FOURSHAME: BAD TASTE WITH EXCELLENT POSTURE

By Dax Silver

There is a particular kind of playlist made by people who distrust the phrase guilty pleasure because it implies pleasure needs an attorney.

Fourshame is that playlist after three drinks and an argument.

It begins with Lou Reed’s Mistrial, moves through Bloodrock, wanders into the exquisitely ill-advised territory of Pussy, and eventually finds Dwight Twilley waiting under a streetlamp with his collar turned up and his heart making several actionable mistakes.

This should not work.

More importantly, it doesn’t work in exactly the correct way.

The transitions are not bridges. They are trapdoors.

Lou Reed gives way to Bloodrock like a New York argument suddenly relocating to a Texas parking lot. Bloodrock gives way to Pussy as though the parking lot has opened onto a meadow painted by somebody experiencing both a religious vision and equipment failure. Then Dwight Twilley arrives and reveals, with some embarrassment, that everybody involved has actually been talking about romantic humiliation.

The title is Fourshame.

Yes.

I know.

I made the same face.

Then I listened.

Unfortunately, the bastard earned it.

I. LOU REED: PLEASE DESTROY ALL EVIDENCE

Beginning with Mistrial is either inspired or evidence of neurological activity that should be monitored.

Probably both.

“Video Violence.”

“Spit It Out.”

“The Original Wrapper.”

“Mama’s Got a Lover.”

“I Remember You.”

“Tell It to Your Heart.”

There are Lou Reed records one selects when attempting to establish cultural credibility.

Mistrial is not usually one of them.

This is precisely why it is the right opening move.

Lou Reed in this period can sound like a man who has simultaneously discovered MTV, drum machines, bad jackets, mortality, New York tabloid culture and the possibility that none of these things particularly respect him.

Which gives the material a wonderful tension.

Lou spent years cultivating one of rock’s most durable personas: amused, contemptuous, sexually worldly, artistically sovereign, three steps ahead of whatever room he occupied.

Then the eighties happen.

Suddenly the room contains synthesizers.

The room contains music videos.

The room contains people younger than him.

And Lou Reed, to his enormous credit, does not leave the room.

That is the interesting thing.

Fourshame begins not with failure, but with the sound of a formidable artist risking ridiculousness.

There is dignity in refusing ridiculousness.

There is more art in surviving it.

“The Original Wrapper” alone could sustain several international tribunals concerning rap, irony and the dangers of allowing established rock musicians near contemporary production techniques.

Yet it also contains something weirdly admirable.

Lou is trying.

Trying is horrifying.

Trying is where shame enters.

A pose cannot embarrass you.

Desire can.

II. BLOODROCK: NOW ADD FOG MACHINE

Then Bloodrock arrives and Fourshame becomes heavier by approximately nine hundred pounds.

This is not heavy music in the fashionable modern sense.

It is heavy as upholstery.

Heavy as seventies wood paneling.

Heavy as a van painted with a wizard whose precise relationship to the moon remains unclear.

“Lucky in the Morning.”

“Cheater.”

“Sable and Pearl.”

“Fallin’.”

“Children’s Heritage.”

These songs carry the glorious density of American hard rock before hard rock had completed the paperwork necessary to become several distinct genres.

Nothing is embarrassed yet because nobody has been informed embarrassment exists.

That innocence is crucial.

The Bloodrock section gives Fourshame its body.

Lou Reed gives us consciousness.

Bloodrock gives us meat.

Riffs with weather systems.

Vocals delivered from approximately three rooms behind the amplifier.

Melodrama treated not as an artistic technique but a mineral extracted from the earth.

And because Fourshame has already established shame as its governing principle, you begin hearing something different in all that heaviness.

Not macho certainty.

Vulnerability disguised as horsepower.

Hard rock has always contained this.

The amplifier says:

I AM IMMENSE.

The song says:

PLEASE CALL ME.

The amplifier says:

I FEAR NOTHING.

The lyric says:

WHERE DID YOU GO LAST NIGHT?

A great deal of rock history becomes funnier and more human once you notice this contradiction.

Fourshame notices.

III. PUSSY: SOMEBODY OPENED THE WRONG FAIRY-TALE BOOK

Then comes Pussy.

There are moments in playlist sequencing where you can almost hear the curator grinning.

This is one.

“Comets.”

“Tragedy in F. Minor.”

“The Open Ground.”

“Everybody’s Song.”

“G.E.A.B.”

Suddenly the record collection has developed mushrooms.

Everything gets softer, stranger, more pastoral, more ornate.

The masculinity of Bloodrock evaporates into something dreamlike and faintly ridiculous.

Excellent.

Because embarrassment requires contrast.

If Fourshame remained entirely sleazy, sleaze would become tasteful.

We cannot permit this.

So Pussy introduces beauty.

Dangerous move.

Beauty ruins everything.

Now the playlist has tenderness in it.

Not respectable tenderness either.

Unprotected tenderness.

The kind dressed in psychedelic clothing because simply saying I feel strange and I would like someone to understand this would be unbearable.

This is where the title becomes less jokey.

Fourshame begins revealing four different methods of avoiding the humiliation of direct emotional speech.

Lou uses irony.

Bloodrock uses volume.

Pussy uses fantasy.

