I really don’t know much about The Beach Boys, beyond a general distaste for “oldies.” “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” seems like a fine song, but I haven’t even listened to the rest of Pet Sounds, let alone any deeper dive into their work. So, in the wake of his death, I kind of discovered a lot of wild Brian Wilson stories for the first time–and the one that struck me the most was his strange obsession with the song “Shortnin’ Bread”:
I was both amused and curious, so I headed right over to youtube to see what the fuss was about–only to be met with this fever dream of a song:
At first I was caught off guard by the simple sing-song nursery rhyme nature of the song. Seconds later my amusement turned into “what the fuck did I stumble on??” The two note piano line, endlessly repeated, the almost frantic vocals over Wilson’s low end repetition, the random subsonic brass, and then the droning synth bass propelling it all forward. I could only think of two musical analogs, the first, of course, being Melkor’s attempt to subvert the music of the Illuvatar in the Ainulindalë:
And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Illuvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.
And the second, obviously, being my personal musical genre of choice, raw black metal:
Using the opening track “Devil Pig” from Von’s SEMINAL 1992 album Satanic Blood (the blueprint for all future black metal–also possibly an album that was created as a joke), you can see many of the same elements at play. By deconstructing pop music to a SINGLE riff, Von (and “Shortnin’ Bread”) become about something more than verse/chorus traditional music. The repetition is all-consuming until the song either falls apart or sweeps forward under its own unquenchable energy–each iteration growing in power until the release of the song’s ending is both dreaded and longed for.
“Shortnin’ Bread” also has an sinister, Lovecraftian otherworldliness, an amalgamation of disparate elements that should not exist together. It is an assault on the principles of musical decency in much the same way that Von’s “Devil Pig” flies directly in the face of “songs should have at least TWO riffs.”
To be clear, neither of these are thoughtless songs (though Von’s genius might have been more accidental than not)–there is a real skill in creating music this repetitive. There are the subtle variations in rhythm and arrangement, the manipulation of dynamics through vocals, and most importantly the complete fearlessness of composition that gives the music the confidence to exist.
Whether Brian Wilson knew it or not, he was only a few steps away from a bonafide black metal masterpiece with this version (an unreleased session recording from 1973) of “Shortnin’ Bread.” Also, the original song “Shortnin’ Bread” is real racist, a quality not altogether unheard of in the raw black metal underground.
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