Recently some fans of rock music have been falling ass over teakettle in a mad rush to shower praise on indie bands who purport to record "serious" music. I'm sure you know which bands I'm talking about; we'll get to them in a minute. They make no secret of their ambition to mean something to a mass audience; they write grand, arena-ready anthems that tackle weighty interpersonal and social issues. When their politics are coherent, they're unapologetically leftist. Their performances are—or at least are intended to be—calls to arms rousing the kids from their beds of apathy. They find little of value in consumer culture; they want you to read books. They perceive grave danger in unthinking conformity and hope, in their own modest way, to make art that blazes a new trail to an alternative future.
Now, all of this is perfectly fine in the abstract. I am not so old and jaded that I fail to understand the appeal of a good rallying cry. Misery loves company and all that. But something about using rock music as the vehicle to accomplish these goals strikes me as a little pathetic in this day and age. Consider: rock writers who discuss these bands often freight their reviews with Lost-Cause-style romanticism for a past when rock and roll ruled the airwaves and the Music Really Meant Something. You know the story: rock first lost its way in the 70s via cocaine bloat, only to rally briefly on both sides of the Atlantic with punk. But then punk got killed by the synthesizer, and rock went underground while the New Romantics ruled the airwaves in the early 80s before giving way to nerf-metal and dumb balladeers. When rock finally reemerged as a popular force in the early 90s, it was chastened, leavened with irony, afraid to go for the jugular and flirt with cliche. It may have produced anthems, but they were downcast; the singers sang with their hair in their faces and didn't make eye contact with the crowd. New guitar bands challenged this approach, but they overcorrected and got increasingly frivolous—first pop-punk, then ska-punk, then that godawful swing-dance revival, and finally the artistically bankrupt, rape-inducing genre of nu-metal. By the turn of the millenium, rock didn't exist as a creative cultural force; the few guitar-based bands on the charts, like Matchbox 20 and Maroon 5 and 3 Doors Down, were just going through the motions, re-covering old ground as inoffensively as possible. And emo—well, that's just music for 13-year-olds. The usual prescription is throwing off the yoke of all that stuff so we can get back to the garden.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think this narrative is a lazy, stupid nutshell history that bears nearly no resemblance to reality. What happened to rock music is what happens to any culturally-powerful artistic moment; it splintered as various creative people took it in different directions and layered their own contexts and meanings on top of the original form. We can never put it back together again, and we shouldn't want to. If you try to revive it, you're only reviving your idea of the part of it you found most compelling, not the thing itself. In the meantime, other things have risen up to take its place, and if we can't accept them, that's our problem.
Of course, there are all sorts of societal and racial implications to rock nostalgia, because the main thing that replaced it is hip-hop, and it's no secret that a lot of white people just can't deal with hip-hop. People who despair that there are no more rock stars today—no profoundly unifying musical figures, no Elvis Presley or Beatles—are prisoners of their own narrow worldview. In the first place, as monolithic as Elvis and the Beatles may have been in white culture, even in their day there was a wide world beyond white America, even if it was much less visible because it was overtly suppressed. But more to the point, at least as far as young America goes, there are larger-than-life figures making music today; they're called rappers. And don't hand me that bullshit about how rappers don't stand for anything compared to the rock juggernauts of yesteryear. If you're saying that, chances are you are not listening very closely. First off, do you really want to argue that Led Zeppelin's Tolkien-addled sagas of imaginary Icelandic warriors meant something? The Rolling Stones sang about debauched extramarital fucking as often as any modern MC. The Beatles may have captured an important cultural moment, and their willingness to experiment was admirable, but they also wrote a lot of mediocre songs, and even some of their greatest accomplishments (e.g., "I Am the Walrus") communicate nothing intelligible, let alone profound.
