Hooray for Compact Discs of yore!
As the latter part of the 1980s started to get a bit, well, boring (the nuclear holocaust we were promised never happened, and we got Chris de Burgh instead. I say we were ripped off), strange racks started to appear in record stores, holding things that looked a bit like records but were smaller (dare I say, more compact? No, better not).
These had been seen previously on scienc-ey programmes such as Tomorrow’s World, where these tiny miracles of musical storage were indestructible to the point that one could type your address on one before popping a stamp on it and posting it to yourself (it was never explained why anyone would want to do this), and a quick rinse under the tap was all that was required to get it to once more work in tippity-top condition.
Of course, this was absolute bollocks, as all it takes to really screw up a CD is to put it in a CD player, followed by putting it back in its box between plays – a twin tactic guaranteed to render your precious collection unplayable by way of Death By A Thousand Tiny Scratches.
I mention this all because this particular album was one of the first ones that I bought on CD even though I already had a perfectly serviceable vinyl copy, because I fell for the mythical cobblers that CDs were “better”. Almost certainly more convenient (the in-car record player never really took off), and definitely easier to find when stacked side-on, but not better. Nevertheless, all old CDs released over here came with audiophile-tempting gospel printed on the back of every insert booklet, going on about lasers, superiority and the word “lifetime”, along with instructions about optimum handling of the disc (instructions that are physically impossible to adhere to if getting them out of the case/player is to be attempted, unless you are some sort of praying mantis), and of course the wonderful 3-lettered description of how the album was recorded, mixed and mastered as if any of us gave a stuff. As far as I am aware, I only own one album that proudly carries the DDD sign of whatever DDD means.
Anyway, all this hovering over the cusp of new technology puts Introduce Yourself at the very beginning of a really important period for me, where I started to ignore what people were telling me what I should be listening to, and started to find my own excitement. This of course wasn’t an immediate or smooth transition, as I missed FNM’s first show in Manchester in early 1988 to go and see Megadeth at the Apollo on the same night instead.
I never really got into their breakthrough single We Care a Lot, I thought it was interesting but never really grabbed me. What did grab me was their follow-up single Anne’s Song, and a subsequent interview in the UK music press (I forget which one) where the entire band seemed to absolutely hate each other.
It was as if most of the stuff I had been listening to for visceral kicks was uniform and staid, conforming to their own rules. Faith No More broke as many established rules as they felt like, which gave the whole rock/metal scene at the time a much-needed rude awakening. Instead of the generic lite-politicking of their geographical peers (which seemed to revolve around girls, cars, the devil and really awful puns with regard to the then-current trend of televangelism), Chuck Mosely’s lyrics tended to revolve around, well, just stuff. And in all honesty, sometimes stuff was all a 17-year old me was really interested in at the time. This isn’t directionless wordplay though: The Crab Song is a heartbreakingly beautiful relating of the end of a relationship; the re-recording of their previous album’s title track We Care a Lot mocks the fake platitudes of the post-Band Aid professional charity single attendees; and central to it all is Anne’s Song, containing the piece of wisdom from the titular heroine that forms the backbone to this album, and probably the whole band, delivered with charming and cheerful openness…
“Do whatever the Hell you wanna do! Now is the time to do whatever you want, and it will turn out great. You’ve got the world at your feet…”
Of course, Faith No More went on to much bigger things than Introduce Yourself, but this rough and colourful step onto the wider stage has a barely-constrained vitality that is still fresh and vibrant today, and as indefinable now as it ever was – even if it did inadvertently spawn a terrible genre when some eedjit decided to describe them as “Funk Metal” and all the attendant drivel from Z-list club bands who realised that Funk is almost a rude word and shoved the joke down our throats far too many times beyond anyone’s reasonable tolerance (ie, at all).
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