Glorified/vilified: I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Tim Kinsella. I don't care if he's pretentious, I don't care if he does retarded airplane dances onstage, I don't care if he squats over a mirror with two fingers up his ass. I don't care if his self-martyring lyrics are written and performed for the sole purpose of getting pussy, or if he's a tortured genius making esoteric-surreal-referential art, or if he wrote this entire album while sniffing rails of coke and listening to Louis Armstrong records (whose voice he approximates on "No Corporate News Is Good News", and which is probably one of the most offensive/creepy moments on In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust). I'm just glad he's given up the gory melodrama of How Memory Works, even if that means we get the fractured poetic dadaist freakout stuff on recent JOA records-- including Rape Fantasy-- instead.
The fact is, Tim Kinsella is a figurehead in the realm of independent music because of the vehement reaction of his critics, fans, and deriders. There's just no in between: people either love him with frothing passion or hate him with ferocious vitriol, to the point that he matters at least as much as any other artist in the increasingly gray area of what we call indie rock, purely because of indie rock's cultural reaction to him.
So. In interviews, Kinsella has said this record consists of outtakes from their February full-length So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness-- the ones that Jade Tree thought sucked. This is a cursed way for a piece of art to come into the world, with the knowledge of being unwanted and second-best. But one lady's trash is another lady's treasure, as they say, and to me, the cache of "weird" songs on Rape Fantasy is better than the tracks collected on Staying Alive.
Maybe it seems stronger because there's less pained singing and more instrumentation, which can be awfully pretty at times (even when it oscillates in noise wankouts), or maybe it's because of the personas Kinsella tests out on different tracks: he sings, "Ignorance is my privileged right," in a protest of American apathy and suddenly, he's Frank Zappa; the aforementioned Louis Armstrong impression is, if nothing else, uncharted territory; and then there's Tim's old failsafe, the grating, wailing juvenile toddler, which he's channeled at every opportunity for the better half of Joan of Arc's career.
Kinsella's toddler persona comes directly to the fore on "Happy 1984 and 2001", as he begins intoning the "shadow government" chorus in that scrawly whine (you know the one), and then lists other kinds of shadows in a children's theater-style singsong ("sidewalk shadow, cowboy shadow, BBQ shadow, hackeysack shadow)-- a sort of "Now I Know My ABC's" of the illuminati. Kinsella's harped on the government a lot recently, which fits in nicely with his contempt for authority (boyhood Catholicism seems to be at the core of "Dinosaur Constellations Part 1", when he repeatedly screams, "God is the bomb"), and also with his inner conspiracy theorist. But you know. I don't care about those things.
Here's what I do care about, really: a semblance of human emotion, a snippet of beauty, a boatload of comedy, some musical friction and a good story. In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust-- and by extension, Tim Kinsella-- possesses those things at varying points, and sometimes all at once. On "Them Brainwash Days", someone credited as "Ingersol Torniquet" reads unintelligible poetry while a graceful guitar blossoms quietly, a steady drum beats, and a piano unfurls-- and to paraphrase Kinsella, it's just nice. On "Them Heartache Nights", austere vocal samples and another burst of pretty guitar fill out the emotion requirement. In the simple beauty of these moments, the question has to be asked: what could Joan of Arc accomplish if they tossed aside their shock-rock tactics and primal scream therapy, and aimed for this instead?
It seems to me that when they're just spazzing the fuck out, it's not for a lack of talent on the behalf of the players-- which, this time out includes members of Califone, Friend/Enemy, 90 Day Men, Ghosts and Vodka, Chicago Underground, Bent Leg Fatima, and just about every other Chicago-based indie session player you can think of-- it's just a lack of attention span. The formula is for everyone to play what sounds like random measures at once; it's not about applying the aesthetics of free jazz to indie rock, so much as getting a bunch of kids on Kool-Aid to jam out together in the basement. The results are never brilliant or violently disagreeable-- just kind of funny and weird.
In Rape Fantasy is more of a curio than anything-- think of it as Duchamp's suitcase meets Richard Pryor's Bicentennial Nigger. But for all the squawky, experimental shit that gives this band its divisive controversy, there are some genuinely nice arty folk moments that would probably get more credit were it not for Kinsella's by-now well established persona. I don't care what side you're on-- if you think this man is this generation's Ginsberg or an idiot fooling no one; when he lets his act slip and indulges his melodic vice, he proves himself far more talented than he otherwise lets on.
