Part III-2: The Descent Still Cum-Tinues Unimpeen-ded

Following my earlier methodology, I’ll now attempt to condense the sixty minutes of Forty Dicks into a manageable, cogent and beautifully written narrative, with brilliant, insightful asides devoted to examining and interpreting certain aspects of the album. Feel free to listen as you read, you multi-tasker you, for in doing so you will find that Forty Dicks is above all else a philosophical treatise – a dicklaration of the moral cumpulsions signifagcunt to a specifuck peeple, time, and place.

The complacency and inwardness characterizing the Pax Bonera gives way to a new, painfully acute awareness of the terrors of the world in Prelude to Erection, where Max obliquely bemoans universal social inequality over a bouncy beat by stating “everyone down the street” is sodomizing him, and, in a poignant acknowledgment of gender hierarchies, intimates that “being a girl is bad for you”. Max unfurls the overarching storyline of the album: he is a man without a penis. How did it leave him? Where did it go? Did he ever have a penis in the first place? It is clear from such questions that this is not a physical penis that Max is missing, but rather it reflects a profound sense of loss that has become central to his character, and to the Artists’ universe as a whole. Whereas life was once bold and dynamic it is now impotent in the deepest sense, as meaningless as the phrase Max yelps, “Ass hair! / We need ass hair / without ass hair we’re nothing” in an attempt to give value to his penisless self, and his penisless world.

In the face of these problems Max’s character believes the only course of action is to refashion the world in the image of the Pax Bonera, a misguided effort that Forty Dicks initially follows, interjecting his saga with parables and fables that offer critiques and wisdom regarding society, psychology, and interpersonal relations, as well as various colorful and inventive transformations of the word “dick”. It then moves forward into a narrative of Max confronting a series of major trials that represent various philosophies, presented of course with an absolute lack of sophistication, wit, and taste that one would expect of a Dickcore group.

The first move that Max and the Artists take to change their world is to look to the past for solutions, a clichéd political formula satirized in the second track, Stick That Dick Somewhere Else! by Max’s stipulation that a disembodied person stick a penis in his nose. Max’s demand is purposefully absurd, a conscious throwback to the chaotic early days of the Artists’ Universe that first heralded the glory of the Pax Bonera. His past-oriented program of preposterousness is promptly picked up by the other Artists, with Tom spitting out rapid-fire homophobic insults against all of the Artists assembled, and Chris chanting “nutsack” loudly in the background. Since the fall of the Pax Bonera, contexts and conditions have irrevocably changed, and any attempts to recreate such a time are themselves absurd, and will lead only to more frustration – the kind of frustration one might feel with a penis in their nose, for example.

The Nutsack Blues - Reduced Version

Such setbacks lead inevitably, as the Artists imply in Nutsack Blues, to criticism of the external world rather than an analysis of the fundamental issues one faces. Max’s character in Blues decries materialism and the self-serving ideology of capitalism, recounting an incident in which a man lost his testicles when he had to use them to make a purchase at a liquor store. The crass commodification of Max’s nutsack serves to mimic the long-winded, hysterical diatribes of contemporary socialist and anarchist activists, whose large-scale agendas, like the idea of a man paying for booze with his balls, have little connection to reality.

Soon after Max’s issues are presented, Chris describes the ongoing situation in his bowels, “I can feel some tension building up inside my ass / It’s not bad / But it could be worse / About to dump out / My diarrhea curse”. The sudden concentration on such toiletty topics represents the focus on the natural world and natural processes central to the modern Western Romantic response to industry. Chris thus argues that this type of thought process – the countering of materialism through a reconnection with an idealized ‘nature’ construct – is like diarrhea: wishy-washy and shitty. Almost as shitty as the bass performance on this track, provided incompetently by Steve/Ashley Sampson.

The Artists’ critiques stop momentarily with The Parable of the Shirt, also known as Movement 4: Slippery Thomas Speaks His Mind, in which Slippery Thomas enunciates, through speaking, things on his mind that he would like to say with words. This parable offers a brief glimmer of wisdom, for as Thomas tells of the troubles he had with his t-shirt, “I wore that shirt, you know, and people saw me wearing the shirt… after a while people were just seeing the shirt, man, so I had to get a new shirt”. Thomas’ insight here is that identity and processes of identity formation are at the heart of social conflicts, both in the Artists’ Universe and our own.

