The following is a Designated Cheerleader piece by @jjkamensky for the Best Album of 1991 tournament, the first of two about Julian Cope's PEGGY SUICIDE. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you follow the link to vote in the tournament. Thanks!
I bought Peggy Suicide off a five-star Rolling Stone review and I haven’t listened to it in over a decade, but putting it on throws me back to the knowledge that my high school girlfriend isn’t going to make curfew. It’s a shaggy, shambolic late night of an album, the sounds of a mid-tier college rock pop artist unfurling his freak flag and giving full voice to all his obsessions at once. The name “Peggy Suicide” refers both to Gaia in crisis and horny Buddy Holly at millennium’s edge. Every song on the the 18-track, fill-out-the-CD album is a testament to a consciousness at once angry and transcendent.
“Safesurfer” might be the quintessential track: an eight-minute dual-guitar-and Wurlitzer jam sesh, the only sung lyrics “you don’t have to be afraid, love/‘cause I’m a safesurfer, darlin’” repeated endlessly, kicked off with a long monologue that contains the phrase “idiot son of Donkey Kong” and may describe the singer witnessing his own conception, the entire thing sung as a character persuading his lover to let him forgo a condom. Of course, in 1991 that was an assassin’s whisper.
Peggy Suicide hasn’t got a bad track, and each one has a strong point of view both musically and topically. Many tracks rage against the brutality of late Thatcher, but all share the loose universalism of the best rock lyrics. The opener, “Pristeen,” starts with a simple melody, an allusive refrain, lush reverb yielding gradually to crashing, dissonant organ chords and Cope building to a flat and chesty snarl-shout. For the closer, “Las Vegas Basement”, he stays in his vocal pocket, though the organ and wah guitar get to travel, and leaves you with a gentle lie to cover up 76 minutes of rage and desire, like Puck's “and this weak and idle theme / no more yielding than a dream” coda from the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I was born to entertain so: here I go."
