Todd Rundgren “No World Order”
Inventors invent things — they leap from one side of the canyon, where there is nothing, to the other side, where there is an original idea. Makers make things — they construct functional objects from those ideas. And designers design things — they sketch, color, cut, copy and paste forms to fit those functions.
Now, to state the obvious, the distinction between roles is not always so neat. And in the handoffs, there can be more than a little overlap. But in general, inventors are not the best makers or designers. Their hair is uncombed. Their heads are in the clouds. We wouldn’t want them to hang drywall or choose a paint color for us but we sure are happy they figured out how wifi works. Similarly, makers are not the greatest inventors or designers, but they do the heavy lifting. Their work is painstaking and detailed. We admire their feats and are grateful for their service, but we don’t put them on postage stamps. Also, they don’t inspire romance the way designers can. Designers can make us swoon. They make things beautiful and, moreover, delightful. But, we do not expect them to conjure something from nothing. They work with pixels and paint, not hammers and nails.
In tech speak Elon Musk is the inventor, Bill Gates is the maker and Steve Jobs is the designer. Say what you will, think what you think, and push back all you want, but each of these men possess(ed) one superpower that defined both their successes and their limitations. Each were granted additional skills and many more weaknesses, but none were bequeathed that second superpower. Sure, Steve Jobs could write some code. And, of course, (I hope) Elon Musk knows how engines work. And, maybe (though probably not) Bill Gates knows that brown and orange are an unpleasant combination. But, these tech titans ascended on account of their greatest feature, and they ways in which everyone else — partners, employees & customers — responded to their singularity.
In popular (and semi-popular) music, however, the lines are perhaps less tidy. Performers, who are the designers in this analogy, do sometimes moonlight as producers — aka makers. And many performers and producers fancy themselves innovators — aka inventors. But, not unlike the tech examples, there are surprisingly few who could truly, credibly claim mastery of more than one domain. Probably James Brown. Possibly Miles Davis. But who else? Maybe Brian Eno? Dre? The greatest, most famous artists since the inception of Rock and Roll — Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Aretha, you name it — worked with established functions (inventions) and relied on engineers (makers) to turn their designs into products. Inversely, George Martin and Rick Rubin stayed off mics.
Famed ghostbuster, Dr. Egon Spengler, once warned his colleagues against “crossing the streams.” In the movie, stream-crossing was associated with total annihilation, before it became the one in a million, hail mary inversion of all paranormal behavior. In music, the results have proven similarly unpredictable. When Brian Wilson tried to operate as designer, maker and inventor, he ended up home alone, barely functional, playing in a sandbox. Tom Scholz had more than a little success with Scholz Research & Development, Inc., but it meant that Boston albums arrived only every eight to ten years. Jeff Lynne had success as a producer, but it necessarily came at the expense of his own art with E.L.O. The list of artist slash producers is littered with ill-fated, overreaches. But, mostly, it's full of artists who were never great producers and producers who were never great artists.
With the possible exception of Todd Rundgren. Rundgren is the lone (ostensibly) Pop musician who can make a credible claim to all three streams — inventor, maker and designer. For more than five decades, Rundgren has been regarded as the greatest producer of other people’s records who also sings and plays every instrument as a (semi)famous Rock star on records of his own. What is also well known, if less discussed, is Rundgren’s side hustle as a tech pioneer — a developer of new software and digital products. He’s the one — the only one — who has intentionally, tirelessly honed the skills of all three vocations.
To be clear, Todd Rundgren is not exactly a household name. His biggest hits, “Hello, It’s Me” and “I Saw the Light” are frequently mistaken for Carole King. And his next biggest hit, “Bang on the Drum All Day,” is more an FM radio drive-time novelty than Rock canon. His first group, Nazz, is name-checked as Power Pop pioneers, but, in truth, they were highly derivative of The Who and The Kinks, not so different from Steppenwolf and, ultimately, surpassed by Big Star and The Raspberries. To some, Rundgren is known as the producer who bridged Jim Steinman’s Rock melodrama with Meatloaf’s theatrical schtick on “Bat Out of Hell.” To others, he’s the man who cleaned up the mess but still preserved the magic of The New York Dolls. And to anyone else who’s heard of him, he’s Liv Tyler’s father who was not, technically speaking, Liv Tyler’s other, more famous father.