He speaks of the tyranny of essentialism and pressures to conform, and of a need for acknowledgment of the ambiguity of identity boundaries, while also emphasizing his own folly in believing that buying a new shirt would solve his problems. However, his message is quickly bastardized by the demands of his audience, who still zealously seek a phallo-centric answer to their problems, and thus his “shirt” becomes a “dick”. As Thomas howls, “So I got this new diiiiiiick! / I got this new motherfucking diiiick!” we see the ultimate irresponsibility and short-sightedness of trying to find lasting solutions through changes in material conditions. This idea is further impressed upon us as Thomas references Will Smith by chanting, “I’m going straight to / the Wild Wild West!”, which then devolves into “I’m going dick dick / the Dick Dick Dick!”. Even the notion of escaping to a new location – even one as exotic as the wild, wild West – is pointless if the underlying problem of being obsessed with dicks has not been appropriately dealt with.

The pointed centrality of dicks in this section of the album can be reflected in the following disjointed dialogue:

Max: Put your dick in the designated locker…

Tom: A-he’s got a dick, a-she’s got a dick!

Max: Dick!

Tom: That woman’s got a dick! That woman’s got a dick! She’s a man!

Max: Transvestite!

Tom: She’s a man

Max: Transvestite!

Such an extreme emphasis (and resolutely juvenile and simplistic understanding of gender differentiation) lampoons the social power of vapid buzzwords and catchphrases. Yet this extremely witty satire obscures the truth that dicks do in fact share a connection with everything in the Artists’ world, a fact that will be pounded mercilessly into the listener's skull for the rest of the album. Nevertheless, such an extreme concentration on dicks is subtly presented here as equally unhealthy as the alternative – that of not recognizing the centrality of dicks. What is necessary is a deeper comprehension of what constitutes a dick – a recontextualization of dicks – and in order for this to happen, Max must experience the physical loss of his penis, which he does in Max Gets His Dick Cut Off.

An unnamed character, presumably a doctor, suddenly arrives and tells Max he will “slowly, slowly cut off [his] penis /(snipping sfx, Max shrieking)”. The doctor then throws it in a river and sings the following telling lines, “Max’s penis is gone forever; it’s lost in a river. Maybe some inbred mutant down the line will retrieve it, and bring it back to him – maybe not”. The mention of “forever”, combined with the evocative, timeless image of a river, when taken into account with the fact that the in the Artist Co-Op Universe, everything is nonsense, should quickly inform the listener that Max’s penis will no doubt return, and the purposefully clumsy foreshadowing about the penis-finding mutant only serves to reinforce this. Surely enough, within a minute Max has been reunited with his physical penis.

Max's Penis Problems

In his fleeting, inexplicable re-loss of a penis Max realizes how easy it is to become like a dick lost in a river, to simply accept what is thrown at him and lead a passive life - or, possibly worse, to grasp onto any appealing flotsam ideology and be carried away faster thanbefore. As soon as he has lost his penis he takes himself to an operating room to be fitted for a “synthetic penis”, actively engaging himself in the future of his private parts rather than going on dickless and dejected. After navigating through empty and unproductive ideologies, Max makes a major breakthrough, refusing to dwell on the past as he had before, and proving that he is capable of changing himself, and, possibly, the world around him.

This new sense of responsibility is immediately tested by the commencement of The Temptations of Max Zimmerman, heralded by the entrance of the Dick Mutant (voiced by Tom), who comes from Planet X/Planet Sex “to tell dick jokes / and then say ‘that’s what she said’ every time anybody says something like that”. In one of the most baffling lyrical journeys ever recorded, the Dick Mutant transforms himself into the Dick Martian, signaling the planetary invasion of the 420 Martians. We are then greeted by a character, inexplicably voiced by Chris, who describes himself as, “Drew Travis… the 420 Master”. Drew's arrival initiates a long jam based around the concept of 420, which culminates in the standout, lethargic groove, So Fucking Chill, instigated in turn by the new character Nick Boots, also voiced by Chris. After listening to this section of the album, one might say, "Wow, that was stupid", or "These guys are really annoying". Sure, that's a fair assessment.

