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After last night's post I suppose it's incumbent upon me to prove that I'm not just a random, bitterly nostalgic geezer who believes that no one has recorded anything worth listening to since some arbitrary holy moment in my youth. So put this in your pipe and smoke it.I think it's safe to say that most people my age (high Baby Boom era) would probably consider this selection to be "noise" just as our parents condemned the Stones or the Rascals as "jungle music." Myself, I view of Seattle grunge in general as an antidote to the sterile, vacuous sound of Reagan-era rock and pop that I was lamenting here last evening. These grunge bands used instrumentation and even production values that could be replicated in any working-class garage or basement assuming a few thousand dollars of investment in recording gear and a mixing board. Pure, primitive rock and roll. I remember that there was a certain amount of hype about the Seattle sound in the early 1990s as if grunge were revolutionary and unprecedented. It wasn't; it was a throwback to the '60s and early '70s with which there was nothing wrong other than pretending that one invented it when one actually had not. Grunge lyrics were, of course, uncensored existential despair for jaded kids, but I don't think that was so much a Seattle innovation rather than a generational change in community standards for rock lyrics trafficking in despair.
This track reminds me of early '70s Alice Cooper in some respects. The chord progression, if you can call it that, seems to be variation of the classic I - IV rock chord change, but using a mutated and dissonant variant of the tonic chord. The band pretty much vamps on these chords throughout, using the mutant tonic chord almost like pedal tones. But the harmonic environment creates plenty of elbow room for the musicians to play pretty much any notes they wish at any time. They do it with discipline, though, using scales, modes, and passing tones for harmonic coherence. As far as my ears are concerned, the vocalist can hold his own with any idol of the "classic rock" era. Lyrics? My mind is too literal to understand much poetry, but I reckon they have something to do with addiction and one-upsmanship originating in some sort of personal rivalry or hostility. I don't care---my earbones have historically processed vocals as one instrument among the ensemble. Never could understand the damn things, either in terms of diction or meaning.
Retarded, Afghan Whigs (1990, from "Up In It," reissued 1991 on "The Grunge Years," Sub Pop SP112b), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.
give this baby a 7. On scale of 1 (leaking tire) to 10 (nuclear explosion).
ReplyDeletebtw-- your "nostalgia" for pre-80s music isn't necessarily a random choice. The advent of music video (MTV, about '81?) really was a permanent downgrade. It gave big business a much bigger control over what "music" was-- ie, backdrop to commercial images.
And I'd add that how and where you first heard music back then made a big difference. Springsteen, for instance. If you first heard his stuff on TV video, it's forgettable (like all other TV is). If you didn't see the video and assimilated it through radio or tape (audio only), it means something different and is 'real'
music. Evokes real memories. And maybe these hammerheads in this clip you present would have too, as long as one was first drugged.
OCH: interesting observations about the final corporate colonization of pop music, which are in keeping with observations by Douglas Rushkoff in "Life Inc.," which I'm trying to finish. One interesting aspect to MTv videos is that they were delivering music in a very low-fidelity manner (through cheap TV speakers) in the decade before home theaters started becoming affordable. But since you insulted the Afghan Whigs I will now be compelled to present more grunge in the coming weeks.
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