Album of the Year, 1979: Can, self-titled

No one can talk sense into a crazy man

Album of the Year is a recurring column that examines one album from each year of my lifetime and digs into what it means to me and others, whether it's a well-known popular favorite or a half-remembered niche obscurity. This installation concerns the awkwardness that comes from discovering an influential underground-favorite band through the wrong album.

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Getting into a cult band in the late '90s required engaging with three phenomena that are now more-or-less endangered if not wholly extinct. The first two are intertwined in a way, and are products of a subcultural drive that doesn't seem to be as prominent now as it was back then: a word-of-mouth advocacy for a defunct obscurity, and the social desirability of the tendency to seek this obscurity out. (Both these things became "hipster"-coded sometime during the Web 2.0 era, and therefore deemed to be avoided as much as possible now.) The third thing, the physical venue where you are given a limited and inventory-dependent opportunity to start exploring this obscurity, is definitely no longer the first or easiest route into finding out more things about an artist that seems like an unknown quantity to you. If there is still someone in your life willing to say things like "they're pretty obscure but you might like them" and you still are able to hear someone say that and reply "oh cool" instead of rolling your eyes like an exasperated teenager, it's never been easier to figure it out from there. Just pull something up on a streaming site and then pinball between Rate Your Music and Discogs and even the dwindling number of actual music-journalism publications that still exist, and come away prepared to engage with this new-to-you thing on the terms of the people who have already spent many years enjoying it in a general consensus-approved kind of way.

This contemporary method of personal discovery is not how I got into Can. I bumbled my way into this band through a carelessly propped-open side door, then got lost in the hallways Spinal Tap style before eventually Hello Clevelanding my way into the stretch of albums they recorded from 1969 to 1973 that made them revered standardbearers for Krautrock. Misstep number one: the first Can album I ever bought wasn't even an original release. It was Sacrilege, the 1997 remix collection put out by Mute that, according to most fans who heard it, really lived up to its name. There are a few cuts I still like: U.N.K.L.E. capitalizing off the place "Vitamin C" holds in the hip-hop break canon to create a zooted extended dub; Carl Craig's mecha-organic "Blade Runner mix" of "Future Days"; the swooning downtempo 3p Mix of "Yoo Doo Right" that reminds me a bit of Chemical Brothers Leave Home deep cut "One Too Many Mornings". But it wasn't the most direct route towards enjoying Can as Can, and they remained this vague hip namedrop that still held a lot of mystery for me because I hadn't quite gotten to the point yet where I could read The Wire without feeling like this stuff was all over my head.

So when I finally bought my first CD by Can, or at least a band operating under that name with most of its original personnel, I wound up taking whatever immediate opportunity my local record store could offer me. And this meant that, sometime in the haze of a crummy stretch of the late '90s my brain has refused to substantially catalogue memories of, I found my introduction to one of the most exciting bands of the 1970s in the last album they released that decade before calling it quits for another ten years¹. The second half of the '70s was sort of an extended nadir of the band, sparked in part by the departure of singer Damo Suzuki, and only allayed by the fluke-hit charm of 1976 UK hit "I Want More" and the generally agreeable if kinda-safe disco-funk excursions of its parent album Flow Motion. But bassist Holger Czukay ceded his pivotal position in the band for Saw Delight and recused himself the group entirely save his longstanding tape-edit role shortly after its release. (He is at least on the record as being fairly charitable to much of the band's vision during this stretch.) So they wound up in a state of flux that culminated in the thoroughly-disowned '78 dud Out of Reach and the temporarily-conclusive endcap of this '79 self-titled record, alternately dubbed Inner Space and The Legendary Can on different regional pressings because who even cared at this point?

In buying this CD, I engaged in a fourth practically-extinct phenomenon that comes with the late '90s model of engaging with unheard music, which is the idea that if you spend somewhere between $12 and $18 for an album you should at least try to give it enough listens to justify the monetary investment one way or another. Sometimes this resulted in a kind of sunk cost fallacy, where the return on this investment didn't really pay off but you salvaged what you could and maybe committed the tracks you liked to a cassette or burned CD before selling the original back for like $4. But that's not exactly what happened with this album for me. I actually warmed up to it pretty quickly. In part this was because I didn't really have any examples of "real"/peak Can to compare it to and find it wanting, but also in part because it actually seemed to connect to a few things musically that I was already starting to get on board with.