The 420 Martians Take Over

But overall, this lengthy movement, spanning from the sixth through eighth tracks, serves as a general critique of “chillness”, embodied in the mythology of the number 420, and in the ritualistic taking of employment at Jamba Juice so that one may enjoy the “hot chicks” present there while exercising one’s right to “blaze in the freezer”. As first propounded in The Lost Whale Sessions, “chillness” is a mindset and lifestyle characterized by conformity, complacency, consumerist masculinity, cannabis club cards, and an irrepressible affinity for board sports. The hella dank, homoerotic hub around which this semi-retardedness rotates is 420, a number imbued with the power to make any “chill” individual immediately bounce their head drowsily while drawling the words, “fuck”, “shit”, “dude”, or “nice”.

In Forty Dicks, the idea of 420 plays an extremely important but subtle role. For instance, at not-so-close inspection on an Itunes playlist, one might notice that every track on the album is cut to four minutes and twenty seconds. Considering that the movements within the album often transcend or rise and fall within the 4:20 boundary, Forty Dicks can be interpreted – apart from the various idiotic ways in which it’s already being interpreted – as a rejection of 4:20 and the shallow fucking nonsense that surrounds it.

The simultaneous appearance of the yuck-yucking Dick Mutant and invasion of the 420 Martians, who force everyone to “smoke a lot of pot”, and are “really fucking gay”, represents the first of Max’s challenges in that it confronts his new, responsible self with an easy escape from the complexities of life – an invitation to forever indulge in the simple, brainless pleasures of life: crass double entendre jokes made ironically popular by ‘The Office’ (the subtle gist of which the 420 Martians never quite grasp), smoking pot day and night to avoid any and all complex thought processes, and constructing a “chill” personality that prohibits holding any opinions at conflict with the status quo.

So Fucking Chill

Instead of giving in to this shimmering ideal of humanity, Max counters the 420 Martians (note that they are not from Earth, and are therefore presented as intrinsically strange to the Artists’ world) and the pot-powered power of Nick Boots by imitating the universally reviled and blatantly not-very-chill character, Larry the Cable Guy. Growling “Git R Dun”, and then, for some reason, barking a lengthy soliloquy about incest - or, at least, shrieking “incest” a lot - Max uses the more horrific aspects of red-state culture to assault the agents of 420 that surround him. It must be noted here that Nick Boots, exhibited as the prodigal student of the 420 Martians, expresses his disdain for "words with more than one definition" with an anti-intellectualism central to the Conservative agenda in the United States and, indeed, to the humor of Larry the Cable Guy. In this crushing blow to "chillness" idealogy, the Artists deftfully demonstrate the inherent idiocy of both redneckery and chillitude, undermining the pretentious moral high ground assumed by those pseduo-liberals who consider themselves "chill". Faced with such a vicious assault, the aura of the 420 Martians slowly dissipates, and the chill mastery of Nick Boots withers, but these are soon transforms itself into another temptation Max must face: statutory rape.

As the chillness of So Fucking Chill unchills itself, Tom announces, “I like to pick up preteen girls / on the Internet!” Chris soon joins in, and the saga of the Internet Predator begins. At this point in our tale, Max has taken command of the keyboard, noted earlier in the song by Tom saying, “Max J. Zimmerman on the keys, everybody!” Despite the forceful arguments put forth by the Internet Predator, who simply yells his own name a lot, Max is able to use his piano skills to refrain from joining in with the pervert’s activities. The Predator is shocked, and his malevolent mantra collapses into the nonsensical chant of “Give it up for Skeletor!” Max has triumphed again!

The Internet Predator and America

Max’s next ideological contest, after a minute-long refrain of Chris and Tom shouting “Dick dick / Balls dick / Asshole dick / Fuck you Max”, is with the warm, all-encompassing embrace of patriotism. As Chris and Tom harmonize, “America! / Fuck you in the ass!” and “America! / Love it or go home!”, Max bravely maintains his piano playing, marching to the same beat, refusing to buckle under the pressure of jingoistic sloganeering. In spite of its assertiveness and offerings of a coherent, if simplistic, ideological framework, the spirits of xenophobia and nationalistic chauvinism – banes of the modern world – soon fold before him. His success is one we can all learn from, especially in this era of globalization and permeable national borders and identities, and it also marks the end of the challenges Max must face. In the end, he has chosen to live a more authentic, complicated existence by forgoing 420ness and everything it entails, he has avoided the pitfalls of being an internet predator, and he has navigated around the treacherous waters of over-patriotic mindsets. He has conquered the three primary philosophical problems of our time, and he has done it with an enviable panache, and a powerful yet dulcet singing voice. He is truly ready to begin mending the Artists’ world.

