In 1970, under the auspices of reviewing Fun House by the Stooges, Lester Bangs emitted a prophecy that I have quoted several times, including somewhere on this very blog:
Personally I believe that real rock n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we will have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.
While the argument about whether that "new free music" ever arrived (hip hop doesn't quite seem to qualify) may continue until the seven seals are opened, the rest of the prediction has turned out to be cannily accurate. Every decade rock finds a way to re-invent itself, and every decade it does so by picking up and polishing off an older style and gussying it up with some more reworkings, until its hard to tell what era a band really hails from.
Nothing dies a crueler death than trends. Bloc Party was hipped to the nines back in '05 by the cognoscenti, and has now all but vanished from their consciousness (who here remembers the laudatory reviews of Intimacy?). Which means it's now perfectly fine for me to get into them. Post-Punk revivalism may have had its hour in the moon already, but the techno-waves ridden by Lady GaGa and the ease with which Yeah Yeah Yeahs have souled their soul to electronica mean there's always a place to go, and go back to.
So I'll probably thank my friend that reminded me of them come easter time if I end up liking them.
poptartssucktoasted makes a good point about third albums in their review of a band I'll probably never listen to, and certainly not in the next month or so (gave up extraneous spending and video games for Lent):
The third record is an absolutely pivotal time in a band’s career. For two records you have steadily attempted to define yourself and build up an audience for you music and that third record is when bands tend to make it or break it for good. Either you become a lifer and get to make music for the rest of your life or you fall into reclusion resurfacing only when there is a call for a reunion.
A fellow might take an opportunity to look at third albums in major bands over the last twenty years or so and see if this rule works out. This would take a lot of work. I'm probably not up to it. But it's nice to think about while I get around to my next CD review.
Just about weekly, Magnet Magazine considers the seminal artists of alternative/underground music and picks five of their more well-known tunes to call Overrated, and five others to call Underrated, in a feature they call the Over/Under (due to the well-known connection between music and gambling). These picks are usually thought-out and well-argued, with what should be more than enough self-directed irony to make the medicine go down, and the invariable effect on the magazine's readership is analogous with pissing in their faces and telling them its raining. Below, the Over/Under on the whole enterprise.
::The Most Overrated Part of the Over/Under Feature 1. The Overrated Songs (Whatever Year This Started)
The essential argument goes like this: the most popular songs of hip artists are rather more liked than they should be, because they obscure other songs through the insidious practice of -- stay with me now -- being more popular. That such can only be underlied by one of two premises: 1) music fans, a.k.a "sheeple," know fuck-all about what is good; or 2) music critics are confused by the meaning of the word "popular"; is lost on the writers, and they must go to greater and greater apologetics every time they slag a beloved track. The poor fellow who penned the Nirvana Over/Under, bowed under with the obviousness of putting "Smells Like Teen Spirit" at the top of the Overrated list actually utters the words "What am I supposed to do here?" (I don't know, write something you don't desire mercy for?) Way too much agita derives from these selections, which, as the editors point out, are inherent to the nature of the feature. I mean, it's not like some obscure song that failed to grasp popular imagination but was relentlessly hipped by the music literati could ever be considered overrated.
::The Most Underrated Part of the Over/Under Feature
1. The Underrated Songs (Yadda, Yadda)
About half of the objections to Over/Unders in the comment section are vengeance upon the writers taking the form of telling them that the songs they offer as better are in fact crap. A typical example, from the aforementioned Nirvana Over/Under:
And seriously, Marigold? Give me a break. That song was terrible. Why not pick some other totally obscure song that no one ever heard unless you were me at age 16 buying bootlegs for $49.00 from) the local head shop.
This attitude strikes me as wrong for a couple of reasons. For one, obscure and neglected songs are the reason we have music critics. It's the same reason you flip through your friend's record collection. If I didn't occasionally let my one housemate try to turn me on to the Dandy Warhols back in 1999, I never would have rented Dig!, never heard of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and never would have bought My Bloody Underground upon Filter's recommendation, and would thus not have what has become one of my favorite albums. Turning away knowledge, any knowledge, is inherently stupid and self-defeating. And while nothing is easier for a critic to write than "Hey, check out this deep track!" (except, of course, "your favorite songs suck"), there's also nothing as potentially rewarding to heed.
