Who's Next?
I've been talking a lot tonight with an old friend about music. As is usually the case with such things, we're remembering old faves and reminiscing about past songs and albums. But many of our college hits remain popular today. The Police are having a tremendous comeback this summer with their thirtieth anniversary tour. Thirtieth anniversary! Why are they still packing in the young kids? If I go back to thirty years before I was in college, I find Dinah Shore, Frankie Laine, The Mills Brothers, and the Harmonicats. If any of them were doing a thirtieth anniversary tour, I didn't know it, and I wouldn't have been interested if I did (although I do remember David Bowie and Iggy Pop on Dinah Shore's afternoon talk show a couple of years earlier). I wonder why this stuff from the '60s and '70s continues to hold on. A while back, I found a Siouxsie and the Banshees interview on YouTube from '76. Steve Severin said that just as the Stones and the Who had destroyed what had come before them, punk was now wiping away them. The Stones and others obviously weren't wiped, but nobody's even coming along to attempt to wipe that next generation.
What does it mean to be in a new rock band these days? Rock always used to mean rebellion, but nowadays, who's rebelling against what? (And no replies of "What've you got," please.) The Internet is allowing musicians and groups to connect with listeners (and, dare I say, consumers) outside of the recording industry, but what are these underground bands giving us? Interesting more of the same, perhaps, but more of the same, nevertheless. Does rock as a form of music have anything new to say to us today? Or should we just keep listening to the Police, the Stones, and what remains of the Who?
posted by Doug @ 3:45 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Doug,
I find this a fascinating topic.
It does seem at times that today's barrier-pushing rockers aren't trying to dismiss their forbears...in my case, however, I sometimes think that I only perceive that to be true because I only hear the opinions of rockers that are supposed to be (but actually ARE NOT) barrier-pushers.
I.E. who is really the modern equivalent of Siouxsie or the Who? Do we really know? Or are they existing on a level too odd or obscure or age-centric for us to pick up on?
But I also think that this "screw the past" attitude is often overstated. The Who included a drummer who liked surf music, a bassist who played the FRENCH F***ING HORN, and a songwriter who wrote even more painful lyrics about growing up English than Ray Davies.
Siouxsie, it seems to me, owed an awful lot to rock's past--the Velvets, the Doors, even the Stooges. I'm sure in missing others. But they believed that they were destroying what about the past that they did not like.
Even the Beatles did that. Sure, they loved jazz and C&W and boogie woogie and songs from musicals, they also knew what they hated: formulaic adult pop, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and toothless background "jazz."
All groups have a reason for playing; my experience has shown that creating music is often a reaction to something one has heard--and either liked or hated--that made them want to do it themselves.
Stu, I don't disagree with anything that you say. I may have phrased my question wrong. In talking about rebelling, I don't necessarily mean kicking over whatever came before. You're right that bands took what they liked from the past and modified it (or copied it outright, sometimes), even if they did claim to destroy the past. Pretty much every prominent punk band played cover songs, after all.
I was intending to talk more about rebellion in general. Although rock music still poses as a form of rebellion, there's not much of it to be found. Rock has been co-opted by the system--it's anything but provocative to join a band these days (although that doesn't mean that there aren't still a lot of other reasons). I think that what I stumble over is that rock continues to claim (and we mostly go along with it) the dangerous, outsider social status it had forty or fifty years ago. Something in there doesn't make sense to me. What's out there today that can completely escape the label of Dad Rock?
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