Tedium - Not Rap, Definitely Alien 👽

Today in Tedium: A common practice on the website Rate Your Music is for two users to make friends and thoroughly investigate each other’s ratings. After I found Karan on a thread about personality types, I saw he rated a peculiar album 1.5 out of 5. It was called Alien Rap: Songs about Life on the Planet Glumph. The cover featured a cartoon MC alien with a backwards baseball cap and bling. “There is a special message on this CD for the kids of Earth,” said the front cover. I eagerly listened to the album and it surpassed all my expectations of weirdness and badness, and to this day I don’t understand why Karan doesn’t embrace it the way I do. But I’m grateful that he showed it to me because I ended up stumbling on a fountain of knowledge, much like an alien in a UFO investigating Earth for the first time. When I saw the creator of Alien Rap was a prolific creator of meditation music and that he died shortly after Alien Rap was released, I did some digging and was distraught to find that almost no information was out there. Soon, I found myself on the phone with the creator’s son. — Catherine @ Tedium

Alien Rap: an odd album making the rounds in weird-music circles

Alien Rap is not exactly a rap album. The style is something between synth funk and space disco, crafted with the cheap plasticky sound of educational music. Nasally alien voices that sound like they were pitched up on Garageband speak in a lightly rhythmic rap with atrocious flow. The subject of the album is “songs about life on the planet Glumph,” and there’s lyrics about their joyful, relaxed work and school lives. Also, five out of the nine tracks are about their food, and it’s all junk food like ice cream, fries, and shakes. Everything they have on their planet is like ours, but it’s “alien”; the lyrics speak of alien teachers, alien corn, alien wood, alien cups, and alien ice without much further elaboration.

And it’s a good album. It may be kind of unpleasant to listen to, but it’s hilarious, and it’s creative almost all the way through. And while not as famous as other meme albums like Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended and The Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World, it’s slowly accumulating a following in its own right. Before we learn who made this and why, let’s get a closer picture at just how truly bonkers this album is.

Gerald Jay Markoe.

Who made Alien Rap? A respected new age composer, it turns out

The album artist is “Alien Kids” and it is ostensibly the lone album released on Creative Kids Productions, although the Wayback Machine reveals that the label also released some Mozart performances for children. The album’s songwriting is credited to Gerald Jay Markoe, and upon research you will find that all his other albums were dollar-bin new age affairs with titles like “Celestial Mozart for Relaxation Vol 2” and “Sacred Music for the Seven Stars” (new age is a genre characterized by meditative works like these). They were all released on Gerald’s label, Astromusic (here is the long-defunct website). If you enjoy new age music at all, it’s good, but a bit hard to find online unless you pirate it. He also once co-wrote a successful musical called Charlotte Sweet which debuted in 1983. It was praised by Leonard Cohen and won three Drama Desk Awards.

Gerald was born in 1941 in Brooklyn; he attended Juilliard School of Music for his Bachelor’s and Manhattan School of Music for his Master’s (where his son, Jeremy, also attended). Gerald was an enthusiast of all things new age: aside from composing new age music, he loved yoga, meditation, studying traditional music from around the world, and going to new age conventions. His special focus was celestial bodies. A lot of his astrology-themed music was composed via “heavy-duty math” based on planetary relationships. People paid a lot of money to make music based on their astrological charts. His own Astromusic software did this same job via algorithm, but it was never updated past Windows XP. I can’t find evidence it existed anywhere on the internet, although Jeremy attested it was real.

Gerald worked as a children’s music teacher. A very effective instructor who would always get restless troublemakers to get themselves together and play as an orchestra, he would play a lot of wacky games with his classes to help them get the wiggles out. This practice often got him fired and as a consequence, he taught at many different schools in New York.

“As a dad he was a lot of fun,” Jeremy told me. “He let me do all the things that most parents would forbid. One time we were visiting friends overnight in Florida and they had a lake behind their house. There were maybe 100 frogs out there. The son and I decide to fill a box with these frogs and we brought them into the house. And then somehow the box gets turned over and they got loose everywhere in the house. I never saw [my dad] so happy in his life. Normally, if you brought your kid to somebody’s house, and they dumped 500 frogs in your living room, you’d probably be pretty concerned, right? I think the woman never asked us back.”

Naturally, the marriage between Gerald Markoe and Jeremy’s mom did not last for very long.

I asked Jeremy why Gerald made Alien Rap, and he said it was a fun spoof. Whether Gerald thought he was making cool beats or not, or actually entertaining kids or not, are details lost to time.

Rumor 2: Alien Rap advocates for ethnic cleansing (mostly false)

On Rate Your Music, one review by utolso_nyoma attests that the album includes messages about ethnic cleansing.

“For example track 6, The Great Message (How the Aliens Transformed Glumph Into a Peaceful and Happy Planet) begins with the line ‘Glumph has very low crime rates, because we racially segregate!’”

People on RYM and some of my friends were confused and believed the review, when in reality it was a dry attempt at humor. This is a fact I confirmed with the writer herself, whose real name is Jolene.

Wachan Bajiyoperak’s Inka Sunrise, produce by Markoe. (via Discogs)

While the ethnic cleansing sentiment is not present on the album, Gerald has allegedly made racist statements. In the 90s, Gerald signed Wachan Bajiyoperak, a Native Peruvian medicine man, to Astromusic. They released an album called Inka Sunrise. I contacted Wachan for what I thought would be a peaceful, harmony-tinged interview, only for him to release a torrent of repressed fury against Gerald.

“I met Gerald in 1993 while I was living [on] the island of Kawaii, Hawaii. He attended one of my concerts and he was fascinated with my music and who I was. He approached me and he proposed a recording deal, and we made an agreement that he was going to promote my record with his company. We made a contract that he was going to pay me 50 cents for each album he was going to sell.”

But Gerald ghosted Wachan after releasing the album, which was successful and sold thousands of copies. Eventually he came back: “He laughed at me and told me that I was a poor Indian that cannot afford money to pay the lawyers. And he was right. After two years he sent me a one thousand dollar check. I recorded 30 more hours of music later on—I found that he labeled it ‘Ancient Brotherhood,’ a collection of four albums with my music, and he didn’t even put my name on it.” [Writer’s note: I found six.]

I mentioned this to Jeremy, who remembers Wachan and found his anger not surprising in the least. Gerald burned bridges in almost every relationship.

“He had tons of adoring fans that thought he was the most peaceful, mellow guy in the world,” said Jeremy. “And meanwhile he’d be screaming at people in traffic.”