Milovan Djilas’ Obscure Music Hour!

Well this is my answer to Tito’s song of the week columns. In it I will deal with more esoteric music, music you’re unlikely to have heard of, probably, maybe. Expect more about Voodoo Glow Skulls than about Audioslave, and more on Dirty and the Mudflaps than Guster. By the way, Milovan Djilas was Tito’s Vice President in Yugoslavia until around 1948, so I felt it was a fitting name to adopt.

I realize that Smith Michaels will hate me for this, but my obscure song this week is John Fruciante’s “Enter a Uh”. I am one of two people I know that actually liked this song when I heard it, here’s why. I realize that it is 8 minutes long and that Fruciante’s singing style is somewhat grating in a lot of this song. What I find interesting is how willing he is to experiment in the song, shifting singing voices, tempos, and musical themes throughout, and never repeating himself. Certainly it doesn’t always work out, but I respect the fact that he is willing to try something new, something original.

The music itself is very simple, with a repeating feedback riff that is fairly haunting even as he is yelling into the microphone or mumbling incoherently. While I can’t really determine what the song is about (beyond the “uh”? of the title), it seems very clear that this is a drug consciousness song. I would bet dollars to bags full of pcp laced weed that the sounds of toking heard at the beginning of the song are genuine, and I dare anyone to find a song that shows more clearly the influence of drug use in writing and performing. The result is a song with a kind of nonsensical poetry such as “It isnt so task true key/ Insandrium heart leave back/” and a sound that you’re just not going to hear anywhere else. This is not the kind of song that many people are going to like, but I think it is an excellent and interesting piece, and recommend it to anyone looking for something strange and new.

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