Freak When Spoken To

by Anastasia Jonsen

  Freak Kitchen also incorporate all sorts of odd or unusual elements and influences in in their music. This is very difficult to do seamlessly, to avoid a patch-work kind of feeling. Linus says that to his ears, it’s very obvious when the Indian influences or the jazzy tonality bits appear, for instance.

  “But do they have to be completely integrated? I think they make a thing out of it, and that’s cool. Take for instance the middle part of ‘The Sinking Planet’, where you get this surprise section which works really well because it’s thought through. But should you want to strive for a more seamless sound, you could always ‘mask’ it, let another instrument cover its slightly more unusual sound or time signature. And even just by transferring the Indian elements into western rock, you’ve already covered the edges somewhat.”

  If you’re interested in rock music from the Western world, you can probably give a rudimentary explanation of its elements and traits. The Indian music IA uses is a different matter, and it’s probably not that common that musicians outside of India can define it in music theory terms. Linus explains the Indian element in Freak Kitchen’s music.

  “First and foremost the scales are a lot different from the ones used in traditional Western music. We sometimes talk about the concept of church modes, and that concept goes for the Indian style as well. You start out with one basic scale, but you can get more scales if you begin at another note within that scale and use that as a root note. This is what IA has done. He takes a scale, but starts out from another note, which gives the impression of a whole new scale, because you get another sense of where ‘home’ is. In the Indian scales, it’s common to use chromaticism, meaning many notes with just a half step between them, as opposed to most of the traditional Western scales and church modes that use a half step at only two parts of the scale and the rest of the notes have a whole step between them, which makes it very interesting when it comes to the harmonies.”

  The music fan who mainly listens to Western music may sometimes hear notes in Indian music which sound “out of tune”. This is, however, not present in Freak Kitchen’s music, despite the Indian influences.

  “It’s important to remember that India is a huge country with many different variations in music and culture, and the particular style IA concentrates on, doesn’t contain all traits you’ll find in other regions of India. There is Indian music where some of the scales have microtones in them that occur in between our Western half and whole steps. We may hear those microtonal notes as ‘out of tune’ because we’re not used to them. I think there are two reasons why you won’t hear them in Freak Kitchen’s music. IA probably wants to keep the music more accessible to westerners and there would also be certain technical problems, as his guitars wouldn’t allow for microtonality unless he bends the strings just right, which could be difficult in faster paced music. And sometimes in the Indian tonality, you may get what we perceive as minor and major simultaneously, because in some of the Indian scales there is both a minor and a major 3rd, as heard in the track ‘OK’. Sometimes people who are used to listening only to Western scales perceive this as somewhat tonally askew.”

  “The Indian concepts IA has incorporated are not just to do with tonality, but with time and rhythm as well. There are rhythmical structures in Indian music which are not used in the same way in Western music. They may have long parts of rhythms that are cut off, extended or repeated until it evens out. The listener may feel that the rhythm has strayed very far from the basic rhythm before finally landing on ‘beat one’ again. The pattern may increase or decrease and it’s quite mathematical, where you may have to add a phrase in the end up to make it add up.”

  “In ‘Murder Groupie’ there is a very interesting rhythmic concept in the chorus/main riff. It’s an Indian music concept where you add one note every time you start over, and the lyrics follow the same idea. The first note is a longer note (a dotted 8th note, which means that it’s 1½ the length of a normal 8th note), and all the notes added thereafter are shorter (regular 8th notes). With L = long note and S = short note, the full rhythmic pattern goes like this:

  L, S-L, S-S-L, S-S-S-L, S-S-S-S-L, S-S-S-S-S-L.

  What’s extra interesting about this pattern is that while it’s based on odd-time phrasing, it all adds up against three bars of regular 4/4 time.”

