Stephen Malkmus Series: “Forget Your Place”

When Stephen Malkmus made the rounds and talked to journalists about his 2018 album with the Jicks called Sparkle Hard, he routinely made reference to a solo, keyboard-centric album that he had in the can. In fact, he revealed in a 2018 Washington Post interview that he had submitted this album to his label Matador Records as the follow-up to 2014’s Wig Out at Jagbags.

He recounts in the interview that didn’t hear anything from Matador until the label’s co-presidents Chris Lombardi and Gerard Cosloy flew out to Portland to talk to him directly. According to Malkmus, he opened the door and asked them directly: “Am I dropped?” Malkmus recalls his reasoning in asking this question:

“I might as well ask first…Make it easier for them to break up with you. Who knows what’s going on with their finances. I don’t know what Queens of the Stone Age sells. What if they gave them so much money hoping that they would be like the next Foo Fighters?”

In conversation with Lombardi and Cosloy, Malkmus agreed to delay the electronic solo album and instead record and release another full-band Jicks record, which would turn out to be Sparkle Hard. But knowing that he had to be talked into another Jicks album lends credence to the theory that Malkmus knew it would be his final statement with the Jicks. 

Finally, in 2019, Matador agreed to release this now-fabled solo keyboard album, cheekily titled Groove Denied in reference to the whole kerfuffle with the label. After all this consternation, what was it about the music that caused so much handwringing? The album’s fifth song “Forget Your Place” is a good case in which to explore this question:

The track begins with a dull wash of noise and a suppressed throb of a beat repeating on a loop, but it barely registers as a loop. The sound has a blurry and hazy quality, similar to the songs analyzed in a piece I wrote for Aquarium Drunkard that act as musical equivalents of Jeremy Blake’s time-based paintings in Punch-Drunk Love. The music of “Forget Your Place” exhibits the same diffused qualities as Viktor Vaughn’s “Rae Dawn,”  “Loose Gravel” by Geologist and D.S., and the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s piece “Ngo (Bitmix).”

Breaking through this blunted undulation, a voice emerges, singing, “Sky-high in the galleria.” The paradoxical voice is at once deep yet also inexplicably high. It’s clear and smooth in a robotically synthesized way in distinct contrast to the dull sound of the music. Who is this singing? It can’t be Malkmus. Did the device mistakenly play a different track? The voice has similar quality to the incredible Willis Earl Beal, whose voice is equal parts mysterious, alluring, powerful, vulnerable, and desperate as exhibited in his song “Flying So Low”:

The vocal from the beginning of “Forget Your Place” feels as if it has been generated by a program designed to make any voice sound like Beal’s. The artificial Beal voice continues singing, “Walking around on a neon afternoon.” There’s a descending figure of notes in the melody of this line that could be vaguely Malkmusian. Other indications that it’s actually Malkmus are the words from the rest of the verse:

So nice to see you
Skulking around
High plains driftin’.

“Skulk” is such a perfect Malkmus word and the last line is an allusion to Clint Eastwood’s 1973 metaphysical western High Plains Drifter, in which Eastwood’s unnamed character comes to a town as a sort of avenging devil. Of course, the Beastie Boys did their own spin on the Eastwood character in “High Plains Drifter” from their 1989 album Paul’s Boutique. While approached from different angles, both the Eastwood movie and the Beastie Boys’ song are hallucinatory, mind-bending narratives of which this maybe-Malkmus artist is referencing, bringing those connotations to the blurred, fuzzy landscape that is “Forget Your Place.”

During this verse, a high-pitched pinging emerges and fades away. It returns again along with a strange rattling as the artificial Beal voice chants the words, “Peeling it down.” The pings, which sounds in rapid succession, could be from a radar or the type of tones used to test one’s hearing. Those sounds tail off as the dull loop churns away underneath. Soon, a series of laser beam effects crackle, serving as a fanfare for a new voice to enter the song’s frame. It’s clearly Malkmus, who sings, “24/7 creative adults” twice. This sets off another set of laser beam effects and a quick burst of sound that could have been generated from a guitar, before the laser beams and pinging resume.

