Lady GaGa, Because one Ga Just Isn't Enough

Ace of Spades stepped out of politics to express opinions similar to my own regarding Her Ladyship, the Ga of Gas, which can be summed up as "Huh. That's...interesting..." The comments are overwhelmingly anti-Ga, and I can't come up with very much pro-Ga, but like I say, I don't hate her, which for young pop stars is an achievement.

Maybe I just like "Poker Face" more than I am prepared to admit.

Demetri Martin & Sarah Silverman Have a Show

Because they aren't tepidly amusing enough on their own.

And His Suit is Made of Liquid Metal

So I saw Adam Lambert's other performance on SYTYCD (DVR's do not bring about a sense of urgency in TV watching), and it was so meh-tastic as to deserve a word that rhymes with meh-tastic that I don't feel like inventing right now. For one thing, now that it's 2010, my patience for invoking the fashion sense of 1986 is officially at an end. I'm prepared to start wearing a striped vest over a T-Shirt over my shorts n' Docs with a jaunty Cat n' The Hat hat if need be, just so I never again have to see a grown man dress up a shiny Vietnamese pimp suit with poop on the shoulder while not wowing me with lyrics warbled over a Kajagoogoo beat.

Each of these guys would give Adam Lambert a wedgie.

 

I don't know what Lambert's record deal involves, but I get the strange idea that he's perfectly content with the kind of glam-pop his handlers are squeezing out of him. And while that may sell for a while, he's only got so much timbe before the next Idol season and America finding another rubber-faced yowler to make its Gay Boyfriend.

Sisqo's Sadness Now Seminal

I don't know who the loons are at the 20th Century Masters, but they are breaking all ankles to ensure that no artist falls so rapidly from omnipresence to obscurity that he cannot have a repackaging passed off as a "Best of." Not even Sisqo.

But do you know what's really sad? I mean aside from vainly trying to recall any track on here that's not  "Thong Song". Aside from "Home Wrecker" instantly making you think of "Gold Digger" and then making you laugh really hard at how "Gold Digger"-like it's not. Aside from an album cover seemingly unsure whether it's a crime scene on a snowbank or a freeze-frame for So You Think You Can Dance.

 

WTF?

What's really sad is the fact that two of the tracks aren't really his. Apparently Sisqo can't even fill out a Greatest Hits without accompanying tracks by hip-hop powerhouses Mya and DMX. You'll remember them when you click on the links. The latter fellow liked dogs.

I am Become Phlegmatic...

Got a rather nasty cold on New Year's Eve, and then spent the weekend either in bed or running around to Southern Maryland. So the musicing, it has been light. I've a few things in embryo, but am, as they say, craploads of busy. More later.

And While I Won't Give the Album a Full Review...

...I will say that Them Crooked Vultures is the kind of album that makes you pop open a Miller High Life and rock the fuck out to it. And saying that may be the truest review there is.

I've Gone Crazy! With the Music! And the Listening! MMGLAVIN!

Must be an end-of-the-year/start-the-blog rush, but I've been buying tunes like a record executive this last week or so. Here's what I've acquired since Christmas:

• The aforementioned Them Crooked Vultures (vinyl)
• The aforementioned Dr. No's Experiment (CD)
• Muddy Waters' Electric Mudd (CD)
• The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz! (CD)
• The rest of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (iTunes)
• The All My Friends EP by LCD Soundsystem (iTunes)
• LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk is Playing at My House" (iTunes)
• Two tracks from Zero 7's Yeah Ghost (iTunes)

If I had any intention of being as trendy as these selections indicate, I'd promise to blog about them soon. As it stands, I'll get to them when I bloody well feel like it.

Happy new year.

I Can't Wait For the Decade to Pass...

...so the hipsters will finally go away.

So My Crazy Music Blog led me over to POPSENSE led me over to the Hipster Wife Hunting blog, and I'm about ready to hurt someone. Or make rude pictures all 4-Chan style. I got Photoshop Elements today; I'm not afraid to use it.

Memes apotheosize lameness and mental masturbation.

Now get off my lawn.

Did Jack White Punch Someone at the Spin Office?

I'm kind of curious what causes a particular magazine to start a vendetta against a band. I mean, was there something actually wrong with Icky Thump, that Spin let loose Brian Rafterty for a whiney, B- half-hatchet job two years ago? What manner of nerd hears the delicious boogie of "Rag & Bone" and dismisses it as something "he could have written while slumbering away on his color-coordinated pillow" (completely unacceptable in garage rock, don'cha know)? For my part, I don't consider myself a "die-hard Meg fan," but I don't really have a problem with "St. Andrew, the Battle is in the Air," because 1) it essentially builds off of "Prickly Thorn, but Sweetly Worn," which immediately precedes it, and indeed functions as an outro to that song, and 2) it's short. The whole review reads like a mass of projection: Raftery woke up pissier than a bladder stuffed with Boone's Farm and decided to send in his hangover reaction as a review. In the same issue, some genius decided that he could be dismissive by pretending that it was relevatory to link Jack White's guitar style with that of Jimmy Page (so how does it feel to get scooped by Guitar World?)