But any celebration is cut short by the beginning of a new chapter in our tale – the introduction of the supernatural element into Forty Dicks proclaimed by the unexpected manifestation of The Penis Banshee. This nefarious character takes on all of the Artists, rather than simply Max, and then takes – or “vanishes”, as the thesaurus-informed Artists say - their cocks. Ultimately this subplot serves only as a red herring, a cheap narrative tool used to reunite all of the Artists, for their genitals are soon returned to them by the wisecracking Dick Genie, who grants them three wishes, but only follows through on one.

The Artists’ mark their reunion by a brief but joyous Festival of Dickery, singing an impromptu dick-filled version of “Smoke on the Water”, and announcing to themselves and to you, the listener, that they have now been singing about dicks for 45 minutes. Once assembled, they realize where their faults lie, and set the scene for the final momentous climax of the album.

Steve/Ashley, until this time playing horribly on guitar or shouting out inaudible things in the background, tells the artists that, after all they have witnessed – in their own troubles and in The Temptations of Max Zimmerman – they must go back to the beginning, forget all their assumptions and prejudices, and find “the essence of a dick” in order to truly understand their place in the universe. In acknowledging their historically and spatially situated position, the Artists choose to create their own mythology and their own gods, in the words of Nietzsche, and give meaning to the world according to their own specific, subjective realities. This undertaking guides the rest of the album.

The Formation of a Dick

In the awe-inspiring Formation of a Dick, Chris and Tom narrate the origins of The Dick, a personified entity, tracing his development from being a “little boy” who “played with toy cars and sheep”, to being a “full grown motherfuckin’ man” who currently resides “in your ass”. Tom divulges the name of The Dick to be “Kevin Olsson”, the name of the Co-Op’s drummer. This is entirely logical, given that The Dick, described as both innocent and “gay”, inhabiting both a child’s play world and the dark depths of your anus, balances the extremes of human existence, just as Kevin balances the entire album through his trusty drum playing. Kevin, an understated character in the Artists’ Universe, nevertheless gives form to everything that takes place within said realm, even as he is maligned by Tom, who implores him to “learn how to play the drums / you are gay / you are really fucking gay”.

These subtle paradoxes about Kevin – both the real Kevin and his Dick persona – form the basis of what constitutes the new reality of Dickness according to the Artists. They build upon this Taoist idea of duality, using Max as an example, in that he is both “a bitch / but he’s gonna kick your ass”, a reflection of the more nuanced view of the world they have attained through their struggles.

Beyond newfound understandings of ambiguity, the real crux of this section is growth – primarily emotional. Tom, speaking about his chapped lips in Chapped Lips on a Dick, for the first time in the entire album displays a sense of vulnerability, in contrast to his normally boisterous and haughty attitude. Despite his admission of weakness he is confident as ever, and thus we are meant to infer that this is a positive transition for him, like the construction of a loving, flowery, faggy God in the New Testament who can still fuck things up. Indeed, after this touching moment Tom rarely attacks his fellow Artists, who find themselves united in awaiting the arrival of The Great Penis, a messianic character whose purpose is, and shall remain, largely unclear.

The changes undergone by the Artists allow the music to develop and evolve, building momentum with an upbeat, bluesy riff over which Max speaks to a disembodied dick about its impending erection. This riff mutates into a swinging, extremely clever version of The Champs’ surf rock classic, “Tequila”, in which every note of the song is converted into the word “dick” (hence the song’s title, Movement 13: Dickquela). The Artists have taken their earlier realization - of the innate connection of all things with Dicks – and used it to create something accessible and enjoyable. This productiveness, contrasted with their previous attempts at conceptually concentrating on Dicks, has been brought about thanks to their new understanding of the subtle paradoxes that make up their world.

