BIG WRECK - “Inhale”

BIG WRECK - “Inhale”

And now, we interrupt the usual intelligent pop discourse for yet another MuchMusic testimonial, proving unequivocably that MuchMusic (USA or Canada) is the only video/music channel worth a damn. As if the obvious superior aspects of the channel aren’t convincing enough - the sock-puppet VJ, the abnormally high ratio of video content:non-video content, the ability of their executive producers to shamelessly broadcast folks flipping off the camera and videos featuring such hot-button words as “hashpipe” or “cold” without scampering to the post-production gadget closet drenched in waves of nervous sweat.

One day, while eating my customary lunch (mmm…microwavable Thai cuisine), MuchMusic plays a video by Big Wreck. They’re a rock band, not unlike the bevy of post-grunge poseurs preening on stage at a mid-sized concert venue near you. (I believe their newest CD - The Pleasure & The Greed - is currently in the “low-priced” stage of its promotion cycle. If the group flops, the CD price will eventually escalate. If they succeed, the price will skyrocket even sooner. I think your money would be better spent buying two copies of the newest Stabbing Westward CD @ $4.98 US, and then using the CDs as oversized pasties. And did you know that the glossy paper used to print CD inserts is highly absorbent? Ah, but I digress.)

The video was excessively stylized - low camera angles, stark white background, stop-motion sequences, computer-altered amps shimmering like mercury, long legged women with even more shimmer. The band “worked it” to the best of their ability, though the effort put forth belied the weak sound of the guitars (and the weak concept of the song - ooo, INHALE! At 4:20! Fuck da po-leece, while you’re at it, kids. And remember to get that green stuff from your mommy’s and daddy’s wallets and send it to Soupy Sales C/O ABC Television). And the singer - ah, the singer. He aped a certain special someone, in his vocalizing and enunciation. Even in his tousled hair & rakish goatee. It was blatantly obvious. So obvious that even the presumably diplomatic folks at MuchMusic couldn’t let such a golden opportunity pass them by. As the familiar notes of the next song/video drifted from the speakers like wind-swept dandelion seeds, and the flower of recognition bloomed in my heart (ah yes), I knew that I’d follow these MuchMusic people through thick and thin, through Snow & SoulDecision, wherever they may take this entertaining enterprise.

The video in question was Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun”.

That made me very, very happy.

PEACHES - “Fuck the Pain Away”

PEACHES - “Fuck the Pain Away”

It’s funny that Ned should post an article on summer festivals past, given that I was attending a summer festival of my own this past weekend. The Siren Music Festival (sponsored by the Village Voice and various folks) offered the usual festival fare, albeit with a decidedly corporate slant. There were clothing kiosks (sponsored by Abercrombie & Fitch), there were CDs for sale (via Tower Records), and there were transvestites (schilling for Budweiser - it’s quite the sight, seeing a pair of righteous drag queens say in unison, without a whit of irony or self-awareness, “And remember - This Bud’s For You!”)

My friends & I made plans to arrive at the festival by about 2 PM, meaning we would miss the first two performers - Enon (a group made up of former folks from Brainiac & Skeleton Key) and Peaches. “Who is Peaches?” my friends ask. I offer a quick sketch - 30-something woman, Canadian, ex-teacher, raunchy, straddles anything rideable, bad fashion sense, old-skool hip-hop, drawl/sneer, gives her crotch more mimed self-love than 100 Madonnas. (Check out the front page of her website, if you don’t believe me.) I also offer a small lyrical sample of “Fuck the Pain Away”, to complete the description (the only lyric from the song I accurately remember) - “Suckin’ on my titties, like you wantin’ me’”

With those few strokes, I was able to make Peaches out to be the worst thing to smack popular music upside the head since Gary Cherone besmirched the relatively good name of Van Halen. However, even the turgid pace of the New York Transit System couldn’t keep us from catching the ass end of Peaches’ set. Said woman described above (with a frizzy, unkempt head of naturally curly hair) was found alone on a large stage, strutting to and fro, dropping her carnal knowledge with only a lonely drum machine to back her up. Said woman referenced above wore an outfit you could probably find in any number of ultra-chic new wave videos circa the early 80s, or in any Fischerspooner production - red fabric cut at sharp angles, covering all the pertinent naughty bits, with fishnet stockings and high heels. And guess what she ended her set with (getting up on one of the monitors, shaking her groove thang)? Peaches finished the song in odd fashion — first, coughing up the chorus (which is nothing more than the name of the song) at normal volume, then quietly (for the kids), and the SCREAMING the chorus a couple more times before yelling something about censorship (and Canada, perhaps), spiking the microphone, and leaving the stage. The crowd cheered, sort of, I think.

Ever since then, I haven’t been able to get that damn song out of my head. I’m boiling water for soup, and I’m sucking on my titties. I’m perusing the Web, and it’s like sex on the beaches. Hell, she’s even reading my mind, as I file away my incomplete application to college - stay in school, ’cause it’s the best. I even go so far as to play the song in a vain attempt to get the damn thing out of my head. Didn’t work. And why, I’m asking myself, why is this damn thing stuck in my head, when it’s obviously so damn bad? Justification — it’s bad, sure, but so are most porno movies, and there’s an odd thrill - non-sexual thrill, I should say - watching something so contrived and clumsy unfold (or, if you prefer, collapse). And you can’t help but watch sometimes. It’s one thing to watch Traci Lords earn her paycheck on her back; been there, done that, ho hum, eject. It’s another to watch her suffer through the script to get to what she once did best — THAT is where the true entertainment value lies. (Conclusion: Peaches = dialogue in a porno. QED.)

