Rachel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kleenexwoman) wrote2005-06-19 06:07 pm
kleenexwoman) wrote2005-06-19 06:07 pm
the rock star isn't dead, he's just pining for the video
I'm fantastically pleased with the way the day is going so far. I don't know who these people in my house are, and I don't really care, because they're making me a sandwich. It's so nice out. Actually, it's hot, and my arms are turning red. I'm sitting outside on the deck, watching the waves.
Dad had to go to someone's wedding for a few hours, so I've got control of the music. We have music channels on our cable TV thing. My favorite channel is called "Retro-Active," and the description says, "Pogo your way through the synthesized sounds of post-punk and New Wave madness." New Wave is my new musical phase...just as I stopped liking grunge.
They're playing Oingo Boingo. Yesss. It's a version of "Just Another Day" that I hadn't heard yet.
Coincidentally, one of my dad's pop-culture music magazines has a short feature on New Wave music. Oingo Boingo is under "L.A. Silicone Wave: 1980-1987." "The kings of the Angeleno scene, though, were twitchy party mob Oingo Boingo, worshipped by Californians and nobody else, and led by future film composer Danny Elfman." No pictures, though. And how the fuck does Iggy Pop count as New Wave? According to the book "We Got The Neutron Bomb," in California during the 1980s, yelling "Deeeeevo" at someone was an insult if you were a punk.
Ah, Talking Heads. "Once In A Lifetime." Perfect, 'cause I'm trying to work on a BttF fic. Goddamn do I love this channel. They played the Smiths earlier. And Depeche Mode. I'm waiting for Bauhaus and the Cure.
Brian says that he heard one of his friends asking someone why she hated Kurt Cobain. "Don't you know that Kurt died for your sins?" she asked. We spent a while trying to dissect this statement.
The two genres one most associates with the 1980s are heavy metal and New Wave. New Wave is musically "fake"; the emphasis of the New Wave sound is on processed elements such as synthesizers, drum machines, and computerized vocals. While the human musicians that play the instruments may be genuinely talented, and while the lyrics may be deep and heartfelt, the sound that comes out of said instruments sounds programmed, almost inhuman.
Heavy metal is aesthetically fake; its entire purpose is to present a fantasy lifestyle and philosophy that is eminently desirable to a hormone-wracked and rebellious adolescent. Nobody in their right minds would seriously try to live like a heavy metal song, and the people that do inevitably end up as burnouts, and indeed, most heavy metal icons who lived the life are now dead, in rehab, or sputtering wrecks of humanity.
Both of these were accepted by music fans in general in the spirit in which they were created. It doesn't matter that New Wave sounds like humans have been eaten by computers, because it sounds really groovy. Nobody cares that Iron Maiden doesn't really worship the devil, because it's fun to pretend. Pop culture was a consensual and entertaining facade.
So when the grunge movement came along, it was initially accepted as just another facade. Dressing like lumberjacks and street people--how cute! Downtuned guitars and fuzzy riffs--how catchy! Songs about depression and malaise--how interesting! It's like punk rock (another genre that is currently obsessed with realism and disdain of posers), but with less energy! Kurt Cobain is such a clever musician to come up with such a nifty gimmick! Oh...wait...he killed himself. Poor dear.
Meanwhile, the frustrated teenagers in Fargo, North Dakota who took heavy metal seriously are going, "Shit, that's pretty hardcore." Music should be fucking real, mang. What's the point if you pretend? Kill rock stars. Fuck the audience and what they want. Tear down the pretty facade. Here's my lyrics, here's my guitar, here's my pain. Take my heart and don't bother to give me money.
And ten years down the road, we get emo. THANK YOU, KURT. And indie rock, which, as Brian likes to point out, "is bad if it's good, because if you're good, you get signed to a label, and if you get signed to a label, you've sold out." Neither are any fun at all to listen to.
So does this make Kurt Jesus? Only if heavy metal is the Pharisees, who were ultra-pious (hardcore!) so that the common Jews (oh you rebels) didn't have to be, and New Wave is the Roman Empire, which took over pretty much the entire civilized world (and the Top 40 charts), and culturally influenced every civilization it took over (and every genre on the radio). And emo kids and indie rockers can be just as boring and self-righteous as fundamentalist Christians.
Dad had to go to someone's wedding for a few hours, so I've got control of the music. We have music channels on our cable TV thing. My favorite channel is called "Retro-Active," and the description says, "Pogo your way through the synthesized sounds of post-punk and New Wave madness." New Wave is my new musical phase...just as I stopped liking grunge.
They're playing Oingo Boingo. Yesss. It's a version of "Just Another Day" that I hadn't heard yet.
Coincidentally, one of my dad's pop-culture music magazines has a short feature on New Wave music. Oingo Boingo is under "L.A. Silicone Wave: 1980-1987." "The kings of the Angeleno scene, though, were twitchy party mob Oingo Boingo, worshipped by Californians and nobody else, and led by future film composer Danny Elfman." No pictures, though. And how the fuck does Iggy Pop count as New Wave? According to the book "We Got The Neutron Bomb," in California during the 1980s, yelling "Deeeeevo" at someone was an insult if you were a punk.
