Day 34: "S.C.I.E.N.C.E." - Incubus (1997)

Sometimes I see an album in the Pile and I think "Oh, I know what I am going to write about for this one".  Mentally I was all prepared to tell the sad tale of how Kate and I broke up, what led to it, and why this album reminds me of that.  However, a strange thing happened.  I was listening to this album while repainting our bedroom walls (just a touch up, some of the paint was looking grubby from when I first did it 7 years ago), and the more I listened to it, the more I realised I had totally missed the point of it back in 1997, and how relevant it is to what is happening in the world today.

So instead, I'm going to talk about reinterpreting old albums, and the crossover of music and politics.  We will get to the Kate story later, "Make Yourself" and "Enjoy Incubus" are still on The Pile somewhere...

Listen to me here

Let's start with something slightly off topic though.  While I was listening to this, which is an album I probably listened to a great deal back in the late 90s and then stopped almost dead (and certainly haven't listened too for over a decade), the intro to "A Certain Shade Of Green" came on and gave me instant flashbacks of nights spent in Sheffield "Corporation" nightclub.   Corp is the kind of sordid terrible dive that completely perpetuates every stereotype of rock and metal clubs that you could imagine. Strangely, for the era this album was released in, it reminds me more of the current venue for Corp (which has moved around Sheffield to 4 different venues since I first went back in 1996) than the one which would have housed it back in 1997.  

There was a time where, I was living in a flat in Chesterfield on my own;  mostly broke, extremely depressed, and suffering from constant insomnia.  One of the ways I tried to combat that was I would, on a Saturday night at about 10.45pm, get in my car, drive to Sheffield, pay my £5 to go to Corp, go to the upstairs alternative/metal room, wait for the dancefloor to fill up, and just go out on my own and thrash around on the dancefloor for 2-3 hours, then drive home again, having drunk nothing but water all night.  It felt like a good way to exhaust myself, work through some frustration, and it was better value than a gym membership in my mind.  "A Certain Shade Of Green" would always be a floor filler on those nights, and hearing the intro to that again instantly took me back to that sweaty, sticky-floored, too-dark-to-see dancefloor.

However, the real revelation I had listening back to this was that I had somehow back in 1997 completely missed the fact that this was (or maybe I am just over-interpreting it now, perhaps) a weirdly political protest album.  When I think of political bands from the 90s, I think about Consolidated, I think about Fugazi, and Rage Against The Machine, and laterly System Of A Down. Incubus always to me occupied the softer, fuzzier side of alternative music which was about relationships and feelings - a kind of precursor to what would become Emo/Screamo music today.

Obviously, I just didn't give them enough credit.  There are at least 6 tracks on here which are overtly political in nature, and feel relevant today.  This first struck me when I was painting and listening to the lyrics of "Idiot Box" and thinking how, in a climate of "Fake News" and propaganda, how lyrically relevant a song about people not challenging what they see on TV is.  Then went back and started again.  "Vitamin" is a straight up call to action;  so is "A Certain Shade Of Green".  "Favourite Things" has a chorus which is a pretty direct challenge to the status quo (rather than being a challenge to Status Quo, which would be an unfair 3 vs 4 fight, not even considering the age difference between the bands).

There's a such a difference tonally here between this album and "Make Yourself", which is the kind of tone and sound I associate in my head with Incubus (like the nauseatingly saccharine "Stellar"), but it's becoming increasingly obvious to me now that I have been doing Incubus (well, at least, early Incubus) a disservice by painting them as some wishy-washy cuddly feelings band.  "S.C.I.E.N.C.E" is such a weird combination of styles and feels a little all over the place, but there's an undercurrent of youthful anger that runs all the way through it in a really effective, if slightly on the nose, way.

I read an article recently about the death of protest music.  I don't know if I am just not plugged in enough to what kids are listening to today, but if there is protest and political music out there being made in 2017, it's on the fringes, away from where the corporate big bands are careful not to alienate any part of their audience by making contentious statements.  I feel like rap, certainly in America, has become the music of protest.  Someone said, on the election of Donald Trump, that 2017 was going to produce a lot of good protest music.  I'm still waiting.

I wonder how I missed the message of this album at the time.  I mean, it's entirely possible 21 year old me was far too wrapped up in his own business to be thinking about what was happening in the world outside his own social bubble.  Maybe I've never really listened closely enough to it to actually think about what the lyrics might be trying to convey until today.  I feel like I've seen it in a whole new light now, and while the sound might significantly dated, looking around the world at the moment its hard to think of a time when their messages on this album could feel more relevant.

Way to go Incubus.  I didn't know you had it in ya.