  “In ‘Mathematics of Defeat’, the main riff is a reversed variation of the ‘add one note when it starts over’ concept in ‘Murder Groupie’. Here we have a pattern with regular 8th notes as the long notes (L) and regular 16th notes as the short notes (S). But instead of adding one short note each time it starts over, two long notes are cut off, making the riff shrink instead of grow (as it does in ‘Murder Groupie’). The pattern looks like this:

  S-S-S-L-L-L-S-S-S-L-L-L x2, S-S-S-L-L-S-S-S-L-L x2, S-S-S-L-S-S-S-L x2, S-S-S-S-S-S x2

  …which is then followed by four heavy accents on regular quarter note beats. As with many previous examples, the drums keep a steady 4/4 beat over this fairly complicated pattern in order to keep it groovy and ‘dig along-able’.”

  IA speaks warmly about music theory and the benefits of studying it. He hasn’t studied music formally himself, but quickly realised he was missing something when his sister started questioning his racer shredding.

  “I could play my Flying V at top speed in my early teens, but she showed me a music book with notation of popular tunes and asked me if I could even play simple chords. I had no idea what it meant and I felt instantly that I had missed something elementary. Next stop, town library! So I’m self-taught and I even learned notation by sitting at home, cramming the stuff.”

  IA studied music theory books and had eureka moments almost every day. He says it felt liberating to know the definitions and terms for everything he loved in music and since then, he’s always been partial to music theory.

  “That’s my music education pretty much summed up: learn stuff by heart which means something to me, absorb knowledge from books, record myself and listen over and over in order to single out what can be improved.”

  Lyrical Analysis Nerdery

  IN 2002, IT WAS FINALLY TIME for the new members to show the world what they were made of. They had toured and played old material for nearly two years, but now they had a new album out. The reviews for Move were generally positive: nobody seemed unhappy with the new lineup, but some people weren’t convinced by the sound. Many reviewers mentioned the addition of double bass drums and applauded the new direction. IA’s increased focus on social commentary started to dawn on listeners and reviewers around this time and was commented with everything from “faux-intellectual” to “ingenious but hardly elegant”, “beautiful and painfully to-the-point” and “necessary in a shallow world […] an honesty not often seen in the prog rock world”.

  Most of the lyrics which are perceived as “zany” are in fact satirical rather than just simple, random and funny. But Freak Kitchen has a mischievous and silly side too. For instance in “Michael & the Syndrome”, there is a very suitable intro speech by the man himself, Mike Spritz. Before being played back in reverse, the spoken section goes: “Well, you wanna have a photo session, huh? Well, I’ve got to finish my cigar, but first I’ve got to take a couple of cocktails too. Mmm-yeah!” This silly side is, however, not present in any way whatsoever on Move. In fact, IA’s lyrics here are almost borderline cynical in many cases. Before, they had regularly been called “tongue-in-cheek”, but perhaps IA was now showing that he had left the old Freak Kitchen behind him.

  One of the most talked about pieces of lyrics is “Porno Daddy”. Around the turn of the millennium, a local politician where IA lives made the headlines when his party expelled him. The reason was that he had taken part in several hardcore porn films. He was still active in the business and also debated the question on TV. What seems to have upset IA first and foremost wasn’t the fact that the man was a politician and a porn film actor, but that he had several children and acted in films which were described as pretty f
ar from mainstream. It’s not unlikely that the “daddy” himself knows about the song’s existence; it’s not a very big area they live in.

  There are plenty of examples where IA has met or come across people who behaved in ways he found irritating, inappropriate or just plain wrong, and used the situation in lyrics. It’s one thing to write about people you’ll never meet, such as the family of the girl in “Becky”, but quite another to write about a racist mother you met (“Honey, You’re a Nazi”) or an obnoxious person at a party (“Nobody’s Laughing”). IA isn’t bothered by the fact that these local people might find out about the lyrics.

  “To be honest, I couldn’t care less if they hear about it. I think their attitudes and actions need to be discussed. They’re adults and what they have said or done isn’t a secret.”

  Seeds to some of his lyrics are sometimes sown in situations like these, and most of IA’s ideas are born when he’s walking the family dogs, the German shepherds Bardo and Panja.

  “I always bring my small black notebook and a pen where I scribble down words and lines and ideas when they crop up. If I don’t make a clean copy of them on the computer right away, sometimes I can’t even read what I’ve written myself. I always write in capital letters and my handwriting is hopeless.”

