clint Conley’s “Fight Song” should by all rights have been a worldwide smash with its marriage of punky defiance and sing-along infectiousness. And king of the road Roger “What’d You Say?” Miller pays homage to the dada art master of the title with abstruse words and a jagged song structure that hangs together through sheer vigor. The sparks thrown off by the hydroplaning feedback explosion at the end lit the way for future indie guitar killers to follow. (“Academy”: Mission of Burma CD [Rykodisc, 1988]; alternate version of “Ernst”: The Wasted Years [Ace of Hearts, 1995])

3. Flipper “Sex Bomb/Brainwash” (Subterranean, 1980) – Speaking of dada… these San Francisco lude-core pranksters had the conceptual moxie to fuck the spike-heads where they breathe, and this single is one of their most gleefully sloppy thrusts. “Sex Bomb” is a sticky, messy jam, Armageddon as giggly orgy – I advise us all to put this on full-blast at 11:56 on December 31, 1999 and usher out the millennium properly. “Brainwash” is masterfully annoying – twenty-eight seconds of somebody trying to explain something and giving up over a swift smudge of sound repeated thirteen times, complete with lock-groove at the end. More than most, Flipper knew that when you say nothing, you’re saying it all. The four-headed Beckett of punk. (Sex Bomb Baby! [Infinite Zero, 1995])

4. Hüsker Dü “Eight Miles High/Masochism World (live)” (SST, 1984) – The flipside merely previews their then-forthcoming Zen Arcade epic in a delirious rush of S&M cacophony, but “Eight Miles High” was the real seismic blast, fit to blow your mind in ways even David Crosby never knew. It’s Bob Mould’s show – his six-string sprays triumphant skreekage every which way and his serrated tonsils tear himself and his band out of the hardcore straitjacket and into primal pop liberation, like the best bad trip you’ve ever had. This is not another old song trashed by knee-jerk punk cynics, but a from-the-gut testament to the transformative powers of the best rock ‘n’ roll. If you need buy only one item from this list, this is it. (The Seven-Inch Wonders of the World [SST, 1986])

5. Big Black “The Model/He’s a Whore” (Touch & Go, 1987) – Another historical homage, this time from indie curmudgeon Steve Albini (I hear he’s into producing these days). First he covers Kraftwerk with crunching guitars warming its computerized body, then he gets the jump on everyone (even his nemeses in Urge Overkill) by plundering Cheap Trick before it was de rigueur. The sleeve art alone makes this a keeper, with Little Steven and his disciples of soullessness parodying the covers of The Man Machine and CT’s debut album. Pity Big Black broke up before they could go to Budokan. (Songs About Fucking CD [Touch & Go reissue, 1993])