The Official Vatican Newspaper releasing a Top Ten Albums List is bizarre, and it is not bizarre. It wasn't an official pronouncement of the Pope, it was some editors at the newspaper with space to fill, something fun to brighten up a section. In my days as an editor of a college newspaper, this kind of thing happened all the time. And I can't really fault them for putting Revolver at the top slot. Still, one can't shake the impression that this is worlds colliding, which seems to be happening a lot around the Vatican these days.
80+ years old, and takes a tackle like a champ. Best Pope ever.
But, as the video shows, everything will go on as before.
I like the 1950's. And when I say I like the 1950's, I'm not talking about poodle skirts or leather jackets or pompadours or Elvis. Nor is this about some bygone era when men were men, women women, children seen rather than heard, and everyone had a steady job and the Ten Commandments tattooed on the inside of their eyelids. That world only existed on television, and it was meant for children. Actual grown-ups did not need a bunch of beret-sporting hobos with track-marks on their arms and delusions of literacy to tell them that the world was more complicated than The Donna Reed Show let on. So let's just bury the cliche, shall we?
Imagine, if you will, a universe in which the Ramones actually had serious commercial viability, and did not require an endless touring schedule to make a living. Imagine a hip young manager took over the Ramones and made them into pop stars, and that the band went along with this, and basically turned themselves into the Jonas Brothers, perhaps dumping the drummer and replacing him with an amiable, technicolor-named journeyman in the process.
Then imagine that they became the biggest band in the world, provoking media insanity on two sides of the Atlantic, and every band wanted to be them, and everything they recorded turned to gold. Then imagine that they tired of this, and worked over a few records to transform themselves into Bends-era Radiohead, without sacrificing a jot of their sales. After this, they shifted again, to become Pink Floyd, and when the run was over, an odd halfway split between the Kinks and Fugazi. So that's Ramones to Jonas Brothers to Radiohead to Pink Floyd to Kinks/Fugazi. Improbable. Impossible. But it happened. That's basically what the Beatles did.
Magnet's Put Up Your Dukes feature seems awfully clever the first few times you read it: every argument about music you've ever had with your one friend that you never agree on anything with. Then you realize that it's every argument about music you've ever had with your one friend that you never agree on anything with.
This is totally not staged.
But whatever, the pressure of knowing that your mag is fishwrap for Andrew Earles' column must be intense. What's drawn my attention and ire is the latest installment, in which the Matthews argue about whether Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme belongs in the category of Formerly Great Stars Who Can't Write A New Song Worth A Damn, sinkng into the Stygian depths with Stevie Wonder, Paul Weller, and Michael Jackson (yeah, I said it. I spoke ill of the dead. When you all stop pretending that he wasn't a laughinstock on the day that he died, I'll stop pointing it out). And in the course of this otherwise paint-by-numbers slapfight (Era Vulgaris sucks; no it doesn't; Drummers are important; no they aren't; etc.), both agree that Them Crooked Vultures is somehow bad.
Let me be fair; not bad, "disappointing," a judgement that lacks the courage of detail. I'm guessing that they expected the combined efforts of the Queens, Zeppelin, and Foo Fighters would sound like something other than psychedelic-flavored hard rock. Maybe they were expecting Pet Sounds? Paul's Boutique? Kind of Blue? Maybe this was supposed to re-invent the genre? I don't know, because they aren't saying, and no review of it is on the web site.
So yeah, I don't know what I'm even complaining about. Unless I'm complaining about that.
...apparently made a record. That should mean something, and I'm sure if I sat here long enough, I'd figure out what. I do know that I won't be making a great deal of effort to acquire or listen to it, as the description indicates that it's going to be forgotten as soon as it drops. I can practically read the forced critical interest.