At this point Can's remaining core are perpetually inventive guitarist Michael Karoli, avant-steeped and improv-adept keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, and most-aptly-named-drummer-in-history Jaki Liebezeit. To fill Czukay's reduced role in '77, they hired on two members of Steve Winwood's recently-defunct band Traffic, bassist Rosko Gee and percussionist Anthony Rebop Kwaku Baah. Only the latter played on The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, an overambitious yet good-natured jazz/rock/funk/prog/folk melange and one of my favorite unfashionable classic rock albums of the early '70s. But I still wound up forging some tenuous association between that LP and Can based on that slight case of shared personnel, plus the fact that both covers featured enigmatic cloudy airbrushed pop-art tableaus that seemed to embody the sentiment genre shmenre, we're going exploring and the only way is up. I had no idea of how disappointing this lineup's previous two albums had been, so I went into Can with a clean-slate open mind and no real stringent demands other than a desire to avoid boredom.

My demand was met and then some. In hindsight I get the antipathy for Saw Delight and Out of Reach -- uneven-to-mediocre albums I wouldn't hear until well after this album steered me towards that crucial Monster Movie to Future Days stretch of their discography. But Can sounds to me like this lineup finally clicking into place before cutting their losses and ending on as high a note as you could probably expect from this configuration. They're not quite as prone to moments of shock and unpredictability as the band at their early '70s heights, but I didn't have that background at the time. What I heard instead was a sort of playfully askew suite of songs from jam-prone art rock band with a heavy emphasis on funk-simpatico groove and a lead guitarist who seemed to fit in this odd space I would later place somewhere between Robert Fripp and Ernie Isley. Having as little context as possible about what Can were "supposed" to be might've actually been something of a benefit when the aggregate effect of hearing the songs on this album was a succession of variations on the reaction what in the hell is this? 

It turns out that would always be the right question to ask of this band. And so it was the little enigmas in the margins that drew me in closer once the immediate impact of the music caught my attention. "All Gates Open" is a song that sort of chugs and ambles (or choogles?) its way through a dazed-sounding expansion of the taut motorik energy that, I'd later discover, drove earlier cuts like "Moonshake." Its place in Can's discography was secure enough to inspire the title of an authorized history of the band, and Czukay framed it in his Perfect Sound Forever piece as the band's conclusive statement -- that they were in the process of freeing themselves from their longstanding roles and looking for their own paths outside. I've also read semi-apocryphal analysis, that I can no longer easily track down, that it's also a nod to the way their increased reliance on multi-track recordings altered the intra-band dynamic in itself. 

But the lyrics themselves, delivered by Karoli with a tone somewhere between affectless and contemplative, emphasize that one of the best traits of Can was their sense that this music was not so much improvised or shaped as it was just spontaneously yet intuitively transmitted amongst the members of the band. It turned out that this was a trait that their latter-era focus on more refined musicianship, accelerated by their usage of multi-track recording, was starting to sabotage. "Sometimes it is hard to say where the songs come from / Especially when there are so many around" is a pretty funny matter-of-fact way to address this, and there's a joke I could make about how often I feel this way when I try to do deeper analytical criticism. But again, that ties into the whole "not knowing everything" aspect I brought to this album that helped me enjoy it on a more open-ended level.

And that whole sense of vagueness around this album -- one that is by a version of Can many diehard fans don't recognize, one released under multiple titles, one that even tripped me up chronologically because Discogs files it under 1978 -- just added another layer of intrigue that lingers even now. Is the shuddering floppy-aluminum jazz-funk workout that serves as the album's fifth track titled "A Spectacle" or "Aspectacle," and if it's the latter, is that a portmanteau of "aspect" and "spectacle," and considering that, what connection does that draw to the lyrics, which seem to give an odd distance-related polarity between perception and autonomy ("Come near and you see / You walk out and you're free")? Is "Safe," besides being a semi-Balearic cosmic disco glide that flirts with being a kosmische version of Philly Soul, an internal callout because it pits unnamed people who "try their best and make everything quite easy and who aren't sure either which is the right way" against "all those friends who are obviously wrong"? How long had the Pink Floyd-on-codeine bummer dirge "Sodom" been kicking around in their heads, considering they recorded a song in '73 titled "Gomorrha" that almost sounds like it should be a companion piece? And, most importantly, why did they record that goofball rendition of the "galop infernal" can-can song from Jacques Offenbach's "Orpheus in the Underworld" and release it as the lead and only single?

