LISTEN CLOSELY What you hear will be absurd(ist). |
Let's just allow that Doctor Astronaut is a digital maestro, an enjoyable and entertaining wordsmith, a progressive barrier crasher. All that said, just when do you give a spin to an '80s synth anthem that features a chorus of "really (need to/want to/should have) put my dick in you"?
Or, as it's written in the liner notes, "really want to put my 8===D in you."
Is that a second-date song nowadays? Seriously, while the first song, "Holemates," on Doc Astro's debut EP, Analogies, is ostensibly about a space traveler, I'm assuming this is all some kind of riff on "Doctor Ass-tronaut," since the man is about as obsessed with ass (and "pussy") as any artist I've come across since Dr. Octagon (the Octogonecologyst).
The saving grace: I never get a whiff of misogyny throughout the six increasingly absurdist tracks here. This could all fail epically if there were some kind of bedpost-notch recounting, but it's instead a kind of ode to the female form. Doc wants to be "the king of your pussy," and he's not ashamed to say it.
Are there people who would be offended by this? Well, of course. Lots of them. Maybe 75 percent of the adult population, I'm guessing. It's raunchy, over-the-top, and more than a little perverted by mainstream tastes. I don't intend to put it on at the Fourth of July family BBQ.
Nor is this a South Park/Andrew Dice Clay joke album, though. The music is serious, a progressive hip-hop/8-bit mash-up that's R Kelly by way of Donkey Kong, even if the subject matter defines puerile: "Can I hit that ass?/Because it won't stop looking at me."
It's hugely fun and silly and, like the best absurdist art, demands that we question the very foundations of our social mores. Why is all this sexual stuff so taboo? Why is the expression of base desires so frowned upon? Astronaut repeats and repeats these words and phrases of the bedroom (well, traditionally) until they lose all meaning and become rhyming words like any others, the building blocks of contemporary musical expression.
Marvin Gaye said it best: "Let's Get It On."
Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam_pfeifle@yahoo.com.
ANALOGIES | Released by Doctor Astronaut
