Album Notes

SLIP is Joseph Lapsley’s second solo album. Joe is also the lead singer and lyricist for Neighborhood Texture Jam of Memphis, Tennessee (check out neighborhoodtexturejam.com). SLIP is mostly a rock album, but concludes with three acoustic folk songs performed solo by Joe. Taken as a whole, this album is a personal collection of snapshots of the early 21st Century in The United States.

Joe is accompanied on SLIP by Marc Shepard (The Naughty Bubble Orchestra) on electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drums, keyboard, and backing vocals. Jana Measells and Kelly Grotke (The Objectivettes) sing backing vocals on "Freemont P. Rumper" and "Frozen Like a Mugshot". Jana also sings on "Crawling from the Wreckage".

Track 1, “Freemont P. Rumper,” is a sarcastic commentary on the ideas of Ayn Rand. This topic is appropriate since the United States is the foremost right-wing model of an industrialized country.

Track 2, “Task Force Moose,” celebrates an as-yet-to-be created group of progressive superheroes. They await their own comic book and feature film.

Track 3 is “Frozen Like a Mugshot,” which concerns the alarming attempt by the Bush II administration to legitimize torture.

Track 4, “Crawling from the Wreckage,” is an interlude in the march of ideas. It’s a Graham Parker cover that simply celebrates Jana and I surviving a horrendous car crash on a frozen interstate bridge.

Track 5, “Overton Window,” refers to a political science concept, the window of political possibility for ideas at a given time. There are two sets of Diggers in the song; one from 17th England and the other from San Francisco in the 1960s, both were radical egalitarians.

Track 6, “Gendered Shoe,” argues for the role of history in shaping unconscious assumptions about biological sex differences. It takes issue with many of the assumptions of Evolutionary Psychology.

Track 7, “Tar Baby,” laments the dichotomous structure of thinking about political economy: markets vs. centralized planning, Democrats vs. Republicans, etc.

Track 8, “Quarter Mile,” is both an ode to NHRA Drag Racing and a meditation on the position of the U.S. working class in world history.

Track 9, “Borax Factory,” is an acoustic version of the Neighborhood Texture Jam original from “Funeral Mountain. This is SLIP's love song”

Track 10, “The Ginsberg Dream,” is a poetic discussion of the limits and possibilities of freedom and equality in the United States in the form of an engagement with some of the ideas of the Beats.

Track 11, “Honey Buns,” argues that both the Clinton and Bush II administrations engaged in war crimes in their attacks on Iraq and many of their top officials should be incarcerated. It is also supposed to be funny.

Track 12, “Market Society” argues (against conventional wisdom here in the United States) that markets, as a primary mode of economic organization, are incompatible with a truly free and egalitarian society.