One way or another, consciously or instinctively, many of the most demanding younger critics have been pushing ill-made antisong for years. They look to immerse in sound that destroys or supercedes the sense/nonsense continuum: posthardcore, industrial noise, skronk, grunge, shit-rock, records that deteriorate before your very ears. Most of it sounds dead end, is dead end, but a new dead end is at least a change, and out of the wreckage of feuding cults and stupid experiments has emerged the one Amerindie band to show significant upward musical and electoral movement in recent years: Sonic Youth, who finished 12th and deserved better with a noisy album whose songs never call attention to how they're made and connect more powerfully for it.
Still, the wreckage is there. Beyond this year's top 10 (plus dB's and Blasters and 42nd-place X hanging on and Del-Lords ready to emerge from limbo), our recent LP and EP lists have touted too many imminent obscurities. The roll call begins with tragedy and fast degenerates into small-time professionalism, earned anonymity, and pathetic self-indulgence: Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Fleshtones, Lyres, Rank and File, Bongos, Love Tractor, Let's Active, Salem 66, Violent Femmes, Neats, Lifeboat, Flipper, Butthole Surfers, Dream Syndicate, Del Fuegos. Of the 17 Amerindie bands to place 41-100 last year, seven made new albums, one of which placed 41-100 this year. (That would be Big Black's Songs About Fucking, tied for 77th with supergriot Salif Keita's Soro, which is my idea of poetic justice. FYI, the Leaving Trains' Fuck got shut out.) If any of the six American ill-mades to place 41-100 this year--Red Kross, Dinosaur Jr., Firehose, Big Black, Chain Gang, Negativland--ever finish as high again, I'll be astonished. And also, probably, pleased. It's not as if I don't hope the Amerindies shock me into recognition again--I want to mention that the best songs of the 70th-place Silos beat Mellencamp's by me, albeit without Kenny Aronoff to kick them home, and wonder what Negativland think of the Pet Shop Boys. Even among enthusiasts, though, enthusiasm is flagging palpably.
|
With all exceptions and amalgams granted, let's divide the Amerindies into subgroups labeled pop, roots, and pigfucker. Now, I'm not sure why the best roots band extant hails from Leeds, England, rather than the good old U.S.A., though geographical distance--good for a measure of (shall we call it?) postmodernist irony, and thus covering the inevitable chops shortfall just as it did in the Beatles' day--isn't hurting one bit. The pigfuckers could wind up mucking about anywhere, and they're welcome to their wallow as long as they don't blame the universe for not joining in. But if you're going to truck with pop values--which often means no longer modish/commercial biz values, with many roots types and by now some pigfuckers feeling the urge--you're better off doing it right. Because commercial corruption was the great Brit disease a few years ago, its biz is now generating marginalia by the carload. It's also providing a context in which young bands can cop a little attitude from garagelands on both sides of the Atlantic, then bring it into the studio for the processing increasingly refined musical concepts demand.
|