Rundgren’s bio reads a bit like the tale of a jack of all trades, master of none. But, that framing does a disservice to what has been a diverse and accomplished career. Since Nazz’s 1968 debut, Rundgren has released more than thirty studio albums, most of which performed somewhere between modestly and admirably. He has nearly twenty songs that found their way into the Billboard Hot 100. His best selling album, “Something/Anything,” was both wildly ambitious (Rundgren played nearly every instrument on every track) and highly successful (Gold record with two top twenty hits). Decades later, it’s still considered a landmark for Bedroom Rock and Power Pop. As an artist — a designer of Rock songs, if you will you — Todd Rundgren is no slouch. He’s well regarded by critics. His fans are loyal and global. He is perhaps the epitome of what Robert Chrisgau calls a “semipopular” artist.
And yet, Rundgren was never a transcendent artist — never a superstar. He was not a take your breath away kind of designer. He was never Steve Jobs, not even for a moment. His early songs did, in fact, sound a lot like Carole King (even though he was trying to sound like Laura Nyro). His best Power Pop was sturdy and likable, but also nowhere near as potent as The Who or as gorgeous as Big Star. And while it was novel that he could play every instrument on a record, his playing was closer to Lenny Kravitz (really, really good) than to Prince (how the fuck does he do that).
On some level, it seems that Rundgren knew this — that he wasn’t meant to be the artist, much less the star. He quit Nazz, in part, so he could learn to produce records and, possibly, program computers. And when he did eventually start to make solo records, he vacillated between using his own name, using “Runt” or, eventually, “Todd Rundgren’s Utopia,” and then, simply “Utopia,” before returning again to the name on his birth certificate. Despite the fact that he wrote so many songs and played so much of the music on those songs, he never seemed to identify as an “artist” in the mold of Dylan. Todd Rundgren was more interested in product than persona.
As an engineer and producer, however, Rundgren was less coy. Dubbed the “Boy Wonder from Bearsville” for his work on The Band’s “Stage Fright,” he went on to produce Badfinger’s Power Pop landmark, “Straight Up,” The New York Dolls’ iconic, self-titled debut, and a string of other albums, culminating in Meat Loaf’s diamond-selling epic, “Bat Out of Hell.” Years later, he built Utopia Sound studio on his estate near Woodstock, New York, where he would go on to produce XTC, The Tubes and The Psychedelic Furs. Biographer, Paul Myers suggested that the recording studio was Rundgren’s “ultimate instrument.”
For many years, computer programming was the road not traveled for Rundgren — the career that called to him but to which he did not immediately respond. But as computers got smaller and music more digital, his attention turned away from Pop music and back towards that other passion. In 1978 he produced the first interactive television concert and in 1981 he produced the Utopia Graphics System, an early paint program designed for the Apple II tablet. The artist from Philly, who became a producer in New York, finally became an inventor in San Francisco.
Whereas in the Sixties the heady waft of The Bay was all peace and love, by the Eighties it had become the smell of money. The Dead and Jefferson Airplane had been eclipsed by Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and hundreds of Stanford grads who’d made good in the PC revolution. And while he was more famous than most of them, and could play more instruments than all of them, Todd Rundgren had more in common with the Bay Area technorati than he did with Jerry Garcia or Grace Slick. Conversely, many of those inventors and investors had once been enraptured by psychedelia — the drugs and the music. And while some of the passion and many of the ideals had been either lost or forgotten, the love of invention had not. Those millionaires with high IQs who’d smoked weed and dropped acid while listening to The Dead while also assembling motherboards and writing C++ were not so different from Todd Rundgren.
Rundgren’s waning commercial prospects in the Eighties afforded him the space to experiment. His work with Utopia crept into Progressive terrain. And, just as that outfit regressed, his own solo affairs got more daring. “A Capella,” from 1985, was produced entirely using samples of the artist’s voice, and “2nd Wind,” from 1991, was recorded live, with a band, in front of (mostly) silent audiences at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. While both albums were inventive and warmly received by Rundgren’s small but loyal fanbase, neither cracked the top one hundred on the album sales charts. Slowly, but surely, the inventor was swallowing the designer.