And then Dwight Twilley strolls in carrying perhaps the most dangerous weapon imaginable:

a really good pop song.

IV. DWIGHT TWILLEY: NO ARMOR ALLOWED

“I’m On Fire.”

“Could Be Love.”

“Feeling in the Dark.”

“You Were So Warm.”

Already we're doomed.

Dwight Twilley’s section makes the rest of the playlist snap into focus because power pop has an unusual relationship to dignity.

It destroys dignity very efficiently.

Hard rock allows camouflage.

Experimental music allows abstraction.

Art rock allows theory.

Power pop gives you three minutes, a melody, somebody you miss, and nowhere to hide.

A great power-pop song is basically emotional exposure with handclaps.

And suddenly Fourshame’s entire architecture becomes obvious.

This playlist isn't really about bad taste.

It isn't even about embarrassment.

It is about the elaborate disguises people invent for wanting something.

Lou wants connection but wraps it in sarcasm.

Bloodrock wants connection but buries it under amplification.

Pussy wants connection but sends the request through a psychedelic woodland.

Twilley finally just writes:

Here is the melody.

Here is the ache.

Everybody can see it.

Fine.

And the result is devastating.

SHAME AS A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT

The cleverest thing about Fourshame is that it refuses the boring interpretation of embarrassment.

Embarrassment is usually treated as something external to art.

The outdated production.

The ridiculous clothes.

The uncool band.

The unfashionable genre.

The line you probably shouldn't have sung.

Fourshame treats embarrassment as evidence that something human survived the production process.

This is far more interesting.

The immaculate song cannot embarrass itself.

It has already been embalmed.

The songs here frequently reach too far.

They wear something unfortunate.

They employ an effect whose statute of limitations has expired.

They love too loudly.

They confuse grandeur with volume.

They attempt contemporary relevance.

They attempt timelessness.

They attempt sexiness.

God help them, they attempt.

That attempt is where the life is.

The horrifying truth is that taste frequently depends on distance.

Once enough time passes, yesterday’s humiliation becomes texture.

A synthesizer once considered unforgivably tacky becomes historically fascinating.

A hard-rock affectation becomes period vocabulary.

A psychedelic indulgence becomes atmosphere.

A power-pop chorus nobody respected becomes the thing that breaks your heart forty years later while you're washing a coffee mug.

History is an extraordinary laundering service.

Fourshame skips the laundering.

It says:

No. Leave the stain.

That stain is part of the record.

THE FOUR SHAMES

So, because somebody apparently insisted on calling this thing Fourshame, we must eventually confront the numerology.

I propose:

Shame One: Trying to Stay Current

Lou Reed.

There is no more vulnerable sight than an established artist reaching toward the present.

Sometimes they touch it.

Sometimes they touch a Yamaha preset.

Both outcomes are interesting.

Shame Two: Trying to Look Tough

Bloodrock.

The wonderful male tradition of communicating emotional distress through equipment capable of damaging masonry.

Shame Three: Trying to Escape Reality

Pussy.

The pastoral-psychedelic solution.

If ordinary emotional vocabulary proves insufficient, add comets.

Shame Four: Simply Admitting It

Dwight Twilley.

The final humiliation.

Melody.

Romance.

Need.

No camouflage left.

And there it is.

The playlist isn't mocking any of them.

That's important.

Fourshame loves these records.

That is what keeps the concept from becoming smug.

Smug curation is unbearable.

You know the type.

Someone puts a supposedly kitschy record into a playlist with quotation marks around it, thereby assuring you that they understand it is beneath them.

Fourshame doesn't do that.

Fourshame says:

This may be ridiculous. Turn it up.

That is a much healthier relationship with culture.

THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF TASTE

People frequently claim they want artists to take risks.

This is mostly untrue.

People want artists to take risks successfully.

Afterward.

Once history has certified the risk as visionary.

Actual artistic risk is much uglier.

It involves moments when nobody knows whether the thing works.

It involves clothes that age badly.

Technology that dates instantly.

Lyrics delivered with alarming conviction.

Genre experiments that cause critics to begin touching their temples.

It involves shame.

Which means Fourshame accidentally becomes an argument against the museumification of music.

Stop treating every artist's catalog like an immaculate sequence of Approved Masterpieces.

The failures matter.

The awkward periods matter.

The unfashionable records matter.

The songs that almost work sometimes matter more than the ones that glide perfectly into the canon.

Because culture isn't built entirely from triumph.

It is built from attempts.

Some successful.

Some disastrous.

Some Lou Reed rapping.

FINAL VERDICT

Fourshame is an unusually good playlist because it allows taste to become three-dimensional.

You are not merely asked:

Is this good?

You are asked:

What kind of good is this?

Is it good despite its flaws?

Because of them?

Was the flaw once considered a virtue?

Did history reverse the polarity?

Is something uncool because it failed, or because it succeeded in a language we stopped speaking?

And, most dangerously:

Do I actually like this?

There.

That is the shame.

Not Lou Reed.

Not Bloodrock.

Not Pussy.

Not Dwight Twilley.

You.

Standing there with the ridiculous chorus playing again.

And again.

And again.

You could turn it off.

You don't.

Excellent.

Now we're listening.

DAX SILVER
Crease

Rating: ★★★★½

Half a star withheld because dignity should retain at least one emergency exit.