Artist: Self
Album: Gizmodgery
Year: 2000
Engineer: Self and Shawn McLean
Label: Spongebath
Quick history lesson: Self is a quirky group from Murfreesboro, Tennessee that combines rock, pop, dance/electronic, rap, R&B, punk, and a slew of other styles of music. Its core songwriters are the brothers Matt and Mike Mahaffey. One of them (can’t remember which) spent his college years playing in rock bands and selling beats to rappers. The music is like Beck on overdrive. Self mixes, matches, melts, stitches, slices, and dices its music together. The first album, 1995’s Subliminal Plastic Motives, was mostly rock sprinkled with random noises resembling, in some instances, pots and pans. I also remember a decent amount of electronically produced sounds. Over the following few years, the band released albums either on record or the Internet. Their style shifted from album to album but the foundation remained: catchy songs that meld styles complimented with sarcastic lyrics.
Gizmodgery is, in my opinion, the most unique of the bunch. The band only used toy instruments and listed them out on the back of the cd case. True, the music was probably recorded on high-end studio gear, but the fact that they even considered an album of toy instruments is pretty brave and creative if you ask me.
No two songs sound alike. The rhythms, ranging from pop to R&B to rock to electronic, lie underneath melodies neither predominantly major nor minor. Many bands tend to stick to either major (happy feeling) or minor (sad feeling) melodies, but Self change it up from song to song. The rhythms also change mid-song.
“Dead Man”, for example, has a noticeably light-hearted melody backed by a vaguely electronic beat in the verse that melds into a rock beat in the chorus.
“Chameleon” is dominated by a raunchy rap beat with minimal instrumentation, just some random toy sounds that seem to add depth and structure. Then, in the middle of the song, the music stops and a stoned guy mumbles in slurred speech:
You cats gotta order me [pause for thought] the All-American Slam, then you gotta find me when it’s ready. [pause for thought] I can’t sit in Wal-Mart and boil.
And the music resumes.“Pattycake”, probably my favorite track, starts out with a nursery rhyme-esque melody on top of a straight rock beat. The vocals are done in BeeGee traditional falsetto and the choruses have an “Oohhh la la” in the background. A normally sung voice doesn’t appear until 1:18 into the song. Below is a lyric excerpt:
let's pretend it's 1978
we're playing patty cake and baker's men
let's pretend the popsicles we ate all gave us stomach aches
on our neighbor's lawn
hello operator please give me number nine
and if you disconnect me I'll kick your fat
behind the refrigerator there was a piece of glass
miss suzy sat upon it and broke her little
ask me no more questions, i'll tell you no more lies
the boys are in the bathroom zipping up their
flies are in the city and bee stings are our crutch
the boys and girls are necking and asking you just
what ya gonna prove
how you gonna prove it
there's no need to waste your life
shatter and abuse it, babe
i'm talking about a time when a dimebag was a dime
no need to dwell upon the here and now, baby