On the other hand, to paraphrase BIll James, maybe hip-hop doesn't mean anything to you, but that doesn't mean it's not meaningful. You can make fun of all those crack-slangin', gat-totin', slow-drawlin', sizzurp-guzzlin' Houston MCs, sometimes with good reason, but how many rock stars have ever concocted a narrative as specific and melancholy as Bun B's "Pushin'"? Don't hate because Bun's story happens to be about a fatalistic, 30-something, two-time-loser crack dealer trying to salvage some pride from the useless dead end that is his life; he's writing what he knows. And how many rock stars have written a protest song as nuanced and defiant as Chamillionaire's "Ridin'," and to boot about a social problem that actually affects them in day to day life? I know no one stops us white folks as we're driving around in our Priuses, but should we dismiss Cham's complaints about racial profiling because his narrator is honest enough to admit he does, from time to time, carry a gun and smoke weed? That perspective sure beats a polemic written by some unself-critical guy who thinks he bears no blame for the world's problems. You underestimate hip-hop at your own peril. Looking for someone to save rock and roll is just the modern-day search for the Great White Hope. Even if you succeed, all you end up with is Gerry Cooney or Chuck “The Bayonne Bleeder” Wepner.
Setting aside the racial angle, it’s no wonder that the image of a bemaned rock star astride a guitar gives some people comfort; it represents a cultural moment that’s past, and the past is always less scary than the present or, god forbid, the future. But even if you believe it’s worthwhile to try to recapture that moment, it does not follow that one can just will it to be so. You can try all you want to recreate an organic past experience by applying logic and determination, but it's never going to work. All you'll end up with is an incredible simulation drained of all joy and spontaneity.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Arcade Fire’s new record Neon Bible. In many ways, it’s better than I expected it would be, in that it’s not just the first record but 70-80% as good, like, for example, Room on Fire or Antics. I give them credit for experimenting with song structure (“Black Wave/Bad Vibrations,” “The Well and the Lighthouse”), but it’s also true that those songs are among the least memorable on the record. Likewise for the bassy, mumbled title track, even though it does break new sonic ground for them. One big problem is that Win Butler really only knows three or four melodies, and the band falls back too often on the same bouncy mid-tempo shuffle. They still love them some Springsteen, but they never actually commit to rocking; they’re too polite. I think it was Pitchfork’s review that mentioned that Neon Bible’s most exciting track, “Keep the Car Running,” sounds just like “On the Dark Side,” but the review missed why that’s significant. “On the Dark Side” is a great pop single, but when you try for the grandeur of the Boss and end up with John Cafferty, something’s not right.
In the end, I could probably forgive all this—the band is reasonably tight and energetic and the arrangements are fairly interesting—except for one critical, foundational problem: the record is no fun. Funeral wasn’t any fun, either, but, as we all know, once is an isolated incident, twice is a pattern. Neon Bible is the antithesis of fun. It's a sucking chest wound that devours the possibility of fun. The record is self-important and humorless, and, more distressingly, it's self-righteous about its belief in its own importance and its total absence of humor. “Intervention” kicks off grandly, with the peals of a cathedral organ, and it’s a great melody, but soon you realize Butler is singing angst-pandering nonsense like, “Working for the church while your family dies” and “Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.” In the second verse, he wonders, “Who’s gonna reset the bone?” but it turns out it makes no difference, because in the next verse he hips you to the sad fact that “the bone shall never heal.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t need this sort of bullshit in my life. As you probably know, Arcade Fire recorded the album in a church, and they’re touring behind the album by playing churches, the album is called Neon Bible—do you think they’re trying to tell us something? Here’s what they’re telling me: “We are insufferable.” They are very intensely critiquing what they perceive as the mordant fatalism and blind conformity of organized religion by adopting the trappings of a religious service in which they preach fatalism to a flock of devoted followers. They seem totally blind to the tension, but they go on evangelizing. Butler wants you to kill your television; first he tells you that he “don’t wanna work in a building downtown”; one song later, he lets you know that he “don’t wanna live in America no more.” That last comment would have a lot more resonance if Butler hadn’t decamped for Montreal years ago, but ultimately what all this posturing tells me is that Win Butler doesn’t want to bother engaging with society. He sees its bright lights and crudity and exploitation and inevitable compromises and recoils; he is incomparably pained by the thought of losing himself.