By 1992, Todd Rundgren was a middle-aged, former Rock star, former producer, father of two living in Marin County, California. If he’d proven anything during the last decade, it was that he was deeply interested in the intersection of music and technology and largely disinterested in his own commercial prospects. Which meant that, if you were Warner Brothers Records, based in Burbank, California, and trying to sell a lot of albums, you probably wanted to steer clear from him. But, if you were Philips Electronics, based in Amsterdam, and you wanted to promote your new CD-i (compact disc interactive) players and discs, Todd Rundgren was definitely your guy.
CD-i discs were exactly what their name suggests — interactive compact discs that were played through compatible players onto televisions or monitors. They had capacity for roughly the same amount of music as a standard CD, but with extra data storage for ancillary programs, graphics, games and (eventually) videos. Because users could control the CD-i content, the most common applications were naturally video games — Zelda, Pac Man and Mario were best sellers. But due to the massive, and still growing, market for music on compact disc, Philips wondered if a new, hybrid product — an “interactive album” — could catapult their fledgling format and hardware.
The only problem was nobody had ever made an interactive album. Nobody had conceived of a record as a set of modifiable, rearrangeable parts. And why would they? It was antithetical to the very idea of a Rock album. Since “Sgt. Pepper” albums were considered either works of art to be admired or pop products to be obsessed over. Or both. But, in either case, the artists’ work was immutable. As a listener, we might sometimes bemoan the sound of an album — too thin, too flat, too much reverb, etc. But we’d never imagined that we should, could or would control any of those attributes. Rundgren, however, saw this as the ultimate challenge — a test of form, function and invention. It would require every bit of his inventor-self, his maker-self and his designer-self to pull it off. And, even then, there was the question of whether anyone would care — whether anyone wanted to have personal control over Todd Rundgren’s music.
In the summer of 1993, we got our answers. “No World Order,” credited to TR-i (Todd Rundgren interactive), was released as a CD-i (a standard CD, as well as Mac and Windows PC-compatible versions were also released). The album consists of nine hundred thirty-three four bar component parts, all of which could be rearranged and adjusted according to six control features. With the click of a mouse, you could increase the tempo, play things backwards, adjust vocals, adjust the mood etc. Some of the CD-i controls were preset — for instance, the base program you heard was either the TR-i version, or a version produced by Bob Clearmountain, Jerry Harrison, Hal Wilner or Don Was. Similarly, the mood controls allowed only for “Bright,” “Happy,” “Thoughtful,” “Sad,” or “Dark.” Other controls, however, featured gradual dials, simulating the experience of a producer at the board, making decisions about particular instruments and effects.
What’s amazing about “No World Order” is not simply that Rundgren had to compose and record an album as a series of micro-songs so that it allowed for interactivity. Nor is it that he played every instrument and sang (or rapped) every part on the record. It’s not that he and Philips were able to convince four celebrity producers to use the technology to produce their own base mix for the CD-i. It’s not that Rundgren’s promotional “tour” consisted of him encouraging tiny audiences to dance on tiny stages at stereo and home electronics stores while he explained the product and its features. And, obviously, it’s not that the album was a commercial failure or that the CD-i only survived another five years. No, what’s amazing about “No World Order” was that it worked — that the product did exactly what Rundgren and Philips said it would do. Users could mix their own Todd Rundgren album just by clicking their mouses.
Although he was not the inventor of the CD-i, Rundgren was absolutely the inventor of the “interactive album.” In this case, he was also the maker. And the designer. As an inventor, we could marvel at his ingenuity, but, in the end, he failed — the interactive album did not catch on. The market for people who wanted to continuously remix the music of Rock stars was insufficient to the point of being non-existent. As a maker, however — an engineer and producer — Rundgren had succeeded. “No World Order” functioned as promised — as expected. As a maker, he’d triumphed. That much was easy to see. What was much harder — perhaps impossible, to assess, though, was Rundgren’s work as a designer.
When I say “design,” I am not specifically talking about the album packaging or cover, which are both fairly terrible but not egregious. Nor am I talking about the visual design or experience design of the interactive features, which are of course clunky by today’s standards but passable by pre-www standards. No — when I say design, I am talking about the music itself — what it actually sounds (and feels) like. It’s easy to grant that “No Word Order” is well made. As to whether it’s well designed, that matter is complicated by the existential nature of the product — it’s adjustable! There is no single version of the album. In addition to the TR-i “base” version, there are the aforementioned Clearmountain, Harrison, Wilner and Was mixes. Then there’s a “Lite” version designed for a basic compact disc, which was released in 1994. There was also an eight song promotional version released in the Nineties and a thirty-eight song expanded reissue in 2011. And finally, there’s that one of a kind version that you — the CD-i owner — made for yourself every time you clicked your mouse.