Dickquela

As the clock brings us closer to the coming of The Great Penis, crudely prophesized throughout Dickquela by Steve’s nasally yelps, Tom rhythmically informs the Artists that for the majority of the album they’ve been singing into the wrong microphone. In doing so he offers one last piece of wisdom before their Scrotal Savior appears – even though they had been misguided the entire time, they still propelled themselves wholeheartedly into the fray and can thus be proud of their accomplishments. In other, more High School Yearbook-esque words, they shot for the moon, and even though they missed they still landed amongst the stars. The Dick Stars, to be precise.

In his closing statement, right before the Great Penis touches down, Max tells us “you must choose what kind of penis you have”. And though Max himself is still on that journey, as he readily admits, he is blessed for he now has a foolproof phallic philosophy to guide him on the path to enlightenment.

Thankfully The Great Penis violently and abruptly ends these artsy-fartsy musings, riding his searing chariot into the scene with a great fury of noise that inevitably becomes a feedback-heavy rendition of “Auld Lang Syne”, a song used traditionally to signify the beginning of a new era. This new era, hinted at in the bass solo that makes up the final movement, will be nothing like anything that came before… (pff… “came”! Sick!)

In effect, The Great Penis has wiped clean the slate of the Artists’ Universe, leaving no trace of the Dick Mutants, 420 Martians, Penis Banshees, or Dick Genies whom we encountered previously (the Internet Predator cannot be accounted for). It is now up to us to make sense of what happened, and to continue the adventures of the Artists in our daily life. Within legal limits of course.

THE IMPACT

Artist Co-Op never released a follow-up to Forty Dicks. Their second official appearance in the studio involved heavy drug us – specifically the application of analgesic heat rubs to the Artists’ tender regions – yielding the disastrous, quickly forgotten Bengay Session. Many plans for Co-Op reunions and projects have been made since the initial recording, but so far the only outcome of these ideas has been a scratchy 2009 mixtape – composed mostly of song covers and tawdry tirades about pizza – entitled, Shorts But We Know How to Use ‘Em: Take 1: The Westwood Sessions, snippets of which you can hear below:

Pizza Time


Big Brown Shit

Nine Point Dunk

Put That Dick in My Ass

Your Butt Is My Destiny

System of a Down Cover

Little is known about this mysterious record, but it offers us a visceral glimpse into the evolving, ever inane mindset of the Artists. Armed only with a guitar, a 40 oz bottle, and their beautiful voices, the Artists are still capable of creating magnificent odes to such familiar topics as anal sex and NBA Jam. The tapes also reveal a more experimental, non-musical side of the Co-Op, as demonstrated on the B-side in which three of the Artists read the titles of porn movies in the style of 1930’s-1950’s newsreel narrators.

The Old Time Porn Announcers

Despite their lack of prolificacy, ability, or coherence, The Artists made a lasting impression on the Dickcore movement. The boundaries of what would be acceptable on all future Dickcore albums had been obliterated in the maelstrom of perversion that was the Who Let the Dicks Out? session. Also, despite the tastelessness and pure absurdity of the album, it still retained a sense of structure, and an almost-recognizable narrative. Furthermore, it proved to the members of the Dickcore movement, once and for all, that dicks – the idea, the symbol, the spirit of dicks – are very silly things to sing about. This new awareness of dicks as subject-matter, and the possibilities of musical narratives, inspired future works such as Dickatron 5000, the Dirty Old Man EP, and Summer Fun Summer Sun (both the movie and the soundtrack). Such a preoccupation would prove both beneficial and detrimental to the movement, as it both nurtured productivity while inhibiting the true creativity that defined the genre’s earlier pieces. To sum up the problem of Forty Dicks: Once you’ve recorded Max Zimmerman singing about putting dicks in his nose and fucking his cousin, what else can you really do?

In the next installment, we’re going to take a brief step backwards to examine the “Boys Rule” movement, an important cultural phenomenon whose developed in a sense presaged the growth of Dickcore. We will analyze the underlying processes common to both entities, and the give-and-take relationship that allowed both to flourish from 2005-2007. I can’t promise when it will be ready, but I can tell you right now it’ll be pretty goddamn silly.