“Three Chord Rhumba” is built like a logic proof, a simple and efficient argument that stops after just a minute because the point has been made. Most of the early punks were attracted to blunt stripped down arrangements for its roots in earlier iterations of rock or for its utility in expressing anger and aggression but Wire focused in on the possibilities rock minimalism had to offer in servicing formal ideas and making it so cerebral lyrics could be presented with a musical punctuation that could make them physically engaging.
The first verse of “Three Girl Rhumba” is a structured like a game that seems designed to keep you distracted, like a musical version of Three-Card Monte. You think of numbers, open boxes, open and shut your eyes, think of more numbers. You end up with no numbers, and it doesn’t matter at all. But it’s not a nihilistic song – you end up doing the impossible to avoid the inevitable, and that seems pretty cool. Even better, the logic of the song moves towards a conclusion in which all efforts to project meaning on an experience is rejected in favor of just dancing.
OK, here’s a different card game. This time it’s all about luck and timing, and you win by making it appear to others like you actually have control over circumstances that are entirely random. Justine Frischmann demonstrates how it works by looking and sounding like the coolest human imaginable – androgynous, mysterious, effortlessly graceful, and casually flirty in a way that seems to presume that everyone’s interested and thus it’s all very low stakes. She almost seems bored by a positive outcome: “somehow the vital connection is made,” sung with a droll sarcasm that suggests it’s impossible to avoid her inevitable victory.
“Connection” famously lifts its riff from “Three Girl Rhumba” but it’s less a copy and more like a sequel – the Aliens to Wire’s Alien, in which core ideas that were once expressed with a brute minimalism are now presented with a sleek poppy maximalism. Elastica accessorize the spikey central riff with new wave synthesizers, alt-rock crunch, and a very ‘90s sort of gloss that sounds the way shiny vinyl clothing looks. Style for miles and miles, so much style that it’s wasted…
Stephen Malkmus is playing a game too; it’s called Telephone. He deliberately lifts the riff from a song that everyone knows to be a “rip off” – the essence of popular music if we’re being real, but being a clever songwriter he only just uses it as a starting point before heading off in his own direction. So maybe the game he’s playing is actually Exquisite Corpse? He complicates the riff a bit while keeping its energy – always a smart way to avoid legal issues – and by the middle he’s off on more of a Stereolab-gone-feral tangent.
Malkmus possesses a slacker elegance similar to that of Frischmann and a playful mind comparable to Newman, but he doesn’t come off anywhere near as severe as either. “Westy” is very silly in a way that feels distinctly American to me in much the same way that Frischmann’s version of sexiness and Newman’s sort of intensity feels specifically English. Malkmus stacks evocative phrases like he’s fully in the zone with a magnetic poetry kit, each verse ending in a punchline – “all embrace and segue to the burning masses,” “brings to mind the portraits on the coinages and Lincoln’s beard…but why’s he got a horse’s body??” The impossibilities that are inevitable here are all fanciful and strange.
