Bran Van 3000 - House ballads for aristocratic parties

Operating in the late '90s, Jamie Di Salvio's project called Bran Van 3000 rightly and consciously doesn't even try to make rock. Rock, or that strand of popular music which, from an artistic standpoint, had exhausted itself by '91 with the last great rock album ("Nevermind") and the first two post-rock albums ("Twin Infinitives" by Royal Trux and "Spiderland" by Slint). Bran Van 3000 are an ensemble in the mold of the hippie communities of the '60s (hence the family-style psychedelic-rock bands), only with far more refinement, directly derived from a socially alienated and theoretically nihilistic stance. The attitude toward life and music of this small, exclusive community (9 people, including three representatives of the fair sex) sits somewhere between the dandyism of English mods like Kinks and Who, the elegance and sophistication somewhere between self-irony, aestheticism, and the apathy or malaise of a reception for young noble scions after blue-blood titles have been abolished, plus an atavistic taste for hooliganism, begging and street vagrancy.

Since '95 this outfit of debunking rockers, rappers, hardcore kids, DJs, soul singers, folk singer-songwriters and ambient artists has been broadcasting its ideas to the world from Montreal, the hub of French-speaking Canada (Quebec). Techno music (that is, its samples) is the common foundation on which every Bran Van 3000 track is built; the hardcore mindset is the ultimate essence of their thinking and the cultural and existential spring (rebellion, self-destruction) behind their music-making. The strand of popular music put forward by Bran Van 3000 is therefore electronic: and virtually every rock subgenre, or more broadly every pop subgenre, is treated electronically: hardcore, folk, rap, funk, blues, singer-songwriter fare. The way, the approach in which this happens, is that of someone looking with adult (and post-) eyes at a childlike (and proto-) world; and then reversing the roles to look back at the adult dimension. This shift in perspective and relationship is the basis of what it would simply be useless, because unexplanatory, to call genre contamination: Bran Van 3000, in fact, use techno to cancel out hardcore, and the wildest rap to cancel out the most heartfelt singer-songwriter fare; and this is nihilism, that is, a total absence of creed, of values, of committed participation.

Where such an operation leads is not freak-humor (think Zappa), but rather, still within a fundamental acceptance of life, the aesthetic and ecstatic contemplation of lost moments - starting with the present ones - which are observed rather than lived. Grace, form, balance, lightness, affectation are thus devices for circumnavigating the Void. Devices, however, that are inherent to Bran Van 3000's music: fresh, crisp, crystal-clear, virginal, yet also hyper-fast and percussive. It's music that finds its own fullness in the deep awareness of nothingness: its ethics in its aesthetics. Such states are sublimated in one album: Glee (1997). Then the community disbanded, and Di Salvio was left alone (albeit surrounded by some twenty more or less famous pop figures) to mourn a city of the sun either lost or weakened by some siege. Di Salvio thus became the more nostalgic and disillusioned techno-singer-songwriter of the 2000s, but less engaging, and without the beauty of that one perfect era able to recall an entire past of experiences, dreams and images: like an exceedingly refined party, where exceedingly refined friends report back to everyone else their exceedingly refined illuminations. Bran Van 3000's second album, or Di Salvio's first, came out in 2001 (Discosis).

Glee (19 tracks, an hour of music) contains three masterpieces; here is their description, followed by a more cursory look at the other tracks. "Gimme Sheldon" (4:00) must be regarded as one of the manifestos of house music, the music made by DJs who create new tracks by using a mixer to splice together pieces of other songs or rhythm tracks. Except that Di Salvio's "house" or "party" is a palace or a reception for postmodern nobles (noble, that is, not by blood, but by their way of facing life). Di Salvio, half hardcore (nihilist) and half techno (aesthete), builds his dialectic using hip-hop, rather than blues, as his all-encompassing tool. "Gimme Sheldon" is literally built by sampling four hip-hop tracks from as many underground sampler-friends, friends he's presumed to have hung around with - together with their scene, and somewhat as a fish out of water himself (being hardcore and techno) - before the (more or less ideally) communal experience that would lead, as a chronicle of the reunion-party, to Glee. "Cut and sew," then: these must be the magic words, the new gospel of popular music, the antidote to its otherwise inevitable saturation: "Gimme Sheldon", in fact, should be understood not merely as a trivial DJ mix, but as the first true example of post-rock with a capital P: Di Salvio took four different hip-hop tracks and turned them into a single track; all that's left for the post-rock musician to do is take various rock tracks from the past, fragments of songs, and turn them into compositions that can then be called, descriptively too, post-rock. That's how a new musical genre could be born.

