ZE30 - Ze Records Story 1979-2009 (2009)

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ZE30 - Ze Records Story 1979-2009 (2009)

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The adventurous New York label that helped to define the sound of early-1980s left-field dance music celebrates its 30th with a comp.
An almost-teacher growing up in the Bronx during the 1960s starts making disco records influenced by 30s jazz and Caribbean calypso during the mid-70s. A Harvard dropout and Village Voice theater critic is coerced by her boyfriend, heir to a British maternity-goods empire, to record some music. The suggestion is seconded by a Parisian punk-shop owner then new to New York. The song is called "Disco Clone", a brittle dance track by a hot woman about how all the hot women at the clubs look exactly the same, but that shouldn't stop boys from wanting to bed them. It's funny– it's a disco track, but a disco track that ridicules and defiles the image of disco.

Later, the dropout's record is produced by the almost-teacher, who has taken to wearing zoot suits. She calls him an "ice-cream soda," which is supposed to be an insult. Along the way, they're joined by a saxophonist who punches his audience members in the face, and a couple of friends from suburban Detroit who record abstract funk with beat poetry over it. This all happens in the span of about four years, during which Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban of Ze Records– and August Darnell, Cristina, James Chance and Was (Not Was)– change the shape of music around them. Very New York.

The records released on Ze at the dawn of the 80s wouldn't have had a comfortable home elsewhere. August Darnell, the almost-teacher (he earned a Master's in English with the intention of joining the vocation, but music intervened), had some success with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, but wanted more freedom– freedom he got as Ze's in-house producer and with his new project, Kid Creole and the Coconuts. James Chance and the Contortions made violent, anti-musical rock that people were calling "no wave," but Ze invited him to record disco– a chance he jumped at, presumably because it would enable him to piss off the fans he had accidentally earned trying to piss people off.

Some of the label's singles were fairly straight disco with a flair for theater– "Deputy of Love", for example, by Darnell's friends Don Armando's Second Avenue Rhumba Band. Others, like Was (Not Was)'s "Wheel Me Out," were songs only familiar when broken into discrete parts– a disembodied string melody, the purr of a woman's voice, hippie poetry, UFO sound effects making casual visits, Latin percussion. But together? Unpalatable to everyone– too glamorous and dance-oriented for the punks to buy, too freakish to ever work consistently at mainstream clubs or at Puerto Rican block parties on the Lower East Side. When it came time for the label to issue a compilation in 1981, they called it Mutant Disco.

Listening to Ze 30, compiled by Ze's Michel Esteban and Strut Records' Quinton Scott, you might think that Ze was a pretty good label instead of a great one. You would be misled. It certainly isn't the fault of the misfits who recorded all this fearless, cockeyed music, but Ze 30 is a confused baby. About half the cuts are obvious and half are obscure, raising the question of just who Strut and Ze were aiming at with this thing. After several listens, my guess is two-fold: Long-time fans and first time listeners. Naturally, they hit the woods.

Complaints: I don't need to hear Alan Vega of Suicide performing rockabilly. Material and Nona Hendyx's "Bustin' Out" definitely belongs here, but the extended version is a waste of space. I'm glad for James Chance's "Roving Eye"– "Contort Yourself" is, in the realm of 80s art-rock compilations, overrated and overexposed, which is funny considering that most people would probably find it unlistenable. Casino Music's cover of "The Beat Goes On" makes me very uncomfortable, which is more a statement of fact than a complaint. Selections for some of the label's biggest artists– including Cristina, Was (Not Was), and Kid Creole– feel like second choices, and while the songs are great, their inclusion feels problematic if the compilation really is being marketed as "the one Ze Records album you need to own."

But with access to a catalog as deep and frequently innovative as Ze's, "failure" is an accident of the mouth, a word with no meaning. The selections here do support Ze's reputation. They illustrate, in bullet points, not only what made the label special, but what made them influential to artists like the Chromatics, LCD Soundsystem, even M.I.A. (whose "Sunshowers" takes its name and hook from a Dr. Buzzard/August Darnell song). Lizzy Mercier Descloux's "Hard-Boiled Babe" is practically dubstep– so unprecedented that it's hard not to wonder what they were thinking while making it. On nearly every track, rules are broken, boundaries are stretched and pushed back into other territories.

(As an aside for people who might buy this but would want to supplement it with other tracks, here are some suggestions: Was (Not Was)'s "Wheel Me Out"; Cristina's "Disco Clone"; Lizzy Mercier Descloux's "Funky Stuff" or "Lady O K'pele"; Kid Creole's "Annie, I'm Not Your Daddy"; Coati Mundi's "Me No Pop I"– all songs I'd put on a single-disc compilation of the label, all available through Ze's own digital shop, eMusic, or iTunes.)

The current musical moment isn't a particularly great time to reissue this material. There's no particularly great time to be a brave weirdo. Or, it's always a great time. Mutant Disco, unfortunately, is out of print (though available through digital retailers). Ze 30 is a decent substitution, and is accompanied by great notes rife with first-person accounts of the label's history.

When Suicide went into the studio with the Cars' Ric Ocasek, Ze co-founder Michael Zilkha hoped they'd record something like Donna Summer's chilly, momentous "I Feel Love", a track that re-imagined what disco could do without abandoning it. The duo recorded "Dream Baby Dream", an insistent tick-tock of drum machines and glockenspiels offset by the moans of Alan Vega, who does a good impression of someone who has just taken a bad fall. A song by a band that hadn't found a venue they couldn't get kicked out of, sung by a frontman who used to take to the audience swinging a bike chain. A band that, three years earlier, had recorded a ten-minute long exercise in horrific screaming called "Frankie Teardrop". And a couple of label heads thought they could squeeze a dance hit out of them.