Utopia
Deface the Music

In my latest review appearing on the site, dedicated to “One” by the Beatles, I questioned the importance of the Liverpool quartet from an intrinsically musical perspective, while not underestimating the historical and sociological impact of their music, nor the beauty of individual pieces. I want to start again from the Beatles, that is, from the Beatles revisited by Utopia in "Deface The Music" (1980), an album that expressly refers to the Beatles tradition, recovering its styles and tones.

Before examining the album in detail, it should be noted that behind Utopia hides the name of one of the most original, and largely unknown to the general public, musicians of the last thirty years: Todd Rundgren. Todd Rundgren, along with Frank Zappa, is often defined as one of the great “atypicals” in rock history, that is, an artist who is difficult to categorize within a genre or predefined label. The comparison between Rundgren and Zappa is apt on a descriptive level but should be significantly corrected: while Zappa, in his thirty-year career, tackled multiple genres and musical approaches with a sarcastic and detaching tone, highlighting the very limits of each style considered separately (rock, jazz, blues, fusion, classical, electronic, etc.), and recomposing the apparent variety of possible musical expressions into a single sound patchwork, Rundgren visited all the subgenres highlighting their peculiarities and, if anything, exaggerating their tones and clichés, not without a touch of irony. In short, if Zappa’s music is an implicit critique of genres and styles, Rundgren’s music is a declaration of faith in those same genres and styles. In confirmation of these observations, it can be interesting to note the album under discussion. It is, at once, an act of love towards the Beatles and the sixties pop rock, a nostalgia operation, a form of reaction against the genres then predominant (punk and new wave), a recovery of the sonic roots of the musicians, an ironic revisitation of that musical style. In this sense, it seems reductive to qualify the album as a simple homage to tradition, as if Utopia had merely covered the Beatles, as the band The Rutles did before.

As anticipated, the entire album traces the Beatles' career, proposing the main tropes of their style, from the debut to the late 60s, specifically from the beat of the early days (the adaptation of American rock to English taste, with tighter rhythms) to the “psychedelic” pop of Sgt. Pepper, all played with period instrumentation. “I Just Want To Touch You”, the opening track of the album, recalls, in the lyrics and progression, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, with a nice beat pulse. Belonging to the same genre are “Crystal Ball”, “Where Does The World Go To Hide”, the inspired “I’ll Follow The Sun”, “Silly Boy”, “That’s Not Right”, “Take It Home” based on the progressions of “Drive My Car” and “Day Tripper”, where the typical Beatles rhythms of the origins re-emerge, re-adapted for the occasion by Utopia. “Alone” recalls the pieces found on Rubber Soul, just as "Hoi Polloi" is inspired by the more playful Lennon/McCartney songs, usually assigned to Ringo Starr’s voice. "Lifes Goes On" captures the mood of the more atmospheric Beatles pieces like "A Day In The Life", "Eleanor Rigby", while the last tracks of the album explicitly refer to the textures of the band's more mature albums, characterized by the psychedelic nuances so trendy in Swinging London: these are "Feel Too Good", "Always Late", "All Smiles", with reminiscences of "Michelle" and "Fool On The Hill", and "Everybody Else Is Wrong", tracks in which the melodies are always in the foreground compared to the group’s musical accompaniment, simple but appropriate.

Recommended to Beatles enthusiasts, "Deface The Music" could be an interesting piece in the discography of all fans, although by its nature, it is not a particularly innovative product. Unless the good Rundgren, in “defacing the music” of the Liverpool group, intended to also bring out its clichés (both in musical choices, which become predictable over time, and in the executive poverty) giving his sounds a pretend classicism, which sounds like a good-natured taunt to tradition. In line with the album cover, after all, where the four Utopians take on classic poses, which however have nothing classic about them and sound, in this way, profoundly modern.