the illusion that he still cared about rock & roll on
Eat to the Beat. That illusion is surely dead now. And Stein is no longer depriving the world of his "genius," because
Autoamerican is his LP all the way. Indeed, it's such an anthology of intellectual onanism that it's almost the rock equivalent of a godawful Ken Russell movie.
A movie, in fact, is what the record transparently aspires to be. The conception, so far as I can figure it, treats American pop culture, or teenage subculture, in science-fiction terms as a kind of lost Atlantis: a legendary civilization made extinct by the disappearance of the surplus-goods society that fostered it. As an idea, this is one of those notions that feels like a cliché, even when you can't think of anybody else who's done it. It's too easy, though certainly feasible, depending on how it's worked out. Here, it hasn't been worked out at all. The theme is just a convenient touchstone to unify a lot of fairly ephemeral material that's patched together by a few repeated images and some graceless chunks of pretentious narration.
Autoamerican opens with an instrumental dirge called "Europa" (the Old World everybody had to leave, get it?) that's ludicrously portentous. Scored in the pastiche style of wretched soundtrack music, it's so promiscuously ethnic that, if it had characters, they'd all have to be played, in fortissimo, by Anthony Quinn. The album closes with nothing less than that classic anthem to solipsism, "Follow Me," from Camelot (a reference as thuddingly clever as "Singin' in the Rain" at the end of Stanley Ku-brick's A Clockwork Orange). Oddly enough, there isn't a single rock & roll song on the LP. Instead, we get MOR ballads wrapped in highbrow trimmings, funk played as cocktail music, an imitation-dub rap song and three (counting "Follow Me") pieces of fake-Tin Pan Alley, swing-era crooning.
Even when camp isn't the actual musical style, it's still omnipresent as an attitude. As Stein expounds upon and fills his hobbies (art films, sci-fi, kitschy artifacts) with hot air, he deflates rock & roll in order to demonstrate his superiority to it. He's so exclusively concerned with creating a modernist manifesto that he's dispensed with all the pop paraphernalia – e.g., hooks, rhythm, structure – that keeps an audience listening. His sense of pop culture itself is rarefied and coldly elitest: everything, in short, that rock & roll joyfully meant to clear away. Why would anyone make an album about pop that's totally devoid of humor
Here's where it all went wrong, with blame falling on fame, egos and (probably) cocaine. "The Tide Is High" and "Rapture" were both No. 1 hits (and continued to make Blondie one of the few guitar rock acts that were big with black audiences) but the album feels formless and the songwriting is muted. The CD adds "Call Me," their awesome collaboration with Giorgio Moroder.
