Champions of Breakfast – Pleasure Mountain: The Post-Rockist Inter-Review

Hello, and welcome to The Post-Rockist’s very first Inter-Review. The format is simple. We will gather a panel of interesting personalities to review some of our favorite new albums, in the hope to create a constructive dialogue that will help us better understand the work of art in question.

Our first album is Pleasure Mountain by Detroit’s Champions of Breakfast. The album can be purchased via the band’s MySpace page.

Pleasure Mountain is a rip-roaring mock-epic thru vast tracks of electro-pop and pop-culture nostalgia. It’s a sexed-up celebration as horny as anything by Prince or Beck’s Midnite Vultures period. The band’s raucous live show consists of live vocals with the music played as backtracking. The band, consisting of members Val Hundreds and Moses Jackson, play makeshift instruments made of 2×4s and cardboard, designed to look like guitars or Moog keyboards.

To discuss this album, The Post-Rockist has assembled the following expert panel:

Anthony DeRogatis is an author and distinguished music critic who writes regularly for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Paste, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Time, Sport Illustrated, and Monster Trucks. He is the author and editor of several books on popular music, including Rolling Stone’s Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, The Rolling Stone Album Guide, and Rolling Stone’s 100,000,000,000 Greatest Albums of Rock n’ Roll.

Kwame Kilpatrick is the embattled mayor of Detroit, currently being charged on 8 felony counts, including perjury, misconduct in office, and conspiracy, after the Detroit Free Press obtained a transcript of text messages between Kilpatrick and his former aide which revealed a saucy affair about which the two are accused of lying under oath at a trial that cost the citizens of Detroit millions of dollars.

Link is the hero and main protagonist of the popular Nintendo Adventures of Zelda video game series. He is among the best-known video game heroes of all time, and is name-dropped in the Champions of Breakfast song “WHNTR (Can U Smell the Phantasy?).”

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The Post-Rockist (P-R): Thank you all for joining us in this panel discussion of Champions of Breakfast’s Pleasure Mountain. I’d like to start first with you, Anthony DeRogatis, and ask about this interesting form of music, electro-pop with all of these fantasy, sci-fi, and video game references, and the fact that Champions of Breakfast (CoB, for short) don’t actually play real instruments on stage.

Anthony DeRogatis: Quite simply, Champions of Breakfast are challenging the Romantic (with a capital “R,” mind you) ideal of music. Beethoven would be very aghast, would “roll over in his grave,” as the song goes, to hear CoB. But this is the next movement, the explosion of the cultural and creative modes that music used to stand by. Everything has been so manufactured by the culture industry so as to make most new music disingenuous–manufactured–and legitimate only in its state of manufacturedness. In many ways, Top 40 hits and new country music are far more destructive to Romantic conceptions of music than anything the CoB have done. If anything, CoB self-consciously challenge the themes of pop music–the fake instruments just call out the now infamous lip sync incident with Ashlee Simpson. Truly, Champions of Breakfast are post-modern music, using play, irony, and lunacy and passing it off as a serious art form of music, which indeed it is in our post-modern, post-industrial, post-humanist, post-deconstructionist, post-literary, post-rockist (if I might use the title of your so-called, somewhat mis-leading, and trite blog) world.

P-R: Um, thanks? Well what do you think of the opening track, “Gravedigger”?

Anthony DeRogatis: “Gravedigger” starts with a mist of electric sound and a thumping that simulates a heartbeat. “We can dance all night.” “We can rock all night.” All of the standard shout-outs and dance-party calling cards are there. Zombies, the undead, “everybody up” from the grave. You can almost see the video, a parody, of course, of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” with all of the spirits rising from the ground, a bit disordered at first, then suddenly finding themselves in line for a coordinated dance up and down the graveyard, led by swaying and skipping Moses Jackson and Val Hundreds. “Let’s get down together…and break dance.”

The fascination with fantasy characters, particularly those associated with the undead, can very much be explained through the post-911 and current Iraqi war milieu as a form of escapism from impending or possible death. Mummies and zombies rising from the grave to dance. In a sense, the undead are invisible, will never die, and can party all they want. They don’t have jobs and don’t need them. They just need physical contact with a living being, and in these fantasies there’s a lot of that contact, often sexual, which gets kind of messed up if you think about it, but there it is.

Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t obviously read this into the song?

P-R: Well, um, not quite, but…

Anthony DeRogatis: Ah, well, I guess you’re just a blog, right? You probably didn’t even see the relation between “Power of Glove” and Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love.” God! Such amateurs!