Of course, when year's end came along and the damn thing had peaked at #2 and spent 32 weeks on the billboard 200, they decided Icky Thump belonged on their Top Ten albums of the year, calling "Rag & Bone" in for particular praise. Because they're a bunch of whores.

So why on God's Green do I bring this up now? Because When it came time to cobble together this year's Top 40 (Kiss? Really?), they couldn't let Dead Weather's album by without snarkily insinuating that "Jack White is just trying to distract us from the fact that the White Stripes have faded to black." Oh, they have? Is that why they're releasing a live box set from their '07 Canadian tour this month? Is that why they're tossing out Beck-produced EP's? Are they really expected to poop out a new record every brace of years just to keep you from going all "so five minutes ago" on them?

I mean, I realize you're riding the tail-end of a Merriweather Post Pavilion - inspired electro-folk frisson, but that's no excuse for deciding that garage rock suddenly sucks. The Stripes haven't changed, and probably never will. If you dweebs weren't so busy riding the music-industry double-helix like the Rebel Yell at King's Dominion, you'd know that.

Full Disclosure

Like a lot of people who enjoy the ebbs and flows of popular music, I've read and subscribed to my share of music magazines, and learned to find them all more or less tedious. Rolling Stone mixes its unreflective leftism with equal parts pretension and onanism; Spin performs its namesake to its wheels not being as cool as it wants to be; Magnet bores; Maximum Rock n' Roll flails. Each one is ridiculous for its own reason.

That said, I still pay attention to them, because I live in the suburbs, and they closed my local Record & Tape Traders, and I need some way to keep my ears to the underground (whatever that means). So whatever excrable things I say about mags like Filter, I still use them to guide my purchases, as yesterday, when I ordered the Them Crooked Vultures album and the latest by Oh No. Or last week, when I snagged No Age's Nouns on iTunes. Or any of the buys I've made over the last year or so.

Which means that economically speaking, they've done their job on me as surely as any trendhumping teenybopper. And if pop culture class warfare was a goal of mine, I'd suppose I'd feel bad about that. But since I'm way more interested in finding good stuff to listen to and urinating on the hysteria that surrounds it, it actually works out nicely.

So thanks for the tip, Filter. Now stop being a bunch of hipster doofii.

Guess Who's Still Alive?

Each of these, inexplicably, has a top 100 album on Amazon right now.

• Rod Stewart (He pooped his pants, though)
• Darius Rucker (Regrettably, the album is not called "Learn to Live With People Thinking Your Parents Named You Hootie")
• Tom Waits (For No Man *rimshot*)
• They Might Be Giants (Shouldn't we know by now?)
• Yo-Yo-Ma (I can't make fun of him. He's a cellist. There's absolutely nothing funny about cellists. They're like actuarial tables or Whoopi Goldberg that way)
• Lyle Lovett (No, really)
• Barbra Striesand (Looks like she's been to Cher's plastic surgeon, though)
• Whitney Houston (Bobby's college money is still not for bail, though. She ain't playin')
• Kris Allen (Who?)

It's Official: The Flaming Lips are Your Old Favorite Band

I distinctly recall my first exposure to the Flaming Lips: It involved orange hair, the words, "I know a guy," and a great deal of laughter. It later became one of Beavis' best music video rants (would someone tell Mike Judge that the videos were the best part of watching B&B? The episodes are just bare and peurile without them).

Somewhere 'twixt then and now, the Lips became America's answer to Radiohead, the kind of band whose every album meets with the kind of critical rhapsody that smells of the hungry sense of record-industry zeitgeist (I'm sorry, I meant "rebellion and creativity").

I'm basing all this on the fact that The Soft Bulletin occupies a Black Hole in my iPod: its density is the result of the thick faux-gravitas of the overarranged and excessive elements, not out of the layers and structure. I've been trying for near two years to attempt to figure out what's so mind-blowing about it, but I never get there because my mind keeps getting blown away by the desire to listen to "Canadian Idiot" again.

So when Filter decides that hey, the new FL disc is a return to form, full of "a grittier energy one would expect from a band just starting, as opposed to one in their third decade," let us say that I am sceptical. There's return to forms and there's return to forms. Is this going to be Beggar's Banquet or is it going to be Guero? Any artist is allowed to make a Guero every now and again, to go back to square one and pretend you haven't already written those songs. Beck had to do this so he could get to Modern Guilt. But since I never gave a damn about "She Don't Use Jelly," let alone any song from Yoshimi Hits to Death the Pink Mystics, or whatever, this particular return to form just sounds like a bunch of gueros doing the same thing.

