Mess Me Up
By Steven Strange
Rock n roll is all about having fun. For a lot of people that statement is
as given as saying that sex feels good or that Fat Wreck bands suck more
dick than Mike Cynic on a two-day bender. Like, duh, of course (italics)
rock n roll is supposed to be fun. Who wants to subject oneself to an emo
singer prattling on about his difficulty coping with the existential malaise
he faces as a member of an impersonal and uncaring society (i.e. he can't
get laid) or to a hardcore singer taking five minutes to introduce a minute
long song about the Very Important Issue of how the local co-op is selling
cookies with - gasp (italics) - sugar in them and trying to pass them off as
vegan? Certainly not this record geek. Most attempts to infuse rock n roll
with "serious issues" such as politics, social protest, chronicles of
individual oppression, or what have you, usually end up falling flatter than
uber-skank Paris Hilton's chest, and with good reason - once rock n roll
tries too hard to "make a difference" it turns into the rants of a street
preacher spouting off on a soapbox set to power chords and a 4/4 beat -
which isn't exactly my idea of a good time. It's like Ben Weasel so
succinctly said, "politics are fucking boring." That's why for years "social
relevance" in music has been anathema to both myself and, I'm sure, most of
you out there in TB-land. Because if rock n roll is essentially a visceral
and exciting form of music, why bog down that energy with a bunch of
extraneous sentiments? All of those squares pushing their largely
interchangeable, always dull social agendas are just a bunch of uptight
fanatics who wouldn't know a good time if it snuck up and bit them on the
ass. Unlike those suckers, we (italics) know what a good time is all about -
we (italics) know that rock n roll is all about having fun.
Except, the world isn't very fun anymore.
I'm a firm believer that if someone wants to read about politics, they
should go read a political website (or newspaper, book, magazine, or blog)
so I'll save you the play by play on how our world, and in particular, our
country have entered into a precarious era that makes the relative calm and
stability of the 90's seem like a distant, halcyon dream. That's the era I
came of age in, and I'm well aware that it was far from idyllic. However,
I'll take the manufactured slacker culture of the 90's over the 00's equally
manufactured "patriotism," and the war machine it enables, any day of the
week. For example, the biggest problem most kids in my generation had to
deal with was the fundamental existential question of what to do with their
boring life. College or the night shift at the video store? In sharp
contrast to this, kids coming of age in the post-911 world face the
ever-present specter of being drafted into an already understaffed army that
is losing troops on an almost daily basis. While Bush claims he won't
reinstate the draft, does anyone actually think that an already taxed to the
limit volunteer army can afford the price in casualties "staying the course"
in Iraq will incur? With a large percentage of the armed services extended
in Iraq, we're only another "liberation" away from the draft becoming a
necessity. I hear GW has issued warnings to Iran and North Korea that they
could be next if they don't shape up. Guess what post-graduation options
that leaves for a fifteen year old today: Fallujah or Pyongyang? Sure makes
working at Blockbuster seem like a bright future.
Some might say I'm being an alarmist. To them I say, turn on your TV and
watch the corporate nightly news for a week straight and then tell me that
things are just hunky dory in the world today. I watch the nightly news a
few times a week while eating diner, and what emanates from the idiot box
never ceases to depress me: suicide bombings occurring with such alarming
frequency that they all start to blend together into a single disgusting
mass of carnage and wasted human life, a Commander in Chief who justifies
this as the price of "freedom on the march," and an increasingly complacent
media who fails to question why a President whose lies have caused us to
become entangled in the Iraqi quagmire, and is therefore partially
responsible for the incalculable pain it has caused, has not been impeached
whereas a Democrat like Clinton was not only impeached, but also publicly
vilified, for lying about a blowjob. You tell me which one is worse. Yet to
ask such questions in the current political atmosphere is to relegate
oneself to the outer fringes of an increasingly complacent, if not outright
complicit (ala Fox News), corporate media power structure. This media
hegemony has resulted in a silencing of dissenting voices, and when combined
with the post-911 nationalistic daydream that many have yet to wake up from,
it adds up to a docile and manageable citizenry. Its almost as though a
large part of the country has fallen under some red, white, and blue spell
that is blinding them to the fact that our country is needlessly (italics)
heading down the path to a future that makes the turmoil of Vietnam and the
60's look like a Disney cartoon.
