By Brian Pace
May 18, 2002

My, it's a fun time to be a DMB fan.

I say this even after several of my colleagues tried (unsuccessfully) to cajole me into doing a karaoke "Ants Marching" at our district meeting in rural Iowa. Those of you who might have heard me "sing" know how dangerous that proposition is.

Speaking of rural Iowa...man, I thought I was white and honkified. My goodness. Several of the home-office folks took some of us to a college-student bar just outside the campus of the University of Northern Iowa. The first strange thing I noticed was that these lovely corn-fed examples of purity were dancing to the likes of Ludacris, Busta Rhymes, Usher, Jay-Z and, well, you get the picture. It was kind of incongruous. And then...they started square dancing to them. Square dancing to Ludicris! Oh, they won't actually admit to it being square dancing. But that's precisely what it was, and I'll never forget it.

I was going to write about DMB, right? Oh yeah. The new album, retitled from the old album that never was. You thought the Lillywhite Sessions were good? I haven't yet heard the new album (I got mad skillz and all, but not that many skillz), but the potential is there for this to be their Graceland, their Fumbling Towards Ecstacy, their Kind of Blue, their Quadrophenia.¹

Don't believe me? Well, I could be wrong - and certainly if the producing isn't there then the album won't sound to its full potential. But in my defense, two examples. First, take a gander at the structure of the brand spankin' new "You Never Know." I couldn't make heads or tails of it since I'm not an artist, so I found an artist (aren't I resourceful?) and this is what he said.

"'You Never Know' plays in a variant of 3/8 time with the emphasis on the 8th note. On the verses, Carter plays in duplets instead of triplets against the 3/8. In the meantime, he puts in a fake downbeat that is a backbeat of a duplet, making dancing to it a real adventure. The bridge has alternating 5/8 and 3/8 bars, with the 3/8 bars having a feel of 3/4 with the accent falling on every two eighth notes instead of on every three eighth notes. This time signature treatment is common in classical (see: Schubert and Brahms), but I've never heard it outside of classical and jazz."²

In short, it ain't "I Did It."

More controversially, take a look at some selected lyrics to (at least from what I can tell on the boards)³ one of the most intriguing songs on the new record, "Raven":

What you got in your head
The father said my son
You got the whole world, you got it
Between my finger and my thumb
You take care of these
The only one there is
And it'll take me a lifetime, old man
To undo what you did

C'mon on now, the boy thinks
What would Jesus do
He'd shake his head like an angry mother, spoke the boy
He said I don't know what I would do
You take care of me
For it's the only one
It'll take me a lifetime
To undo what you've just done

...

What you got in your hand
The secret's safe with me
Well I got the truth here, boy
And let me whisper in your ear
You take care of these
It's the only one there is
Ah, c'mon now, taste it please
Give it just a little taste
Boy shrugged, walked away
The man stood and watched as he was leaving
Boy shrugged, walked away
Man just stood there twisting.

Now capitalize the F in father, re-read, and take a deep breath. Dave singing about priest abuse? He's come a long way, baby.

nancies.org | May 18, 2002