Eventually, the grinding loop decreases in sound slightly and the robot voice reappears singing, “Forget your place” a few times. Then the regular Malkmus voice joins in also singing the title phrase. These alternating voices seem to be answering one another, but they’re only repeating the same words to each other. It could be a call to arms of dropping out and embracing a “24/7 creative adults” lifestyle by truly forgetting your place. The goal is to live in an environment of skulking around, high plains drifitin’, and seeking out art on a neon afternoon. Over this mantra of “forget your place,” the regular Malkmus voice enters again and sings in a high, vulnerable tone, “Sweeter than a harmony.” It’s a beautiful little vocal figure from Malkmus. The words also reinforce the apparent message of the song. Living in a world of imagination and art is the ideal. Reaching this place is a state of true freedom. It’s more elevating and enrapturing than even the most beautiful instance of pure musical harmony.  

As the vocals die away, the throbbing beat increases in volume again accompanied by a tapping of a snare drum. Suddenly, the beat drops out and the regular Malkmus voice returns one last time to sing the “Sweeter than a harmony” line. In this instance, the vocal sounds are processed and broken up as if the utopian feeling from before has been fractured and vanished. What replaces this lost freedom? A weird little early 1980s arcade game jingle like from Pac-Man or Donkey Kong. And with that, “Forget Your Place” is over. 

In 2020, Malkmus was asked in an interview with Fader to go through his favorite songs from his solo work. He included “Forget Your Place” and provided the following commentary:

“This was me fucking with [the German music software] Ableton and a short loop and thinking I did more than what I actually did. It’s a style of recording that I haven’t done — get a loop, how much do you wanna add on there, how much do you wanna take away? It’s how hip-hop records are made, probably — I don’t know, I’ve never made one. It’s about how to be minimal. I don’t have too many songs where it’s one altered loop, a detuned voice, and a couple of keyboards. It stands out in a certain way.”

It does stand out in a certain way. Likewise, Matador thought that all of Groove Denied stood out from the rest of Malkmus’s work. But did it? There were hints from his work along the way. The clearest precedent to the sounds and style of Groove Denied was “Kindling for the Master” from Malkmus’s 2006 album Face the Truth:

First of all, the lyrics are vintage hilarious Malkmus from “I was shot for meat / And left alone with a crow” to “I’m the leech who can preach / They call me Sinister Joe” to the song’s title. “Kindling for the Master” has the screwing-around-in-my-basement-studio vibe as the rest of Face the Truth, especially those outrageous guitar and keyboard solos. The section over which Malkmus sings, “Everybody’s got a heart to sink” sounds awfully familiar. Malkmus showed his hand about influences on the song’s creation in the same 2020 Fader interview:

“I wish I could remember if I’d even heard of LCD Soundsystem or dance punk at that point. I’d bought a drum trigger machine, which was how [‘Kindling for the Master’] started. I think everyone who doesn’t play bass eventually wants to do these type of things in their songs, and I couldn’t wait to do wannabe Prince funk things. Maybe it references Beck’s Midnite Vultures — I can’t even remember if I liked that album back then. Maybe I was trying to parody the Rapture’s’ ‘House of Jealous Lovers.’ We did some cool remixes with Hot Chip and some British people that Lawrence from Domino recommended, too.”