And that's where we come in. While I'm all in favor of rock n roll, and by
extension rock zines and message boards, existing primarily as forms of
entertainment, I can't say I'm not shocked, and somewhat disappointed, at
how little our little underground scene is reflecting the world that we live
in. I'm not talking about Dead Kennedys sloganeering or hardcore didactics
here. I outgrew that stuff before I was old enough to get a drivers license
and it would be awful if garage/rock/pop/punk bands started to inject their
songs with that particular brand of banality. What I'm talking about is
making music that reflects the spirit of the time. Nowadays, the vast
majority of "our" bands aren't doing this. A quick look at some of the best
records that came out this year bears this out: the Lids, Reigning Sound,
Ponys, Real Losers, Fatals, Slowmotions, Blank Its, BBQ, and Feelers all put
out great records this year, but by and large they're all sonically
traditional records full of songs about having fun (or not having fun in the
Ponys case). There's nothing wrong with that. The Lids and Reigning Sound
LPs are constantly jockeying for position as my favorite album of the year,
and right now BBQ, Slowmotions, and Blank Its are in heated competition for
the coveted "single of the year" prize (which is really saying something
this year). I'll make no bones about it; for the most part I'm a rock
traditionalist who enjoys catchy songs, a driving beat, and clich� (or
archetypal) lyrics about girls, frustration, jubilation, boredom, anger, and
being a punk rock loser. All of which is great and all, but when I listen to
a lot of my favorite records these days I can't help but get the feeling
that I'm just burying my head in the sand the same as all of those soccer
moms with yellow ribbons on the back of their SUVs. Obviously writing a song
about the evils of war, let alone listing to one, isn't going to end the
war. However, listening to nothing but fun, escapist music doesn't seem to
acknowledge the all too grim reality we're living in.
A couple of days ago I was listing to a tape I made of a bunch of 70's punk
rock and was floored by how much better some of those songs captured the
zeitgeist of 2004 than contemporary records do. Listing to the Weirdos sing
lines like "United Nations and NATO won't do it too/it's just the red,
white, and blue" and "foreign aid from the land of the free/but don't blame
me" its hard not to imagine John Denney as writing under some sort of
precognitive intuition. Even the Pack, those pimp fighting, pleather pants
wearing misanthropes from Germany who have become the pinnacle of
collecterscum cool, sound like they were writing their lyrics while looking
into a crystal ball. When I listen to lyrics like, "my neighbor/he's talking
about freedom/human rights and justice/but he's a terrorist" from their song
"Terrorist," I can't help but let out a bitter laugh at the irony of a
German band from the 70's being more in touch with my feelings on living in
post-911/Patriot Act America than anything contemporaneous I've heard. The
funny thing is, the world those bands were complaining about seems like a
cakewalk compared to today. Which begs the question, where is the comparable
sentiment in 2004? Why has dissent fallen out of fashion as a lyrical topic?
I can't profess to have the complete answer, but I'm pretty sure the
proliferation of politico hardcore bands in the 80s must have something to
do with it. After hearing/seeing a zillion uninspired bands ineloquently
railing against everything from cops, the system, to (the hardcorites
favorite muse) Regan, one starts to equate the idea (italics) of lyrics
expressing dissent with the puerile manner in which they are executed. In
contrast to this is rock n roll/garage, where the lyrics seldom matter and
juvenility is all part of the package. Years of stereotypes as to what a
hardcore band should write about and what is appropriate subject matter for
a garage band have had a self-perpetuating effect. Few bands think outside
of the lyrical box that their subgenre has constructed for itself, and the
result is the continuation of stock themes that are largely devoid of
meaning.
