Frank Black: or if you think you can control your audience?

The Pixies were a very cool band but as cool as they were, if they ever had the notion that their audience would be composed of only cool of age moshworthy types, they didn’t count on my eight year old daughter singing “is she wierd is she white is she promised to the night” and a few other choice lines from the catalogue. (Its a big dad moment when your sweet young blue eyed daughter is singing Wave of Mutilation at the top of her lungs).

I happen to think The Pixies were too cool to pretend to be cool. Now Frank has been out on his own for many years now and musical cliches keep falling to the wayside. I enclose a video for your inspection: One…is this the image of a alternative rock star and Two…is that the kind of song an alternative legend would be singing?

There is a lot of crap at the beginning of the shoot, it really only works after the half way mark, and if you have access to Bluefinger, its a much better version. But this is all that is available. Now the this is the latest singalong song for me and my daughter when we are in the car. Its called She Took the Money but we know it as Shamalamadingdong Oh Me Oh My.

In the clean version, the female vocal backup comes in in a wonderfully haphazard manner that makes you think she’s off doing something else and then remembers to join on in again. Its really quite nice.

All in all the cd is his best in years. I buy everything he puts out but would not say most of them are that great; there is always a song or two. But what I like is that apart from coming from one of the truly great bands, he is a old time musician in that he spends more time writing and performing than worrying about the production values. Not that they sound bad but it is a good enough version usually. He is also in that McCartney position that everyone compares everything to The Pixies as if that is the peak he must once again ascend. In this one, he does on a few, but that is beside the point.

Bluefinger is one of those cds that on first listen I thought it was no more than good and on the second and third started really warming to it. He’s also one of those performers that I think I like more because I have been listening to him for so long, than for the pure merit of his material. I think we all do this sort of thing. A musician hooks you once and then to some extent they have you.

But to get back to the original point: You cannot control who is going to be singing your song. My daughter at 8 and even more so at 12 is one of the very uncoolest of demographics…we’re talking Hanna Montana, various Idol types, White Ts, and other forms of anti-music. And I’m sure the record companies wish they could control Black Francis and keep him singing pseudoPixies and get back their traditional audience in a bigger way but he’s going to be singing all over the map, he’s going to put on more weight and have more kids, and all kinds of people who never knew about The Pixies or who like Avril or play with floam will be singing along. And that is such a good thing.