skip to main |
skip to sidebar
- Today I will meet with an anthropologist whose book about the labor movement i like a lot. This will entail my first jaunt outside of the house in many, many hours/days. After so much traveling, I am overcome with the odd sense of beginning the regular season. I hope it's a championship season (insert semi-finals reference here for all the sewanee blokes and women.)
- How can it be possible that there will be a Ghostbusters remake with the Office people writing it?
- Speaking of Ohio Rock Gods, do we all know the New Bomb Turks, whose first two albs rank alongside your Rockets to Russia and your Fun House and (especially) your Pink Flag? If you don't, get to know them with this well-written bit by the main man from Last Days of Man on Earth. It situates their music within the larger, overlooked Columbus scene.
- And speaking of Last Days of Man On Earth, this post dedicated to the wide variety of left and right- political postures that accompanied the Great Punk Seven-Inches of 1986! It is a must-see.
- Oh, and Wobs.... the Greatest-Ever, Better-Than-The-Velvets-Maybe? first Pere Ubu 7", over at the already-missed Detailed Twang.
3 comments:
nice synergy, patchy. i've coincidentally been dripping with pere ubu for the past two days... early live, 1976 cassette recording with nice wanna be yer dog and heroin covers.... this is the toughest though... a real band, not a 'project.' how many of those are still around?
robes,
i know that tape.
do you know what's weird about yr "real band" question? i feel like a lotta the usual suspects - like Wilco, Magnolia and Cardinals, to name just a few of my faves - are succumbing to this weird fetishized version of being a "real band" (or is it, a real "brand")... in their bizarro world, being a real band means less touring constantly (which all these bands do) and more putting out 70s-ish, Band/Crazy Horse-influenced albums full of five-and-a-half-minute long album rock. not that i don't love the whole canon outlined above. but i notice that being a "real band" these days seems to have _more_ to do with a 70s posture and a certain pop-rock sensibility than it does with any kind of collectivist, band-of-brothers vibe a la, say, the Black Flag or the Minutemen.... let alone the completely honed, "sounds-first" cohesion of otherwise egotistical subjects that early Ubu brought to the table. like the Velvets, they had a compelling vision of what they wanted to do... but they'd just've been so much more pretentious art rock if they hadn't figured out a way to get past themselves and arrive at the fucking promised land of post-industrial sonics that they got to. excellence in execution, just like Bret "the Hitman" Hart.
much agreement there chlips. i guess that's why i didn't really include them (wilco, et al) in my category... also because they are established. i am thinking of upstarts, non made-men.. at that point, ubu was small time, but they had everything there. i just marvel at the dave thomas/peter laughner/tim wright axis... they are all 'real' versions of their roles... tim wright is such a bad ass bass player, and i think to me that is what you need to have a real band... in my own world, that is. that could just be that i have never felt like i was in a band unless there was a bass i could lean on, full-weight style. i just lust after that type of situation... not to toot our horn, but the congrats format is my ideal... drums/bass/guitar. so simple, but somehow so elusive. i think what has to happen is that you 'accidentally' hear yourself objectively, and realize you have something that carries whatever it was you wanted to do back out into undifferentiated space, then you become somehow passive in relation to your product while remaining assertive. if everyone is crafting something they are not also witnessing for the first time, then i think it collapses back into a project of sorts. sorry, this is a bit incoherent, due to arguing over unclear terminology. i think it's just an old fashioned 'whole vs. parts' scenario. like that horrible eno/ayers/nico/cale album. shoulda been the greatest, instead, yawnsville.
Post a Comment