Ah, Talking Heads. "Once In A Lifetime." Perfect, 'cause I'm trying to work on a BttF fic. Goddamn do I love this channel. They played the Smiths earlier. And Depeche Mode. I'm waiting for Bauhaus and the Cure.
Brian says that he heard one of his friends asking someone why she hated Kurt Cobain. "Don't you know that Kurt died for your sins?" she asked. We spent a while trying to dissect this statement.
The two genres one most associates with the 1980s are heavy metal and New Wave. New Wave is musically "fake"; the emphasis of the New Wave sound is on processed elements such as synthesizers, drum machines, and computerized vocals. While the human musicians that play the instruments may be genuinely talented, and while the lyrics may be deep and heartfelt, the sound that comes out of said instruments sounds programmed, almost inhuman.
Heavy metal is aesthetically fake; its entire purpose is to present a fantasy lifestyle and philosophy that is eminently desirable to a hormone-wracked and rebellious adolescent. Nobody in their right minds would seriously try to live like a heavy metal song, and the people that do inevitably end up as burnouts, and indeed, most heavy metal icons who lived the life are now dead, in rehab, or sputtering wrecks of humanity.
Both of these were accepted by music fans in general in the spirit in which they were created. It doesn't matter that New Wave sounds like humans have been eaten by computers, because it sounds really groovy. Nobody cares that Iron Maiden doesn't really worship the devil, because it's fun to pretend. Pop culture was a consensual and entertaining facade.
So when the grunge movement came along, it was initially accepted as just another facade. Dressing like lumberjacks and street people--how cute! Downtuned guitars and fuzzy riffs--how catchy! Songs about depression and malaise--how interesting! It's like punk rock (another genre that is currently obsessed with realism and disdain of posers), but with less energy! Kurt Cobain is such a clever musician to come up with such a nifty gimmick! Oh...wait...he killed himself. Poor dear.
Meanwhile, the frustrated teenagers in Fargo, North Dakota who took heavy metal seriously are going, "Shit, that's pretty hardcore." Music should be fucking real, mang. What's the point if you pretend? Kill rock stars. Fuck the audience and what they want. Tear down the pretty facade. Here's my lyrics, here's my guitar, here's my pain. Take my heart and don't bother to give me money.
And ten years down the road, we get emo. THANK YOU, KURT. And indie rock, which, as Brian likes to point out, "is bad if it's good, because if you're good, you get signed to a label, and if you get signed to a label, you've sold out." Neither are any fun at all to listen to.
So does this make Kurt Jesus? Only if heavy metal is the Pharisees, who were ultra-pious (hardcore!) so that the common Jews (oh you rebels) didn't have to be, and New Wave is the Roman Empire, which took over pretty much the entire civilized world (and the Top 40 charts), and culturally influenced every civilization it took over (and every genre on the radio). And emo kids and indie rockers can be just as boring and self-righteous as fundamentalist Christians.
no subject
Anyways, I like your Deep Thoughts on heavy metal vs new wave. You perfectly articulated the dichotomy, as usual.
I like...
Kurt Cobain? I was there and 21 when he killed himself. I thought he was rather stupid when he did that and I dreaded the imminent martyrdom that he would get from it. Jeff, our friend Sean and a friend at the time Toni and I discussed it and Jeff, Sean and I were annoyed that the martyr thing would happen. Toni, ever the trend-follower, thought that he was a martyr. She thought he was Jesus. Or at least, Jesus-like. Or something. She did the "I'm going to wear black to mourn the loss," thing and it wouldn't have been so bad except that she actually got offended at us for not doing the same. For going on with our lives in the face of Cobain's death.
no subject
> present a fantasy lifestyle and philosophy that is eminently
> desirable to a hormone-wracked and rebellious adolescent.
Hey. Well, you're partly right. Some of it is. The stupid, latter-day, cartoonishly over-the-top forms of it are. I had a roommate for two years in college (to this day I have no idea how we wound up rooming together the second year, because I hated the guy so much) who fancied himself an ultra-cool, hard-living-lifestyle, uber-super-duper metalhead, when in reality he was the dumbest sumbitch ever to walk the earth, and the whole thing was just a complete shuck, a put-on, and everyone who saw him with his painful and feeble attempts to be something laughed at him to his face, and the best thing of all? He didn't even realize it.
But that's just the inevitable result of what happens when people try too hard to emulate something that's truly really something wonderful. Just as a great deal of what followed in the wake of Elvis Presley at Sun Records was hollow and ultimately passionless, so too with "heavy metal," so-called, that tried to be Led Zeppelin, which it was not. But nothing, nothing is more powerful, more passionate, nay, more magical, than what Led Zeppelin was able to accomplish in its time.
It's quite interesting: what you wrote (and I quoted above) parallels almost exactly in its structure and intentions something that the late, great Lester Bangs (if you've not read him, you should) once wrote: "Rock is for everybody; it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody's qualified to perform it should never even arise."