  IA has said that he sometimes finds inspiration in films and books, but one of the more unusual triggers has been The Firebird, a ballet and orchestral concert work from 1910 by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. In the story, Prince Ivan rescues 13 princesses from an evil figure, Kashchei the Immortal. Yes, it’s “Mr. Kashchei & the 13 Prostitutes”! The Firebird in the story helps Ivan in exchange for its freedom, and tells Ivan how to kill Kashchei, and IA has very clearly and cleverly based his lyrics on this story.

  Not only does IA write music and select topics in an unconventional and highly varied way, he also pens his lyrics according to several different structures. He claims not to read poetry or study lyrics at all.

  “I don’t have any sense of poetic language and I don’t pay any attention to lyrics, apart from possibly in the music I listen to normally. What I hear in my head and what will work with the music is my starting point; I also focus on rhythm and what feels good to sing, the actual physical sensation in my mouth. I like rhymes if they’re not forced and awkward. I can go semi mental if the lyrics lack a good flow. I write and rewrite until I’m close to a one-way ticket to the loony bin.”

  His most common stanzas (verses) have the rhyming pattern ABCB, as for instance in “Sloppy”:

  Bleeding information in every move you make (A)

  You’re not alone anymore (B)

  Big brother is watching (C)

  Like he never watched before (B)

  This rhyming pattern is found in a variety of songs, such as “Dead Soul Man”, “Shithead”, “Vaseline Bizniz” and “Burning Bridges”, sometimes followed by rhyming couplets. This is quite a common pattern in rock lyrics, and we also see sequences of rhyming couplets, for instance in “The Rights to You” (AABB). The verses in “Private Property” and “See You in Pittsburgh” also use mostly rhyming couplets (AABBCC + AABBCC and AABB + AACC + DDEE, respectively). But in the latter track, we see an example of how IA breaks the structure by using internal rhymes, (life + knife), within the body of the line rather than at the end. This is a way to create lyrical dissonance, and it mirrors the lyrical content very well: “But it’s my life, it’s my Swiss army-knife/Do as I want, I’ll cut myself free”.

  However, IA also writes more unusual patterns which may at first glance look like free verse, but have a thought behind them. We see this in, for instance, “Chest Pain Waltz”, where the pattern is AABCA, with a bridge, a chorus and a repetition of the song title. Another piece of lyrics which looks like random lines with occasional end-rhymes, but has quite a complex structure, is “Super Model Baby”: AAB + CDED + FFB + repeat chorus + GGHI + JKLK.

  As it happens, these two songs also have a clever musical structure, which Linus explains.

  “In ‘Chest Pain Waltz’ we find another example of IA’s ‘open string chord’ trick. The chorus has a neat little rhythmical thing going on where the guitar and bass riff is one 8th note ahead of the drum beat when it starts over, creating a backbeat feeling which is later resolved by adding extra notes at the end of the riff to make it add up to 4/4 time with the drums. It could be analysed as drums playing in regular 4/4 all the way while the guitar and bass play a pattern of 15/8 x2 + 2/8 = 32/8 which equals four bars of 4/4.”

  “The riff after the intro in ‘Super Model Baby’ has a similar structure to ‘Silence!’ and ‘Blind’ with a guitar and bass riff in 7/16, but where the drums play a straight quarter note beat. The riff is played four times and aligns with the drum beat after seven quarter note beats (the drums can be analysed as being in 7/4) but then on the snare drum hit instead of the bass drum hit, so the pattern isn’t actually fully resolved until after 14 quarter note beats, when the riff has been played eight times. (This is also the case with the intro riff and drum beat in previously mentioned ‘Blind’.) The section before the guitar solo has a 5/16 riff which is a shortened version of the regular 4/4 verse riff, and this is one of few times where the drums actually play a fast odd-time signature together with guitar and bass, instead of superimposing a more straight and quarter note-based beat.”

