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RED (K)CRAYOLA

Way back, in March of 94, I wrote my first music review ever for this paper. The album I chose to review was Corrected Slogans by the band Art and Language and the Red Crayola. Though the album was almost twenty years old at that time and had not been recently rereleased I felt that it was so incredibly important to the understanding of modern music history that I could not begin to review any other album without a review of Corrected Slogans first. It had become something of a fetish to me.

My 94 review started off (after what I thought to be a poor editing job) ... the only information available on Mayo Thompson’s Crayola and friends is incomplete and contradictory and then I went on to prove this by calling 76’s Slogans the Crayola’s third album when now I believe it to be their fourth (even that guy who wrote that late 94 Exclaim Red Crayola review goofed by saying that their last, previous album was Black Snakes of 84 when in fact it was Male Factor Aid of 89).

Next, before my review of the album, I briefly mentioned the high art connections of the Red Crayola, something I was quite passionate about at the time because I had just finished reading Griel Marcus’ Lipstick Traces on a cigarette. That book is purportedly about the links between the Situationist International (read as Marxist-Da Da) and punk rock (for the record, read as Rough Trade Records) but Mr. Marcus had his head shoved so far up John Rotten’s ass (even Pistols artist Jamie Reid knows it) that he failed to include what I believe to be the only direct link between the two, that being Art and Language and the Red Crayola (sure daddy McLaren was a Situationist in the late 60’s and yes mummy Westwood’s original punk duds were in situ and plainly subversive but their whole cash from chaos mandate is deplorably Nashistic and a clear Situationism.

All of Malcolm McLaren’s later work, with artists such as Boy George, Bow Wow Wow or the Dream Team, is far more radical than the pathetic spectacle of Sid and Nancy). After all, Art and Language (of whom Mayo Thompson was a member) were one of the few artistic ensembles featured in the huge (Elle magazine even wrote a piece about it) 20th Anniversary Situationist retrospective that took place in May of 88. They can be readily found in the document of that event (A Few People ...) but the Red Crayola finds no mention in any of the Situ or pro Situ-punk anthologies that the anniversary inspired (all but the Toronto book Sound by Artists that came out around the same time but has nothing to do with the event).

This peculiar historical omission becomes even more senseless in the knowledge that Mayo’s Crayola (copyright violation anyone?) was one of the original Texas punk bands way back in the late sixties (around the time of the first Situationist anniversary) and that a good chunk of the Crayola’s songs deal with the encounters and reasonings of history (Mayo has also produced material by respected artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and James Blood Ulmer).

It is now 1995, very late in the year, and I’m writing my second music review for this same paper. Even more the same than that I’m writing this review of my old review on the same band and their latest album in the same paper. It seems that since I had the original foresight to review this apparently defunct band they’ve released two more brilliant albums (in a normal world this would mean that I scooped almost all the other music writers (name one other mention of the Crayola in early 94) who are paid shit by Warner subsidiaries (the only record label) to do this job and that music mags and such should be keeping their eyes on me ... right?) only unlike all of their other albums (Corrected Slogans, God Bless..., Soldier Talk, Male Factor Aid, The Art of Walking, Microchips and Fish, ... etc.) I believe this latest creation, AMOR AND LANGUAGE, is the long awaited sell-out album, the one that will finally bring them the attention that a normal world should have brought them by now.

By saying that this is the sell-out album I do not mean that the band (read as Mayo Thompson, he’s the only constant member) have compromised their quarter century old musical style (read as late sixties new wave a la Beefheart) or that Mayo is now writing the type of mindless lyrics that one has come to expect from popularist (read as business) music. Infact Mayo’s lyrical bent (I’ve come to call it dialectical idealism) works so well with the current line up that you’d think they were his original band (one of the many pro-situ features of the band is that it’s members are stolen from whatever record label Mayo is recording with, helping to break down the hegemony of product fetishism and the ideal of groupism). It’s the cover of AMOR AND LANGUAGE that makes this album hyper-commercial, now, hip and desirable.

First off the Crayola are now spelling their name with a k, as in Krayola (mimicking the teenage cop-out of Redd Kross), and therefore legitimizing themselves within the marketplace (after twenty something years of abusing it).

Secondly, Krayola cover girl Rachel Williams, a former Victoria Secret model from Woodstock who’s been in the tabloids allot lately because of her lesbian affair with rocker Alice Temple, poses like a dead blonde on an upside-down Black and Decker Workmate (perhaps symbolising the subversion of labor), that’s wrapped in plastic bubble packaging, in a see through nylon bra and camouflage pants (clearly a strong Reichian statement (revolution is the only true act of love) coded as a cheap commercial ploy) on the back of the album (infact the CD version of this record clearly states that Rachel (wearing a camouflage T-shirt with a bomb on it’s front), along with a popular Minutemen musician, is a member of the AMOR AND LANGUAGE provos).

Thirdly, a month or two after the release of Amor and Language Rachel’s full frontal nude pictorial was the lead cover story for Penthouse magazine (just one issue before the Unibomber appeared as their lead cover story). Never before has Mayo’s (K)Crayola involved such a high profile (Entertainment Tonight, FT, Vogue, National Inquirer) celebrity. There’s just one problem. I haven’t seen one single ad for this album anywhere. I’ve seen allot about Victoria Secret’s models, pornography, music of the sixties and punk rock but absolutely nothing about the one thing they all have in common. A hugely topical sell out album and not one worth while mention, song to phone up, site page, glossy ad or billboard (age of super information my bloody asshole.

I think fellow Crayola David (UBU ROI) Thomas said it best when during a Much Musick interview he said that the music industry is a mountain, a mountain of stupidity). So I thought I’d do my best mention because you (an easy domestic consumer target) deserve better. You deserve the dirty thrill of sexual espionage and sensual terrorism from a market that other wise thrives off the mediocrity of tits’n’arse sexploitation. You deserve the knowledge that most of the history of rock’n’roll was created as a lie (omitting artists like Hasil Atkins, Bobby Curtola, the Holy Model Rounders, Simply Saucer, Link Wray, Ed Sanders, anything French ... etc.) by corporate executives to ensure that the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd will still make them millions with every shitty album they convince you to buy. And you deserve to have all the entertainment options the market possesses at your disposal, not just the options given to you by Time-Life Warner (WEA)-Turner (watch which label appears most during the flow period of Much Musick.

Get to know which ones don’t appear at all). Give welcome to the new situ-commercialism. It’s just as exciting as anything Jamie Reid’s cooked up. The punk is dead, long live the punk. Sine rec rec qua non. (NOTE ... I believe the Mayo Thompson book that porno journalist Rachel is so intently contemplating on the back of the CD pullout is real and new. If anyone reading this could tell me where I could purchase a copy of it I would be very grateful. The damn CD picture is so small that I can’t read the publishers name. Thanx).

The Red Krayola
AMOR AND LANGUAGE 95
Drag City Records
P.O. Box 476867 Chicogo Illinois 60647.

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