Have You Been Living Under a Rock For the Last Forty Years?

Completely unaware that there was this popular rythmn group called the Beatles (clever, I know)?

Devoid of the necessary affluence to slowly buy the Beatles albums you like on CD at somewhere between $12-15 a pop?

Missed the thousandfold re-issues? The album of their No. 1 hits? The soundtrack to the movie based on their songs, which contained tribute versions of their songs? The various albums of tribute versions of their songs?

Fear not, my antideluvian friend. You too will be spared the agony of seperation from the loving embrace of Beatles fandom. All you need is $175.

Casting Around the Blogosphere...

1) The aforementioned Andrew Earles has a book out about Hüsker Dü. I pretend to like Hüsker Dü, so I'll pretend I might buy this. Maybe If I had something other than Zen Arcade, or if I felt the need to listen to Zen Arcade more than once a year, and that out of an obligation similar to what Lester Bangs felt for The Who's Happy Jack, I could maintain that pretense through a paragraph. Nevertheless, I wish him good sales, as this is the sort of project a writer goes into with reverence.

2) A quick scan of Fluxblog yields the following knowledge:

• Charlotte Gainsbourg working with Beck is an "enigma in itself."
• Anxiety comes in two varieties, good and bad.
• A member of Portishead has a side project called Beak.
• For the Fiery Furnaces to perform crowd-pleasing rock shows is abnormal.
• Bands that are about to get all over the coming wave of 90's nostalgia are giving themselves appropriately Zen-bizzarre names, like "Boat."
• People are fixating on R. Kelly yodeling in a song.
• I can't read anything about a band/artist named Gigi. It just sounds too stupid, no matter how many laudatory adjectives are sprinkled like M&M's in it.
• It is possible to say that a band that consists of "super-hard working veterans" has put on "a very enjoyable rock show" and yet worry about being condescending to them.

3) A woman who looks like one of the members of Monty Python in drag can record an album of all covers with a tautology for a title, and it can become #1 on Amazon.

Longest. Lull. Ever.

Ultimately, if I really really wanted to never post here again, I would have deleted it. Since I don't want to do that, I am bowing to reality.

I have been thinking about a Music Blog for a long long time, even to the point of considering putting down cash money for a unique URL. But before I lay down cash money, I have to be willing to write.

Two things convince me that I can:

1) I'm working on a Master's Degree in Professional Writing. So I'm kinda laying down cash money already.

2) It's the most useful thing I can think of doing when I'm not working.

So the Notion, my first blog that I got bored with, is now the Place wherein I shall write about music. I will pose many a query here, such as:

• Why the hell doesn't Magnet update Andrew Earle's column on the website when its the best thing about the Magazine?
• Why is Andrew Earle's blog so boring?
• Is my complete indifference to Lady Gaga a sign of my withdrawal from awareness of modern music or my new willingness to stop saying "that was so much better twenty years ago, when it was called __________________. Now get off my lawn."?
• Why do I suspect Adam Lambert to be a cyborg? And one of the 600 Series, at that?
• If I listened to Death Cab For Cutie from now until the Second Coming, would I ever care?

Send angry emails to bobama@whitehouse.gov

"Repeater," Indeed

Or, Why Ian MacKaye is the Lost Del-Tone


Reading Mark Andersen's often insightful, often irritating, always passionate Dance of Days: Two Decades of Punk in the Nation's Capitol, one gets the impression that DC Underground stalwarts Fugazi, fronted by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and backed by other veterans of that cities early-to-mid 80's hardcore scene, has created a form of music altogether new in America, at once powerful and gentle, beautiful and raucous. Having listened to Fugazi's popular Repeater this evening, I can find little to dispute. I hear gentility, and power, and violence, and moments of beauty.

But that ain't new.

Gah, I've started with the most prevalent of current rock criticism cliches, that All New Rock Rips off Old Rock. Man, I'd hate to have to be a new rock band today, to have all your efforts reduced to your Influences, with snide commentary. As if this makes Mooney Suzuki somehow less than the MC5. As if Nirvana didn't steal from every 80's underground band from the Pixies to Big Black. As if the Ramones didn't arrive at their entire sound by throwing together the Stooges and the Beach Boys. As if the Beatles were anything other than a bunch of Buddy Holly wannabes singing show tunes. And if you're wondering about Elvis, ask a black dude.

Now, I'm not going to argue about Fugazi's influences. As far as I can tell, Fugazi is the logical progression, not to say departure, of Ian and company's respective musicalities from the fasterlouder sheets of thrashy hum that Minor Threat exemplified. I don't think a one of their songs was deliberately patterned after anyone else's, indeed they seem to have taken great efforts to avoid such. Nobody deliberately names a tune "Song #1," unless they're interested in working from a clean slate.