As bad as the song was in a live context, it’s just as good, if not better, on record. (To hell with my intellectual gag reflex — if a song gets stuck in my head for two days’ straight, there must be something good happening.) The amateurish rapping (complete with a muffed rhyme in the bridge), the simplistic thuggery of the one & only verse (punctuated by a punch-drunk ‘uh, wha?’), the drum-machine farts and claps, the single-minded pursuit of fuck (complete with some contraceptive suggestions, so you don’t get fucked by the fuck, for fuck’s sake) — all these things sound so much better when shoved through a speaker cone, instead of a monstrous PA system. It’s Licensed to Ill, made with tits and poon! Better yet - it’s the Yeastie Girls fronted by Iggy Pop wearing camel lips! Prepare to be stupified. It’s a slice of moronic genius that would (in a perfect imperfect world) be on the radio 24-7. If only a GUY were singing it. About a GIRL. No such luck for radio execs — instead, the guys are off trying to be all silky smooth, tearing & slamming with their string-laden Curtis Mayfield funk. Worse yet, they’re going for the ‘funny, shy and introspective’ demographic with off-kilter homilies about unapproachable hotties in supermarkets. Meanwhile, Peaches is taking the righteous parts of Liz Phair’s ‘Flower’ to heart (among other less acceptable places). She’ll take you home and make you like it. Submit while you still have some dignity left.

Freaky Trigger

Freaky Trigger updates — this time around, you get to put up with me rambling on about Tool’s Lateralus and summer festivals, while Mark Sinker considers Simon and Garfunkel. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

TEN YEARS AFTER – 1991 Into 2001

No, not Nirvana. I could talk about it, but you know, no. In the cold light of history “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is a dividing line for better or for worse, though NWA’s chart-topping feat with Efil4Ziggan or Dr. Dre’s smash success with The Chronic the following year is as much as an indicator, if not more so. Look at the bands of the now, and everything seems perfectly distilled from the implications of all three of those events — hip-hop’s own continuing reach, the explosions of anger=intensity=perceived depth via rough-voiced rage and disaffection and the ultimate combinations of the two that produce bands like Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park.

But in 1991 the things were a little different for me than the above — well, a lot. Esconced in the hothouse environment of college radio at UCLA’s KLA, for one thing (obscure and obsessive even for that medium — no actual broadcast tower, a station the size of a couple of closets if that, a staff numbering about fifty to seventy-five people on a campus of thousands). A semi-incipient Anglophilic obsession that seems to grip plenty of people in my position meant following Melody Maker religiously, learning about shoegazing bands and the echoes of baggy, going to Ride/Lush tours and things like that. An era when one could talk about the chart-topping efforts of Jesus Jones and mean it — and hell, I saw them twice that year, one time right outside of KLA’s door in Ackerman Grand Ballroom, and they rocked the place very well, dammit. Armed with my well-worn copies of the third and fourth editions of the Trouser Press Record Guide, inspired by Chuck Eddy’s newly published Stairway to Hell (the first time I think I fully realized that one could easily talk in depth about pop without shame, regret or loathing, catalyzing my own public stances from there on in). Watching MTV, watching 120 Minutes and good ol’ Dave Kendall (in retrospective, no less moronic than anyone else, no matter how loathed at the time), going to shows, talking music music music with fellow obsessives — well, those last two parts haven’t changed any.

So what exactly happens with bands you start following in such a time and keep going as you keep going? Where does the initial hot flash of revelation take you? And above all, what if those bands aren’t the overripe gods of the sixties and seventies, but the inescapable products of them, either in worship or in reaction or both? Not actually a question I specifically dwell on, though I do still follow along with bands long after people consider them past a sell-by date — or ironically when they outlast the initial reputations they have to achieve a status nobody might have dreamed of. But what do I think of them? Do they impact me at all, do they challenge me, should they challenge me? Are they ultimately just the background music of a new age, an accepted buzz as I’m looking away from cul de sacs?

The albums of choice are the Charlatans’ Wonderland, Mercury Rev’s All is Dream, Stereolab’s Sound-Dust, Spiritualized’s Let It Come Down, and New Order’s Get Ready. New Order I was already following for several years before 1991, so that’s a bit of a cheat, but everyone else I first heard about or started listening to that year, and they’re all out right about now, in a bizarre confluence of dates that brings everything back without trying.

