Review Summary: Sid and Nancy think they're in a safe place..
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In 1979, in the thick of punk’s first coordinated uprising, somewhere among West Coast’s crop of evil masterminds like X, Minutemen and Meat Puppets; Black Randy and the Metrosquad sprang to life like shite through a clogged toilet. The band’s one and only LP
Pass the Dust, I Think I’m Bowie remains an artifact of its scene, and the only full-length the legendary and short-lived imprint Dangerhouse Records released in their three-year existence.
Slapping the tag of funk-punk onto themselves with ostentatious grace, Black Randy and the Metrosquad rumble through Isaac Hayes’ Shaft theme, Charlie Bobbit’s ‘Turn it Loose,’ and James Brown’s ‘Black and Proud,’ turning all three numbers into fractured, stiff-jointed mutants. The band’s originals - aware, self-gratifying and jovial the way junkies will full pockets are, are just as lopsided and rickety. And so it’s all too easy to miss, amid all that cheeky havoc, how sneakily good the songs get. The shattered piano underpins ‘I Wanna Be a Nark,’ proudly declaring that all the things it knows ‘can fill a prison yard.’ The crude rhythm of ‘Down at the Laundrymat’ still makes it danceable somehow, and the bulk of
I Think I’m Bowie’s remaining set-list speaks for itself (Sperm Bank Baby, Loner with a Boner, Beer***, I Tell Lies Everyday).
Faced with syrupy moogs, debased covers of funk greats, and love letters to both Marlon Brando and Idi Amin, it isn’t a particular stretch to write off Black Randy the Metrosquad as a mere comedy act, keen on taking the piss out of the burgeoning scene brewing around them. But for all that frontal stupidity, purposeful or otherwise,
I Think I’m Bowie boasts more nihilistic abandon than most insurgents could lay claim for, and it gets there without crumbling into humourless myopia. There’s certain knowledge coursing through the record that rebellion is only virtuous in its failure, and the second it gets anywhere, it becomes the very thing it rails against. Because anarchy is intrinsically bound to conventionalism, and atheists still scream Oh God! when they come.