I get the concern—the world is overrun with genocidal thugs, the United States is governed by a RICO enterprise masquerading as a political party, and, particularly for educated white males, the temptation to become, and the rewards for becoming, a self-justifying asshole are tremendous—but this is really a profoundly adolescent worldview. In “Windowsill,” the song that exemplifies this attitude most obviously, Butler asks “World War III, when are you coming for me?” This is so embarrassingly solipsistic, I don’t think he even realizes it. Win, global catastrophe is not your personal existential crisis. If it’s coming, it’s coming for everyone. Get your head out of your ass and rejoin the rest of us.
There are a couple of other recent records that fall into the New Anthem Rock category, and while they don’t bug me as much as Neon Bible, they do make me wonder just why anyone thinks this sort of thing is worth doing. Bloc Party emerged from the U.K. in 2004; like Arcade Fire, they released a great single (“Banquet”) and an uneven debut album. On their new A Weekend in the City, they’ve abandoned trying to write radio singles to concentrate on sounding more like TV on the Radio. Because they’re British, the main stadium-rock touchstone is U2 rather than Bruce, but they’re even less funny than Bono. Even so, the record is not bad. It’s very cleanly produced; you can hear all the musicians working hard, and they do some nice things. But I’ve listened to it five or six times now and I have to confess it’s basically made no impression on me whatsoever. I know I’m just one guy, but, for a band striving to really mean something, that can’t be a good sign.
Meanwhile, since Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is way artsier and more obscurantist than Arcade Fire, fewer people pinned the Savior of Rock and Roll tag on them, but a lot of folks found their first record pretty compelling. (I am guessing nearly all of these people live in Brooklyn.) Unlike their debut, Some Loud Thunder is not a collection of anthems; if they ever had ambitions to save any genre of music, they’ve renounced them. I give the band props for branching out both songwriting- and production-wise, but I continue not to get it. Mainly, it annoys me that I can’t understand a goddamn thing Alec Ounsworth is singing, and I can’t escape the conclusion that’s how Ounsworth wants it. Reference to the lyric sheet doesn’t help; you get “sophisticated” signifiers like “Rimbaud” and “salad nicoise,” but not much coherence. The band conjures some pretty soundscapes, but they never come together as songs, because the singer is off in the ether reading thought fragments from his journal, sounding like Tom Verlaine gargling paint thinner. Then again, at least unintelligibility has the virtue of mystery.
Couldn't agree more with most of this. The new Bloc Party really is a disappointment. I guess you can't fault bands for trying to make a Grand Statement - we all want to be important and thoughtful, don't we? - but when every song on your record is an attempted anthem things get bogged down pretty quickly. Especially when those anthems are about how Kids These Days Don't Care Anymore (the awful "Uniform") or Modern Life Drains Your Soul ("Waiting for the 7.18").
It's especially a shame since these guys are clearly competent, professional musicians (especially the drummer) and it's well-produced. I don't know if they turned their back on Silent Alarm because it's hard to write pop gems (like "Banquet") or because pop gems are beneath them now. Either way, I liked the old Bloc Party better.
I haven't heard the new(er) Arcade Fire or Clap Your Hands yet. I liked the first Arcade Fire record, but the seeds of their potential destruction are pretty obviously sown all over it. I find it hard to believe that they are now smashing guitars on Saturday Night Live, but I guess that's what rock stars do.
I also agree that Clap Your Hands is harder to peg, but in my mind that's a virtue. Frankly, I don't care if they don't have an agenda or save rock 'n' roll so long as they keep churning out infectious stuff like "Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" and "Over and Over Again." If something sounds like Talking Heads meets the Feelies, that can't be all bad. (Plus, their ascent to recognition is a feel-good story that everyone who hates record companies can love.)
Posted by: psessions | Tuesday, March 20, 2007 at 11:00 AM