P-R: Yes, well, Link. First, thanks for joining us.

Link: Hey, no problemo, dude.

P-R: As a famous Nintendo hero, what do you think of “Power of Glove”?

Link: I’ll tell you one thing, that god-damned thing did no good for me, so god bless ‘em for findin’ somethin’ better to do with that piece ‘a shit.

P-R: Well, if you feel so strongly about it, I suppose we could move on to another song. What do you think of the fourth track, “Vanilla Always Gets It Raw”?

Anthony DeRogatis: I’ll answer this one. It’s absolutely obvious that the line “I will be your ice cream man” is a nod to Master P’s album Ice Cream Man, as well as the Van Halen and Jonathan Richman songs titled “Ice Cream Man.” Here, the Champions condition their place in pop music as the electro-pop practitioners of Ice Cream Mannery, since Richman’s folky pop, Van Halen’s classic rock, and Master P’s rap have already positioned themselves among this pantheon. Also, it attempts to overturn the idea that bland white males (the vanilla’d ones) are not as great lovers or sexual beings as others. You have to admit that white males have not exactly been stereotyped lately as vivacious lovers in popular culture. I mean, Justin Timberlake is h-o-t-t and all, but his glib self-characterizations and generally wussiness leaves him as our bad best example of Caucasian viral sexuality.

P-R: Mayor Kilpatrick, do you agree with our critic’s interpretation?

Mayor: LOL LOL! No question.

P-R: Link, what do you think?

Link: Shit. Lemme tell you somethin’. Just you try to save the world from evil or from monsters and shit. Get it bro? Fightin’ with broadswords is serious shit, ya know? Especially when you’re just a reg’ler guy from Hyrule. That’s some serious shit! And how the hell does that royal dame keep gettin’ kidnapped anywho? Every coupla years I gotta get off my keister and save that dame and what do I get? The satisfaction of savin’ the world again from evil and that’s it. It gets old after awhile, man.

Mayor: Damn that.

Link: Fuck yeah, Ya know, you’re not so bad, Kwame!

Mayor: LOL!

Unicorn Bible

P-R: Um, let’s move on. The song “Unicorn Bible” is a standout, and it was the song that really got me interested in the band. I thought it should be the theme song to a really sexy Renaissance Festival fantasy. I really enjoy the track. What do you think?

Anthony DeRogatis: Well if you know anything about music, it’s pretty obvious where the Champions of Breakfast got this from. Everybody’s wrong when they say it’s based on Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, it’s obviously a reference to the 1969 Tyrannosaurus Rex album (later to be known as T. Rex, for you neophytes) entitled Unicorn. On the back cover of the LP, Marc Bolan and Steve Took are surrounded by literary influences, such as books by Blake and Shakespeare and, of course, The Bible. On that album, there’s a song called “She Was Born to Be My Unicorn,” that includes the following lyrics:

“Giant of Inca hill
Loosed his boar to gorely kill
The dancing one horned waife
In doublet of puffin-bill.

The beast in feast of sound
Kittened lamb on God’s ground
Ridden by the born of horn
Jigged like a muse on life’s lawn.”

So there. Don’t you get it? It’s obvious.

P-R: Link?

Link: I kinda thought that song was about fucking.

P-R: How so?

Link: A night under the dragon’s flame always leads to fucking.

P-R: Alright. Well, let’s move on to the next track, “Bacchanalian Rock.” Link, do you have any thoughts?

Link: Yeah, you know, I can really relate to the line “When we grow tired of battles and defeats” part, except for the defeats part, you know, because I always end up saving Zelda and shit, but, you know, you kinda want to get it on with some elfin’ babe afterward as a kind of reward. Seriously, dude, there’s no better bait for ladies than coming back from some kick-ass battle all horny and shit and ready for a night of gettin’ it on, you know, so I kind of think that song is about me.

P-R: What about “WHNTR (Can U Smell the Phantasy?),” where you get name-dropped by the band? That’s got to be quite an honor.

Link: Look, they call me the “sexy little guy from the Zelda game.” It’s no name drop, you know what I mean? I mean, how about a song called “Link is the fucking Hero of Time.” I mean, come on! I’m not a little guy, as any Hyrulian babe will tell ya. Ha ha ha.

Mayor: LOL!

P-R: So Mayor Kilpatrick, Pleasure Mountain is a dancy, electro-pop circus of sorts. I heard the album for the first time at a perfect moment: in the car, driving to a party. It’s fun. Where did you first hear the album?