But wanna do something fun, something that would probably annoy Mark Anderson until he found a point from his back notes that would cover him?

Load Repeater into your stereo so that it plays after The King of Surf Guitar: The Best of Dick Dale and His Del-Tones. Then pick your jaw up after you discover how oddly alike they sound.

Now, this might upset some people who want to believe as Anderson does, and won't have the Holy Fugazi left on a plane similar to the Strokes, who hardly get mentioned without being alternately compared to the Velvet Underground and Television. But that's only because certain loud people in the underground possess a bizzarre, obsessive compulsion to reject any music they deem as "not relevant," to which we can add as a matter of course anything more than five years old. To such as they, Dick Dale is that guy who did that song from Pulp Fiction. Yeah, it's cool, but it's old, and we have a moral obligation to listen to the new Go-Kart release, because that's about today, man.

Whatever. Anyone who uses the word "relevant" and means it is either unable to see that hunting "relevance" leads to the same kind of empty ephemerality as the record industry's business cycle, or they see it and ignore it. In either case, the position renders them blind to the truth: that Dick Dale is Rock n'Roll.

Rock n'Roll is dated. It's yesterday. Your mom and dad used to dance to it. We've all smelled that desperation in the recent issues of Spin, trying to sell the Music That Rocks, succeeding in selling the Music That Rocks, only to have the Music That Rocks still swamped like a tiny boat in the sea of Music That Goes Platinum. Hip-Hop is what lights MTV's fire, and Hip-Hop is what all the kids are listening to no matter what their melanin level. Rock is still there, but it just ain't the big dog no more.

So Rock is yesterday. It just so happens that yesterday is almost endless, today is but 24 hours, and the future doesn't actually exist in our frame of reference. And since we can't go four years without examining in excruciating detail all the cool and uncool stuff that happened in the previous decade, I say we drop, for good, any pretense of interest regarding what's going on "today." If VH1 has taught us nothing, it's taught us that whatever we think is cool today stands a real good chance of being embarrassingly laughable tommorrow.

Honestly, who cares how old music is? The first time you hear Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll", be it on your shiny copy of their fourth album or those formerly ubiquitous Cadillac ads, you're transformed, overwhelmed, and if you have any life in you, air-guitaring like a chimp on six espressos. The same goes for the most ancient of Rn'R: Link Wray's "Rumble" still swaggers mightily, as does the yob hopping of his cycle that anyone who hears this song thinks of.

So does "Run, Run, Run," or "Blitzkrieg Bop," or "Bad Reputation," or "Sabotage," or "Seven Nation Army," or any of a thousand others that have claimed neural space in our collective noggins. So who cares if Hip-Hop rules the Billboard charts? Let the industry pukes worry about such; it's their job. Ours is to cherry-pick what we like. What's worth remembering, from any genre, will be remembered.

Besides, it won't be long before H-H too becomes mostly retro, mostly reworkings of old forms. It may even be so already. Is it any secret that the best Rap steals from the best black instrumental music? Same with R&B, the genre for gospel singers who don't want to sing gospel. Sound-wise, R&B has always bowed to whatever else was hip at the time. That's why it sounded like jazz and blues fifty years ago, like soul and funk in the 60's and 70's, like disco in Michael Jackson's heyday, and today bears the description foisted on it by Chris Rock: "a bunch of people singing over rap beats." It's the only genre where people really are just interested in the vocals.

Anyway, back to Fugazi, the band that served as an escape for many from both hardcore and emo, the undiplicated punk band for grown people. If R&B is multi-genre-friendly, then Ian and the Boyz are a perfect marriage of genres: as distorted as Johnny Ramone's Mosrite and as funky as James Brown's pelvic bone. They manage to be exciting to listen to, and breathable at the same time. You could probably find a way to dance in a non-slam sort of way to them (and you'd better, at a show, lest you face the scorn of St. Ian of the Church of the Reformed Mosher), but you don't have to. The groove is enjoyable either way.

Whatever you pick, Fugazi's a lot more Rock n'Roll than they realize, and that's a good thing. They prove what can be done with Rock n'Roll if it's approached deliberately, with a mind for variation, for using the framework rather than bowing to it. Miles Davis achieved something similar with modal jazz in the late 50's with Kind of Blue (current Amazon.com Sales Rank: #167. So much for the tyranny of the present).

So for the truly avant-garde, for those who grok Ecclesiastes' dictum that all rivers run back to the sea, I suggest doing the twist, or some robotic form of jitterbug, at the next Fugazi show you attend. You'll be stared at, but that's half the fun, and ol' Dick will be proud.

