Each week, The Perfect Chord looks back at albums you may have missed when they dropped, or miss now that they've faded from memory. This week's glimpse into the crates:
Fishbone – Chim Chim’s Bad*ss Revenge
While it’s hard to argue there have been anything other than strange times for legendary SoCal Black rockers Fishbone, the mid-1990s found the band in unequivocally, uniquely strange times. Founding guitarist Kendall Jones left the band in 1993, during a mental breakdown that prompted him to join a religious cult. Keyboardist Christopher Dowd left the band acrimoniously shortly after the release of that year’s album Give A Monkey A Brain and He’ll Swear He’s The Center Of The Universe. The album had been a complete commercial flop, leading Sony to drop the band from their roster. To make matters worse, bassist Norwood Fisher’s efforts to save Jones from the cult resulted in his facing criminal kidnapping charges. By 1996, five years removed a landmark album that had garnered comparisons to Sgt. Pepper (1991’s The Reality Of My Surroundings), the band was two members down, wounded, and deep into what would become a colossal personal downward spiral. Perhaps most tragic is that the band released—to virtually no fanfare—what was, arguably, their tightest, most focused album in nearly ten years.
At first glance, Chim Chim’s Bad*ss Revenge even looks like the band’s taken a financial step backward. Whereas Reality and Give A Monkey both featured elaborate, slick cover art, Chim Chim’s National Enquirer-parodying front cover is a starkly simple cartoon; appearances don’t belie cheap production, however, with legendary R&B producer Dallas Austin behind the board. Austin himself had signed the band to his own Rowdy Records, at the time distributed by Arista records; with Chim Chim, he’d resolved to do for the band what Rick Rubin had done with resurgent rockers (and Fishbone friends) Red Hot Chili Peppers. To Austin’s credit, his mix is crisp, and significantly punchier than albums past (particularly “Fish” Fisher’s drums, which occupy more space in the mix than on the flatter-produced predecessors); his R&B background shows in the prominence of Norwood’s bass. The most notable change in the band’s sound, however, comes from the elevation of saxophonist Angelo Moore from co-lead singer to undeniable frontman. Moore no longer having to share the spotlight results in the band largely pursuing his artistic vision, nebulous and chaotic though it may be.
Certainly, chaos reigns all throughout Chim Chim, from the barely-comprehensible spoken word intro (performed by assistant producer John Nelson) to the frantic anarchy of the band’s performances. The album’s loose concept, personifying the band itself as Speed Racer’s sidekick—a trained primate treated as little more than a sideshow –taking revenge against its master appears to be a jab at the band’s experience with Sony (a possibility attested to by repeated assertions buried amidst layered vocals that “Chim Chim” endured horrible things at the hands of their corporate master, including holding him in a “contractual nut-lock”).
As loose as the concept is, it serves to tidily hold the song’s numerous songs together. After the intro, the album begins proper with its title track, a hybrid party jam and punk anthem. Indeed, Chim Chim, despite the band’s previous excursions into more polished hard rock and heavy metal from their rock-solid second-wave Ska base, is easily the most “punk rock” of the band’s albums, from its lyrical content (“takin’ ‘em hostage/holding up the bank/blocking the sewer/drainin’ your gas tank/breakin’ the rules/ignorin’ the system…”) to the sheer unbridled energy of the band’s sound (particularly Moore’s theremin, which adds a panicked tone to every song on which it appears). Even the slower, longer numbers—particularly the second song “In The Cube,” a lengthy scatological allegory for the band’s major label experience set against the backdrop of, well, a toilet—overtly make anti-establishment statements that wouldn’t seem out-of-place on, for instance, a Clash album.
Following "In The Cube," the band takes a brief excursion into silliness with “Beergut,” powered by John Bigham’s taut rhythm guitar in tandem with Norwood’s bass. The first of two “Interludes” follows, both consisting of Moore spitting bilious metaphorical invective against Sony over an extremely disorienting sonic collage of portions of other songs (the first, for instance, features the horns from “Beergut” over the backing vocals from later songs “Riot,” “Nutmeg,” and “Sourpuss”). From there, the band launches into the album’s clearest, most linear song. “Psychologically Overcast” seems pretty straightforward—it’s a break-up song powered by Bigham’s muscular riffs (which Austin unfortunately mixes in a bit too low)—but, out of the middle of nowhere, Busta Rhymes appears to spit a verse over the bridge (and a fantastic Bigham solo). As if too afraid to let the song’s emotional sincerity linger for too long, the band quickly retreats back into the realm of silly with the skankin’-pit-ready “Alcoholic” and “Love/Hate.” After another “Interlude,” the band rips through “Riot,” a fifty-second burst of angry punk rock. “Monkey D*ck” returns the band to the realm of the scatological, as does “Sourpuss.”
After “Sourpuss,” however, the band abruptly turns dark, personal, and deeply bitter, with “Rock Star.” The song is the album’s most lyrically clear and direct, Moore’s autobiographical tale of his own youth as a fan of music, in particular rock and roll (“I wanted to be like Bootsy, Dr. Funkenstein, and Jimi/the Rock Star”). The lyrics go on to talk about how Moore started Fishbone with the understanding of how Rock was, in essence, a colorless genre, but the band’s experience in “the racist music industry” found them constantly being victimized by the white decision-makers at Sony:
Blurrin’ my art piece/ Makin’ it weak, see/ Makin’ it watered-down/ Dilutin’ my funky sound…
The song goes on to criticize the growing isolation of Black musicians into R&B and Rap genres, with Black rock musicians becoming marginalized in the interest of perpetuating racial stereotypes, in a surprisingly lucid (if angry) manner before ending with an abrupt, chaotic stop. For an album as at-times silly as Chim Chim, it’s easily its highlight, and certainly one of the band’s best songs (if tragic). Correctly recognizing the impossibility of effectively following such a song, the band wisely chooses to end with the very subdued pro-weed legalization anthem “Nutmeg,” with “Rock Star” still echoing in the listeners’ ears.
The story of what would happen to Fishbone after Chim Chim has been told by numerous people, most recently in the documentary Everyday Sunshine, but it warrants repeating here if only as a reminder of how accurate the band’s commentary on the music industry would be. Chim Chim garnered a small degree of critical acclaim, but sold relatively poorly compared to the band’s efforts with Sony. The mid-to-late 1990s explosion of pop-rock bands exploring the musical structures and stylings of punk and ska (in particular SoCal stalwarts and Fishbone acolytes No Doubt) kept the band on the pop radar long enough to get the band one more major-label contract with Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records, but the resulting album—2000’s Fishbone and the Familyhood Nextperience Present: The Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx failed to garner enough sales to keep them on the label. A lengthy period of instability, line-up changes, and personal struggles followed that continues to this day. Still, Chim Chim remains a curious item for fans of the band, and an incredibly solid album for those that take the time to listen to it.
A. Darryl Moton is a freelance writer/Iowan/curmudgeon driving a bus in Portland, Oregon.
