Consumer Guide Album

The Fugs: Dancing in the Universe [Fugs, 2023]
Eighty-four-year-old Ed Sanders's perennial democratic-socialist folk-rock agitprop is here augmented by posthumously enhanced Tuli Kupferberg's standup-or-siddown laff-a-line ditties, their highlight one called "Where Have All the Commies Gone?" ("Gone to Scarsdale, some of them") plus a tribute song by resident younger muso Steven Taylor in which every stanza ends "God bless Johnny Cash," this is neither the comedic erotomania of the Fugs' '60s nor the pensive humanism of their long maturity. But it is a true Fugs album, especially if like me you believe the late-'80s "Dreams of Sexual Perfection" is their masterwork. True, that one wouldn't have signified so strikingly if it didn't come from a band so smutty that in the '60s Warners stole them from ESP-Disc on account of their sex appeal. Here on a brand new album best classified as a grab bag, they end with two heartfelt history lessons. Sanders's "Tribute to Frank O'Hara" finally honors the commission he got in 1966 to write a poem about the just-deceased poet. Tuli's "Song for Emma Goldman" begins "If I can't dance you can keep your revolution/If I can't fuck it's you that's out of luck." B+