Music Review: The Hives -- Tyrannosaurus Hives

Or, How to Serve the Master Without Eating Bugs


The moment that made me realize that Rock really was coming back into fashion was the moment I first saw the video to "Hate to Say I Told You So" by the Hives. It was perfection itself: perfect guitar riff, bass solo (!), Howlin' Pelle Almqvist screaming and preening and carrying on like Mick Jagger circa 1966. I liked the aesthetic of the video, too: Blazing white background, matching suits for the band, freezing members in mid-jump when their instruments dropped out. It was the best video I'd seen in years, and the best new song I'd heard in years, and it made me do something I hadn't done in years, if ever: run out and by a CD based solely on a music video.

Holding that CD in my hand made me see the direction the Hives had taken with the retro genre: Play like the Sonics, look like N'Sync: Bright and shiny and electronic. An Exploding Plastic Inevitable for the new Age. Sure, I dug the Strokes and the Stripes and Los Vinos for what they brought to the picture, and probably agreed that Jack n' Meg were the most artistically daring with their soulful, minimalist bump n'grind. But Pelle and the Boys had the "Makes Me Jump Up and Down" award, down pat.

That was then. A few years later, and how fare the New Rock Quadrifecta? The White Stripes knocked a lot of socks off with Elephant, a record that improved on White Blood Cells in the quality of the songs and the satisfying way they click together. The Strokes, more cautiously perhaps, followed up Is This It with Room on Fire, also an improvement, but far less obviously so. The Vines opened with a great deal of promise on their first album, but have come apart, as yours truly predicted, on Nicholls' drug issues and are presently swirling the drain. The Hives are the last in with their sophomore effort, and in Tyrannosaurus Hives, have given us what amounts to an enigma.

The first time I listened to it in my car, I was frankly disappointed with the first half of the CD. It sounded like them, but they sounded almost neutered, trebly and sparky, with none of the balls-to-the-wall explosion that propelled the first album. It wasn't until "B is for Brutus" that I found a song that stayed with me longer than it's playing time, and it wasn't until "See Through Head" I found a song I enjoyed, and it wasn't until "Diabolic Scheme" that I found a song I'd call good. After those three songs, everything melded slowly back to inconspicuousness. Aware as I was that the band was planning a more severe departure for this album, and aware as I was that their new label, Interscope, had balked, I concluded that the boys had taken the path of least resistance, got a few "different" songs on the record for the critics, and made the rest a half-assed retread of Veni Vidi Vicious.

Yet for some reason, I couldn't stop listening. At first it was for the three songs I'd deemed worthy, then I decided that the new single "Walk Idiot Walk" wasn't too bad, then I started bobbing my head to the other songs as well. Somehow, subconsciously, they'd wormed their way in and had their way with me. And here I sit at the keyboard, unable to explain how this happened.

When in doubt, I go to the cover art. The Hives have apparently decided that the best background for their slick ties-and-spats look is a sickly, scaly green (some connection here, no doubt, with the "Tyrannosaurus"). Instead of a picture of a band, they go for a drawn slight-caricature (others have noted that it makes Pelle look like a Clockwork Orange-era Malcolm McDowell). It looks deliberately ugly, and not in the typical punk-rock, it's-so-ugly-it's-cool way, but rather in the way that makes you not want to look at it. Why on earth would the Hives, who have made a name for themselves in cheery self-idolization ("This is your new favorite band" bellowed the sticker on their first album), go out of their way to mess with their image? It's not as though they've stopped bragging about themselves. Word has come quietly through the rock press that they're the best live band of all the NRQ. So what's the deal? Are they actually disowning their second album, as a label-ruined monstruosity?

I found an answer where I first found joy, in "Diabolic Scheme," a murky exercise in feedback and gloom. "They sound like vampires," I thought, and then it hit me. The Hives are vampires, the new vampires of rock. That is not to suggest any affinity with Alice Cooper/Misfits horror-core burlesque. I'm thinking of the vampire in an Ann Rice novel, shiny and beautiful and masterful, and empty inside. They raise undead sounds (channelling Jagger a hell of a lot better than Jagger himself, these days) to precise, almost machine-like precision (can you imagine these guys jamming?), and use it to say... nothing in particular (I haven't read the lyrics in the liner notes, have you?). They even dress like vampires, right down to the spats, eschewing capes probably out of diligence to the garage-rock aesthetic and not wanting to evoke the aforesaid Alice Cooper.

I'm fully aware that all this may be the result of too much caffeine, but I think it makes all the pieces click into place. How else to explain their aristocratic relationship with critics and fans ("Look into my eyes...We are your new favorite band..."), or the mystery man who actually writes the songs? As Dracula with Renfeld, so the Hives with Randy FitzSimmons. And like real vampires, they don't tell anyone, leaving only certain encodes signs for the wary. They hide their true face behind a shiny mask, sucking your twelve dollars away, and leaving you feeling wierd, drained, and for some reason hungry to repeat the experience.

