I walked up to the local community college on a whim. It seemed decades since I first realized that any prospective goals I had could only be achieved through a commitment to academia, but for years I'd lacked the vigor to take any steps toward "realizing my potential." So, as I entered the admittance office, I bore a sense of pride that had been all but foreign to me since high school. After the necessary paperwork had been filled out, I was presented with a number of options for possible courses. Only two piqued my interest: one cryptically titled "Cultural Literacy and Criticism"; the other called "Nathaniel Merriweather's Deconstruction of the Modern Eros." I had no idea what "Cultural Literacy" could possibly mean and, having gone to public school, I decided it was probably instituted for aspiring writers. So, under the impression that I'd have more opportunities to utilize my talents as a writer than as a lovemaker, I opted for "Cultural Literacy and Criticism."
Initially, I was plagued with regret. It had come to my attention that Mr. Merriweather was to have a very strange assortment of characters guest lecture before his class, and the resident prelector of cultural literacy, one Dr. Nayr Rebierhcs, was hardly concerned with churning out the next Shakespeare. For the first few days of the course, I was completely in the dark as to what he hoped to achieve by talking about the "science of wit," "litmus tests for cultural relevancy," and "the tragic dictatorship of media-induced opinion." But eventually, things began to fall into perspective. On one particularly enlightening occasion, Dr. Rebierhcs was instructing the class on effective literary devices:
"We shall begin," he said in his usual didactic bravado, "with the most primitive device a critic must keep in his canon: the analogy. We'll start with a very simple example and then move onto more esoteric selections. Darren Aronofsky's Pi is to independent cinema as Will Cullen Hart's Circulatory System is to independent music." The class reacted to this with varying degrees of inquisition, but eventually came to the consensus that the statement was plausible. The doctor's eyes scoured the room, finally settling on mine.
I struggled for a few moments and then thought of Mr. Merriweather and his motley crew of "sexperts." I stammered out, "Mike Patton is to sex as Abe Vigoda is... to sex."
Lovage meets every expectation one would have for an "all-star" line-up, had their preconceptions of an "all-star" group been defined in the 80s with the release of Band-Aid's "Do They Know Its Christmas?" Or was "Heal the World" the prototype Dan the Automator followed when assembling the likes of Prince Paul, Kid Koala, Plug 3 of De La Soul, Jennifer Charles of Elysian Fields, and Mike Patton to create a self-parodying album about doing the dirty? Regardless of where the formula originated, someone needs to crack a window 'cause it's gone bad.
The album begins, modestly enough, with an endorsement from Prince Paul, the Automator's partner-in-mediocrity from Handsome Boy Modeling School. This sets the tone (and, incidentally, the tempo) for the remainder of the record. As flourishes of mandolins and a sampled brass section segue into "Pit Stop (Take Me Home)," the album's thematic developments come to a jarring halt thanks solely to the absolutely wretched lyrical content. All but one song was written by Dan the Automator (aka Nathaniel Merriweather), Jennifer Charles, and Mike Patton, and each sounds like something a cocktail waitress would find scrawled on a napkin freshly slipped to her by a roaming businessman. "I think a pussy's your best bet/ Stroke that shiny coat/ Stroking is the antidote/ Stroke that/ It's a start/ Only for the wild heart." I've listened to this album ten times straight and the genius of these lyrics, which find Jennifer Charles graphically chronicling a menage a trois, has managed to elude me.
The music is infinitely more tolerable, though it occasionally becomes as garish as the album's art, which is horrible even by the lenient standards of kitsch. Here are some basic musical ingredients which, if all mixed together, would give you a fair idea of the Automator's musical approximation of "love-making":
Now that doesn't bode very well, does it? The negativity doesn't end there, I'm afraid. My biggest gripe about Lovage is that it finds a number of clearly talented artists constructing the same song continually without variation. Kid Koala, for one, lays down some nice turntable work, but is never allowed to exercise his full potential. If the mood strikes you, songs like "Sex (I'm A)" and "Strangers on a Train" can be mildly affecting. But the sensuousness of many of these tracks relies solely on Charles' heavy breathing and husky voice, and somewhere around the ironically titled "Love that Lovage, Baby," the potency of her moans begins to wear off. Which is why none of this makes any sense: if there's anything Nathaniel Merriweather hates, it's impotence.