Honestly, I think the album's sour rep does hinge more than it should on the last three cuts -- "E.F.S. No. 99: ‘Can-Can,’" its thematic variant b-side "Can Be," and the pointless interstitial track between the two that's just 20ish seconds of a game of ping-pong. Can started indulging their tendencies to engage in some lighthearted cultural appropriation pretty early on in their careers, even though most of the "Ethnological Forgery Series" didn't hit shelves until a bunch of them appeared on 1974's post-Damo odds-and-ends comp Limited Edition. And by designating this one with the fairly final-seeming #99, it seems to come across as a sort of snarky conclusion to an idea that they were only marginally inclined to take further than brief, often silly experimentations. Lop Can off after "Aspectacle" and while you've got an album that's only five tracks, so was Saw Delight and it's only five or so minutes longer than this would've been. Why did they completely upend the album's otherwise impeccable atmosphere for this? Again: who knows?

My friend and fellow writer Ned Raggett posted something recently to his Patreon that, among a lot of other points, notes that the streaming era has turned up a relatively new problem for music appreciation in that it sidelined the tendency to put the music of this young century in the same context-illuminating ways that reissues and box sets and their attendant liner notes did back in the peak CD era:

The celestial jukebox is one thing, but the eternal present means more and more is added to it without the need, much less the real incentive, to create a documentation of it. An analysis, a breakdown, a survey, a diving in and considering. Who needs that when there are playlists that can be occasionally added to or revised? Why not let the algorithm do the rest? Why can't a song find a place on TikTok to just rework the concept or history of how an act found their voice to start with?

This is true, and yet here I was some 25 years ago finding a connection to this album precisely because I was only vaguely aware at most as to where it stood in Can's wider body of work. It is a "lesser work" -- the second-lowest-scoring album of their original 1969-1979 run after Out of Reach on RYM, the recipient of a pitiable 2 ½ star rating from AllMusic (albeit accompanied by a diplomatically positive-leaning review), largely ignored or at least back-burnered in the retrospective analysis offered by Pitchfork and The Quietus. Sometimes when I get into an album like this and I discover after the fact that it's held in low esteem by the band's enthusiasts, it triggers this impulse inside me: the fervency of their dislike and their refusal to hear the same things I do makes me double down on what might've otherwise been a casual enjoyment, and I wind up reinforcing the impressions I first experienced when I first listened to it without any preconceptions. I can be kind of stubborn like that sometimes.

But honestly, I actually expected to like Can a bit less when I revisited it for this post, having not listened to it in full for a while. In the decades since I first copped this on CD I've joined every other Can fan in deeply loving albums like Monster Movie and Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi, in flipping out over the material resurfaced on The Lost Tapes (goddamn, "Millionenspiel"!), in finding new angles on the band's sense of slow-burning controlled chaos through the live concert reissues that've been issued over the last few years. So I wondered if being immersed in the work of the band at their peak would've had a detrimental effect on this last hurrah. Instead, I actually wound up liking "Safe" even more, and sunk into "All Gates Open" and the noodly-yet-brisk instrumental "Sunday Jam," the best of their "let's be Santana" moments, like comfortable furniture. Sometimes when you have a first impression that's more positive than it's supposed to be in the conventional wisdom scheme of things, that can be hard to shake. But sometimes that just means it's an album worth liking regardless. It's outside the parameters of the popular fan narrative, but it's not something anyone can earn credibility points for liking more than most people do. And without any real stakes or context beneath, it just feels like an album to enjoy on my own terms without making a big deal about having to fight on its behalf. That's pretty rare.

And, hey, if nothing else, you know who else found something to love about this album? Only one of the greatest hip-hop artists of my generation. So there's that.

1. There may be some people out there whose first Can album was 1989's Rite Time, and lord knows how that panned out for them.