Not only could “Kindling for the Master” be slotted in alongside the rest of Groove Denied, it might be where Malkmus’s entire build-a-song-from-the-ground-up-with-synths method began. Another song that fits this paradigm is “Difficulties / Let Them Eat Vowels.” Well, part of it:

The track starts off with a melding of strings and horns for the big rock and roll sound found throughout Sparkle Hard. The entirety of the “Difficulties” section of the song is like a grand, sweeping statement, complete with a sing-along aspect straight out of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” It’s a natural album closer, embracing the approach of the rest of Sparkle Hard. Except the song doesn’t end there. The band transitions into something else midway through. The “Let Them Eat Vowels” portion feels like something else; namely, it feels like a song from Groove Denied. Though the full band is playing, highlighted by funky scratch guitar and groovy keyboards, it’s different from the Jicks sound on the rest of the Sparkle Hard. This may be due to the multiple, weird vocals laden with effects similar to the employment of the artificial Beal voice in “Forget Your Place.” 

Why connect “Difficulties” and “Let Them Eat Vowels” into one song? And why end the album with the weirdness of the latter when the former is a prototypical album closer? Recall that Groove Denied was already in the can at this point and rejected put on hold by Matador. “Let Them Eat Vowels” works as a transition to Groove Denied. For Malkmus, it points the way to this new sound that Matador was so concerned would feel jarring to the critics and fans.

Even with Malkmus dropping audio breadcrumbs to lead the way towards his next musical step, the back half of Groove Denied contains sounds that are close to traditional Malkmus songs. The piano-led, sweet melody of “Grown Nothing” could fit well on Face the Truth. A few tracks would respond well to full-band Jicks arrangements, including “Ocean of Revenge” and the Nuggets-y sound of “Love the Door.” Malkmus front-loaded Groove Denied with the weirder, more experimental tracks as a jolt to the system, whereas the more guitar-centric selections came towards the end of the album’s running order. Malkmus said as much in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 2019:

“It’s not that experimental. It’s just me with drum machines. … It’s only me on all the instruments and production and engineering. Guitars are not the focus. They’re on there, but the guitar player’s not really the alpha. Towards the end, it starts bleeding into guitar-ness. It’s waters I don’t usually swim in. I don’t think it’s too much of a head-scratcher.”

After releasing Groove Denied, Malkmus committed to the solo musician bit. The Jicks Picks collection contains a number of live solo Malkmus tapes from this time period, many of which are fascinating. Friend of Recliner Notes Bryan Morrisey shared the following account of seeing him play live in Milan on September 27, 2019:

“The Santeria Toscana 31 was a restaurant with a back room and a bar which was pretty small. I think once he got up on stage there were maybe 100 people in attendance. It was just him, a guitar, small orange amp, laptop, keyboard connected to a laptop through an Apogee interface, and of course a handful of pedals. He was way more on the guitar than the keyboard. He started the show on the computer and keyboard, just making weird noises. But then after that he would hit the computer and get a beat or sound going and then play guitar over the top of it. But 100% just him.”

Bryan dug up a video from this performance at Santeria Toscana 31 that depicts Malkmus talking to a girl who Bryan said was right up front, giving him feedback after every song. Bryan reports that at one point, Malkmus said to her: “Yer really speaking truth to power, eh?” The video also shows, as Bryan said, how Malkmus employed pre-recorded loops or samples over which he played guitar, allowing him to perform the Pavement classic “Fight This Generation” in solo mode:

Up until this point in his career, Malkmus never really did an extended experiment with other genres. He mostly performed rock songs on rock albums. Sure, he dabbled with specific sounds from album to album, but no full genre exercises like Neil Young’s 50s rockabilly rave up Everybody’s Rockin’ or the Elvis Costello-goes-to-Nashville record Almost Blue. Matador Records eventually came to understand that Malkmus had earned the right to build a different yet specific type of sonic experience. As Groove Denied demonstrates, he isn’t simply fucking around or taking years and spending millions of dollars à la Axl Rose and Chinese Democracy. Malkmus is an old pro by now; he knows what he’s doing. “Forget Your Place” is a distinct example of Malkmus’s ability to create soundscapes using new tools. It also proves that he fits the ideal envisioned in the song’s lyrics; he is in fact a 24/7 creative adult and living in a world of imagination and art.

Photo courtesy @degi14