Once again, there's nothing wrong with this, as it's an inevitable part of
making music within the parameters of a given scene. Personally, I'm not
really a lyrics guy. I think about lyrics largely the same way I think about
basslines; usually I don't pay them any mind, but occasionally really good
ones come along and add an extra dimension to a song. Pardon me for going
emo on you, but personally I think music is all about emotion. Every good
song should make you feel something; whether it's happy (as most rock does),
melancholy, romantic, scared, touched, or angry. Given the state of the
world today, I've been feeling the latter quite a bit more than I used to.
Yet to listen to most of the records I've bought recently, it seems like I
must be the only one. While there's a plethora of great music being made
right now, much more than there was a few years ago in fact, the vast
majority of it sounds interchangeable with records from 1998. Based on
records by bands like the Black Lips and Catholic Boys one could almost get
the impression that we weren't living in an increasingly theocratic and
undemocratic country where half of the population supports a megalomaniacal
President who appears to be hell bent on brining about Armageddon in the
Middle East. I don't mean to single out those bands since I think both of
them sound great the way they are. There's always room for bands that write
lyrics without any social criticism; in fact the majority of music is
probably better off without it. However, when hardly anybody seems the least
bit upset about the way the world is going right now I have to wonder just
what the fuck is going on. Doesn't anybody else care about the fact that
we're living under a far-right Republican hegemony and being spoon-fed
sanitized news about the disaster unfolding in Iraq by a neutered corporate
media? Doesn't this make anyone else at least a little nervous and upset?
Of course it does. It must. Anyone who doesn't feel some outrage towards the
direction our country has drifted post-911 is either not paying attention or
is the kind of myopic, nationalistic tool that Karl Rove and company where
able to manipulate so effectively this past November. Based on conversations
I've had, I know of more than a couple of "our" bands that feel upset about
these things, but for some reason most of them haven't incorporated this
sentiment into their music. Maybe they feel self-conscious about trying to
write a "political song" or maybe they just think music and politics are
best kept separate. There are some current bands, however, that have shown
that it is possible to incorporate a sense of today's precarious world into
their music without coming across as heavy-handed or sloganeering. The Lost
Sounds' "And You Dance" and the Clorox Girls' "Vietnam" immediately come to
mind, the later for its direct comparison of the current war to the
catastrophic, and ultimately pointless, war that has come to demarcate the
late 60's era more than anything else, and the former for basically
expressing the same sentiment I've spent almost four pages on in a few
succinct lines:
"You're at the discotheque having fun/while your brothers are firing
guns/killing everything in their path/but not you just drink and laugh!"
This from the guy who once wrote a song called "Puke On You." Times change
after all, and so do people. Sometimes, that is.
Of course, just because the world is going to shit doesn't mean that people
shouldn't be at the discotheque having fun, or at the bars and rock clubs
for that matter. Life is short, and no matter how bad things get people
should always try to squeeze as much enjoyment out of it as they can. The
problem lies in people who ignore the problems facing us all today in favor
of having a good time. There's a thin line between being entertained and
head-in-the-sand escapism. Like I said, rock n roll is all about having
fun, but sometimes there comes a need to acknowledge reality. And for a lot
of people, the reality they are faced with today is grim to say the least.
I'm not going to whine about how it's the responsibility of bands to act as
"voices our generation" or any such Rolling Stone nonsense, but at the same
time it would be nice to at least have a sense that the people making the
music I spend so much of my life listening to are not just cognizant of, but
also care about, the state of the world in 2004.
Because it's not very fun feeling like I'm the only one that's pissed.
Contact:
Steven Strange
1115 Paul Parkway #102
Minneapolis, MN 55434
steveotron--at--hotmail.com
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