Rockhunter, Issue 28, 25 September 2006
Destroy Cool Shit Before It Destroys You
What a load of mouldy old stuff we’ve got spinning around on our turntables at the moment. And, wait for it, from the looks of Myspace it seems we’re in the throes of another 80s-style garage rock revival. With all the related toss that goes with it. Dimwit 6Ts couples with not a word of sense between them carbooting for all they’re worth. With the splay-leg coffee tables, and the tapping a finger to recent rareities only (not well-known obscurities, if you please), and Tim Warren and his foetid ilk (He’s just released their retrospective LP… The Foetid Ilk’s, that is!!!—Ed.) squatting on the whole damn mess. Gawdelpuss!! (Used to have a cat of the very same name!!! — Ed.)
Like I’ve said before, Thanes, yes please, Mystreated (or Higher State as is), very nice, thank you. And more of The Sticks, if there’s any going!!! But all I can see is a vista crowded with Green sodding Hornets, Mourning Afters, Witchdoktors, and the sorry-arsed like. And I don’t know if I’ve got the strength…
On the bright side, there’s always the hope that with greater knowledge than ever before of the toons and style of raw rockin’ sounds, we’ll get a more tasty, dirtbag-basic approach to torturing the wires — blasting the blackened corpse of taste out of the coffin of professionalism!!! I fear, though, that the focus will, as was certainly the case in the 1980s, be on looking through hair rather than on melody and nice chord-patterns (my ever-present high).
For Link’s sake, don’t let us fall into the Trap of Cool. What I mean is, I hope bands don’t start thinking about dumb spazzola sleazebag grind as part of the ‘Great Tradition’ to which they must pay homage. Okay, the Top Ten stuff on Nuggets was totally the soundtrack for a generation. But the reanimated product from the vaults, 5c racks, boot-fairs, lofts, attics, served a different purpose, both then and now. It was a way to scratch a mark on the passing culture-stream. It was all about hitting and running. Although I’m heavily into revisionism—it was the right thing to do to remind the world, through example, that there were other great groups in the 60s than The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane — I despair of a more inclusive history that serves to incorporate strands of Cool Shit into the Great Tradition of Rock, thereby giving dimwit scenesters, eggheads, and assorted know-it-alls the lowdown on where to get started in the world of media and culture.
I am being timespun back to about 1983, watching the confident middle classes at play with pop culture. We’re talking the one their university-educated folks gave ‘em. I got Billy Fury, Little Richard and Duane Eddy. Thanks mum and dad!!! They got The Beatles, William Burroughs, prog, airbrush art, hard and Kraut rock, science and literature. Sound familiar? Well, I can tell you that way back then it mainly added up to Whitesnake, Tolkien and army surplus canvas medic’s bags. I was present at the middlebrowing of my generation. And I’m still laughing.
Anyway, with all the versioning of Free Noise, Inner-Space Jaz, Neu-Kraut, psychedelia, Two-Tone, garage punk, or whatever you will, all I can hear is the acculturation — the assimilation, entitling, rite-of passaging, confidence-building — of the comfortable well-to-do, who won’t shut about how they’ve discovered The Cool Shit. Of course, the joke’s on them. Because the Cosmick Unzipping they’re grokking is actually their ticket to Squaresville, via the University of Rock. Serves them right.
Always with the ‘discovering’. Rest assured, all the beat-hot super-dumb fuzz crud was there before ‘we’ found it and it’ll still be there, albeit its DNA and TNT changed a bit by our meddling, after we’ve passed to glory. When we get records, we must remember we’ve discovered nothing.
Anyway, who am I kidding? Does anyone care about this stuff any more? Is anyone giving a second, or even a first, thought to what’s at stake in replaying all the past all the time? These days, it’s all about going forward and moving the agenda on.
General guilt — involving everyone taking the blame, even those who consume fuck all and get shafted first — has taken over. Even warfare’s gone pop. And the wrong of invading lands where people were trying to live their lives in happiness is beyond discussion. It’s like the air we breathe.
Two love,
Ed.
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