Klaxon is a trademark for an electromechanical horn or alerting device… they alert listeners of the vehicle’s arrival and possible danger… derives from the Greek verb klazo, meaning “to shriek” – Wikipedia
I have discovered a way to improve the image of sixth form poetry. It has cost me dear, so I would like to share it with you. It is to expose the lyrics perpetrated by “nu rave” (“no hope”, more like) band Klaxons. Their migraine and nausea inducing sounds are backed up with the most ill-thought-out pseudo-intellectual lyrics you are ever likely to witness. Unless you are a particular fan of Jimmy Page (more fool you).
Now much as I HATE MUSIC (in capitals for the commenters who seem to still miss this basic point), I have a fondness for the written word (like most ‘web-loggers’) and a disposition for what is grandly termed literary fiction. As these Klaxon boys pretend to. However with all of literature to choose from they seem, predictably, hung up on male ‘cult’ authors (I said ‘cult’) beloved of adolescents. Books such as these are like drugs: fun to experience but tedious to hear being talked about, let alone sung about. Just as each generation fondly imagines they are the first to discover marijuana, every moping goth thinks they are the only person to have read Herman Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game” under the covers with a torch. The Klaxons might actually be the first to have read it under the covers with a glowstick, alternatively they might have been doing something else with their “glowstick”. In any case it is we, the innocent public, who deal with the horrendous aftermath: the resulting regurgitated purple prose. Usually this is locked away in the sixth form common room along with posters of Che Guevara and Roger Dean album covers. But when this prose starts to gain a wider public profile, swift action must be taken.
But why take inspiration from literature when you can merely replicate the titles of books! That’s right, just name your album and a couple of tracks after JG Ballard and Thomas Pynchon novels. That’s the hard work of making you look literate done. Then you can get away with pasting lyrics together from the mystical guff copied off the back of books about Aleister Crowley and HP Lovecraft. Here’s a particularly bland example:
“A whipporwhill in flight, turns east towards Westphalia, In search of lost time, with the magic of true light”
To give them a smidgeon of credit, a North American bird would indeed turn east if it was to head towards a region of Germany, though why that would be a destination or even directional guide across such a distance I don’t think anyone cares to know. Perhaps the word was carefully chosen after it was once highlighted, in orange, in a copy of The Atrocity Exhibition with the words ‘oo, nice sounding word’ in the margin. And an empty allusion to Proust as well: bonus points on the “not actually read or understood a word of it”-o-meter.
That modern music has resorted to the lyrically moribund tactics of 70s prog bands is no surprise, but their abuse of language to publicise this as a “new” form of anything, leave alone “rave” (the very mindless music I asked the government to outlaw in 1994*), leaves me breathless.
Nu-rave: I dig thee a NEW GRAVE.
*Have you seen the Utah Saints recently? EXACTLY.