Life in the Foodchain
Tonio K.
Full Moon/Epic
By Tom Carson

A CLUTCH OF veteran studio heavies plays on Life in the Foodchain, and you can almost feel their glee at being allowed to cut loose. Tonio K.'s manic, sprawling satire is refreshingly unsubtle. Rather than make you think, this guy means to bowl you over with pure energy and high spirits. His music is all boom-boom percussion, lunging riffs and yelping vocals that twist around the lyric's rapid-fire joke with the frantic, ingratiating speed of a carny's spiel. Here's a record that grabs you by the lapels and shakes you right from the start—and the pace never lets up.

        Side one, subtitled "Life in the Foodchain," is a monstrously elaborate epic of venality, greed and good-natured corruption. The title track turns evolution into a (literal) dogfight that runs through the ages. "Funky Western Civilization" (a dance tune, naturally) carries us into the present: "There's a baby/Every minute/Bein' born without a chance," Tonio K. bellows. "Now don't that make you want to jump/Right up/And start to dance?" The end of the side has God irritably greeting the Second Coming of Christ by asking, "Who is this kid?" Sure, it's utterly sophomoric, but that's why it's funny—it appeals to the high-school graffiti scrawler in all of us.

        Side two, "Love among the Ruins," fares less well, partly because the ham-fisted misogyny used for humorous effect is too uncomfortably close to what people like Meat Loaf and Billy Joel do straight to be really enjoyable. As usual, though, there are a few great lines:

        Yes I wish I was as mellow
        As for instance Jackson Browne
        But "Fountain of Sorrow" my ass
        Motherfucker
        I hope you wind up in the ground.

        Since Life in the Foodchain is so insistently cast in the same yammering, high-octane mold, it get to be a bit much—you're finally worn out by the unending barrage. But excess is the heart of Tonio K.'s charm, and this debut LP—one-shot joke though it is—is a happy, infectious tribute to his irreverent gusto. It's also the only album I know with references to both Thomas Mann and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Now that's got to be the best pop-culture synthesis so far in 1979.—Tom Carson