The Charlatans were the only band I actually saw in that year, in fact also performing essentially in front of KLA at Ackerman Grand Ballroom, supporting their baggier-than-thou Some Friendly, rather audaciously (so I thought — and it still is, in retrospect) playing the ‘hit’ first, “The Only One I Know” dispatched with energy and then everything else dealt with. There were liquid psych projections, that Madchester beat, Tim Burgess singing about this and that in his not-really strong voice, but the album was okay enough and when something really connected, it did — the concluding version of “Sproston Green” was an honest-to-god monster, and it’s no surprise it’s still played to this day, never a single but The Song, as much as “A Forest” is for the Cure. And now the band can look back on baggy with a wry smile, not to mention Britpop, riding both waves with stuff stolen from everyone else and somehow finding their own way as a result, a melange band that never is perfectly individual but somehow works. And Wonderland works surprisingly well, even better on relistenings, as much a grab-and-devour experience as any rock band can hope to do in a world of instant recontextualization, where the sampler doesn’t so much reign surpreme as center everything by default. The big beat “Judas,” the steel guitar twang and slight psych of “A Man Needs to Be Told,” the growling techno buzz and clatter of “The Bell and the Butterfly,” the more open psych then slam of “Is It In You?” and above all else Tim Burgess’ nutty trick of using a falsetto much of the time, initially unsettling but surprisingly the killer touch. He finally sounds like he’s meant to be the center of the music rather than the unexpected guest wafting through it, and when he’s not actually there he’s missed. The beats hit incredibly well, the music has tons of classic rock in it but it doesn’t piss me off, it’s just comfortable enough, just different enough. It’s not the Super Furry Animals’ astonishing Rings Around the World, say, but it doesn’t pretend to be. The Charlatans may never be cool, but they sound like a band I can appreciate even more — like a bunch of guys who know that they want to sound a certain, specific way, but keep listening to other things and use them in their own style. Much to my surprise, I find myself inspired by them. I don’t so much want to be them when I grow up — I never did — but I like where they’re at. They’re actually not old somehow, not yet.

All Is Dream’s start might as well be “You Only Live Twice,” which would make for an interesting twist that that collective hasn’t tried yet. It’s not quite that song, though, but in some perverse way it suits them. Mercury Rev came to my attention through Melody Maker — a weird way for an American band to get known, perhaps, but not so surprising when you consider their then label Rough Trade was about to finally go under in the States. Prompted thus, I picked up Yerself is Steam and was all the better for it, especially given that nobody else seemed to have it because the album had barely been released. For all the band’s odd evolutions since then, that remains the watermark for me; I was honestly and truly bowled over by what the Rev did back then, David Baker’s weird ass way of singing up down and all around (he’s near the top of the ‘where are they now’ file I keep mentally — one great album as Shady, some production work, then silence), the feedback, the rollicking death stomps, the dramatic orchestrations, the static, the wibbling. For a first album it felt like a fifth or even more, and learning more after the fact how Jonathan Donahue had clearly built on his time in late eighties Flaming Lips didn’t keep me from being any less impressed. I got pissed at hearing about all the great live shows in the UK that I had no chance of seeing, practically barked with annoyance over the fact that at a festival in Finsbury Park (where they were put on the bill by the Cult, of all people) they invited a bunch of little kids to dancing around in bee costumes while hitting things during “Chasing a Bee” — a moment of ‘planet Tharg’ genius, to quote a review of the time, that I could never see. And will never see, because All is Dream isn’t like any of the previous albums, maintaining an admirable winning streak of near constant change (well, okay, Boces was Yerself redux to an extent). I’ve heard the Beatles/Supertramp/Flaming Lips triangulation and it makes sense but this feels more like a Pink Floyd album than, say, Amnesiac does, though like Radiohead there’s a similar borrowing of elegantly wasted keyboards, but the Rev uses steady rock stomp, string-laden sweep and swoop, post-David Gilmour electric arcs into the infinite with a dollop of Neil Young here and there, like if The Wall wanted to be heartfelt instead of miserably empty. I regard them with an endlessly bemused eye these days — I’ve had the chance to interview Baker, Donohue and Grasshopper at various times, still for the life of me can’t figure them out. They connected once again, didn’t they? I may not obsess, but I appreciate.

Stereolab were just a name to me in 1991, only just, but I was already vaguely intrigued by what I heard — something about Marxist drones and references to McCarthy, about whom I knew nothing. Later years would take care of the revelations as well as the amusing realizations — in an era where eight million neo-Krautrock bands can be found, comparing things to the early nineties is instructive. The motorik sprawl, the slabs of noise, the easy listening vocals delivered over the top by Laetitia Sadier and the unfairly ignored Mary Hansen, nearly everything has been taken and revamped by tons of others since then but in individual approaches or focuses, not as a unified aesthetic. Stereolab themselves stopped caring and then got into things like Brazilian jazz psychedelia and other stuff and now Sound-Dust. “Space Moth” shows how they’ve taken it in their own way, relentless rhythms first mysterious and chiming and slowly but surely concluding with an easy good time vibe, the brass and ‘doo doo doo’ making for an upbeat jam session experience. The sparkling horns are a lovely touch throughout, really, and the whole thing is an example of how the lack of volume need not mean lack of creativity — perhaps an obvious point, but still worth the remembering. More to the point, it’s a different kind of tension, where tempo shifts aren’t automatically prog rock signifiers and blithe spirits don’t mean things are necessarily happy. It isn’t new for Stereolab, but after the misfire of Dots and Loops and the more welcome return of Cobra, sterility and hesitation has been replaced by a new lushness, and if the High Llamas influence on the groop has never been higher — one can tell within two notes where Sean O’Hagan is sitting in on piano — it’s still Stereolab at heart, where silence and the disappearance of any sort of beat at points now truly becomes as important as all the more obvious signifiers.

Spiritualized and the whole Spacemen 3 world was just intruding in on me in 1991, thanks to Sonic Boom’s solo album Spectrum, but initial reports and thoughts about singles indicated something was up. Acquiring The Perfect Prescription helped ground myself more thoroughly in Jason Pierce’s own work, and the pristine glow of the singles before Lazer Guided Melodies, not to mention the album itself the following year, helped introduce me to an idea that psychedelia was not so much dead and buried as simply recast into more structured and obsessive realms. Thus they became the gateway drug to a lot of different stuff like Loop and Main and more, while like Stereolab the fusion they helped pioneer became all the more prominent over the course of the decade, though that was mostly with bands rediscovering Spacemen 3’s approach while at the least listening to the newer stuff. Painfully loud, deathly quiet, gospel as not-gospel with gospel singers, they were a rush and a thrill, sonic joys for sonic joys and sonic depths for sonic depths. Let It Come Down wryly includes a nod to the followers — Low covered “Lord Can You Hear Me?” from Spacemen 3 days and Jason remade it with Mimi from said band, matching his ever-more expansive tendency for mega-arrangements to his past. Like All Is Dream, orchestration is key, a signifier rejected by punk and abused by Britpop, but in the right hands for all its fripperies and indulgence successful precisely because it is frippery and indulgence, the band — whatever there is of the band — swallowed whole by it, explosions like “On Fire” and “The Twelve Steps” notwithstanding. Jason sings over the strings or gets dominated by them, and the strings lead the way — perhaps after firing every last member ever it’s simply the only way he can operate, his ever-obsessive, circular ponderings about emotion and love and drugs and god no less present, navel-gazing as smeared portrait of sadness that never ends. And even when navel-gazing like on “Don’t Just Do Something,” it sounds like a universe building up and ripping out, the merest move of a molecule the Apocalypse, a mountains-into-molehills-into-mountains approach. Perhaps Jason is the secret goth nobody ever realized was the case, the Morrissey of a generation not so apt to wear hearts on sleeves. And for me? He still thrills, but he still in the end essentially is tweaking. The guy who whipped up “Walking With Jesus” and “Things’ll Never Be the Same” simply keeps increasing his compositional palette, expanding outward and outward, from electric guitar to symphonies and back, to repaint the same portrait within the same lines. Lazer Guided Melodies in some respects still says it all, but there’s something more immediate about the sheer scope of Let It Come Down that even makes the vast flow of Ladies and Gentlemen seem small. Gigantism was never so precise.

But somehow above and over and just plain better than everyone and everything else, New Order. New Order seem, ahem, eternal to me. They seem like they’ve always been there, even though I only first heard them in the mid-eighties. One of my first concerts — them touring Technique 1989, mindblowing, loud, incredible, a version of “Temptation” was pure surge and exaltation. What made them connect so well? How did they do it? Sooner than the Cure, even sooner than Depeche Mode, more so than the Smiths or many others they were on top 40, more than MTV favorites, even if “True Faith” went into eternal rotation. Were they speaking to my soul in odd, hesitant ways, the way Bernard Sumner didn’t so much sing as softly question or puzzle, the most unlikely mainstream lead vocalist ever, a role he took out of tragedy to a status that says so very much to me still? Stephen Morris’ ‘doesn’t matter if they’re electronic’ drums, Gillian Gilbert’s sprightly then melancholy keyboards, THE BASS. To me not liking them seems, well, wrong, and even if Republic is forever complained about in some corners, it has “Regret” and that alone is more than most can ever do. So they weren’t defining 1991 per se — though the Electronic album came out that year, so puzzle that one out if you will. And 2001? They define nothing — instead, they perfectly transcend it. Somehow this should be called dated but can’t be, somehow this should be comfortable but it isn’t. Whatever has happened over all this time, now they’ve found each other again they’ve recorded an album rather than recording a New Order album, they aren’t indulging in the pointless retroactive crap of U2 these days. Not as experimentally dour as the earlier eighties, not as hyperactive as the late eighties, not as gently comfortable as the early nineties — reflective yet impassioned, beat-laden but not reviving twenty years ago, absolutely comfortable in and of itself but somehow still having an indefinable, beautiful it, and every so often finding the frenzy once again, an energy both new and old, a sound both then and now. Britpop, nu-metal, bling-bling, all ignored — Get Ready doesn’t even need to acknowledge it, and the bits with Primal Scream and big beat drums and all sound like a particularly majestic New Order song more than anything else. Even the most self-consciously ‘mature’ song, “Run Wild,” has that spark — maybe because Sumner never has to worry about losing his voice, sounding eternally 26. If there’s a moment, when I stopped for enthrallment, surely it was “Take Me Down.” And why not — my own nineties musical hero above all else save Kevin Shields, the ever-maligned Billy Corgan, sung and played guitar, his fragile backing ghosting Sumner like a delicate web, the music at once familiar and astonishingly new, the combination of everything from the Velvets’ “Sister Ray” trance that Joy Division took inspiration from to disco’s endless invocation of the beat, from psychedelia’s invention to elegant collapse, two avatars suddenly locked in endless swirl. It could have gone on forever.

So ten years on and what has changed? Everything, nothing, who knows? My worries and fears take on new forms in reaction to new events, my desires plow their own strange paths, my hopes reconstitute themselves anew daily. And what was once sudden newness generally now feels…pleasant, but every so often something more. The bleeding edge is far away, assuming any of the groups in question had it in the first place, and maybe aside from New Order they didn’t. But even if my new kinds of kick circle out endlessly forwards and backwards in time, these bands are still here. And you know? I’ll keep them. My twenty-year-old self loved them all and still does.

ARE YOU GOING? – Simon and Garfunkel and memory

“And you read your Emily Dickinson/and I my Robert Frost”
– “The Dangling Conversation”, Simon and Garfunkel

The LP Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme came out in 1968: my father bought it for my mother that Christmas, and it was played a lot in our house over the next months and years. They had many records, but not much pop: aside from Beatles, S&G was as out as it got. They were in their early 30s, felt somewhat of the age, but mostly somewhat older, caught already in the rhythm of work and kids. Too late to be freaking out, anyway.

In response as much as anything to the “grown-up” reponse to Simon and Garfunkel, pioneer rockcrit Robert Christgau — in his late 20s — wrote an essay, ‘Rock Lyrics are Poetry (Maybe)’, in (I think) Esquire that same year. He zeroed in on ‘The Dangling Conversation’, praised in the New York Times for its portrait of non-communication, as “a pitiless vision of self-consciousness and isolation”: as ever, both protective and dismissive of rock’s claims for itself, determined it be respected, suspicious and worse to the children’s-crusade excesses of the, um, counter-culture, he [faint]praises Simon’s obvious craftsman virtues in order to slam this song above all: “[the] voice drips self-pity from every syllable…The Mantonvani strings that reinforce the lyric capture its toughness perfectly.” (The latter remark, for the Mantovani buffs among us, is boilerplate sarcasm: Mantovani was the unhippest of the unhip in 1968.)

Aged eight, I loved ‘The Dangling Conversation’. I liked the picture painted, of two adults reading in a quiet apartment: we’d only just got TV, and I could easily remember back to when mum and dad often did just that, while my sister and I played in front of the fire. I liked the controlled sense of brooding, looming menace that the singing pushes towards, then steps aside from: there’s danger here, maybe, but no, we’ve escaped it. Our house was safe from this danger. “And you read your Emily Dickinson/and I my Robert Frost”: I liked this line most of all, possibly because I KNEW WHO ROBERT FROST WAS. There was a book in the bookcase, hardback, pale pale green paper jacket: The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. I never saw mum or dad reading it — another sign that the danger did not yet threaten.

In 1967, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease: unusually young, and a couple of years before the L-Dopa breakthrough. It was assumed that he would not be cured; that he had perhaps ten years to live at most. If I knew this aged eight, I hardly grasped it: I think I probably didn’t know in any real sense for three or four years. In the event, he’s lived with it for 34 years, fighting and declining, declining and fighting. Bed-ridden earlier this year — courtesy chickenpox, ludicrously enough, from which he’s recovered, albeit slowly — he played the three Simon and Garfunkel CDs (burned for him by my sister’s boyfriend) more than anything else. When we were trying to convert mum and dad to CD technology, one of my arguments was that new music was simply no longer available on vinyl. “But we don’t really want to listen to new music any more, Mark,” said Dad, simply: “We want to listen to the old music.” Which I suppose I had long known, and never faced: if I consider the amount I’ve actually talked about my work — my life — with my father, given how much I see of him, it seems almost absurdly little.

“And you read your Emily Dickinson/and I my Robert Frost…”: Xgau is right, of course: the song is shallow and judgmental. Its narrative eye sees more than its narrative-’I', a classic mark of untackled complacency. We are enjoined to feel superior. But in discussing why or how it goes wrong, Xgau goes wrong himself, in a classic young-man way: “… all he’s really doing is scratching [the people who buy his records] where they itch, providing some temporary relief but coming nowhere near the root of the problem.” For years I would certainly have used some line like this about S&G, somewhat embarrassed, I suppose, at memories of my eight-year-old love of them. (With some tiny personal justification: because they were actually the root of the first aesthetic argument I ever had, with my schoolfriend Chris, a Sabbath fan: I said I liked them, and he said, “Oh, I always thought you had some taste…”. He was at war with his dad; I’ve never been at war with mine — or anyway always avoided its overt expression.) I read Xgau’s essay at college in 1978, when I was already planning to become a rock-writer, though as yet telling no one. It had a big effect on me: poetry bad/pop good is the crass, silly version I often throw at people. Sometimes it makes them stop and think.

The uncrass, unsilly version is harder: crafted songs where you can hear the words, the great Crosby-crooner tradition of adult expression, to me this has always been a world of ambiguous evasion. Of grownupness as a retreat, a settling, a compromise. Rock’s callow address of Other Issues — war, race, genderfuck, hate, craziness — issues from within a 15-yr-old listener’s world, yes, but this is the context that save and protects and allows it. Think of all the things Sinatra ever sang of; then think of a few things Fields of the Neph sing of. Who’s more grown-up, who’s more evasive, who’s sillier, who’s deeper? Triviality protects awesomeness; awesomeness protects triviality. Dad likes music where you can hear the words; I almost never listen to the words in music.

There is no music without shadows: I no longer quite know what once I knew I knew, about what’s wrong and weak about of settling, compromise, or not freaking out. Strength is not about what presents; it may well be about what doesn’t.

“Coming nowhere near the root of the problem”: if this is why my dad liked S&G then and likes them now, well, good. Good for him and — as a result — good for them. Evasion is sometimes FAR more life-affirming and helpful than pitiless idealistic examination of all that’s the case in the situation. Yes, I could start discussing my work with him, and my theories and my worldview — and probably I should — but at some point there’s going to be a hiccup I can do without: the music that gets him by, the reading — he has always adored poetry — mean almost nothing to me. Would this amuse him, or would it crush him? I deal with the disparity by not dealing: by accepting my opinion-when-eight of S&G when I’m sitting with dad, CD player softly running, not what I may think now, shadowed and conflicted as that is. There’s grief that needs to be dealt with, and grief you can avoid.

Darkness In Light

Tool’s Lateralus and Willful Withdrawal in a New Summer of Love

It is, of course, a brilliant time to be alive. Sure, there’s another idiotic president raising international tensions in hamhanded ways, but this one lacks ol’ Ron’s gift of the gab and is currently finding new ways to screw up and be compromised and attacked by both left and right, so I’m not too worried quite yet. And while part of me is convinced that somewhere somehow right now the past products of American foreign policy are about to result in something horrific, that’s something most people who have put their mind to it have expected for years anyway. So relax and enjoy the music. … read on …

Summertime Rocks And Rolls

Concerts in the American Sun

Late last night I went to the rock show. Or so was what I was hoping the other day, but I ended up being unable to float along, and thus alas had to miss the Frogs, a severe pity but not life threatening. However, that would have been your usual gig-in-a-club deal, where the drinks were overpriced and where the clink of pool balls would likely have drowned out the quieter moments. I would not be surrounded by about 20,000 of my closest unfriends or rather nonfriends slathering on the sunblock and experiencing that unusual frisson of feedback blowouts combined with fresh breezes and the desperate hope that the speaker stacks would provide enough shadow to mosh in peace with. And yet for all that such a description sounds horrible, I’ve been there more than once and don’t really mind — too much.

All-day rock festivals: discuss. One reason why Woodstock was so fetishized in America was its perceived uniqueness — bolstered by the film, a hit single or two, and Incipient Rock Legendaria, not to mention Altamont’s messy collapse and equally high level mythologizing. They were both seasonal gatherings as well — you can’t get away with such things in winter, even in some place as relatively temperate as Southern California, and they seem just perfect for the times when the days are longest, the weather warmest and everything’s supposed to be happy, in the good ol’ summertime. Other folks took notice of this thing and while America was just too damn big to recreate a national gathering again along the level of Woodstock and all, in Europe the principle was first established and then let run riot. Reading’s earlier life transformed into a regular rock fest, while Michael Eavis made Glastonbury a household word, while on the continent itself Roskilde in Denmark was just the tip of the iceberg. The ‘festival circuit’ became common currency for Euro tours, while in America the mainstream rock audience had nothing like it in the eighties, say. There were the abortive attempts of the US Festivals, to be sure, theoretically epochal but now just dated, odd one-offs aiming at full inclusion of styles that didn’t quite connect — then there was Live Aid, but that was even more of a grotesque orgy of posing than anything else, the bastard child of Geldof’s good intentions, now nothing more than a blip.

Things started to get a little more in the swing of things with the Monsters of Rock tour in 1988, where Metallica was the opening act and the Scorpions near the top of the bill — as bemusing a snapshot of the times as anything else — while Ian Astbury came up with his ‘Gathering of the Tribes’ idea and managed to pull off something where Public Enemy and the Indigo Girls could share a stage. Leave it to Perry Farrell, however, to dream up something at once perfectly sellable and mushily air-headed enough to seem deep and wondrous, and thus was Lollapalooza born ten years ago. Theoretically it was supposed to be a celebration of Jane’s Addiction’s break-up (which I still believe is the case, so let’s all pretend the current walking corpse is just that), but whatever it was, it brought the idea of ‘alternative’ ever more closely to the public audience at large. Right when it finished, Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and that finished the job (and arguably a lot of music, but that’s another story).

Lollapalooza and all its bastard and often more entertaining offspring now have made the idea of American rock festivals as regularized an intrinsic element of the calendar, with ever more widening circles from there — consider all the various radio station festivals now in place, all across the musical spectrums, especially when one realizes how many bands play that particular ‘circuit’ instead of something like the Warped Tour or Ozzfest or what have you. And as such they provide a new series of memories and experiences, helping to define something that couldn’t have as easily existed in previous years. And mine, well, they’re an odd bunch.

I was actually at the first Lollapalooza thang back in 1991, and it was, well, an all-day rock concert. It most certainly was not a life-changing experience, but it did provide amusements. Not least of which was the fact of sitting way the fuck up on a hill, looking down towards the stage from the lawn area, and seeing Henry Rollins emote rather loudly about things with his band while the cars on the freeway in the distance kept driving along and planes landed at the nearby US Marine base. This while baking in the sun, no shade in sight, overpriced drinks, bootleg T-shirts being sold inside the concert area itself (an admirable approach, I think, especially since they were clearly better than the real ones and went for half the price), the whole shebang. Yay! Other interesting sights — seeing Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers wield a shotgun and then start firing it off, Trent Reznor’s invoking darkness and fog machines…while it was still light in the sky, Jane’s itself firing up an amazing live show and then all of a sudden discovering bodies hurling past me and realizing I was right on the edge of a huge mosh pit on the hill’s 45 degree angle dancing around open flames. It was perhaps mystic, but I had no need to die, so I carefully positioned myself so my ex-high school linebacker friend was between me and said pit. Things were then happier.

The next three summers after than brought more Lollapaloozas and more such experiences (most priceless — Jim Reid to departing hordes leaving after Pearl Jam’s set, in broadest Glaswegian, “Hey! The way out’s over there, you fucking cocksuckers!”). There’s something about the flat, caustic feeling of hearing full volume assaults in dead heat which is absolutely enervating, it’s where you want to be listening to something like Loop more than anything else (or maybe the Meat Puppets), but instead feel surrounded by the invocation to be part of the Carbonated Caffeine Generation and thus become part of happy youth enjoying the music today that the kids seem to like. Savage torpor vs. becoming part of the live video clip for Alternative Nation or something like that — 1993 on an endless loop, right there. And thus I also found myself thanks to a free pass seeing Suede as part of that year’s first KROQ Weenie Roast, arguably a major catalyst of the summer radio festival trend. Suede didn’t belong there at all, really, but neither did anyone else — still, it made for an interesting collision of styles in the year when KROQ thought it was a college radio station, sorta. Thus amidst people like Stone Temple Pilots and Terence Trent D’arby, you had Bettie Serveert and the Posies and at one point John Reis of Rocket from the Crypt pointing up towards a video screen showing a bunch of grilling hot dogs and saying, “I don’t know about you guys, but those things look fucking foul!” Said dogs also looked about the way I felt, mushily parboiled and then crisped. 4 pm in an LA summer outside with, again, no shade is not an idea of perfection. The Lolla later than year was a bit better — there was shade at various places — but was there really any call for the security people to take everyone’s food and water from them and then consume it in front of everyone’s faces?

Sometimes things worked, though — Front 242 in ‘93 and Nick Cave at ‘94 at Lolla, since most everyone didn’t know who they were and went to get ’smart drinks’ and other such things and experimented with talking ‘on-line’ when not sitting at the ‘poetry slams’ (ah, the early Bill Clinton years). The advantage was that the area in front of the stage was just shaded enough, happily, and so all the goths and their spiritual friends like myself gathered and had a fucking great time with all the usual mosh denizens and their ugly-ass sunburnt torsos gone. Let me tell you, hearing a song like “Headhunter” or “Loverman” coming out of two-story high speaker stacks is a dream come true, especially when you’re in no immediate danger of being crushed for once. It made all the zoning elsewhere worth it, though sometimes there were joys — sitting under trees and hearing Dos from a distance or ending up sitting next to Tim and Laetitia from Stereolab and chatting about life. Or in my own case (Orange County reference coming up!) running into Mike from Naked Soul unexpectedly while heading for the water-mist tent, or listening to friend Chris do imitations of Billy Corgan’s on-stage rants all the way home. I think I heard the whined line “And when your churches abandon you…” about twenty different times on the way back to my house as a result.

The last summerfest type thing I’ve been at was ‘This Ain’t No Picnic’ two years ago — it was perfectly scaled for what it was, a college-rock fest, a Lolla in a much smaller locale. Type of thing where Guided By Voices, Superchunk and Sunny Day Real Estate were on the bill (who I desperately tried to ignore in favor of the Boredoms, Rocket From the Crypt again, and Sonic Youth, who played a perfectly pleasant if utterly unsurprising oldies set — nice job with “Mote,” though). There was heat and there were bugs and all the usual stuff, but it all felt friendlier, and even the moshin’ fools in front of the Boredoms for their one-track fuck-off art-Kraut-slam of a set seemed more intent on having fun than splitting skulls. By that time everything was perfectly codified and set-up, all the hippies enjoying HORDE and then endless Phish and Dave Matthews Band tours, the punks gone to Warped, the nu-metalheads splitting time between Family Values and Ozzfest, gentler wordsmiths and AAA types settling into Lilith Fair, and so forth. Festivals for niche markets, a pleasantly inevitable solution. I can’t mind, it’s the typically limited way. Just bring proper sunglasses with you when you go.

CHEAP THRILLS – Peaches Live

Peaches, The Bowery Ballroom NYC, 26 July 2001

Making fun of Peaches is beside the point because she gets it over with immediately, like taking off her clothes. Like her costume, your titters are mostly gone by the first song. The show Peaches put on at Bowery Ballroom that Friday night was not a slow-strip triumph of soft-porn lighting and rehearsal, it was something else. (Maybe that’s why she didn’t open for Madonna as she might have, in another pop time or place.)

“This ain’t no fuckin talk show” after all, as she snarled in “Rock Show”, squatting on a raised upstage platform in red high heels and stockings, whacking a huge imaginary cock, with a similarly visually-absent guitar kicking out a crude and blistering jam that rode the shocked crowd of twenty-something bar-hoppers like a sadistic bareback expert. “You came here for a rock show!” she screamed, alone on stage, singing to a minidisc.

There were famous people there. A photographer I’d never heard of who’s made a name for himself using cheap point-and-shoot cameras for his million-dollar fashion spreads. Somebody said they saw Adam Yauch. The lights went down. An ominously cheap bass line started pounding the walls, and the skin of the place tingled - what would she look like? What would she do? There’s no band fer chrissakes, just a mic stand on an empty stage bathed in magenta light. We were in a frenzy. Where was she? I imagined the perfect Peaches show: the entire show played off her minidisc. No act, no people, no Peaches, just savagely cheap beats and pre-recorded vocals.

But I was at the wrong show for that kind of perfect conceptual cleanliness, which is the ideal form that seamless-mix DJs take, hidden in the shadows of the cave, fleshless tech manipulators. Peaches is about the flesh: the embarrassing reality of the flesh, of ugly instincts you want to imagine away. Out, damn spot! But the blood showed up: Peaches bounded out of the wings, aviator shades in effect, scowling, a walk that was more like a stumble. She mumbled something about “New York City” and lurched into “Set it Off”, the dank thuds of bounce-tempo casio beats driving a big fuzz bassline and the chatter of synthetic hi- hats. The crowd was freaking, desperate to cheer this crazy woman, to validate what? Their sense of kitsch perhaps. The $15 they spent on tickets.

But the shared joke among us - that this woman Peaches is a novelty act, hilarious in theory, or for 3 minutes off a hard drive - was left hanging in shreds by the time she’d got down to her red silk panties for “Rock Show”, which seemed like some performative point of no return. A singer with a fake band. A performer with no moves. A sex symbol who insists on her own ugliness. Peaches reversed something about the crowd. She made us accomplices. She knows about that stain you’re trying to hide.

Moldy Peaches were the opener. They were all wearing costumes that looked like the band had made them about 5 minutes before the show, and they played sort of strummy folkrock songs with kitchen-table pothead lyrics (“we hate dance and we hate rap / but we like to contradict ourselves / that’s our act”) and they drew lots of laughs. “Who’s Got the Crack” was a crowd favorite. Knowing what static lay ahead, the MP’s straight-up irony was oddly comforting. I idly amused myself with thoughts of rushing the stage later on, ripping off my shirt, taking Peaches up on her challenge, to turn a promise into flesh, to turn erotica into porn. Peaches did hop down from the stage at one point. A bouncer appeared out of nowhere, his arms crossed, watching. This is New York after all. No one could see what was happening down front, but after a minute or two the bouncer pulled her up and out of there. “That was fun,” she said. And two girls joined her on stage for “Lovertits”. Some guy showed up for “Rock n Roll” and got bottles chucked at him.

But really, Peaches needed nothing but herself: sometimes not even that. About 3 songs in, a long bass drone slams into the room, the lights go crazy, synth drums pound nonsensically and this stripper with a gut, this junkie Sandra Bernhardt, flips off the whole room, crouching with her mic (having flung the mic stand offstage on the first song) and screams “I don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck…. I don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck….” She starts humping the floor, a vocal comes in, clearly Peaches, but she’s not singing. Peaches swings the mic violently around her body, twisting the cord, making herself into a bondage doll. She stuffs the microphone in her bra and sings along to herself. She slides it down her pants and hits it with her hand. She wants to break the tool she uses. Or fuck it. Or abandon it. Or all of the above.

After the inital thrill had worn off, and the cheapness of the entire evening began to dawn on us, the crowd was, understandably, a knot of confused indecision. Laughing was impossible - we had gone well beyond that. Cheering also seemed equally strange - how do we applaud this willfully nasty neglect of performative duties? How do we reward this refusal? And then, finally, the infamous “suckin on my titties” song started up and the entire crowd, enormously thankful for some recognizable shard, some agreed-upon if ill-remembered emotion, sang the chorus with her - “fuck the pain away, fuck the pain away” - fists raised in air, triumphant. It was not.

Elisha Sessions

A Quick Mention

A Quick Mention of Club Sussed III at which I’ll be DJing TONIGHT (Thursday) under my ninja guise DJ Cockfarmer. I will be for the first time playing the CLIMACTIC SET of the night so do not miss it (Club Latino, The Plain, St Clements, Oxford, 10pm-2am). Unfortunately I have had to promise no erection section in order to win this privilege BUT I will be attempting some proper mixing at about 1.55am so you should if at all possible be there. Cheers.

Dancing About Architecture

Dancing About Architecture goes eighties with an album-a-year trawl through what (sez they) made the Eighties less “synthy, spiky and safe”. In other words, ten albums which try to wrench back the 80s from their rightful nostalgiapop weirdness into a context Proper Rock Criticism might understand. So for a start we might point out that “spiky” and “synthy” still don’t equal “safe” and for a second we might point out that in a paranoid fittest-survives era ’safety’ might be a subversive value. Maybe this is why - contra Peter Gorman’s “five eighties myths” - I’ve listened more to Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” than anything by the Clash, ever. I’m keener on the Mick Jones who seems behind the gloss for four minutes not to know anything than the one who seems behind the grit to happily know everything.

(Though, actually, The Clash were a gang for fucksakes, i.e. a confederation whose only purpose is mutual support and ’safety’.)

Of course some of DAA’s picks are excellent records, all are underconsidered and worthy of attention…but still and all, the “synthy, spiky” eighties got something right: the reason ‘1982′ feels like a spell to me isn’t anything to do with ironypunkers Flipper and is everything to do with each gasp from Billy Mackenzie’s urgent lungs. And more still needs to be said about that! Meanwhile, praising a 1989 album for being “rock and roll as it was meant to be”? Sure, but they’d had since nineteen fifty fucking five to get it right, so one would hope so, eh?