Electric Six: Fire and Fun

A gig in London at the weekend gives me an excuse to write about one of the most glorious acts in contemporary rock.

For sheer lyrical joy, Electric Six rival Sparks (another US band I have expatiated on here). And their tunes are even better.

The Detroit sextet made it big with its debut album Fire (2003). It included two hits. One was Gay Bar, in which a man’s offer to take a woman to a gay bar somehow segues into an invitation to “start a nuclear war” (above is a clip of Saturday’s rendition which I found on YouTube).

The other was Danger! High Voltage, which has flames engulf a disco, a Taco Bell outlet and the gates of hell, in that order.

The sound was so fresh that even such unhip publications as The New York Times and The Guardian raved about Fire.

When asked about that title, front-man and songwriter Dick Valentine explained that most hit songs mention heat, burning, or some kind of combustion. “When you sing about shit like ‘fire’, you sound cooler than who you really are,” he said.

Electric Six’s subsequent work has not set the music industry ablaze. But the band has kept a faithful following happy by churning out albums on a yearly basis.

My favourite is Switzerland (2006). At the time Valentine reassured fans that the new material was not as boring as a superficial observer might conclude: “For the first time, none of the songs have the word ‘dance’ or variation of ‘dance’ in the title. But fear not. We have songs with ‘drugs’ and ‘girls’… and ‘party’ in the title, so we haven’t given up on our philosophy just yet.”

Since then, Electric Six has maintained a pleasing balance between provocation and naffness in their album titles. These include:

. I Shall Exterminate Everything Around Me That Restricts Me From Being The Master
. Zodiac
. Bitch Don’t Let Me Die
. Roulette Stars of Metro Detroit
. Fresh Blood for Tired Vampires
. You’re Welcome!
. How Dare You?
. Bride of the Devil

One day someone will write a PhD thesis on this. But I’m no scholar, so will just illustrate Valentine’s poetic genius with a few snippets from his songs:

• Formula 409 begins with a paean to domestic detergents:

“You can clean your kitchen baby
Make it look good every time
You can use a little Mr Clean
Or Formula 409"

• I buy the drugs explains a dealer’s modus operandi:

“Send in a self-addressed stamped envelope to
PO Box 900, Los Angeles, California, 90212
And I will fill your prescription with some degree of accuracy
And then I’ll send it back to you”

. Slices of you spins the familiar metaphor of starvation for carnal desire, waxing Shakespearean:

“If music be the food of love, play on — but I’m really too hungry for just one song.”

. You’re Toast includes this development on the importance of rehearsing your chat-up lines:

“You can’t emote
What you ain’t made rote
There’s no antidote…
And it goes to the one
Who blazes the prose
And if you hesitate, lover
You’re toast, you’re toast, you’re toast.”

. Germans in Mexico turns the spotlight on an exiled community that artists have neglected for too long:

“There are Germans in Mexico, taking over tonight
Falling in love with your daughter”

• When cowboys file for divorce raises equally underexplored questions:

“When cowboys file for divorce
Where does the money go?
Who gets the kids?”

Electric Six can flirt with controversy, as in:

“Calling unprotected girls
Infected girls
Do it better” (Infected girls)

“She’s white, she is so white
I was born to excite her
She could never be whiter tonight” (She’s white)

“Girls like you make guys like me make love to a computer” (Rubber rocket)

But interpreting this as incel misogyny would be wrong. The above songs were written long before public discourse was poisoned by contrarian trolls and social-justice activists.

It is so obvious that Valentine does not take himself seriously that no one, not even the Guardian or the New York Times, can suspect him of venting nastiness. Ninety-nine percent of his lyrics, he has said, are “not about anything or anyone”.

And in so far as he has expressed ideas, these are of the centrist, anti-authoritarian sort.

Dark politics, one of his rare chansons engagées, is a rejection of all radical ideology — and happens to be historically correct:

“When Baron Von Schnitzel turned the last oven off
He left the lights on for Baron Von Stroganoff”

The only other openly political Electric Six song I know of is Gun Rights. Far from being a conservative hymn, it mocks a second-amendment freak who drones on about my “rights, rights, rights, rights, rights, rights, rights, rights, rights.”

Valentine’ absurdist brand of humour is incompatible with serious politics. But occasionally it can illuminate them. Back in 2015 he wrote:

“When Vladimir Putin stops commutin’
He runs around the Kremlin shootin’
Everything in sight.”

I’m aware of the woeful lack of music in this post. Words cannot do justice to any tune or beat, so I’ve focused on E6's lyrics. I leave you to click below for a fuller experience of their genius.