memo to self: gotta get that Jeff Keen cd on Trunk
"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno ................................................................................................................................................................................................................. welcome to the drivel blog of "music detractor, Simon Reynolds"
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Monday, December 3, 2012
the Rich Kids - proof of two things
1/ talent (songwriting, musical, etc) isn't enough, not without that (often extra-musical) spark that comes from the Member with Vision (or Edge, or Attitude, or a Really Big Idea) (see also Eno's career as X Factor)
without Matlock, Sex Pistols as creatively generative unit went into swift decline (give or take a few, their best songs were cowrites with him)
without the other Pistols (and Glitterbest milieu) Matlock's new venture never even started
2/ bands formed through happenstance almost always get better results (certainly more distinctive results) than bands formed in a deliberative, choosing-from-many-options fashion (the supergroup, the next venture formed by someone in an established position after being in a supersuccessful or epochal band).
The thing about great rock bands is that
usually they have formed in a partly accidental and contingent way – through
friendship, chance meetings, geographical proximity as much as through musical
affinity – so you have a random factor,
an X Factor -- you also have a mix of skill levels -- -- David Byrne in How Music Works argues that
a band in itself can work as a framework of creative constraint. If there is a principal songwriter in the
group, that person learns to adjust their writing to play to the strengths of
the other members and bypass their deficiencies. The group’s creativity is
channeled through that limited zone where their talents and their variable
abilities mesh. Compare that with the solo careers that follow the break-up of
a famous band, the singer or the principle songwriter is able to pick freely
from a broad pool of often highly skilled session musicians. The top players
around. As anyone knows these records are almost always inferior to the records
made with the original group – compare Mick Jagger solo to the Stones, Bryan
Ferry solo to Roxy Music, Morrissey to the Smiths – Byrne again: “One might assume that having better
players... means that a composer can be more adaptable, free, and
wide-ranging,” Byrne says, but actually, that’s rarely the case.
what make this such a rocker
the choppy rhythm, splitting the difference between Steppenwolf "Magic Carpet Ride" and Sly & Family Stone "Thankyafalletinmebemiceselfagin" (or howevayaspellit)
and the tone of the lead guitar
as for the obnoxious lyric, supposedly it's some kind of allegory to do with the Vietnam War, or so I read somewhere
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