Songs By The Coasters

In praise of … music box sets.

The Immersion box-set of Dark Side of the Moon, their 1973 album, offers a shelf-bending array of CDs, audio DVDs, audio-visual DVDs, a blu-ray disc, previously unreleased versions of various songs ... plus a 40-page booklet, and a doubtlessly aesthetically pleasing handful of black marbles and coasters. It’s the “complete artistic experience”, apparently.

One school of thought says the band should leave well enough alone; after all, they made their fortunes, and established a worldwide reputation, on the back of Dark Side of the Moon, which has sold 45 million copies. To others, however, the thought of boxes of dust-covered tapes being excavated and freshened up for public consumption in 2011 is irresistible.

There’s a third, smaller, group, amongst which I should count myself. Weakened to a possibly fatal degree by shiny objects, this group will probably buy the set after pricing different sites online.

The CDs will probably go unplayed; the audio-visual DVDs will be admired without actually being watched. We don’t care whether there’s an interesting new version of one of the album’s tracks; the appeal lies in the whole – that shiny, weighty, ponderous box that stirs the hungry, sharp-eyed consumer in many of us.

Music box-sets, however, can have their uses, and not just as a topic of conversation. The Neil Young Archives box-set helped fans to understand how he made so much artistic progress in such a short space of time.

Even so, £88 is a lot to pay for the new Pink Floyd set. Perish the thought: I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’d lost my marbles.

Run Red Run: Funny Song, Serious Message < PopMatters

The year 1960 started off an era where pop musicians began to speak out on social issues. Before the decade’s end, artists felt compelled to include at least one “protest song” per album, at least if they wanted to be thought of as “serious” artists. But the first pop music salvo that specifically attacked the white power structure in the U.S. was not a protest song at all. It was a novelty tune about a gambling monkey, penned by a team of Jewish songwriters and performed by a black doo-wop group known more for songs about comic book characters than racial politics.

The 1959 song, “Run Red Run”, by the Coasters—a group that was already famous for a string of pile-in-the-jalopy novelty hits—is a fierce indictment of racism, a brilliant detournement of a nasty stereotype and a provocative taunting of fearful whites, nervous over the reckoning to come. The genius of the song, written by consummate hitmakers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, was that it used a ridiculous comic parable to convey an insurrectionist message. It works as a joke, it works as a call to arms, and most importantly, it works as a pop song.

This first line is classic Lieber/Stoller, whose songs for the Coasters often featured wonderfully bizarre settings and characters. Sharing the 1950s fascination with all things “exotic”, Lieber and Stoller served up scandalous and weird story-songs like “Idol with a Golden Head” alongside summertime fun like “Charlie Brown” and “Yakety Yak”. While much of what they wrote about was just silly, their early work included songs like “Framed” and “Riot in Cell Block No. 9” which, in their own jokey way, spoke to the unfairness of the American justice system.

It was a system that was under strain in the late ‘50s, as the civil rights movement was just gaining the momentum it needed to push back against the segregation and oppression directed toward Blacks of the day. It’s pretty well acknowledged that the pop music of the 1950s and ‘60s had a buoyant effect on America’s civil rights movement, first by granting African Americans access to the cultural mainstream, and secondly by celebrating the social and economic freedoms brought on by the end of World War II. While exploration of those freedoms often amounted to little more than goofy teenage fantasies (like when Eddie Cochrane beseeched the U.N. to find a cure for his Summertime Blues), they still spoke to an awakening desire for new liberties that suddenly seemed possible in American life. In Black America, that awakening was about much more than fast cars and itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-yellow-polka-dot bikinis, even if sometimes Black pop performers didn’t, or simply couldn’t, explicitly say so.

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