  There are also stanzas which depend on each other for rhymes, so called chain verse, such as in “Mussolini Mind” with an initial AAB + CCB. In this case, you’d expect a repetition of that pattern after the chorus, but IA has instead divided the rest of the lyrics into a slightly more random set-up, likely because he needed to adjust to the rhythm of the music. There are also other examples where he uses chain verse, for instance in “Inner Revolution”, where the stanzas follow the strict rhyming pattern ABC + DEC + chorus, FGH + IJH + chorus. Interestingly, these tracks are described as fairly straightforward by Linus.

  One of the most well-crafted pieces of lyrics is found in “(Saving Up for an) Anal Bleach”. The verses are structured as follows: AABC + DDEC + FFGH + IIJH + KKLM + NNOM. This is not just IA showing off his rhyming skills; because the lyrical content is so harsh, you need a strict structure in order for the content not to come across as IA just spewing hate.

  There are, however, a number of songs where IA has clearly prioritized content, rhythm or a general flow before conventional verse structure, for instance “Clean It Up”, “Michael & the Syndrome”, “Scattered” and “The Sinking Planet”.

  In “The Sinking Planet”, focus is indeed on lyrical content and musical composition rather than rhyming patterns, as Linus illustrates in the analysis.

  “There’s a tempo shift in the instrumental section where the new faster tempo is derived from what would be quarter note triplets (three equally long notes within the space of two quarter note beats) in the old tempo. However, no triplets are actually played before the actual change happens and therefore it feels like a random tempo change – but after the solo, right before the break where the intro riff comes back, the original tempo returns and there are two bars of 4/4 played with only quarter note triplets, which feels the same as four bars of 3/4 in the faster tempo. Clever and tricky stuff!”

  Even if the lyrics structures aren’t unique, some of the rhymes certainly are. Sometimes they’re just plain funny (dope/nope, hypocrite/hippo-shit, juice/moose, Voltaire/pubic hair) and other times you can actually tell that IA has done his research. In “Super Model Baby”, the lines “Striving for that Third World Look/Skinny is trendy (with a matching doek)” aren’t just an awkward way of getting the rhymes to add up, because a doek is a square of cloth worn mainly by African women. This is, albeit not the main theme of the song, a criticism against cultural appropriation, where white, privileged people use traits of a less privileged group as a fashion statement.

  Although you can certainly find very serious lyrics on the early Freak Kitchen albums, there are definitely fewer silly or light-weight songs on
the later albums. IA says he hopes he has developed as a lyricist.

  “I think I’ve matured a bit. God, that sounds boring. Let’s say I’ve grown a little more insightful. Not everything I write is amazingly exceptional, that’s for sure, but there are certain moments were I feel I really put my finger on something. If I manage to expand my lyrical territory a little bit for each album, I’m satisfied. It doesn’t have to be ingenious all the time; nobody can do that. The important thing is that the essence of what I’m trying to say gets across.”

  Christian and Joakim openly said that they didn’t subscribe to everything IA said in his lyrics. If official opinions of the band members are anything to go by, a qualified guess is that Björn and Christer are more in tune with IA’s lyrics.

  “Sometimes they have very delicately expressed thoughts they might have about certain topics, where they think I’ve exaggerated, but it’s very rare. We share much of our outlook on life and general philosophy. And nowadays both Björn and Christer are pretty much vegetarians too, to the great frustration of many gig organizers who very often seem to be stuck at the moronic Neanderthal stage. Meat! Meat! Meat! It goes hand in hand with metal! No, it bloody doesn’t; that’s nonsense.”

  Björn has experience of IA as a lyricist, both as a fan and as a member of the band.

  “I liked his lyrics right from the start because they dealt with such a variety of topics – but sometimes in a slightly odd way: too much lecturing. As if there were no good kinds of personality in the world at all and that didn’t fit in with my pretty positive view of the world. But I think IA has realised that finger-pointing isn’t always the best way to criticise things, because around Move he started to include himself: ‘How did we become such hateful little people.’ And I think that’s a healthier attitude, to realise that we’re all a part of this world.”

  Björn appreciates IA’s precise way of expressing his thoughts, as well as the fact that he hasn’t got a typical vocalist manner.