A Year of Blind Spots: Songs the Lord Taught Us

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

Songs the Lord Taught Us

The Cramps

1980

Oh, yikes, two psychobilly albums too close together on this list. I didn't know! Most of this list of Blind Spots was ordered randomly! Don't worry, we won't rehash anything we talked about with the Reverend Horton Heat. The genre is not really the hook for this album. Yes, you'll see it noted in plain text that this band is a "progenitor of the psychobilly subgenre," and if you listen to their debut album, you'll have no argument about it. But it also feels miles away from Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em. The best way to distinguish the two is to think about them like movies. If Reverend Horton Heat is a western, then the Cramps are a B movie horror film.

Psychobilly is punk mixed with rockabilly, but the Cramps lean farther toward the punk side of the equation, far enough that they push back into garage rock territory. It's worth noting that they cover the Sonics' "Strychnine," a song that I was already familiar with from the only garage rock compilation that matters, Nuggets. But it's even rowdier than the original. The Cramps seem to elevate the drama in a lot of this. The very first song you hear is about a beheading. It's horror done in winking style. Rock music as danger.

That was the explicit intentions of the band—they wanted to bring the "danger" back to rock 'n' roll. In the beginning, Elvis swung his hips, and that shit was so dangerous that they blocked it from television. 25 years later, Elvis had died fat and sweaty, and rock 'n' roll had been normalized, and it wasn't considered dangerous at all. Hence the Cramps attempting to inject some horror into it. Wave your needles up in the air.

The problem is that time continues on and on, and now it's been 45 years since Songs the Lord Taught Us, and everything that must have felt incredibly dangerous at the time once again feels safe. You wanna know the only reason why Gen Z kids would have any fucking clue who the Cramps are? Because Jenna Ortega was flailing around to one of their songs on that dumb Netflix show. And that didn't even last that long, because about five internet minutes later, some asshole switched it out with a bastardized version of a mid-tier Gaga deep cut, and that was the one that went truly viral. The Cramps—not even dangerous enough for a children's television show!!

Not the Cramps' fault, obviously. It's not even Wednesday Addams' fault. That's just what happens to music as the decades fly by. It loses its edge. There's nothing you can do about it. But that's okay. None of this has anything to do with quality. I liked Songs the Lord Taught Us. I respect what the Cramps were doing. Just a husband and wife making bloody punk music. If I missed out on the time period when this music felt essential, then that's on me.