Cheer-Accident
Great pop is about giving the people what they want, but great experimental music is about giving the people something they didn’t want, because it hadn’t occurred to them yet. Lots of music fans don’t particularly want too much of the element of surprise: they aim to nurture and maintain a specific mood and don’t like being snapped out of it, which is why genres that celebrate the familiar sell so well. But the fact is, even surprise becomes familiar. Free jazz has conventions of its own based on 40-year-old Ornette Coleman records; much avant-garde music remains comfortably within the confines of John Cage’s 50-year-old turf. Confrontational stage antics cease to be truly so the minute the audience knows they’re coming and starts paying to see them, and most legitimately unpredictable performers–Axl Rose, say–lose currency fast.
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Maybe surprise is just flat-out overrated: it’s certainly overhyped, claimed to exist in places where it really doesn’t. Maybe the worship of it in rock fandom is a hangover from the Woodstock Nation days, back when the drugs were so good people were often genuinely shocked by sunrise. Still, there’s a kernel of real need there, and I’ve caught myself wanting surprise so badly I’ve tried to will it into being. You probably have too.
According to cofounder Thymme Jones (via e-mail), the project began when “we were still in high school and would just sporadically (there was a community of about 7 or 8 of us dorks) get together to either free-form improvise or work on structured material. All of this would get recorded. (I can assure you!) CHEER-ACCIDENT was merely the umbrella for all of the stuff that gushed out of us whenever we would all get together. We didn’t become a proper band until July of ’87 when Chris Block, Jeff Libersher, and I played our first show.” (Due to the proliferation of cassettes distributed among various sets of friends and wider, Jones isn’t sure how many records Cheer-Accident can be said to have made–conflicting discographies abound–but he reckons it more or less from Sever Roots, Tree Dies, which the group released on vinyl in 1988.)
This is a band that’s kept a cable-access show, Cool Clown Ground, going for ten years as a side project; this is a band that understands the proper place of theatrics, which is to say, all over the place–a far cry from the dour antiperformance of some avant-garde players. Yet it’s never quite “theater”: there’s never a point at which listeners can say to themselves, “Oh, that’s what it means!” and thereby let themselves pay less than full attention. Each successive passage, be it dreamy-sweet or aggressively crunchy, demands to be savored, because it won’t last long.