Mayor: At Benz Chili Bowl.

P-R: Really? You know, I was at a Champions of Breakfast show at the Garden Bowl in Detroit where they dedicated the song “Nasty Bunz” to you. Did you hear that they had dedicated that song to you.

Mayor: Damn. I just got out of the shower and looked at my two way. Next time, just tell me to sit down, shut up and do your thing! I’m fucked up now!

P-R: Really? Having the song dedicated to you messed you up pretty bad? Those guys actually gave a shout out to our website once. It was pretty cool.

Mayor: I really feel you.

P-R: The bonus track on the album is called “Rosalie is One Hell of a Party,” and contains the lyrics “O Rosalie you’re gonna turn 18 / before you know it girl. / Then we can finally do it legally. / Won’t that be cool?” This song seems a little illicit to me, depending upon the age of the singer/lover that’s delivering these lines. Mayor Kilpatrick, what do you interpret these lyrics as meaning?

Mayor: In this important and somewhat confusing time in your life, please know with all our hearts and soul that I love you. And you will never, never be alone.

P-R: That’s quite a touching, albeit safe interpretation of seemingly sexual lyrics, Mayor.

Mayor: Damn! Thank you!

P-R: Don’t take offense if I say so, Mayor, but I think you’re being a bit coy. The situation seems a bit like an affair between a younger, pre-18 girl and an older man. What is your real interpretation?

Mayor: Everything is cool. Did you get busted? You were kind of wet last night, inside and out. LOL.

P-R: I think you might be right, Mayor.

Mayor: The ‘might’ is on you!

P-R: Mayor Kilpatrick, are you willing to stand by this statement, on the record?

Mayor: Hell no! Don’t start none. Won’t be none…LOL.

When Trolls Roam the Earth

P-R: Moving on, then. One of my favorite songs on the album is “When Trolls Roam the Earth.”

Anthony DeRogatis: A masterpiece of comic form. Ambivalence is key here. The lyrics turn positive statement into negative statement to the point of stagnation. Monty Python should’ve come up with this. And, of course, it calls to mind the Bush Administrations policies in Iraq, and has a lot to do with the current predicament with China, as well as the work of Jim Henson.

Link: Fuck that. I guarantee you that trolls got no time to write no songs and make no fuckin’ food. Those fuckers got spears and arrows and shit. No good to me.

P-R: But Link, many non-Nintendo gamers who have a very basic knowledge of you sometimes think that you yourself are a troll of some sort. What is your response to these allegations?

Link: FUCK THAT! You tell me who those fuckers are an’ I’ll broadsword their asses!

P-R: Well, I think that CoB put a pretty good spin on the positives that trolls could bring society.

Link: Yeah, I can see that, kinda. But you don’t get no Triforce of Courage or get to be no Hero of Time for nuthin’. You got to grab that bull by the god damn horns, you know? Look, when you get a Master Sword to throw around at those sons a’ bitches, it’s no play time, you know what I mean? They fuckin’ bite, man. Sharks are cool, but when they start biting, you kill those fuckers.

P-R: Well, on that note, I think we’ll wrap things up. I’d like to thank my guests for this first ever Inter-Review and hope we can do this again soon. Any last thoughts about the album?

Anthony DeRogatis: Well what kind of scale are we judging on?

P-R: What?

Anthony DeRogatis: Do you want a one-to-five scale? A-thru-F? How many stars can I give the album?

P-R: Well, I’d rather you just say what you think.

Anthony DeRogatis: Your site sucks. I’m giving it four stars.

P-R: Link?

Link: Well, I think it’s kinda unrealistic, you know? Dragons aren’t that awesome when you gotta fight ‘em, and that whole thing about the god damned trolls! Although they did hit the hammer on the nail on that thing about Mummy’s eatin’ brains and shit. But, you know, good fuckin’ tunes, so yeah.

P-R: Mayor Kilpatrick, what do you think about Pleasure Mountain, and Val Hundreds and Moses Jackson, overall?

Mayor: I enjoy that. I might be there stepdad one day.

P-R: Wow. Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Mayor: Love you too. I realize more everyday how much. You look real good, by the way. See you tomorrow.

P-R: What?

Mayor: Hell yeah! Walk in.

P-R: Ok, well thanks for reading, folks.

Mayor: Love you.

Here’s a recent video of Champions of Breakfast at PJ’s Lager House, courtesy of Motor City Blog: