I Know It’s Crazy But I Can’t Stop – The Honeycombs

I’m in love with Honey Lantree, and anyone who cares about pop should love her too. Look at the cover of The Honeycombs ‘I Can’t Stop’ - she’s above the boys, looking to the left and slightly upwards, red lipstick and dark back-comb. If you could see her body, instead of just her head, you might expect to see her seated at a typewriter, clockwatching the last ten minutes of a working week, looking forward to tonight’s club, tonight’s friends, tonight’s music. She’d be wearing a skirt slightly too short for the typing pool and perhaps a little too much make up - but there’s no time to go home to the suburbs and change before the 100 Club. No time to waste.

Well, it’s not quite as ordinary as that. Although at one time a hairdresser, Honey Lantree was 60’s pop’s greatest drummer - The Honeycombs’ one woman popstomp explosion. For a week or more I’ve been immersed in the four Honeycombs songs on Castle/Sanctuary’s staggering new Joe Meek anthology The Alchemist Of Pop . Not only does Alchemist replace the fairly difficult to get hold of ‘It’s Hard to Believe and the various volumes of The Joe Meek Story as the definitive Meek comp, but it’s also absolutely compulsory listening for any pop fan. Hang on - I don’t want to talk about The Alchemist of Pop here - read Marcello Carlin’s Church of Me article for a brilliant overview of the whole thing - I just want to talk about The Honeycombs. About Honey.

Let’s take them one at a time. First - ‘Have I the Right’ - the BIG one. Where to start? A debut Number One in August 1964 - two minutes and fifty six seconds of hormones-out-of-control pop mayhem. As with all great records, the intro sets everything up perfectly - an urgent, slightly marching-on the spot, backbeat with tambourine topping and Meek’s trademark compressed beyond belief guitar and ice rink organ. Dennis D’ell’s weird growling and gargling delivery is one of the great pop vocals, cranking himself up to a frustrated howl on the chorus (“‘I’ve got some love and I long to share it!”) over Honey’s brutal thump. The slightly off-mike ‘Alright’ after the second chorus sounds as if D’ell has fallen to the floor unable to continue, leaving it to the guitar to carry the tune while he recovers. Here, Honey punctuates with skipping end -of phrase off beats - I told you she was good. The empty-cinema ambience of the production is amazing, Meek ensuring that you have to lean in and listen hard. But still you always feel that something in the mix is still out of reach, as yet unheard.

It’s no surprise that they never equalled ‘Have I The Right’, spending the rest of their short career casting around for another big hit. Follow-up singles either failed to chart or ran aground well short of the top ten, although they did manage a sizeable hit overseas with ‘I Can’t Stop’, which oddly was never released as a single in Britain. To put it bluntly ‘I Can’t Stop’ is fucking mental. An obviously speeded up Dennis D’ell yelps and growls over a stripped down and scratchy R+B/Merseybeat hybrid. The bridge is bonkers - D’ell squeaks a camp ” A-we can’t go on kissing - like THIS” while Honey alternates thundering rolls with a proto-glam thud. Martin Murray’s guitar solo, meanwhile, battles against insane amounts of compression which at times reduces it to a high whistle and only Alan Ward’s Vox Continental escapes the crush as Meek runs riot on the desk. D’ell declares in the second bridge, “You’ve driven/ me wild/ from the start - WOW!” and we go around again until Honey’s cymbal flaying finishes it. Genius!

The third Honeycombs track on ‘Alchemist’ is a 1965 Kinks cover, ‘Something Better Beginning’. While the original is a pretty good, slightly Mersey-cheesy album track from ‘Kinda Kinks’, this version is gigantic - the best Kinks cover I’ve heard. Better even than The Raincoats’ ‘Lola’ or The Nomads ‘ I’m Not Like Everybody Else’ - that good. From the off Meek punctuates another cavernous production with a blend of groaning baritone sax and muted trumpet, gliding in ballroom strings halfway through the first verse. This time Honey’s beat is pure driving pop-Motown, pushing D’ell’s hopeful vocal to a dramatic falsetto conclusion. Massive - but it only struggled to number 39 in the charts.

There was one last hurrah - a summer 1965 number 12 hit with re-recording of the Howard/Blaikley ballad ‘That’s The Way’ from the previous year’s album ‘The Honeycombs’. Here Honey gets the microphone, joining a mixed-down D’ell in a soaring bubblegum duet and she sounds, well - heartbreakingly beautiful. A few more singles stiffed in 1965/66 before the band ground to a halt sometime in 1967. Well, maybe not quite - The Honeycombs have existed in various forms on the clubs and pubs circuit until just about the present day, usually featuring Dennis D’ell as the only original member. Honey Lantree never featured again except for a rumoured 1996 attempt to put the original line-up back together. I read somewhere that her mother had kept Honey’s sixties drum-kit in her basement in Hayes and that she planned to use it again, but somehow it never happened. I just can’t imagine how the heck the kit had survived the beatings she must have given it thirty years before.

So that’s why I love Honey and her Honeycombs. Sometimes everything- the sound, the look, the songs - is so irresistible that you can’t help yourself. You can’t help making them part of a story, part of a dream. And that’s the way you fall in love.

Dr C

The Geezaesthetic Manifesto

A Manifesto, by Various Geezers

Geezaesthetics was coined by ILE’s Jerry The Nipper as a one-word summary of our critical stance. What did he mean? Only he knows (printing this is at least partly a nudge at him to tell us!) – we took it as an affectionate diss, and over a few beers decided to reclaim the word. Since it’s rather a good one.

Hence this modest sort of manifesto, our version of what being a Geezaesthetic might involve. It speaks for itself, but I’ll use this introduction to make a couple of extra points. First of all, the manifesto is unfinished. It will probably always be unfinished, but add to it yourself if you like. Second, and importantly, we know that the word ‘geezer’ carries a gender implication. We also know that everyone who drafted the manifesto is a man. Geezaesthetics, though, wants to show no gender bias: whether it has avoided any is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

1. We are critics as soon as we listen to a record, watch a film, experience any art of any kind. Any reaction, from rapture to depression of the off switch, is an act of criticism. We’re not necessarily happy about this, but we’re stuck with it so there’s no point being unhappy about it either. … read on …

UK Garage In 2001 – Down Down BIZZNIZZ

Part 1: The Scene

I’m obsessed, I know; I bang on about it endlessly, analysing minute shifts and gradations, imagining radical mutations that only exist in my head, devoting reams of print space to nothing much in particular. And yet, despite all this, UK Garage is an awfully difficult area of music for me to write about. Difficult because I’m aware of how personally involved I am in the music’s success – an involvement that cleverer and healthier listeners tend to shy away from. Sometimes I feel like my patronage – downloading tracks, buying compilations, visiting clubs by myself if necessary, and then turning those experiences into something I can write about that might interest others – is all that keeps the style on its feet, keeps it generating delights for me in some sort of elaborate karmic feedback loop. To be obsessed with an artist is one thing, but to have such an attachment to something so abstract as a ìsceneî or ìmovementî is quite another, and even then UK Garage seems an odd choice, requiring a particularly skewed worldview. Clearly I’m not the right person for an impartial assessment.

For to immerse oneself fully within garage is not just to enjoy the odd track, but to wholeheartedly buy into - and believe in the success of - a musical narrative that stretches over a decade, encompassing whole genres (’ardkore, jungle, etc.) within a broader sound that can perhaps best be called ìthe sound of the piratesî. It’s to become so intimately associated with that story’s sonic twists and turns that the style’s constant musical characteristics actually become objective values in themselves, bestowing worth upon a track simply by being present. In fact UK Garage, much more than the sounds that preceded it, is music about that story, distilling every worthwhile element into a heady mixture that is undeniably ìpirateî music. In this way, garage is sonically more true to itself than jungle; the producers have a better instinctive understanding of the passage of the broader narrative they’re swept up within, and maybe because of that seem to know better where it should go next.

But where did garage go in 2001? The unbelievable rise of So Solid Crew excepted, from the outside it’s hard to tell that it went anywhere at all. It’s in fact arguable that by the end of 2000, garage had no sonic stories left to tell, having completed its street-to-academy progression by achieving both pop crossover (Arful Dodger, Craig David) and serious muso acclaim (MJ Cole, Wookie), not to mention its own breakaway sub-genre in the form of ìbreakbeat garageî. At any rate, it may have seemed as though garage had left itself little space to develop, and that the rise of the MC was a result of this: the areas of progression within the scene would now be vocal, lyrical and cultural, but not musical.

Garage’s chart-action less pronounced last year too, with less fabulously sparkling pop gems lighting up the higher reaches than during the Golden Age of The Artful Dodger. In truth there were probably more garage pop hits last year than prior, but their sheer diversity - from Misteeq’s enthusiastic helium-pop to Oxide & Neutrino’s angst-rave to DJ Pied Piper’s happy-go-lucky MC-vehicle to The Streets’ oddball geezers – undermined any impression of a full-frontal assault. But as any music critic will tell you, diversity and disparateness doesn’t equal interesting stories.

Instead, 2001 may go down as the year of breakbeat garage, and that would be a bit of a shame because last year this development, which had once seemed potentially invigorating, revealed itself to be a massive red herring. There were a multitude of tracks that followed the same deadening one-bar trudge of looped breakbeat + squelchy bassline, spiked with wacky noises or edgy dialogue sampled from martial arts films; a formula that quickly became played-out to the point of strong irritation. More crucially though, even at its best breakbeat garage comes across as both inessential and little more than a subtractive style: not only are creativity and invention thin on the ground, but the very stylistic foundation it rests upon – the use of a ‘funky’ and ‘natural’ looped break rather than 2-step’s trademark sub-Timbaland beats – excises the dangerousness of garage’s rhythmic excess, replacing it with a reassuring but unexciting familiarity.

At the same time, the sparkling pop-fluff vocal tracks began to lose their attraction, due to the drop in genuinely exciting productions (although as always there were exceptions like Selena’s trembling ìGive It Upî, and of course anything by Mis-Teeq) and the rise in the endless succession of useless remixes. With this radical tapering off at its extreme edges (pop vs. breakbeat), garage’s healthy diversity was beginning to resemble an Achilles’ heel. It’s easy to imagine many garage producers literally recoiling in horror from the twin dooms of over-sugared pop tracks and deeply uninteresting breakbeat dirges; consequently, instead of pulling the style into two distinct groups, these extremes actually cancelled out each other’s magnetic forces. The challenge facing producers was (and remains) discovering how to work past these two pitfalls, as opposed to simply remaining caught between them.

The Stockholm Monsters

EVERY TIME IT HAPPENS IT HAPPENS SO FAST

A hot Friday night, Summer 1985. Inertia everywhere - there’s not a lot left here for me, in 6 weeks I’ll be gone, leaving for London. But tonight something special - Factory Records are in town and everyone I know is crackling with anticipation. I bunked off work and got there early, drinking with the France brothers and Shan Hira. Gradually everyone assembles - D and S over there in the corner talking to a couple of roadies, E at the bar. F enters with a brief shimmy of the Ian Curtis dead fly dance, nods at the Monsters and picks up a pool cue. The buzz is that Hooky will drop by to do the sound or something.

Meanwhile, while hammering back the Special Brew, I’m looking out for her. Thus far I’ve screwed the whole thing up oh, sixteen or seventeen times. Spent too long honing my two world-class talents of saying the wrong thing and not noticing what’s under my very nose until it’s gone. Ah shit, she’ll show up, have another pint.

What’s so great about the Stockholm Monsters anyway? It’s this - there are no layers of style to get in the way, no third-hand signifiers to get in the way of the process. Because there’s no dirty great ball and chain to drag around, The Monsters get to punch home the point time after time without needing to worry if their hair looks good, or how they fit in. There’s no effort wasted in saying ‘Look, we’re doing this’ or ‘This is what we’re about’, they just DO it, and that’s why it goes straight to the heart. That’s why it hurts. Has a band ever responded better to the challenges that Vic Godard laid down in ‘Ambition’ and ‘A Different Story’? No learned rock and roll moves here - ‘Alma Mater’ is a pure hit of the strong stuff, a record to make you SHIVER. A shifting bass-line, THAT voice, a muted trumpet in the distance and you’re lost for ever.

It’s been said that The Smiths cut through to the heart of the matter like this, but I don’t think so. You can peel back Morrissey’s carefully constructed layers for ever and find yet more artifice. Listen to the first two singles and you’ll know all there is to know about how Morrissey’s world has been fashioned, but you’ll never get a glimpse of Morrissey himself. You’ll just see yourself in a mirror looking back. With the Monsters it’s all out there for you, all on the surface and it’s more than you can take.

Where was I? Oh yes, back then. ‘Everything’s wrong, Everything’s Wrong/I Understand Where I Belong’ swirls over me - a ride in a rattling rollercoaster - peaks of euphoria, troughs of despair. Lost in music, too far gone to resist, punch after punch, head spinning. I don’t remember exactly what they played, only that they were giants - effortlessly great. She turned up alright -late. Late and beautiful. We walked a tightrope of drunken possibilities - back to yours, back to mine? Neither actually, I ended up walking the streets in the small hours again and guess whose music was playing in my head.

December 1st 2001 - it’s my 40th birthday party. Sixteen years on and I haven’t learned much - I still drink too many, too fast, too often. This time she was early. ‘It could’ve been me’ she said as we stepped outside and kissed. God, it’s hard enough to keep things together without having your life rewind and get real like this. And now those bastards at LTM have re-issued Alma Mater and more. I suppose the best way to describe it is to admit that I’m completely fucked. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Dr C

The Jubilee Stuff

1
The weather matters. Saturday 1st June: 8pm, and the sky out of my window is still fading pale blue, weightless, benevolent. A jubilee weekend of rain would be a symbolic down: but then, we are long used to finding a meaning in the rain. Not just we aesthetes (’I'm happy when it rains’; ‘You’re happy cos you’re cosy and the rain comes rattling in’), but British Life in its broader-stroking manner. ‘It wouldn’t be Wimbledon if it didn’t rain’: ‘Queuing’s our national pastime – especially queueing in the rain’ – all of that has its kernel, but has been stretched to banality. We may yet be able to test whether it gets wheeled out over these four days. But for now, the miracle of the sun: to which we adapt and flock instantly, despite the myth of a rainy people. … read on …

C90 Go: Number 3

The Qt Of Blood Technique

Having spent the latter half of 1999 away from tape making due to self-imposed mix detox, the acquisition of a CD burner during that year’s Yuletide sent me back into the hobby with a mad frenzy. I didn’t fall off the wagon so much as I gleefully leaped from it, clammy palms and all. The Qt of Blood Technique (a foolproof defense tactic that doubles as a Trading Places reference) was one of the first CDRs I made but it was misplaced shortly after that. Lo and behold, the forgotten disc was discovered recently while rifling through some old paperwork and several credit card offers that were waiting to be ripped in half. It was made with the intent to be given to my brother Dave, who since the time of this CDR’s finalization has had to wade through more than enough of my mixmaking crud to the point where it would be redundant to give it to him now.

‘Street Life’ isn’t merely one of my favorite Roxy Music songs; it’s one of my favorite album openers as well, and it seems to be ideal for the opening scene of a movie involving a group of people who conduct their business on the streets and in dimly lit clubs of ill repute. Cliche! When I was assembling the tracks and sequence, I thought about how great it would be to open the mix with this and close it with the Crusaders‘ ‘Street Life,’ even though it was already used for Burt Reynolds’ 1981 thriller Sharky’s Machine. So bam - there could be a theme of some sort! A few other songs came to mind that fit along the same lines of those like-named songs, and all I could think of was a soundtrack for some imaginary film stuck between the blaxploitative likes of Detroit 9000 and a more recent film like The Limey. Gutter-ridden but sleek in a sense. Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman would most definitely have to be in this film.

Primal Scream’s Vanishing Point - which cribs dialogue and thematic content from the ’70s movie of the same name, another inspiration for this mix - is a really uneven record, and the instrumental ‘Get Duffy’ might not be its most representative moment, but it has the right glassy-eyed flow to follow Roxy Music with its ’70s rhythm box and an atmosphere that lends itself to a backroom scene at some joint where all the decor is dark red and black.
With a forceful swipe of organ, the possible party sequence is kicked off in the form of Latin percussionist Candido’s monstrous version of Olatunji’s
‘Jingo.’ This mix is six and a half minutes long, over three minutes less than the version most are probably familiar with. Even in its truncated form, it’s still able to build up, break down, and show off all those intricate layers - the percussion duel between the left and right channels, the swelling organ, the galloping bass, and… everything else (this time constraint is no good!). There’s so much going on and yet it’s easy to take that fact for granted when it’s so reflexive to simply delight in its direct-to-the-hip lusciousness. Hooah!

The bass line gets deeper and slows down a bit for S.O.U.L.’s ‘Burning Spear,’ another instrumental that’s one of maybe five songs containing flute that I actually like. A big reason why this song appears here is to set up
Axelrod’s ‘The Mental Traveler.’ ‘Burning Spear’ actually begins somewhat like the breakdown of drum and bass of that song that comes along later, but it has its own charms to distinguish itself apart from the song it’s more or less assisting for effect’s sake. ‘Burning Spear’ makes me think of early
’70s Bar-Kays with the keyboards replaced by flute. It’s pretty much the lead instrument here, ducking in roughly 20 seconds in and skipping and winding around the rhythm and plaintively strummed guitar for the remainder. Everything’s direct and amiable until it speeds up at the very end, where it ends abruptly.

‘Bassthema’ - by Einstürzende Neubauten’s dapper Blixa Bargeld - is one of those songs with a title that tells you just as much about the song as any desperately rushed description. Thanks to some muffled production values and lots of revrrrrrb, the primary bass line is even deeper than the one in the song preceding it. Paranoia-inducing chime-y effects (bells?) and a slight rhythm hover, and then a jolting succession of pungent thrums jab and jab and become louder and louder and louder until - gasp! - suddenly dissipating with no tension resolved. This could be the crime scene.

The shuffling ‘Shadows’ by Superpitcher creeps out of the sewer holes and, like Kompakt mate Dettinger’s Intershop, it sounds like the ideal accompaniment for driving down a barren damp avenue around 3 a.m. A looped ghostly sample of a female vocalist intones something that sounds like
‘Breathe in the sympathy/ When the shadows fall.’ Now I know the ‘when the shadows fall’ bit could indicate that it’s from a version of ‘Willow Weep for Me,’ but I just can’t place it because of the ’sympathy’ (?) bit. Any help with this brainwracking issue would be appreciated.

I am, however, positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that the origin of the
Black Box Recorder song that follows is in Althea and Donna’s ‘Up Town Top Ranking.’ Black Box Recorder’s claustrophobic angle on the young duo’s original picks up nicely after the eerie murk of the Superpitcher track. This is rather different from the original, not only in the production but the delivery. The vocals seem to come from someone whose idea of a good time involves robbing a bank instead of double-dutch.

Oh no it’s another ’70s spy-type deal - mallets, cascading keys, seesawing strings - this time from Tindersticks. ‘Paco’s Theme’ is a b-side to one of the few singles of theirs I’ve bought. The only reasonable defense in this being relegated to a secondary spot would have to be that it was recorded after the album was done (in this case it’s Curtains). It’s better than anything on their soundtrack/score records to date, more lively but pensive and seemingly put together in an off-the-cuff fashion with a brilliant result.

‘The Mental Traveler’ ups the drama with all of David Axelrod’s legendary trademarks: the fat chords, the breaks, the crisp but graceful touch - acted out by all-star personnel. Speaking of all-star personnel, some label should anthologize bassist Carol Kaye’s session work. Such a thing would have to include songs by the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, Nancy Sinatra, Quincy Jones, Joe Cocker, Cannonball Adderley, and Axelrod. Now there’s a mix. I reckon you could also devote a whole disc to bassists who mimic Kaye’s style (hello Broadcast, hello His Name Is Alive). But back to ‘The Mental Traveler’ before it vanishes. Just as ambitious as a side-long ELP medley, the song fits as much thrill and dazzle in its few minutes as most LPs, and it ends as it begins: with a massive swell of strings.

And it’s another swell of strings that begins the Walker Brothers‘ ‘Nite Flights,’ one of the weird dark (not quite death) disco numbers from their album of the same name. It’s funny how that top-heavy record has songs that inspired Brian Eno and David Byrne (and some neuromantics), and then there are songs that seem to have paved the way for Glenn Frey’s ‘You Belong to the City’ and Foreigner’s ‘Waiting for a Girl Like You.’ (Gary Walker, the finger is pointed at you.) What business these stage siblings had making this type of music is beyond me. How this particular song fits into the pseudo-scheme of things of this CDR is also beyond me. It just sounds right
- the mood, the velocity, those strings - even if I have no clue what Scott means when he sings of glass traps, broken necks, feather weights, and blood lights (sp?).

Like Arab Strap and ELO, you either love or hate Steely Dan, and I tend to love ’em despite the fact that they’re a couple of know-all jazzbo snots. They remind me of a couple of my uncles, and in fact it was a couple of my uncles and my dad who exposed me to these crotchety muso bastards. I wish Becker and Fagen would have made more songs like ‘Show Biz Kids.’ It’s a simple pop song without a great deal of flash and showmanship. No matter how low the volume is on the stereo you’re playing it on, it’s all but impossible to ignore it. Oh yeah, I forgot about the handclaps. Pretty much any song with handclaps is a good song. When I was little, I used to get them confused with Jimmy Buffett. Are Steely Dan fans dildo heads?

During the scene in which a scuffle of some sort takes place, the Tony Williams Lifetime’s ‘Some Hip Drum Shit’ would play rather loudly. It’s a violent 90-second percussion cluster wankfest for Williams, Don Alias, and Warren Smith. All I can see when I try to put an image to the song is a bunch of flailing limbs - they’re either playing all sorts of percussion devices or rib cages and abdomens. Attempting to pick this mess apart would be like hopping into a tornado to retrieve some post-it notes.

Immediately trailing ‘Shit” is the less frantic ‘Covert Action’ by Urban Tribe, the ridiculously overlooked Sherard Ingram project that released a spectacular full-length on Mo’ Wax. This one, however, dates from a 1990 Retroactive release that also featured Underground Resistance and Carl Craig, who mixed this track. Out of the all the compilations I’ve put together, I’ve probably used this track the most. I’m convinced that in 20 years it will still sound like something lunar, something from the future.

Ending the disc is the aforementioned ‘Street Life’ by the Crusaders, featuring vocals by Randy Crawford. It sounds rather displaced after ‘Covert Action.’ Indeed, the Urban Tribe track would have been a fine way for Qt of Blood to end, but I had to follow through on the concept of opening with a
‘Street Life’ and closing with a ‘Street Life.’ (Plus I have this thing for making mixes with an even number of tracks that last just a shade over 60 minutes.) The somewhat tacked on nature of ‘Street Life’ can actually be justified by the fact that a lot of non-imaginary soundtracks end with a song that sounds little like anything else on the record. At any rate, the Crusaders bring the disc full circle in a way that neither Neil Diamond nor the Geto Boys could have. For me, this is an indivisible jukebox.

Andy Kellman, February 2002

C90 Go: Number 2

Emergency Ward

Art’s “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos”–just the intro, please, none of that “we’re all boat people” stuff–is one of the most vicious songs I’ve ever heard, a sneering indictment of precisely the subculture that’s listening to it and nobody else. So, naturally, it had to open “Emergency Ward,” a document of my college years’ musical experience that’s still just about the best tape I’ve ever made, I think, 11 or 12 years later. WHRB’s rock program was called the Record Hospital–still is, actually. The name replaced “Plastic Passions,” and stuck around much longer. Record Hospital alumni tend to be fanatically loyal to it, and to the idea of it–more than any other college radio station I’ve ever encountered–and a lot of us have stayed in touch. In late 1990 or early 1991, I headed into the studio with a pile of my favorite records to make a tape that would encapsulate what the Record Hospital meant as far as I was concerned. I’ve probably made about a hundred copies of it since then. While I listened to it for this, I made another copy. It’s a song about why most of my friends aren’t happy. It makes me happy. I don’t know what this says about me.

We move on to the Dils‘ “You’re Not Blank,” another dismissal of people who adopt punk fashion–I think. The Dils were “The West Coast Clash,” except that they never got around to making an album until they’d turned into a series of much worse bands. On this one, though, they play like they can’t get fast or trebly enough, except there’s that weirdly dragging bass-drum pattern.

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282’s “Sister Hell” is where things start to get weird. They were from Iowa, and moved to San Francisco, and felt like freaks wherever they were. I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be about, but their anger is _personal_ offense: someone has done something disorienting and deeply unfair to somebody else, and it doesn’t make sense when they try to articulate it, but they both know there’s something really wrong. It ends almost arbitrarily.

And suddenly we’re accelerating into Bastro’s “Shoot Me A Deer,” a record completely out of control of its own tempo–you know, I remember when David Grubbs thought that rocking was a good thing, and he was RIGHT because he was so GOOD at it. It’s mostly doctrinaire one-TWO one-TWO until it hits that middle section where the guitar signal starts breaking up, and just where he can’t hold onto it any longer he repeats the first four notes of the song, yells “SHOOT!” and we’re off again. The rest is doctrinaire, but it’s been redeemed.

From there, we have to cool down quickly and efficiently, so: Beat Happening’s “Look Around,” which it sounds like they rehearsed for about a quarter of its playing time. Here’s the thing about the faux-naÔf approach of which Calvin Johnson is the master: there has to be a lot of stuff underneath it, or it just doesn’t work, and there are a million little ideas burbling through this one, even when Calvin is scatting or going oo-oo-oo. “If a black cat’s gonna cross my path it might as well be you”… gorgeous.

The longest gap between songs on the tape occurs here, and I think it’s about two seconds long–having been trained in radio, I’ve always been into ultra-tight segues. The crackle builds up nicely to Pere Ubu’s “Final Solution,” though. Everyone always talks about what a “Summertime Blues” rip it is, but it’s important to note that nobody is supposed to take the teen-angst thing seriously. David Thomas, for instance, was never a teenager: he suddenly appeared on this earth as a full-grown fat man. The teen angst is merely a formally appropriate setting for the basic throb of the song and the on/off guitar fits. I’ve never liked the bar of silence after “nuclear destruction,” though–seems cheaply manipulative. I remember with pleasure an acoustic show David T. and Jim Jones did on an early neo-Ubu tour where he sang the line as “guitar got a sound like a nuclear destruction… TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT Seems…” Don’t know about that wankity guitar solo near the end, either. But the sequence of this tape is too firmly burned into my neural pathways for me to accept not hearing it.

Afterwards, I need cheering up, though, so it’s the Vaselines‘ “Son of a Gun,” one of those songs like “Dancing in the Street” that’s figured out that it’s a great aesthetic strategy to have one verse and just repeat it a couple of times. I love the way it’s two little private songs–the kind you make up and sing to yourself–jammed together, one from Eugene and one from Frances, and that there’s obviously some kind of sexual obsession going on, but it’s not clear how requited it is. Nice simple guitar solo, nice simple gallop of a riff. For a moment, I tried to imagine an alternate universe where the Vaselines had stayed together and recorded a couple more albums that are just as good, but actually I can’t–it seems like the kind of band whose creators were just having a particularly inspired day when they did everything they ever did, and I know that’s not true, but on the other hand I could live without that live cassette’s proof of their imperfection.

Nice cross-segue from the final riff of “Son of a Gun” into the freakish electronic whoop of Jad Fair’s “The Zombies of Mora-Tau,” which scared the living hell out of me AND gave me a week-long case of the giggles the first time I heard it. I can’t imagine a brain that wasn’t Jad’s coming up with anything like this–the sound, the words, the shocked delivery. Years later, I got to put out a couple of Jad’s records, and the first time I talked to him I thought “I can’t believe I’m actually talking to the person who wrote ‘The Zombies of Mora-Tau.’” “I was so thirsty”–what a line. Also the ending of the song, which I will not spoil for people who haven’t heard it.

The opening of Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” hits instantly after the end of “Zombies.” Sort of amazing how that one single was so good it made people think they were a good band; afterwards, they didn’t do anything I liked at all until “Inside Job” ten years later. A friend of mine back in Michigan was simultaneously sexually fixated on Mudhoney and Halo of Flies, so I tended to conflate them. Which is probably why Halo of Flies’
“Headburn” isn’t on here–I pretty much think of them as the same thing.

Short little song, I’m realizing now. We drop off the edge into the Frogs‘
“I Don’t Care If U Disrespect Me (Just So You [heart] Me),” their best joke ever as far as I’m concerned, especially since it seems to have been made up on the spot. I copied this tape for my friend Maya a while ago, along with a bunch of others; months later, she called and was very upset that she’d lost one of my tapes–”the one with the early Beck song, where he’s talking about checking out men’s asses in the clubs”… I figured out that she hadn’t actually lost it, and had just thought that this song–with the
“that was a good drum break” line that Beck sampled in “Where It’s At”–was early Beck. Also once saw the Blake Babies cover it, but that’s another story.

More good cheer: the Clean’s “Tally Ho!” They’re just about my favorite band in the world, even now–I once nearly flew to New Zealand to see them play, the second record I ever put out was a Clean tribute EP, and when I finally did see them, it was Sept. 16, 2001, and it did more good things for my mood than any other show I’ve seen. Curious that their first single would be so unrepresentative, I’ve always thought, but now that I listen I hear that cheerful brutish rhythm section that got lost under the keyboards for me early on.

The appearance of Big Black’s “L Dopa” here is a bit of a bringdown, have to say–of all the bands I loved to distraction in my college day, they’ve aged worst. I tried listening to Songs About Fucking a few months ago and couldn’t believe how blustery it sounded and how whiny the guitars were. Inflexible, one-dimensional: music for people who think there’s something somehow cool about serial killers. Though I do like the slide and bam-bam-bam at the end.

Another abrupt stylistic shift into Mecca Normal’s “Man Thinks ‘Woman’”–an overtly preachy-to-the-converted song that’s still gorgeous because of the genius weirdness of its words–that biting-a-man’s-tongue-at-a-party routine makes me laugh, still–and because of the absolute assuredness of Jean Smith’s voice, bizarre as it is (love those ultra-low notes at the end). There is no template for what they’re doing, but they know EXACTLY what they’re up to. Also, she’s totally correct, in multiple senses.

Pavement’s “Forklift” is a strange one here–I suspect I initially got into them because everyone else at the Record Hospital adored them, and they took me a while to get into. I suspect that when I made this tape, I was figuring I’d catch on to them eventually. I did (it was “Heckler Spray” that did the trick, and before that a live show with “Debris Slide”). This record does support the contention that they were Scott Kannberg’s band before Steve Malkmus’s. Clearly they’re trying to do “New Face in Hell”; wish I could make out the words. Crudity against sophistication; it bears fruit for them.

Into straight crudity: the Urinals‘ mammoth “I’m a Bug,” a tiny little one-minute joke that can be told over and over. Lots of bands have covered this one, some of them friends of mine, and it’s never lost its fun for me. Highlights: the acceleration of the drum part at the beginning; the way the singer’s voice breaks with conviction; everyone joining in for the “buzz buzz” bit; the terrible/great rhyme that finishes the song.

Minor Threat’s “Think Again” has the same sort of conviction, though they wouldn’t know a joke if someone slipped it into their drinks, because they wouldn’t touch their drinks. What I like about them and nobody else seems to is that they were great conventional songwriters–at their best, they have the sort of primal simplicity of, say, Hank Williams. A friend and I used to do a very slow acoustic/harmony cover of “I Don’t Wanna Hear It.” Also nice how the riff for the last verse inverts the one from the rest of the song; too bad Ian sounds so contemptuous–it doesn’t look good on him.

I seem to like the big stylistic shifts: off we go into Azalia Snail’s
“Another Slave Labour Day,” her first single. Azalia’s one of those artists who connects with me in ways I can’t even explain–is this her most heavily
“produced” record? I’ve heard them all so many times I can’t even be sure. But I loved this single so much I tracked her down in New York when I came to town for the 1990 New Music Seminar, and got to be friends with her, and that ended up determining a lot of the course of the past 10 years of my life. (As did the lyric to this, I’m only now realizing; maybe this is part of why I don’t have a day job. “‘Work is not life,’ said Henry Miller; I agree!”) And I’ve still never heard anything else that sidles the same way.

I had totally forgotten the intro to the Eastern Dark’s “Johnny and Dee Dee”; after hearing it a hundred times, that’s not good. I also can’t believe I put this on rather than, say, the Ramones. On the other hand, I still had barely even heard the Ramones at this point (I was a latecomer, for reasons I don’t understand), and though they came up with better melodies, they never had one quite like this. Still, a weird choice; nowhere near even the best Eastern Dark song (that would be “I Don’t Need the Reasons”). Terrible snare sound; good harmonies; sorta dumb lyric. And an acceptable transition into…

…the Germs‘ “Lexicon Devil” (maybe not; it’s half a step down, I think). Still not sure how a walking mess like Darby Crash managed to come up with something this fine-honed and poetic and jet-propelled. But the last three songs on this side of the tape are illustrating something scary about me at that time–the nasty moods I was fighting at the time, the persistent mental image of flying along at top speed so I could bash myself into a reflective surface. The Eastern Dark did it literally, the Germs did it more or less literally…

…And Negative Approach made their descriptions of it completely convincing and managed to avoid the reflective wall anyway. “Nothing” is a freakishly scary way to end a side of a tape–this sounds like the 7″ version, with the guitars coming out of tiny tin boxes and John Brannon convinced that there is _nothing at all_ for him, no matter what door he opens. That series of howls at the end really does sound like the big reflective surface rising up in front of him.

Onward to side two. The Nightblooms‘ “Crystal Eyes” was a sort of Record Hospital theme song for a little while, especially its monumentally freaked-out whammy-bar-extruding guitar solo in the middle and the ferocious grind at the beginning that resolves itself into some Swedish girl’s barely audible voice and the softest of melodies while the rest of the band keeps Hammering So Hard. Less revolutionary now, esp. after their first album went all shoegaze and their second went all CSNY, but the tune is sturdier than you’d think. I remember seeing the band play a few years after this and thinking the bass player was super-cute. Another virtue this record has that not many of its descendants have: it is SHORT.

And stops dead just in time for Stiff Little Fingers‘ “Suspect Device” to lift off the ground. I played this on the radio again just a few weeks ago and remembered that the singer sings “fuck-all” just in time to bleep it. At the time, I thought “they take away our freedom/in the name of lib-er-ty” was some kind of profundity. It may in fact be, but it doesn’t seem quite as, uh, deep any more. But his voice still sounds like it’s being sharpened against a knife, and so does the guitar part’s stop-and-go in the chorus. I like the fact that the bridge repeats as the very end of the song, too. Apparently SLF are still at it, and still flogging this song to death every night–though my friend who saw them said it was the highlight of their set. Why does this not feel more important/contemporary right now than it does?

Another contrast: after it blows up in your face, Bird Nest Roys‘ “Jaffa Boy” comes insinuating in from one side. Twelve years after I made the tape, it seems to have some kind of weird sexual, maybe even pedophilic, subtext; maybe that’s just the culture that’s changed. Certainly the words are prima facie innocent, and how do they make those guitars so big and their harmonics so hornlike? “Orange lips”: is that like the Jaffa orange part of Jaffa cakes? The whole thing about this song is how much mystery there is to it, how they’re singing loudly and joyfully about something so personal they can’t even explain it comprehensibly. Plus the kid himself gets in the last word at the end of the song, which I’ve always loved. Chorus goes “Jaffa boy/Jaffa boy/Jaffa boy/Jaffa boy,” and repeats. What would I think if I didn’t understand English? Would it work like the Mutantes, say?

I let go of the slipcue mat a little too late for Pussy Galore’s “Cunt Tease,” so the first note comes skidding in. This is the essence of Rock That Parents Don’t Like, but I don’t think that’s why I like it: they’re yelling “fuck you” like they JUST discovered it and can’t get over how much fun it is to say. My old band Forget used to cover this, with Laura (our drummer) singing it and me doing the “fuck you” bit–a friend who saw us play it said she couldn’t believe how wide my jaw opened when I yelled it, it was like I was some kind of anaconda. So raw, so FUNNY–and so many nuances to the way the slightly out of tune guitar comes through the slightly damaged amp. How did they get through it without collapsing in giggles?

Afterwards, the beginning of the Misfits‘ “Where Eagles Dare” even sounds vaguely tame. Another one a band of mine has covered (Customer Service, a.k.a. Manipulations)–and another one where the cussing in the chorus MAKES it. “I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch!” Not until we learned how to play it six or seven years later did I realize how utterly weird the rest of the words are (”an omelet of disease awaits your noontime meal”?). Supposedly, the Misfits practiced 40 hours a week, and re-recorded their songs obsessively. And yet it sounds like they made it up in 15 minutes, got high, and kept the first take they recorded in the living room of their uncle’s house.

World of Pooh’s “Someone Wants You Dead” is a much slower and prettier and, though you wouldn’t guess, infinitely more vicious song. It’s an autopsy of a suicide that keeps shifting the blame away from the killer, or maybe from the victim–Barbara Manning, God bless her, feints and feints and feints and then delivers a couple of punches like Ali fighting Foreman–you can see the sweat flying off the song’s forehead. “Bury the axe and clear the air/There’s always someone who hates you somewhere.” Come to think of it, I’m not even sure how that ties into the narrative, but it’s clear that it does. Their secret weapon is drummer Jay Paget, who twice runs headlong into the bridge to drag it forward and then pulls back. The amount of hate that this band turned into art deserves a technical designation of its own. Quantify it: point three seven World of Pooh. So cruel, so cool.

The Fall’s “Totally Wired” starts banging away before the last chord has rung all the way through. I love this band to distraction, and have probably played this song until it’s lost a bit of its force for me, but I can still admire its technical details: the band together-but-not, the way they reel in every chorus, the single chord that runs through the whole thing like a sewing machine that spits plastic wire, the hilarious backing vocals, Mark deliberately changing the words (”I’m totally biased!”) even on the formal studio version that would nail down their most famous song more specifically than they ever did it again. And I admire the fact that he hasn’t played this song in public since before I made this tape. The rhythms are so unsteady, too–he has to be signaling them about when to change from one section to another, even while he’s doing that brilliant voice-breaking thing that can’t have been easy on him.

Sick Of It All’s “My Life” is, as one commentator at Record Hospital wrote,
“the greatest hardcore song ever.” It’s also only about 20 seconds long. A pure lunkheaded Statement of Intent, and if they’d never recorded anything else, they’d be the greatest hardcore band ever. But they did.

I didn’t realize for a couple of years after I made the tape that Sun City Girls‘ “The Fine-Tuned Machines of Lemuria” is actually supposed to play at
33 RPM, and I taped it at 45–that’s what happens when you have an instrumental. Anyway, this is SCG in their finest mode, which is to say Alan Bishop’s guitar blazing away like it’s been left out in the sun and somebody poured flammable aether on it, and the other two following along while whatever they started chewing half an hour ago kicks in. Not a “song” exactly, more like a directed modal improvisation, though there are some bits that are clearly through-composed. Also very much a side of the Record Hospital that doesn’t get represented otherwise on this tape, especially by the end when it dissolves into scribbly modal chaos and then attempts to resuscitate itself a few times with limited success. Edit, Girls boys! Editing is your friend!

So I slipped in something after it with all the formal solidity you could want: Lush doing “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” a ghastly old ’70s pop song which they make float by puffing helium into it and keep control of by having a solidly muscular rhythm section under it. And really: as long as they’re not condescending about it, choruses like this are like bowls of sweet cold soup in the summertime. Sweet cold STUPID soup, but sweet cold soup. Nice detail: the harmonies don’t quite match up, and the bass, on reflection, is a little sharp too, even though its low end is very heavy in the mix. And they don’t make a big deal about the old Eurovision trick of going up a key before one of the final choruses, or of the way they nail down the ending with four quick blows.

Give anyone four quick blows, though, and they’ll sound like the singer of the Frantix, whose bass completely dominates “My Dad’s A Fuckin’ Alcoholic.” And their bass is audibly flat. REALLY flat. The joy of the song, though, is listening to the guitar during the verses: it’s not playing any notes at all, just coughing and wheezing and threatening to destroy its entire signal path all the way from the wall to the tape. The singer can’t quite make his sneering bitchiness heard over it, but the chorus is maybe even more anthemic than “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”’s. Actually, both songs are about parental abandonment issues; a nice little dyad in the middle of the second side. Should’ve been a single. And if you’ve never heard this song, it is unbelievably fucking funny, as well as being maybe the bitterest single ever committed by a self-righteous straightedge, or possibly a self-righteous young drunk.

I always have to follow the rough with the smooth, don’t I? The Chills‘
“Pink Frost,” a song darker and more powerful than it actually is, I sometimes think, realizing that that makes no sense. Just wish that Martin Phillipps had realized that what gives it its spooky power isn’t even its words so much as the instrumental passages, which seem to be maneuvering through near-total lightlessness to something they know how to get to but know is going to be scary when they get to it. There are dissonances all over the place, and they don’t call attention to themselves at all. The drums sound mid-’80s, which of course they are. Also not a guitar-driven song, much as the Flying Nun bands have a rep for that: if you took out everything but those quiet, insistent bass chords, you’d still have a sense of the shape of the song. Maybe sort of belongs with “Someone Wants You Dead,” in the cryptic-autopsy-song category.

Lucky Pierre’s “CommuniquÈ” is the weirdest record here in some ways, and the one that it took me longest to find my own copy of. Trent Reznor’s first band (!), but this was before he joined: a single that’s sort of one-sided and sort of just-over-one-sided (I’m not going to describe the physical artifact here, I’ll just leave the fun to you if you ever happen to see a copy). They’re from Cleveland, and they sound like they’re from your subconscious nasty urges instead. The singer keeps screaming about how he wants to communicate and how something is finally going to be happening tonight, and it’s not about sex, it’s about an ugly internal transformation. At least I think so; his voice keeps shorting out, and all the instruments are overheating, so things are turning at the wrong speed. Which means he can’t really communicate. Which means maybe it’s not going to happen tonight. But I’m thinking about it, and I can’t do that: “crawl to your intellect and ask for its advice,” he’s mocking. A Lucky Pierre is some kind of sickoid sex thing, I know, but I don’t know exactly what it is. But he’s dissolving and going away at the end, so maybe I don’t have to worry about it tonight.

I take refuge in how literal Superchunk’s “Slack Motherfucker” is. Nobody was surprised, really, when this stuff broke through to the extent it did. I imagined a radio spot for Superchunk live: deep voice goes “Superchunk!” Record clip goes “I’m workin’…” In retrospect, this basically sounds like a Bricks song without the acoustic guitars and with everything turned up much louder–Mac had the presence of mind to work out his craft at volumes where he could listen carefully, and ever since then he’s known how to construct chords and riffs and songs that are put together non-obviously. I don’t even care about the chorus of this one very much. Which is not to say that I don’t think about putting my fist in the air when it comes around.

Back to the A.R.T., with Gang of Four’s “Love Like Anthrax”–yet another one I’ve covered (this time with the Media–our audience was baffled and offput, I think). I love the figure/ground distinction in music, and this one does it really well: simple (but not quite as simple as it sounds–took us a while to figure it out) bass/drum riff that doesn’t vary at all for four minutes, guitar that’s free-form like a storm cloud, two voices that are mostly out of synch but keep tantalizing us by slipping back into synch. Like a beetle on its back. Like a Beatle on its back. I think the line they based it on was something about the bourgeois having sex “like beetles on their backs.” Forgotten thing about Andy Gill’s guitar parts: he often just let one note or tone-cluster ring for a really long time by most band’s standards.

The Groove Farm’s “Crazy Day Sunshine Girl” is the la-la pop equivalent of
“My Life,” and typing this sentence very quickly took me as long as the song takes to play. Nifty. (Years later, I realized it was a Faust joke.)

The Mekons‘ “Where Were You?” takes the length of “Crazy Day Sunshine Girl” to reposition the needle on _Fast Mutant Pop_ to find, in fact. As great as a band as they are–well, this isn’t their greatest song, but it’s their most archetypal, the one that would have secured their repetition if they’d broken up the first time they said they were going to. Hence their painting of “The Writing Of ‘Where Were You’?”; hence also the Boredoms’ “Super Roots 7,” which is just its riff elaborated upon for half an hour. “Would you ever be my wife? Do you LOVE me?!” I once found myself air-drumming to this song in my bedroom with a pen in my hand (the intro, with that drum roll) with my eyes closed; when I opened my eyes, there was ink spattered all over the room, little blue-black specks all over the carpet and walls.

Finally, we come to the Swell Maps‘ “Blenheim Shots/A Raincoat’s Room”–it’s that British D.I.Y. axis that I felt closest to the whole time I worked with the Record Hospital (while everyone else got the raw folds of the American underground and knew Lubricated Goat sideways, I was still nosing through the British moment that, in fact, I’m still nosing through). It’s only really got one chord in most of it, and they’re _still_ a little out of joint on the transitions, but like everything else from _Jane from Occupied Europe_, it’s so heavily layered and so out of control that I still don’t have a full grasp of it, and maybe they didn’t either. Which is why I keep listening to it now, and why the Swell Maps have led me (gently, one finger hooked around one of mine, or more often a slight breeze at my back) to the way I live now. And when it dissolves at the end to Epic Soundtracks’ piano (and how about that other one-finger piano part from the rest of the song, huh?), I think: this is what they played as people walked out of the hospital, no matter how long they had been strapped down, now that they’d been healed.

Douglas Wolk

The Strokes – You Have Three Minutes To Amaze Me

1.
This is an article about the Strokes. Yes, yes: I realize it’s gauche to go on about the Strokes. Let’s get that out of the way as soon as possible: you may well feel that a lot more words have been written about this particular band than they deserve, and that even having to point that out got tedious months ago. You may well argue that there’s simply nothing about the Strokes that even bears commentary. You may well do what people kept doing to me back in August, when I tried using the Strokes as a conversational ploy – rolling your eyes and making reasonable-type hand gestures that say ‘whatever, they’re fine.’ You may well even back this by dredging up the names of a dozen other musicians whose records you feel contain more content, more analysis-worthy substance, than the work of the Strokes. Well and good: I salute you.

But if you genuinely feel that way, it’s my suggestion that you go and read a book. Because whatever your local curbside alternative weekly might try to tell you about the Strokes and What They Mean for Rock and Roll, the Strokes are a pop band – almost defiantly so – and surely the first thing we learn about pop music is that ’substance’ is not just ’substance.’ Pop music is an art that eschews coherent statements in favor of just plain statements; it is an art that arranges meaningless signifiers into patterns that suddenly seem to have more to do with our everyday existence than the weightiest, most profound philosophical decrees could ever hope to. Pop music is an art in which an offhand ‘oh-whoah’ or a good haircut can seem blindingly right and true, whereas a stray ‘oh-yeah’ or a bad pair of jeans can stand for everything that is wrong with the universe at present. The self-perpetuating torrent of words swallowing the subject of the Strokes should tell us that one or the other of these things is happening, constantly, to just about everyone who’s out there talking about Is This It? right now, and isn’t that basically the point?

So let’s keep talking about the Strokes, and let’s start by writing all of those weekly editors and letting them know that the Strokes can never ’save rock and roll’ because they are working on something more important: they are waltzing onto the great barren field of guitar-type pop and they are sowing what may in fact be some crucial seeds.

2.
Proper music criticism – as opposed to proper cultural criticism – should probably spend at least as much time talking about what music sounds like, now, as it does talking about what music might eventually mean. What I am attempting is not proper music criticism, which is hopefully good because most properly critical takes on the Strokes wind up being largely useless. This band is not just an excuse for rock critics to talk about the Velvet Underground and Television again: that’s unspeakably tedious and anyway the Strokes, in the end, have next-to-nothing to do with either of them. Every Strokesism that can be traced back to those sources was surely picked up second- or third-hand, either from better reference points – the Blondied Manhattan of the ratty blazer and skinny tie, the Manhattan of Madonna playing drums in new wave guitar bands, sublime dress-you-up dance hits waiting to burst forth – or from any one of the many mid-eighties indie bands I’d already say had next-to-nothing to do with the Velvet Underground in the first place.

And even that sort of antecedent-tracing fails: if Is This It? sounds as much like the Velvet Underground as it sounds like Parallel Lines, then it sounds as much like ‘Atomic’ as it sounds like the Wedding Present or the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Automatic or even the Primitives, really, and it sounds as much like ‘Kennedy’ or ‘Crash’ or ‘Head On’ as it sounds like ‘This Charming Man,’ which may be as close as we’ll ever get to really nailing them down. Plenty of critics have gone so far as to evoke the Stooges – but can you honestly imagine the Strokes playing ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ or ‘Marquee Moon’ or ‘European Son’ without having some sort of attention-span hissy fit, declaring them listless and plodding and hookless, and launching into some boxy plaintive three-minute second-wave popfest of a song? On the other hand, do my Brit-indie references really get you any closer? Does it mean something that amid all the talk of their nicking moves shamelessly, the only concrete resemblance anyone very points to is the fact that the intro to ‘Last Nite’ sort of coincidentally sounds like the intro to a song by Tom Petty?

Seriously: have you ever imagined these Strokes characters listening to or enjoying any other band at all? As with a lot of great pop bands, the antecedents are meaningless: they sound like everything, and consequently they don’t really sound like much in particular other than themselves. And, more importantly, how they sound means nothing compared to the great collective delusion of how we think they sound.

3. And how do we think they sound? Last year’s press seemed to think they sounded like they were going to Save Rock and Roll, which is maybe true if you take ‘rock and roll’ to mean pretty much the opposite of what those critics meant by it. They were said to be brash, they were said to have ‘attitude’ – the British press cleared the path they’d last traveled with Oasis. And rightfully so, because the Strokes momentarily were Oasis. They came out of nowhere with an already-massive Next Big Thing buzz circling and turned out, when the record delivered, to actually be pretty thrilling: seriously backward-looking, it seemed, but with just the right confidence about it to make it almost guilt-free. They stole blatantly from the Cool Collective Past – not deviously, or specifically, but by tapping into an ethos everyone liked but hardly anyone was shameless enough to try and recreate. And all the talk of ‘attitude’ really meant, it seemed, was that they band seemed not to give a damn about any of this baggage, barely seemed to acknowledge its existence – and, actual ‘content’ aside, this was the very thing that seemed so brash and exciting about them in the first place.

Both debut albums – Is This It? and Definitely Maybe – are great, no matter how loath we may sometimes be to admit it. What both of them do looks somewhat silly and somewhat easy, but there’s no question that he songs sound fantastic – and there really is something stylish and charming and very rock and roll about a band kicking through a set of fantastic songs that no one In The Know would accept that they should be playing in the first place. The trick, on their part, is clearly to ignore that last fact for the sake of just plowing through the conventions with conviction; this is glam that doesn’t sound it, right down to the seeming obviousness of both bands snorting lines and shagging groupies backstage. It’s the beautiful kick of old-model ‘rock’ swaggering around pretending that it’s invincible, which is exactly what people liked about rock even back when it did seem invincible.

And so we have these bands, Oasis and the Strokes, who, whether or not they actually were or are brash, still struck us that way. Because amid torrents of equally useless words about whether or not Rock Is Dead, here are these bands walking around as if rock were never even close to dead or even wounded or even threatened or worried, and what the hell are you even talking about and how could it possibly matter? Of course this is a beautiful thing to watch – who wants to listen to a genre scramble self-consciously around trying to outwit the common perception of its own ailments, like watching a middle-aged man fret about his own mortality? Who wants art that devotes half of its energy to defending its own existence, when we could have art that just assumes its own worthiness from the get-go and then gets down to doing something about it?

What these bands are doing is profoundly conservative, but the fun in them is precisely what I imagine the fun is in supporting a young conservative ideologue: they are well-dressed and charismatic and gleefully ignoring everything the world is commonly felt to have become. And when it comes to pop songs – where there aren’t lives or truth or geopolitics at stake – good god can this be fun. That’s what conservative ideology is all about: it’s brash and catchy because it’s simplistic and pre-established. Put another way: as little love as I have for real life’s Ralph Reed, I think he’d make a fantastic fictional character.

4.
But: context aside, are the Strokes really so brash? They are not. This is, in fact, the key to everything that is good about the Strokes, and the thing that all of these Iggy’s Velvet Television etymologies fail so miserably to capture – they make no distinction between the Strokes sounding anything like these bands and, say, the Go sounding anything like these bands, and they lend no insight into why bands like the Go are one thousand times more ‘rock’ than the Strokes will ever be but also one thousand times less fun.

No, the Strokes are not brash, and Tom’s review explains it well enough. It’s right there, really, at the start of the record: these guitars that feel like they’re in waltz time even though they’re not, this plaintive, sweet-faced, pouty / friendly ‘is this it?’ drifting out of a verse melody that’s practically a lullaby. The most swaggering they get is the into to ‘NYC Cops,’ which itself sounds half-assed and half-serious and has Julian clowning and chuckling over the whole thing. No, these guys are sweethearts, and that’s why the Velvet Underground name-checking is so damn far off the mark. The Velvets countered the pristine head-in-clouds-ness of the sixties rock mainstream with weight, grit, snot, bondage, and heroin, whereas the Strokes counter the mookery of turn-of-century rock (and the knotty, considered, intellectualism of turn-of-century indie) with a teen-idol schoolboy insouciance that is quite clearly the best thing they have going for them.

If I have to declare the Strokes to actually be like anyone, I’d probably be best off saying they’re the Romantics: cool, hooky, danceable, guitar-based new-wavery dressed up in spiffy outfits, concentrating on style and pleasure rather than holding up giant signposts to some sort of profound content they’re claiming to deliver – not to mention ‘Alone, Together’ feeling, if not exactly sounding, a whole lot like an updated ‘Talking in your Sleep.’ (And not to mention their live video being shot on, well, video, with a tour de force of lighting designed to make it feel exactly like a late-night network-television studio performance beamed mysteriously in from 1982 – and not to mention a couple of girls in the front row of that performance studio turning up with feathered hair.) As above: the Strokes just may be the sound of guitar-wielders recalling that sometimes the flash, style, and fun actually are the profound content.

I make all of these eighties parallels for a few reasons, one of which has to do with one of the first pop songs I ever loved. In 1981, I fell hard for ‘Don’t You Want Me,’ ‘We Got the Beat,’ and some song or other by Eddie Rabbitt – plus a song by Australian-born soap star Rick Springfield. You likely know this song: ‘Jessie’s Girl.’ It’s notable that Rick was 31 when this song was released. For a few years there, popular rock stars were very much allowed to be (a) oldish, (b) spiffily dressed, and (c) thoroughly bourgeois, a state of affairs that is quite nicely summarized not only by Dire Straits but by the video for ‘Jessie’s Girl.’

‘Jessie’s Girl’ is about a guy who is jealous for another guy’s girlfriend. That’s it – there’s no turbulent drama, no fight, no back-stabbing, nothing Writ Large and Profound, and no navel-gazing or self-deprecating comedy, either: he’s just infatuated with this other guy’s girlfriend. Note also that the song is sung by a guy who is meant to be not only blazingly sexy but deep and artistic as well, and yet he does not have the girl, nor does he drown his sorrows in the thousands of other women potentially available to him. The video is a rock video to the core: Rick gets this intense look in his eyes and performs facing the camera, feet apart, barely moving except to jerk his guitar back and forth in a manner reminiscent of Joe Strummer – and at the song’s climax, Rick’s clenched-fist frustration grows so uncontrollable that he jams the headstock of that guitar through the bathroom mirror he’s been depicted looking into intensely for portions of the previous two minutes.

Yeah, rock. But here’s the thing: Rick is also a dapper man. He’s wearing pleated slacks, if I remember correctly, and a collarless button-down shirt, tucked neatly in. More notably, video-wise, he’s shows meeting Jessie and Jessie’s girl at what looks like some sort of Learning Annex art class, involving either oil painting or possibly pottery. What ‘Jessie’s Girl’ is offering us – and what a whole lot of the popular rock hits of the early 80s are offering us – is not some image of the rock star as tough guy or smart-aleck or misunderstood outcast, but an image of the rock star as proxy for an idealized image of everyday adult life. It’s an image not of youthful vitality and rebellion but of a mature, understandable-but-intriguing grown man who leads a glamorous, understandable-but-intriguing life that consists of dressing well, playing music, attending arts courses, living in a lovely big apartment, drinking wine, driving a sporty little car, and having passionate and dramatic but very adult interactions with women and men who are doing the exact same thing.

Am I Ready To Be Heartbroken?

Rosemary Squires - “I Poured My Heart Into A Song”

Irving Berlin wrote many songs about music, about singing and showmanship; ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ and ‘Just A Couple of Song and Dance Men’ are about as reflexive as you could ask such tunes to get. This one’s a little different, though: for at stake in its act of reflection is not the general action of showmanship and theatre but the song – the artefact itself, the piece we’re listening to, ‘the words and tune’ as the third line has it. The song seems to demand an answer, to ask to be untangled.

It drifts in on a woodwind breath of enchantment, twinkling bells. There’s something of the ritual already at work: a planned address to the listener, a half-lit stage for questions and promises, a platform for imploring. Squires is dawdling in, a dizzy bride: da-da-da-da-da-dum, she murmurs. Charmed into a sleepy whisper by the music, perhaps, the bower of sound where she waits to look us in the eye. Or is she already performing the action of the title: pouring her heart, emotion dissolved into little exhalations? She begins to sing properly, to enunciate words. But they’re almost too enunciated, too deliberate. ‘I - poured my heart - into a song’. This ought to be a confession, a profession, a boast, an explanation. But Squires follows the rhythm a touch too closely for that. She’s intoning, speaking from rote. (Speak the speech, I pray you…) She’s singing a song, let’s say, rather than speaking her mind. She’s found some words she wants to sing to us, for their rise and fall, the tinkle of melody left inherent on the page of staves.

She does let go, does start to ’speak’ rather than ’sing’ – to give the appearance, that is, of speaking from her heart, rather than someone else’s book. ‘And when you hear it please remember from the start / You won’t be hearing just the words and tune of a song / You will be listening / To my heart’. The lines are starting to flow across their bars, the voice to find its pattern. But the sense of singing from somewhere else, sleepwalking through song, that I hear at the start, will remain central to this song as an event – to what it can possibly mean.

Forget the opening, the moon above the trees, the hush of the nursery. Here comes the band. ‘And if it’s never played / Upon the hit parade / It will still contain a heart that is beating true’. Something interesting is occurring here, as the horns, the rhythm section, the boys, all go to work. Sure, the track picks up a new tone: sass and swagger, winking and wiggling. But they’ve also taken over the regularity of the rhythm, imposed order down there: and in reply she’ll fly away from it when she likes, sing atop the beat but also against it. Part of this seems to be about ‘ownership’ – about to whom the words belong. Maybe that band has a stake in it now. But so does Rosemary Squires, who picks up sentences and shakes them. It’s going to be up to her what she does with these phrases. Minor chord. ‘And if it’s not a hit / Well, I won’t mind a bit / Long as it conveys the love that I bear for you’. We are in full flight now: it’s not going to let up.

‘Soooooo’ – she’s teasing – ‘Here is my heart wrapped up in a song’: the same anew. ‘And if you take it please don’t tear my song apart / For if you do you won’t be just destroying a song / You will be tearing up my heart’. The image has changed: from the fluid heart which is poured, to the hidden heart which is covered. In the first, song is the mould which gives shape to heart: form to its content. In the second, the heart is a gift: the song is wrapping paper. Either way the song is the inconsequential side of the equation: mere trapping to the heart’s essence, its – well, its heart. Then again – ‘if you take it please don’t tear my song apart’? That suggests something quite different: if you take the heart, don’t damage what it’s wrapped in: for the wrapping is the heart. The song and the heart are no longer easy to distinguish: slight one and you hurt the other. And ‘Poured my heart’ suggests something abandoned: not just that an elaborate new guise has been found for the heart, but that the heart has been spent. (I poured my life into that job: I poured heart and soul into that marriage.) This is a gamble, a bid. If the song doesn’t work, nor does the heart. It would break, if there was enough of it left to break. Bets are off, the heart has been poured into its new vessel. Take it or leave me.

