Shuji Terayama’s 1971 film Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei was an abject and poetic satire of utopianism, a kind of Lord of the Flies meets Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló, in which children enslave their parents and create new world order of ritualized sex and violence. It begins with a perhaps tongue-in-cheek quote attributed to Karl Marx, a rough translation of which would be: “A focus on accumulating pleasure, not wealth, will bring capitalism down.”
By the time Stereolab took the title of the film for their 1996 album, they’d accumulated an astonishing amount of pleasure, if not wealth. While lyricist Lætitia Sadier was more of a socialist than a Marxist, the earworms like “Ping Pong” and “Peng! 33” she and polymath guitarist Tim Gane cultivated were philosophical tracts as pop tracks, deconstructing economics with pithy verse-chorus-verse structures. Since forming in 1991, Stereolab had stocked shelves with three albums, two compilations, two mini-albums, eight EPs, and thirteen singles, each beautifully packaged, uniformly excellent, and on offer in various limited editions of colored vinyl. Were the lyrics critiquing their own delivery system? Was the medium the message?
Emperor Tomato Ketchup is a close as the Lab would ever get to a definitive answer. It documents a premillennial moment in which people—jazzbos in Chicago and red mods doing the Mashed Potato in Washington, D.C., riot grrrls in the Northwest, bass cadets in Sheffield, and the chic set in Paris and the retro-futurists in Birmingham, and especially crate-diggers in Tokyo and London and New York—wondered if record collecting and community organizing might be the same thing. Yes and no, Stereolab replies. They made dialectics you can dance to, and that was revolution enough.
While their previous work explored motorik’s horizontal momentum and the aspirational levitation of exotica, ETK was something different. Like Talking Heads’ Remain in Light or LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut or Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, the album consolidated international movements into people-pleasing new forms of funk. Its 13 tracks matched polyrhythms to political slogans with results as electrifying as the needle-on-the-record/tornado-on-the-horizon cover art the Groop nicked from a 1964 Béla Bartók LP cover.
That’s not all they nicked. Opener “Metronomic Underground” utilizes bits of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and Yoko Ono’s “Mindtrain” and Don Cherry’s “Mali Doussn’Gouni” for a jam that morphs from amiable to anxious. Live, the track became a roiling headfuck of an epic that panned around the stage’s P.A. as it doubled or tripled its recorded size. “We have about five organs lying around, all plugged in and ready to go,” Tim Gane told the LA Times when the album came out, and on “Metronomic,” they all seemed to gurgle and bubble and scream at once. Singer-guitarist Mary Hansen chants “Crazy/Sturdy/A torpedo” and Sadier intones, “Untie the tangles to be vacuous, to be infinite.” The song proved that having access to everything only works if you can get it into the groove, and that marching can be dancing if you do it right.