A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Not building a wall but making a brick.
I made bricks with Goldfrapp, Jimi Hendrix, Circus Underwater, Lee Scratch Perry, he Comet Is Coming and Moon Duo. Suggestions came in from the Oblique Saturdays brick making community- Ernie with Dexys and the walls of heartbreak, Jake Sniper with Jacob's Optical Language, Braynemeout with Chicago 's Wesley Willis, Walter and Nirvana, Rol with the Ben Folds Five and Chris with Pixies and their red bricks.
This week's Oblique Strategy card reads like this- Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics.
Which when I read it left me cold. Nothing. No response. Zilch. A cursory search of song titles containing the words ambiguities, convert or specifics brought little too, very uninspiring.
So I thought about it a little and took some internet advice and settled on this. Removing ambiguities and converting to specifics is a suggestion to simplify things, to streamline and to focus on the bare essentials. To get down to brass tacks. To lessen the abstract and go for the straight ahead choice.
'Hey ho let's go....'
February 1976 and four pretend brothers from Forest Hills, Queens, rewrite music history by inventing punk rock. No frills, no ambiguities, no extras, just the specifics of a brilliantly dumb chant, three chords and a pulverising guitar, bass, drums combo. Blitzkrieg Bop still reverberates down the years, half a century later, still sounds like the manic and basic thrill of picking up an electric guitar and plugging it into an amplifier and hitting the strings....
Later on that year The Ramones recorded a cover of California Sun for their I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend single and then put it on 1977 album Leave Home (released 10th January 1977- by 11th January the Ramones had already released two albums).
1- 2- 3- 4 ....
California Sun was written by Henry Glover and the most well known version in the 60s was by surf- rockers The Rivieras. It was later seen as the last American rock 'n' roll hit before the British Invasion.
Pete Seeger said of Woody Guthrie, 'Any damn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple'. At least I think he did. It gets attributed to Woody too and to others. Here's one of those unfinished/ unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs that Billy Bragg and Wilco recorded.
Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key
Feel free to make your own suggestions and responses to Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics in the comment box.
Tough one this week Adam. First thought was Sabres - Smokebelch II (Beatless Version) - a track that focused on clarity with very little else to distract
ReplyDeleteFirst song that springs to mind is Buzzcocks' Boredom. A two note guitar solo and a lyric that starts "Well I say what I mean, I say what comes to mind". No ambiguity there, straight to specifics!
ReplyDeleteYou can't get much more specific than commandments so I nominate Jah Shaka's epic 'Commandments of Dub' series.
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/gVX3n5-YOEM?si=zYJv9G444XdJVuoq
Everyone knows the drill with The Cocteaus... it’s the ultimate culture clash of Fraser’s oceanic blur locked inside Guthrie’s spiky, post-punk cage.
ReplyDeleteHer vibrating glossolalia wasn't just some aesthetic whim. Rather, it functioned as deliberate ambiguity. By dissolving the sense of the words sung into a series of pure vowel rushes and disembodied breaths, she produced a pre-lingual howl that hits listeners in the gut.
And yet, that ecstatic wash only works because it was bolted on to a mechanical counterweight. If the backing tracks had shared the same fluidity of her voice, we'd all just be swimming in yet another bowl of flavourless ambient soup.
Instead, the hyper-specific, clockwork geometry of the sharp Linn drums, working in sync with the icy, jagged basslines acts as a rigid anchor for a glorious pop jangle.
Ultimately, it's precisely this interplay between the demands of the industrial machine and the evasive ghostly vapours of the female human voice that creates the unique Cocteaus sound.
They were pretty much the definition of ethereal dream pop, but they wouldn't have stuck in our memories for as long as they have, were it not for these precisely measured contrasting combinations...
https://youtu.be/28tcms00Dno?is=CTuQ15uk2sqyAx5k