Though I’ve seen the product demo and read the customer reviews, most of my experience with “No World Order” is through its original, sixteen song TR-i mix. To note, I’ve spent some (albeit much less) time with the celebrity remixes, which are interesting in that they highlight how one really, truly could make for entirely different albums from the same component parts. Individual styles come through — Clearmountain’s mix is more hook-y, Harrison’s more drum and bass-y and Was’ more Newish Wave. In fact, the base mixes are so different that, upon first listen, it’s hard to imagine how they originated from the same source.
As for that source, the TR-i mix is actually ten distinct tracks, some of which are radically edited, remixed and repeated, so as to total sixteen “songs.” Each of those sixteen songs — even the ones built from the same base of music — are distinct from the previous and the next one. But, sin ce there are no breaks in between, “No World Order” does feel like one piece. Within that piece, however, there are two core themes: something about a fascistic religious state that is either fast approaching or already upon us, and something else about the deeply personal longing for love, kindness and affection as a salve for this dystopian present/future. I’m probably missing something deeper—- as well as many smaller, less deep things — but that’s the basic gist of it.
Those themes are then worked out through a seemingly incongruous blending of genres, which include, but are not limited to Psychedelic Rock, Old School Rap, Electronica (really), Electro-Soul and New Wave. The psychedelic Rock (“Word Made Flesh”) is the most familiar mode here, not so far from late Seventies Utopia and marked by proggy synths and heaps of vocal delay effects.. The Rap (“No World Order 1.0”) is steady and deadpan — robotic more than flowing — as if to suggest some computerized, doomsday pronouncement. The Electro-Soul (“Love Thing 1.1”) and New Wave (“Property”) are not complete surprises and are, to my ears, a fine use of Rundgren’s tenor, which at its best is smooth like Darryl Hall’s and — at its not best — still musters the strained passion of Robert Palmer.
But it’s the Electronica (“Day Job”) that really startles. It’s not thunderous like The Chemical Brothers, or Punk, like Prodigy. But it’s not so far off from either. In fact, throughout “No World Order” (TR-i mix) it’s the beats, the record scratches and the samples that keep things kinetic rather than frenetic and staggering rather than appalling. Which is not at all the same thing as beautiful or moving or, even, enjoyable. “No World Order” is very rarely any of those things. But there are moments when a no doubt about it hook pokes through the din and when the soul verges — ever so briefly — on gospel.
For the most part, however, function trumps form. “No World Order” is music that exists specifically to be tested and altered via an interactive product. Vocals can be suppressed entirely. Guitars can be very loud or almost imperceptible. Rhythms can go from breakneck to glacial. The form is only meaningful so long as it does not threaten the basic function — so long as the program does not break and so long as the output is sufficiently identifiable as “professional sounding music.” It’s a fun album to talk about. It’s much less fun to actually listen to.
Although “No World Order” was the only CD-i that Todd Rundgren ever produced, he held onto the TR-i moniker for one more record. Like its predecessor, “The Individualist” (1995) is split between the political and the spiritual. But, in the years that followed, Rundgren’s music lightened up. He recorded on brand novelty songs like "I Hate My Frickin' I.S.P." He released a Blues covers album entitled “Todd Rundgren’s Johnson.” He covered artists that he’d previously produced (Patti Smith, Hall & Oates, Grand Funk Railroad, etc.) and collaborated with everyone from Donald Fagen to Rivers Cuomo.
Eventually Rundgren traded the hills and bays of San Francisco for the mountains and beaches of Hawaii, where he still resides, makes music, chimes in on American politics and, presumably, stays abreast of emerging technologies. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2021, though less as a singer-songwriter-performer and more as an elite “maker” of Rock and Roll. He has a couple gigabytes of excellent songs — sure. He has terrabytes of great performances — no doubt. But he’s also the guy who made The Band sound like The Band and The Dolls sound like The Dolls and Meat Loaf sound like the Meat Loaf of Jim Steinman’s dreams. As a designer of music, he was prolific — better than most, but also not so different. As an inventor, he had all the brains but lacked whatever separates great thinkers from generational ones. As a maker, however, Rundgren is as good as it gets. That’s his superpower — the capacity to make everything work. Better.