ComEnts

So I've just been called a twat on Berkshire Live after I listed a bunch of possible "The" band names that rhymed with The Thrills and The Kills. Which was assumed to be an anti-NME Strokes backlash comment but was actually just me being bored and wanting to rhyme. Is that a crime? Should I do time? Should I start washing my hair with a hair washing product scented with lime?

Ok, I don't deny being a twat but I think it's a bit unfair that I get a hard time for anti NME/The band rhetoric if that's not what I meant. If I am going to get accused of it anyway I might as well try and explain myself.

I'm not entirely sure why it annoys me that so many really average bands in the Garage Rock scene seem to be so highly overrated these days. When the same thing was happening with Nu-Metal it didn't bother me so much, and we were flooded with loads of REALLY bad Nu-Metal bands. And Durst.

I think what it comes down to is the fact that I get annoyed by qualitative judgements on the amount of 'art' or 'credibility' in music. For some reason the generic Emo and Nu-Metal bands are shit but the generic Garage Rock band is cool. Why? Just because their influences are more credible? In a way I blame Lester Bangs. Brilliantly ascerbic writer and pioneering music journalist he might have been but his legacy seems to have been to leave one section of music journalists scared of liking anything that doesn't sound like something he liked. Garage Rock bands influences read like a summary list of bands Lester Bangs liked, the influences of the bands that are dismissed by the 'cool' music press are mostly descended from the ones he hated for being pompous, overblown and, dare I say it, widdly. I'm not saying he didn't have a point but I think that a lot of the current bands are missing the point of the music they are influenced by. Lester would hate them. Lester once said the following:

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

That's explains so well what I want out of 'credible' Rock music. It's why I so instantly connected with At the Drive-In and Nirvana and it's exactly why so many bands (in whatever genre) leave me dead. I don't feel the passion, I don't feel like the band wants to hurl themselves through a wall.

That'll probably seem weird to some people who know me. I'm well aware that a lot of my favourite bands have absolutely no musical credibility and yet I know how much they mean to me. Ok so I also like stuff that has a lot of credibility. I can listen to Velvet Underground and the "girl with 5 colours in her hair" McFly single and enjoy both or Andrew WK and Mogwai or The Darkness and The Mars Volta. I connect with them in different ways and none of them in the same way I connect with music I really love. There's such a wide mark between music I like and music that wires itself into my nerves and reminds me why I'm alive. I'm not always in the mood for flesh tearing, soul rending passion. Although it's the music I connect with most I can't handle it all the time. Sometimes I want a nice happy pop melody or just some laugh along fist pumping rock. Sometimes you need sad music, sometimes happy. As a personal thing though what I never want is smug, whiney and gutless jangly guitar pop masquerading as ultra cool art. I know that's not how a lot of people hear it but it's how I hear it, I'm not sure what I can do to stop it. I can't make people hear the music I love in the same way as me. I know I probably get just as frustrated by people thinking the music I absolutely love is rubbish as people do by me spouting off a load of abuse at their favourite bands.

So, anyway, I'm aware that I'm much too harsh on Garage Rock, way beyond it's failings as a genre. It's not the first genre to feature a massive wave of mediocre bands in the wake of a few great ones and it won't be the last. For me though it's the most annoying one since Britpop, mainly because that was the last genre that hit where I didn't even really like the best bands in the genre very much.