The Fall -- The Infotainment Scan

(Matador 92263)

Disco has long been -- along with opera -- the most bourgeois of musics, drawing in white-suited Capotes, cocaine-sniffing Bernsteins and cruisy Beattys to create a cauldron of glitter that, when mixed with champagne, creates the ultimate headrush for personalities trying desperately to separate themselves from people.

Punk didn’t merely emerge as Disco’s antithesis. That’s why the bourgeois still slum at low-rent discos, not high-rent punk clubs. I remain fascinated by those rare blendings of disco and punk (Pylon’s Gyrate established the model for the ‘80’s; the Three Johns’ "Death of Everything" may set the standard for this decade), not because they mix musical styles but because they assault two political ideals (and "disco" and "punk" are every bit as political as "libertarianism" or "socialism") and forge weird and unpredictable political compromises.

If disco = fascism and punk = anarchy, then disco/punk = X.

Let the Fall’s new The Infotainment Scan = X.

It’s the dancing-est yet, and their best since 1986’s This Nation’s Saving Grace, which featured the "L.A." single that initiated their brazen and controversial foray into disco punk.

The anger of Mark E. Smith’s poetry blends so perfectly with the auto percussion machine and manual drum whomps, I’m convinced this will inspire at least a half dozen imitators who will find greater chart success. But Smith’s delivery is inimitable, and spews from a cup half full of anarchy -- ranting about Britain’s Suede-driven glam rock revival, leagues of (bald-headed) baseball cap wearers, and Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification trip. He still sells himself as an aesthetic czar, self-hired to cast invective on pretenders, pioneers and other pissdrinkers trying to shred away the last semblance of "punk" in English Pop Culture. Yet for the first time in their careers, The Fall have gone in all the way for the disco sound and the disco politic.

This is disco remade as punk rather than vice-versa, a strategy that kept Pylon and the Three Johns from the gallows. The Fall cover Sister Sledge’s "Lost in Music" as a gut-wrenching last stand for all that is decent and righteous, then toss off Lee Perry’s "Why Are People Grudgeful" as a pithy in-joke for the Georgio Moroder Nation.

If one listens to this CD blindfolded, with cigarette held tightly as possible between lips, one can easily sense how fully the music -- or, rather, the beats -- shape Smith’s meaning. The subjective is replaced by the objective. The points are made more forcefully, but with a ring of hollowness that necessarily encircles disco, baby, disco. Enmesh Suede. Go to hell. Vote Labour. Hit the ball with your glam racquet.

The Infotainment Scan is the compromise between history and innocence that we should have expected from Mark E. Smith and the Fall long before now. It’s a glass half-filled with fascism and for that, the band should be hung.

--- Dave Harrison / Catharsis #32 - July 1993