"Drinking In L.A." (3.56) is the best-known track by Bran Van 3000. A trembling grace rendered through the magic of an ambient-techno that harmonically absorbs and cleanses rap (in the verse) and soul (in the chorus). This is Bran Van 3000 at their most genuine: music that makes children grow up and makes adults feel purer. The dimension of time and matter is confined within a hazy, fetal nebula, yet perfectly delineated enough to trace its classic lines (with rigor and balance). It's the ideal theme song - in title, in lyrics, in transcendence and autobiography - for that "noble" party and that aesthetic crowd who gave rise to, and formed the backdrop of, the album.

"Rainshine" (3.29), setting aside for a moment post-rock's programmatic-theoretical side and thinking instead of a song beyond history, simply a song, stands as an absolute high point - for its orchestration, the interweaving of planes and of loud and soft, slow and fast, male and female voices, overlapping voices and solo parts drawn now from folk singer-songwriting (the opening female part), now from alienated reggae (hence anti-reggae: the middle section), now from nihilist hardcore (the finale). Far more than a summa of garage (as at the start, after an eclectic whirl of electronics and echoes, with the drums primordially and savagely pounding out the time), grunge, folk and rap, it turns everything into a pretext for an overwhelming existential communicativeness: it could become an anthem for the truly zero generation, the post-everything one. Electric guitars (thrash) and acoustic ones (folk), drums (metal) and electronic hisses, distortion and harmony - all held together with remarkable coherence. The lyrics are surrealist, hyperrealist, naive and materialist: they too treat beauty as a value, but on an absolute level feel unable to believe in it given its transience - hence the contrast between ⟦Q1⟧/⟦Q2⟧.

With Bran Van 3000, Bob Marley sings of the need to be stateless, Johnny Rotten of the beauty of a flower. Techno, hardcore, reggae, folk each contradict their own essence by being paired with their respective antithetical genre: no more values, no more predictability (hence neither certainties nor mediocrity), no more calm; but also no more boredom, no more preset tracks, no more conventionality, morality, money, physicality. Nihilism, then, turns out to be only a means or a conceptual, all-encompassing dimension; underneath it, one essentially finds, if not values, then at least mirages or states whose silhouette is, fundamentally, there to be enjoyed. "Rainshine" is the best track on the album (the most intelligent, varied, immediate, heartfelt, moving, exciting, exhilarating); but also the least Bran Van 3000, because, for all its intricate composition, it isn't sufficiently calculated: or rather, for once Di Salvio chose to set logic aside for a declaration straight from the heart. The form is the ballad, the ending a hardcore-metal burst in a very brief crescendo of screaming and detonating drums. A superb track in the studio, it would need nothing more than the most prestigious stages to explode among the audience with all its devastating grace.

Having examined the trio of masterpieces, here are the other tracks in order of appearance.

"Couch Suffer" is a folk-rap with a female vocal echo, as ancestral and all-encompassing as it is futuristic and light: in its blend of acoustic guitars, loops and extremely discreet electronics. "Problems" (1.38) is a double self-quotation and another splendid example of post-rock in the sense outlined above, that is, house music applied to traditional rock. Here, so to speak, the "traditional rock" is represented by the album's two absolute high points, including in terms of harmony: "Drinking in L.A." and "Rainshine".

"Forest" needs to be traced back to its title to be understood: the green of a symbolic forest, functioning as ornament to the line, the design, the golden figure, is rendered through rap (in the Massive Attack-style trip-hop version), thrash rhythm guitars, gospel choirs and litanies (female), and dream-pop (in the Garbage-style disco version). "Forest" thus reconciles, on one hand, the programmatic aim of showing no attachment to a single genre by prostituting itself to all of them, and on the other, taking the best of this multiplicity and synthesizing it into something that never grows boring (which is the aesthetic side) - disco and trip-hop, but also, on a second level, thrash and pop; letting the violent elements (now disco, now metal) provide the accompaniment, and the harmonic ones (now pop, in the female voice, now trip-hop, in the male ones) carry the melody.

"Carry On" is a reggae (guitars) and ambient (electronics) backdrop for rap verses and gospel (female) choruses - technically speaking, these are the devices of the trip-hop invented by Massive Attack. Male and female are not the subjects of some sexual or social battle here, but rather the offshoots, or the souls, of a shared, substantial common denominator.