Success, though, is ambiguous. ‘And if it’s never played / On the hit parade’ –that says, if it fails – ‘It will still contain a heart that is beating true’. This is an allegory of pop, of audience and market, of the writer’s last defence. I don’t care if no-one buys it – I know what it means. And I’d like it if you did too. But even that may not be vital – the author may be able to live in the knowledge of the song’s integrity. ‘Long as it conveys the love that I bear for you’ – conveys, to whom? To ‘you’, it would seem (that means, to us – to you or me). But I’m not sure: to convey it anywhere, to convey it back in a circuit to where it came, might be enough.
What’s clear, though, is that the song allows itself a margin of error. It’s a pop song, it twinkles and swings, it seems to speak to the charts: but in doing so it lets them know that it can live without them. It informs us that the pop song has a double life: as a worldly phenomenon, a noise on the radio in an office in another city, the tune the checkout girls are whistling; but also as an experience in the writer’s own life, a message he or she understands, even if no-one else does. (’These are private words’, wrote T.S. Eliot, ‘addressed to you in public.’) A song may have a secret life; it may speak to many ears, or just a couple; it may win by the writer’s private book of rules, even as it loses by everyone else’s.

What Rosemary Squires has left to do is to intensify and repeat: ‘And if it’s never played / On the great big Hit Parade…’. The band can blast away on a couple of breaks, raising the key: she sails back in at this new pitch, let looser than ever. ‘Don’t tear it apart’, spinning across the beat now, ‘oh, because if you do you won’t be just destroyin’ a song! You will be tearing up my heart’. Impossible to miss the odd arrangement of words here, the slangy placement of ‘just’ just where it shouldn’t be – which imperfection both leaves the stress in the right place (You won’t only be destroying a song – you’ll also…) and works to personalize the thought, keep things conversational. The conversation, perhaps, of a couple of dancers, cheek to cheek, hurtling back into the corner as the band signals an end, the words of one cut loose from inhibition and into perspiring boldness.
It’s one of the best songs about a song I can think of: a performance which spends its time explaining its own significance. As I’ve said, it’s about the relation a song has to its audience (and the author’s pre-emptive attempts to define that relationship): and about the relation a song has to its content. It thinks, or has us think, about whether a song is the mere container of emotion, or whether, if you set your feelings to music, the music becomes identical with them – comes to embody them. ‘I poured my heart into a song’: so I’d better warn you now, as this song begins, and still, obsessively, as it ends, that I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it if you criticize it too much. Because my songs are not just, as is sometimes said, my children – they’re a part of me: parts of me I’ve left behind for you (and you, and you) to hear when I’m not here, for they’ll anyway speak more sweetly than I ever could.
None of this quite exhausts the track, though. For its self-referential abysms are only made darker by the thought that Rosemary Squires didn’t pour her heart into this song: Irving Berlin did. He wrote a song about saying it with music, about the pop song as intimate communication, a contact so direct that he might laugh off its fate in the charts as secondary flim-flam. Yet the song’s fate – the fate of any Berlin song – is to be sung by someone else. Its life, its blood, will only be infused, transfused, by Rosemary Squires, or whoever else fancies the tune. (And the fate of a song in the hands, the lungs, of a singer, is a chancy thing. Are we to hear Squires, released into the inexactnesses of ‘jazz’, as ‘tearing’ at the song itself, enacting something of its theme?) It’s a song that claims to be all heart, but right from the start needs a heart transplant. It’s not, perhaps, radically different from all those other songs (most, maybe, of the best songs) written by one and sung by another – a process with which we all feel familiar. But more than many of those other instances it makes us reflect on the relationship, the transfer of voice and feeling which is involved: on the strange business of pouring your heart into a song that already claims to be made of someone else’s (two hearts, maybe, are better than one; two hearts living in just one song). Sing a song like this, and are you giving your heart away, or borrowing someone else’s?

The Pinefox

They’re Out There Somewhere – The Kids and The Scene

Before we go any further, let us get one thing clear between ourselves: I am 31 years old. It’s not a fact that adds a jaunty skip to my gait but then again it doesn’t make me want to lay down and DIE either - it is what it is, and that is just FACT. I’ve seen what Denying When You Are looks like, and it looks like Fred Durst. Given a choice between EITHER a) obsessively ringing the forthcoming week’s programmes in the TV guide and thinking Mortgages are an interesting conversation choice OR b) wearing shorts and a baseball cap and whining about being misunderstood DESPITE BEING A COMPANY DIRECTOR I know which one I would choose.

So I wonder, am I alone in this pleasant state? Surely I am not the only person EVER to appreciate that, though some things are forever now denied me (Being Allowed On Bouncy Castles; Hangover-Free Drinking; Receiving Handouts About Nightclubs in the Street), some are now MINE all MINE (Getting Served Quickly In Pubs; Guilt-Free Enjoyment of Friday Night Telly; Occasionally Voting For The Party That Wins)? Because judging by the amount of BLEATING going on it surely seems that way - how many MORE times must I hear otherwise perfectly delightful people say “Hey everybody! Let’s create a scene! Let’s support each other, and hey! Foster new talent!”

For these are the words of THE ELDERLY - Well Meaning but fundamentally WRONG, INCORRECT and WRONG. SCENES are not created, MUSICIANS only support each other if they HAVE too, and even then they are BENT ON DESTRUCTION of all those in any competition with them (anybody who denies this is either a liar or a fucking folk singer, or both), and “Talent” is something you put on display at Christmas e.g. playing the spoons. THE MIGHTY POWER OF ROCK, however, exists untrammeled, untrained and unmolested by those who seek to smother it by “guidance”.

See, here’s the thing - there IS a scene out there, there always has been and so long as THE KIDS can get their hands on something that makes a noise and a place to meet others who do the same, there always will be. The FACT that you and me don’t know about it only PROVES how healthy it is. Think back, if you can, to the halcyon days of the late eighties, when Armageddon still hung like an unhooked stage curtain above us, when a rip in the knee could be quite continental, and baggy was a boy’s best friend (NB fill in your own giddy reminiscence if this does not apply). Do you recall when YOU were part of a scene, when loads of YOUR friends were also in bands (or whatever form your funkiness took)? And do you remember there being people of your age now around and about?

Of COURSE you do - they were the ones you took the PISS out of! You slagged off their bands! You moaned about them hogging the decent gigs! YOU STOLE THEIR GUITAR LEADS! Let us be frank here old chap, you HATED THEM, just as THE KIDS now hate YOU - that is, if they know about you at all. Go on, try it out - put on a Battle Of The Bands as an exercise is encouraging young talent, I would wager realistic cash-flavoured MONEY that at some point you will describe someone as having “attitude” and being “tight” AND MEAN IT AS A COMPLEMENT. Oh come ON, you must remember when that happened? When the old sods always gave the prizes to Those Most Like Themselves?

Look, here is a Futuristic Brain Hologram of the event - there at the front are the Old (but well-meaning) Sods, shaking hands with the “soulful singer” of The Whetstone Blues Travellers (or whoever), with their Slap Bass Player smiling all the while. And those young scamps at the back? Why, that’s You! And your MATES! COMPLAINING bitterly about how shit it all is, and how old twats like this will be destroyed one day, SWEARING you will never EVER clog up ROCK in this way.

Fast forward fifteen years and OH MY! It is YOU standing at the front, and just because you are shaking hands with one of the Fashion Children from THE STROKES doesn’t mean it is ANY different. They’ve got “attitude” haven’t they? And look at those haircuts! The witless remarks about “keeping it real”- that’s how a REAL band should be isn’t it? Or perhaps it’s some “urban” “collective” with their FRIGHTFULLY innovative use of technology to whom you are giving the Vouchers Worth Two Days In A Professional Studio? Does it MATTER? IT IS THE SAME. You have BECOME the people you used to LOATHE, and are doing EXACTLY the same thing.

But hey, don’t feel bad, you ENJOY your White Stripes or what have you, it’s FINE. The KIDS have their own things now. Why, just a couple of weeks ago I caught a glimpse of an ACTUAL GIG! There were five bands playing for free - I’ve been to these before, HECK, I have played enough of them, but this was different. Foor one thing, the room was PACKED. Everybody DIDN’T know each other, but absolutely EVERYONE was going MENTAL. The bands were sharing equipment (because they had to), the sexes and races were all mixed up, and there was a JOY in the air that I only very vaguely remembered from when I first started my crazy journey into the heart of sound all those many years ago. The music itself, of course, sounded absolutely APPALLING, like some half-arsed Endsleigh League Punk from 1979 with a dash of the second wave of GRUNGE drizzled atop it, but WORSE, but then I would think that wouldn’t I?

I left them to it, and went round the corner for a Quiet Pint, safe in the knowledge that THE KIDS are doing fine. There IS a scene out there somewhere, but time makes REVERSO QUANTUM OBSERVERS of us all, and to even try to see into it would be to destroy it. We shall know it when it finally arrives in the mainstream, fear not, for we will BLOODY HATE IT.

MJ Hibbett