Or was that all of mass culture? I get so confused sometimes.

Music Review: Sex Pistols -- Anarchy in the UK (Live)

I've been a bit disparaging of late of my favorite style of Rock n' Roll, so much so that in my last two posts on the subject, I've used not only the same arguments but phrased them the exact same way. I submit that I did so unwittingly. Nevertheless, that speaks of the disdain with which I view most of the music I enjoy most. Whether that makes me scitzophrenic or just a dedicated critic, I lack the self-knowledge to say.

A great deal of my affinity for punk is that it's a deliciously extreme form of Rock n'Roll, blending by speed and audio leakage the traditional guitar-bass-drums sound into a single distorted, psychedelic hum. It's that sound I love, not the sound as an instrument for certain social goals. I've stated before in many venues that I hold most of the lyrics in this genre at arm's length.

Most punks embrace a childish, narcissistic leftism, of the kind that will fight bitterly for their own "rights," and not give two hoots in hell for anybody else's. On the most recent Sex Pistols DVD, John Lydon argues vociferously in support of their band's album being named "Never Mind the Bollocks" by saying that "Bollocks" was a common working-class word, perfectly valid English. "How can you ban language? How can you ban words?" exclaims Johnny. I can never sit through that without feeling compelled to ask him "How about the word 'Nigger,' John? How about the word 'Bitch'? How about the phrase 'Half-Educated Limey Street Scum'? Those are all perfectly valid English words, too. Yet somehow I doubt you'd respond to them so favorably."

And that, boys and girls, is why Our Boy Johnny is the real tragic figure of punk. To hell with Sid Vicious and his scratchy-voiced girlfriend, two empty-headed drug fiends as boring as they were useless. Sid contributed nothing but a look to punk, and it wasn't even his look to start with, it was Eddie Cochrane's by way of Ron Asheton and Dee Dee Ramone. Beyond that, the wanker couldn't play bass, couldn't give an intelligent interview, couldn't write anything worth repeating. All he did was die. Woopty-crap.

But Lydon had a passion, an intelligence, a sense of self and a sense of theater that made his band worth remembering when so many of those that popped in his wake are justly forgotten. He encapsulated the strained mentality of a teenager, too smart to be a child, too weak to be a grown-up, and shoved that energy out of him in a manner nothing short of explosive.

And twenty-five years later, the dumb mook hasn't moved on. You can read it in his autobiography, see it in any interviews: bitterness. He's still pissed at Malcom McLaren, at the monarchy, at the world. Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock are all men in their forties, able to look back at their gloried past with detachment, recognizing their achievements and their mistakes with humor and regret. Not Lydon, who still spikes and colors his hair and spits invective. His wit, intellect, and lust for musical creativity, audible on any Public Image, Ltd. record, is swallowed by his terminal adolescence. He's so busy demonstrating how much smarter he is than everybody that the doesn't see everyone shaking their heads at him. That, too me, is true tragedy.

So why in the hell would anyone want to listen to any live Pistols show? The band playing to some tiny audience in some nondescript English Country town, on a crappy PA system? Why, so we can tell ourselves we're listening to "history"?

No. You don't buy a record to listen to history. You buy a record to listen to music. And you buy this record, the complete recording of the Pistols' September 24th, 1976 performance at the 76 club in Burton-on-Trent, so that you can hear the Sex Pistols in their pre-Sid glory (of course, the cover art has a picture of a later performance with Sid. Matlock just can't win). You can hear the tightness of Jones' guitar and Cook's drums, and feel the bottoming power that Matlock's bass added to the mix. You can hear how the Pistols took the brooding, menacing sound of Iggy Pop and the Stooges and added to it the flashpowder youthfulness of the British Mod sound, of bands like the Who. Not coincidentally, the standout tracks on the disc are their cover of the Stooges' "No Fun," and the Who's "Substitute." But the whole set, Pistols originals and pop covers all, is compelling, and exciting, and raucous, and everything Rock n' Roll is, was, and ever shall be, amen.

Lester Bangs once wrote that the future of popular music was as follows: "a small island of new free music, surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage." Most folks would agree with that, whatever their tastes, believing that whatever tickled their ear was the good stuff and everybody else's shit was just that. So, on a certain level, unless you're into Pun Krock already, there's no way I stand any chance of convincing you. If you beleive that Punk was an unfortunate episode in the history of music and culture, and that the Sex Pistols are but one of the "punk" bands that a lot of stupid kids fashionably embraced, you won't be interested no matter what I say. But if you're able to look beyond a label and appreciate hard, fast, slightly irritating Rock n' Roll, then give a listen. It won't hurt, and if it does, CD's make great skeet.

