The weekend before last, I dee-jayed at a surprise sixtieth birthday party for one of my father's friends. My father was supposed to DJ, but he had a prior engagement, so I took his spot. The birthday boy's wife wanted sixties music, so my father made me a couple of mixed CDs containing a type of music he knew I didn't have much of: beach music--Myrtle Beach music.
You've all probably heard at least some passing mention of the rap rivalry of about a decade ago: East Coast vs. West Coast--2-Pac vs. Biggie Smalls. Well, four decades ago, this East/West pop-music feud began over beach music: The Beach Boys vs. The Tams. The Californians surfed, but the Carolinians shagged.* Over the course of the subsequent forty years, one side can now clearly claim victory. Many bands across the nation still play surf music, and one can still find modern incantations of it in scatterings across some (mainly college) radio stations, and Californian pop has not only been far more influential, it's also nationally much more popular. Brian Wilson may have lost his mind, but he won the war.
Most people my age and younger have never heard of Carolina/Myrtle Beach music. What is it anyway? Based on what I've records I've heard (that my dad and others have termed as beach music) since I was wee, Myrtle Beach music is mostly uptempo, containing catchy melodies, effervescent (sometimes flighty) lyrics centered around good-natured flirtation and the lighter aspects of love (l-u-v); a driving, popping, bouncy beat; punctuating horns; an organ or synthesizer (often a Moog); and ever-so-slightly muddled, let's-all-sing-together-now-and-try-to-stay-in-key background vocals that always seemed dangerously close to clipping. It was music designed for dancing (or shagging, depending on what part of the South you're from) and fun; it was frat-house music.
By the tail end of the sixties, rock & soul began to splinter, and beach music's frivolity descended into bubblegum pop; it's best songwriters either dropped out literally or figuartively, making politically & socially-concious pop folk (which would soon slip into the singer-songwriter movement); it's beat and it's horns left to mutate into the beinnings of disco and funk; and its organs stopped functioning altogether, and when organs fail, then the body dies, and that is what happened to (Carolina) beach music. It lay dead and buried for thirty years--till earlier this decade, when a few scattered bands--from the strangest of musical places--started trying to revive it (or at least some of its components). One of those bands is the British group A Band of Bees (once known simply as The Bees).
In 2004, they released their album Octopus, and the Bees filled it front to back with deliberately (though not ironically) retro American party music--Myrtle Beach music. The first single--and best song--from the album is the sublimely silly but incredibly infectious, "Chicken Payback." The song sounds as if it were recorded on analog tape and played back on a low-fi turntable. The song's lyrics are absurdly goofy, similar in structure to "The Name Game," each subsequent word playing a derivation on the previous one. The words in this song, though, use animal names, some based on actual dances ("The Monkey"), some based on imaginary ones (as I wonder how you do the donkey? Okay, please don't answer that). The lyrics are so ridiculous and childlike, that you'd immediately assume this as a novelty record if you took one glance at the words; but if you hear the music, then you'd know that these Bees take their tune seriously, and that the words here are just notes, created more for sound than for meaning, 'cause the sound is the meaning. These British Bees aim to shag--American style. On the beach. With the big honking flaming birthday cake. Sixty candles, indeed.
Oh, by the way, I know somebody else who is having a 60th birthday soon...a week from today, even. Wonder who that is?NOTES* - The shag is the official dance of both North Carolina and South Carolina.
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