Bobby Conn
Rise Up!

Wades and wanders. Evacuating is bitter for him in this greasy mire. Bobby Conn, the “Disadvantaged Cop”, wades in the “boassa.” The Venetian term aptly describes 5 kg of steaming bovine dung. There's a sea of boassa! We're in deep shit up to our necks. But if we try hard, we might be able to climb out. And soon find ourselves immersed only halfway.

More Anti-Bush than Antichrist, though he self-proclaimed himself the latter, Conn, born Jeffrey Stafford in 1967 in New York but Chicago-Illinoisan by adoption, has a career devoid of compromises and omissions: as a singer, he first played in a punk trio, then in a prog quartet; as a detainee, he was a guest of the Maryland jail for postal fraud.

Misdeeds, I believe, he has committed. He encourages his audience, his generation by extension, to collapse the system by accumulating debts recklessly. B. Conn, when all is said and done, is the eternal teenager, the troubled agit-prop minstrel, the mad preacher riding the wind of idiocy; at best a sinister showman, a chronic misfit. Foolish enough to seem brilliant. Brilliant enough to feign insanity.

Nimble like a tuft of straw, he writhes wearing a white shirt with a starched collar, and an Adidas tracksuit on top. Burgundy. Sometimes orange. He keeps his scant gastric muscles toned with rhythmic dance. Acting like an enlightened and bewildered guru.

If I look fondly at antiheroes like Jad Fair (Half Japanese), Conn seems sardonic, excessively so. Unreliable. Conn resembles Sky Saxon of the Seeds in appearance; a bit like Kubrick's Alex DeLarge too. But he's more like a colorful M. Bolan like Ziggy/Bowie. Decadent. Eccentric. Chameleonic: chameleon head, chameleon body. But don't be fooled. Not necessarily the same chameleon.

Musically, he overflows with debris of a glorious past: Bowie with Abba, T-Rex with Devo, Silver Convention with Meat Loaf, Prince with New York Dolls, Curtis Mayfield with Slade. He often and willingly gets entangled in trash aesthetics. He doesn't even hide his fetishes, figure skating particularly, especially the blades. He is celebrated for his live performances: prone in their theatrical oddity. Pompous and verbose. A happening for post-hippy happy few.

“Rise Up!”, Atavistic Records 1998, is a very good album. Sanguine, choleric, arty. A grand feast of genres, assumed post-purge, “like the old folks used to do” before going to a wedding. He has arranged glam-punk, avant-funk, power rock, disco music, sharp wave edges, piercing boogie-blues, hard rock vulgarity, bossa nova alienations, jazzy choruses, literary easy listening, haughty strings, and lunar oboe; Conn's pop is both sweet and salty. But with disillusion in the soul.

When he sings, he whispers, moans in falsetto, howls. He regurgitates and chuckles. Convinced or reluctant or affected.

He parodies the American empire and mocks the vacuousness of the star system. He deprecates all that is mainstream.

Frivolous, learned, rascal. He is the visionary artist far surpassing the common man, who -in reality- he is.

Many credits for this “Rise Up!” go to the production. Perhaps there's a real genius in the director's seat like Jim O’Rourke. It's indeed the Chicago experimenter who nicely refines his “Eureka.” Hence the formal elegance that surfaces everywhere through the pompous and protracted melodious and rhythmic ideas. An iconic album emerges. Raw when needed, but refined. And it doesn't hide but emphasizes Conn's limitations by dramatizing them.

In the cerebral and post-rock Chicago of the end of the millennium, possessed, Bobby the bard reclaims, under a youthfully iconoclastic push, certain vivid pages of rock. Noting that John McEntire will produce his subsequent four albums, the ignorant masses ignore him. They overlook his cabaret, at best sarcastic, at worst devoid of seriousness, announcing the resounding apocalypse with stars and stripes. Like Cassandra, but with Conn's typical trait: his mocking sneer and angelic hiss. At least he ceases to be bothersome, unlike that guy who names himself after a famous actress and a murderer. He’s not as opportunistic. Nor ambitious.

"I have convictions/ but they're all false." (Conn)

“I'll make you crap stubborn synopi turds,/ So hard, your ass will seem on fire.” (Burchiello)

Anarchic but not autarchic. He longs for the transversality of genres. Naturally, he didn’t invent anything. Yet he has one achievement. Something to boast of for a lifetime. Conn, with his wife Monika BouBou, also a faithful colleague and electric violinist, was the first couple subject of Cynthia Plaster Caster’s plaster casts. Yes, her! The mind (and also the arm when necessary) behind the Plaster Caster.

-Recognition of the d###?

-Not just that.

Nowadays, more moderate, he seems to live in Vienna with his wife and two children, downsizing certain proclamations of his recent past, labeling them as “egocentric delusions” and foolish “hyperboles.”

This is the second of his current seven Long-Playing records. Perhaps the best. The glamorous and rolling arrows of “United Nations” are masterful, a whole serpentine chiasm of epic punk delight, and the glam rearranged hard r’n’r of “White Bread”, driven by obsessive and delirious falsetto. “Rise Up!” is a power ballad that explodes into an aseptic disco mutation; from the jazzy lounge delight of “Passover” to the disdainful bossa nova of “Lullaby” where Our Man shows himself as a confidential entertainer, mitigating laughter; “Baby Man (Refrain)” places a goofy, macaronic, and very successful falsetto among dreamy atmospheres evoking brilliant Bolan pages (“Cosmic Dancer”, “Beltane Walk”, “Ride a White Swan”).

One often and willingly slips into kitsch makeup, not avoiding its swooning. But as mentioned, immersed only up to the bust in the muck. Leaving a hair of hope for the continuation of the century. Climbing back up. Velvety. Swimming. Desiring to get out. A bit snobbish like Bob-bye; exiting the choppy sea. From consumerism, if you will.

Bobby “Disadvantaged” is a bit of a pain. Okay. Rightly or wrongly, a thorn in the side. Now I know. But “United Nations” rocks. Big time. A true generational anthem. At least for Generation X. Damn, I'm in! Damn, an anthem even to the post-truth. Damn! As striking as a cast!