Sunk Pucks

My musical tastes tend to evolve in historical fashion. My starting point, the first time I really decided to get "into" pop music, was the early Rolling Stones, back when the thunder of the arena hadn't bleached their simple swagger. From thence, I have simultaneously gone forward and backward: Forward through 60's Invasion and Garage rock through to 70's Punk and now, 80's Hardcore (the move to Fugazi is tempting), backward through older and older blues (most recently I got into Big Bill Broonzy, a contemporary of Robert Johnson) and Jazz. Everything fits onto a gigantic Critical Tree in my head.

That said, I'm not getting a lot of what passes for punk these days. The music is starting to bore me. In the fight between the "arties" (music for creativity's sake) and the "social realists" (music for the revolution) that came in the wake of the Sex Pistols demise in 1978 and the DOA failure of the New York scene, the social realists won, hands down, driving the poor arties to New Wave and other excuses for bad hair. The social realists, meanwhile, insisted on making punk serve the call to arms of the New Tommorrow. The result has been as monotonous as Stalin-era Soviet painting. If a band's not emulating Black Flag, complete with screaming and stuffing every concievable musical phrase into a 3-minute song, they're emulating the Descendents, with trebly melodies and insufferably nasal and whiny vocals. Maybe I'm getting old, but it's all starting to hurt my ears.

Worst of all is the way the genre has marketed itself to oblivion. I refer to the hyphenation. Each sub-sub-sub-genre comes complete with costume, tune template, and ready-made audience. Reality overtakes parody: I used to joke about things like cow-core or emo-oi, only to see them sprout into being. Got a song about your sensitive side? Bang, you're emo, whether you like it or not. Got a riff lifted from Gene Vincent? You're punkabilly or psychobilly. Got a skull somewhere on your record? Welcome to horror-core. This is Glenn; he'll be making fun of you.

The point is, it's become as unlikely to hear something you haven't heard before on a punk record as it is on a Britney Spears disc. Punk, which was supposed to eschew the same old thing, has become the same old thing, dedicated only to cloning itself, with the same clothes, the same sounds, the same preachy solipsistic thug liberalism. Punks are the Teddy Boys of the Left.

The preceding is prologue to me adding Conservative Punk to the linksheet. I do so with a few caveats. The site has yet to really impress me. It defines itself as an antidote to Punk Voter, which is fine as far as it goes, but somehow insufficient. It's not enough to be negative, to define yourself as against the tide. Destruction may lead to creation, but, contrary to all those folk Jon Savage quotes in England's Dreaming, it is not creative in itself. Left to itself, destruction merely frees up space.

In other words, it's well past time for punk to learn how to praise, how to build, how to appreciate. Such things have worn the label of "uncool," for way too long. Snideness and gesture do not sustain: they must be followed up. This is going to require thought and effort, and openminded-ness (real open-mindedness, not the kind that leads you to what you already want to think).

And music. Let's not forget the music. Tell your truth with a smile and a swagger and they'll believe you believe it, and that's half the battle. Thunder in the night forever.

Classic Alternative

Ten years ago I was a senior in high school, getting all thrilled and excited about doing Taming of the Shrew for a high school Shakespeare festival in D.C. I had a crush on a girl in the show, but didn't do a blessed thing about it, because I was quite exceptionally gutless about those things (also, I dressed like Screech, but with less flair). I was looking forward to getting the hell out of Waldorf, MD and out into the big bad world.

In short, I didn't give a fuck about Kurt Cobain, alive or dead. When the news came that he'd blown his head off with a shotgun, I wasn't even surprised. Somehow, I had known it would be thus, that the live-fast-die-young-sex-drugs-and-rock n' roll script would claim him. It wasn't like the secret wasn't out that he was a druggie (I swear, they should outlaw heroin. Oh, wait...). I might have given thirty seconds notice to the fact that he was a suicide instead of an overdose, but that was it. When the little grungies gathered at his house for a candlelight vigil, I rolled my eyes. When the papers started blaring that "the voice of a generation is died" I sneered and told anyone who made eye contact that KC didn't speak for me.

It was when they called him Our John Lennon that I started on the path to understanding.

Truth was, I'd always been kind of a closet Nirvana fan. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a truly magnificent moment in pop culture, pulling fury out of a mockery of a cheap exploitation of the very generational revolt of which Nirvana was thereafter declared the first wave. Remember the "Teen Spirit" deodorant commercial? Remember how insulting, how irretrievably stupid it was? Where on earth did anyone get the idea that my "generation" needed it's own anti-perspirant? Was this some kind of prank? Did anyone actually buy or use that stuff? Why?