"Afrodiziak" is the most grown-up, serious-minded track: always a melody (piano, ambient electronics) and a dub layer (with bass as the true protagonist of the overall sound); then, on one side, rap (male voice), on the other, gospel (female voice). The harmonic, electronic hiss that lingers as the composition's little motif sinks into a sophisticated, prehistoric atmosphere (because this is, above all, a track built on atmosphere).

"Lucknow" (track number 10) opens what we might call the second part of the work: with a noise and indie spirit (more than hardcore), it reinterprets all the most immediate and widespread pop styles, turning them precious and sophisticated.

"Cum On Feel The Noise" is a refined and touching all-female folk chant, with choral hand-claps marking time (arena-rock style) that nonetheless never undermine the overall intimacy. The track's coda is a very fast dance layer.

"Exactly Like Me" is the album's most explicit example of deliberate, studied naivety: soft, enveloping, wordy, free of innuendo or rhetoric; here and there, brushstrokes or touches of moving melody. The female voices of Bran Van 3000 could well sustain solo careers of their own; Di Salvio's singing ranges from hardcore (which is supposedly how his voice was forged) to rap (which he practises almost out of devotion or cultural necessity) all the way, as in this rare case, to urban-folk.

"Everywhere" carries on in this vein and, even as it falls into Tracy Chapman territory, manages (thanks above all to a female voice that is less self-referential, being less warm, less bluesy or soulful than those of Black singers) not to alienate the listener. At this point, in this second part - admirable for applying electronics more to folk than to trip-hop or reggae, as in the first part - Glee starts to show a little wear, and, however skillful and pleasant, occasionally comes across as self-indulgent or filler.

"Old School" is a violent, foul-mouthed street rap (delivered by someone who, without too much self-irony, turns it into elegance, déjà vu and museum-piece contemplation), punctuated by metal guitar riffs and disco-dance passages: it feels artificial, but that's precisely the intent, and so it comes across as rhetorically consistent and correct - sincere. All the more so because its genuinely desolate, suffering undertone never lets up.

"Willard" is another collage: starting out ambient-country, it moves on through dub and techno, somewhere between South American epic (seen rather than lived, the way Americans transplanted to French Quebec might see it) and a photographic, assemblage-like technique.

"Supermodel" is a cyber-country track that drags Johnny Cash into the desolation of the end of all ideologies, and Tom Waits into the inconsistency even of the blues (which, perhaps, he himself was the first to preach). What rises up, then, is a soul that wants to mock itself (in its self-referentiality). In the end, it's a steady alternation of country, techno and soul. A step away from rap without quite being rap: as if every rap element had been isolated and left, unnaturally (and surrealistically), to its own devices.

“Mama Don’t Smoke” (which could pass for a Rolling Stones cover sung by Sheryl Crow), by returning to rock's origins (folk-blues), points the way to the future: the non-rock of post-rock, and it does so acoustically, as if non-rock remains non-rock regardless of whether it's acoustic (folk) or electronic (techno).

Bran Van 3000 weren't/aren't a band, nor were they rock: they were a collective of artists brought together for a single album (Glee), miraculously united by a temporary state of emotion directed at human nature rather than civilization, and at personal life independent of civilization but entirely dependent on nature.

Discosis shouldn't be considered a Bran Van 3000 album (and indeed it features Curtis Mayfield, Youssou N' Dour, Big Daddy Kane, Eek-A-Mouse, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Momus). Any other album released under this name should be considered an obsession of a Di Salvio who believed he could maintain a continuity of ideas and intentions when circumstances and time denied him that very possibility. A name change would have been more fitting. And at least Bran Van 3000 would have remained forever tied to Glee alone, to that mansion, that party, that park.

However cut-up they may be, the product of assemblage upon assemblage, a forge of genres, an elusive multiplicity, however many musicians, however many instruments and tricks are involved, Bran Van 3000's songs are fundamentally ballads; they hold together a unity, a sense, a purpose; they have something to say; they're inspired. Post-rock ballads: house ballads. Songs (never longer than 5 minutes, often around 2 or 3), even though Glee is best appreciated as a whole, in the economy and the counterweights that sustain it.

Bran Van 3000 taught us how to eat a hamburger with Pepsi as if it were caviar with champagne.

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