So yeah, when Nirvana made a video making fun of them, I loved it. I loved it even more when the whole brand -- with their crappy, faux-cool commercial -- dissappeared soon after. And, in my most secret heart of hearts, I loved the song: blistering riff, mumbled vocals, perfect climax, the works. After growing up on the limp-wristed new wave pope and the nauseating hair metal in the 80's, I liked that bands were coming back to the basics.

But I never threw down money for Nevermind. I wanted to, but I didn't dare. Part of this was economic: I was a military brat whose parents were spending every dime they could lay hands on sending me to private school. I couldn't just bug my folks for spending money so I could buy music like all the yuppie kids. The other part of this was a need to not do what everyone else was doing. Since middle school I'd developed a determination to always avoid the crowd, not do what they were doing, not dress how they were dressing (hence the Screech look), and especially not think they way they were thinking. Grunge seemed to have inherited all the political poses (and even at 12 I knew them to be poses) of hippiedom; I had just discovered that Rush Limbaugh was an amusing counterpoint to Northern California's nattering leftiness. So I said "Nirvana sucks" and stuck with it.

But when the piles of hair started saying that Cobain was the Gen-X John Lennon, something in me shook loose. "Dammit," I said, or something along those lines, "Kurt Cobain is not John Lennon! John Lennon was John Lennon, Kurt Cobain is Kurt Cobain! Nirvana is not the Beatles, they're Nirvana! Let them be what they are!" So the path began.


Six years ago, I was just out of college, and had made the decision to stop being a phillistine and start getting into music. I signed up for one of those BMG twelve-for-a-penny dealies and as part of my free shipment, I got Nevermind. "What the hell," I told my roommate with a grin, "It's kinda required, isn't it? Like Frampton Comes Alive was twenty years ago. I'm just bowing to the trends" (remember how admitting how lame you were was so cool in those days?). So I got it, and I listened, and I liked, and I threw it on for mixed-tape fodder, and I hardly cared. The same shipment had Ramones Mania, because I'd gotten into my head that I desperately needed to have "I Wanna Be Sedated." The Ramones got me into the Velvet Underground, and the Velvet Underground got me into all the rest of Punk, and before I had known what had happened, Nirvana had clicked nicely into place on my musical appreciation spectrum. I got the Unplugged album and shivered at the last song (still do). I won't say that they're my favorite band, but I do appreciate their power and their heart. Both of which were evident in their lead singer, who managed the superhuman feat of having charismatic appeal without being all that charismatic.

Which brings us to the media nostalgia/grief machine and the fun they're having this week. Spin prepared a loving print-shrine for their fallen underground martyr that provided the inspiration for this blog entry. The radio stations have shifted to "Gen-X Weekend" formats and playing "Heart-Shaped Box" and "All Apologies" as though nothing was amiss. We got a new Nirvana single two years ago, and someone decided to publish the his private journals not too long afterward. No, I haven't read them, and no I'm not going to, and it's not because I'd feel dirty about it, like this guy did. It's because I've decided that I have no interest in anything Cobain had to say.


I've trodden the path to understanding that Cobain was a man of great talent, and Nirvana a great band. Their noise was pure, and from the gut, and had about it from the earliest days more than a hint of sadness. It stands the test of time. For Cobain the artist, I have nothing but respect and admiration.

For Cobain the man, I have nothing but contempt. I have nothing but contempt for a man who was intelligent and creative but made no effort to understand the wide world around him, who spent so much time huddled in the corner with his precious pain that he could never ever find a chance to get beyond it. I have nothing but contempt for a man who consciously made himself a rock star (and he did, popular legend to the contrary) and then whined like a kindergartener when he discovered that people were becoming his fans without his permission. I have nothing but contempt for a man who claimed to love his baby daughter and then left her, so irrevocably, and to the care of a woman he had to know would not make a good single mother (she's twelve now, and I don't think I'd be her for anything). Mostly, I have nothing but contempt for a man who took the coward's way out, who gave up on hope after promising it to so many. Shame on him.

And that was indeed the final irony of Courtney Love's words at the aforementioned candlelight vigil, words to the effect that if Kurt really hated being a rock star, he could have stopped. No, Courtney, he couldn't, and he knew it. What else was he going to do? Starved on an intellectual diet that demanded an ascetic withdrawal from anything that smacked of normality, Cobain couldn't have just dropped it and sat in a house and had a beer and painted something. Like the Cathars of the 13th Century, grunge/punk demanded spiritual purity of its perfecti leaders while the laity were off having the time of their lives. Kurt didn't have the philosophical readiness to deal with his disappointment, to find the thing that made him valuable and cling to it. He was so busy unleashing his demons that he neglected to hunt for angels. He never grasped that the reason you walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death is not for its own sake but to reach redemption on the other side.

More fool him. And more fool us, for not learning from him.