"A lot of indie-rock today feels like a collegiate pissing contest"
- Dan Boeckner
Recently, a friend has been helping me explore the roots of rock'n'roll. It is easy to forget where we come from, especially in the maelstrom of a music media telling us who we are, what we should like, and - most importantly - balking at that we supposedly shouldn't.
This friend has aided me in rediscovering my love for music and not through the channels I expected. It came through the Kinks. It came through The White Stripes, The Libertines, Pulp and the 13th Floor Elevators. This person watched the following video with me at my flat one night and remarked "look at them. These are real rock stars, and not because they try to be. It's because they write and enjoy soulful rock music... look at how much they feel it. Everyone is walking around today, pretending to be a rock star and don't even know what rock'n'roll is. This is why these guys are immortal".
This is why I love Handsome Furs.
In more recent times many overrated rock bands have risen to dizzying heights in the stoned haze of indie-rock auteurship. I tried to follow for a while, but keeping up with the 'latest shit' sure spun my head around in circles to the extent I didn't even know what music I liked anymore, and I'm sure this is a familiar story with some of my peers. If I didn't know what my soul wanted, then how could this possibly be rock music?
Afterall, rock'n'roll never came from a guitar. It came from the church. It came from the gospel and the spiritual, the cleansing and excercise of the soul through the body and voice. Music would grow in your chest and simmer until it errupted out of your fingers and mouth. You had to move. You had to get up and shake, and twist, and jump, and scream, and throw all you'd be trained to believe back into the face of your mentors. You were forced to lose control. Take Jerry Lee Lewis, raised in the church, taught music through gospel, and setting gospel alight:
In 1955 ecstasy escaped the soul. Fifty years of rock'n'roll later a 'real' rock band has to blast the church not only from their fingers to the keys, such as Lewis does, but from their entire being, dousing their audience with so much pure ecstasy that they in turn have to move and dance and send the love back. For example, take that Lewis performance and churn it through fifty years of rock evolution and mutation. You'd probably get this:
But Trail of Dead are, in my opinion, a band with their musical roots closer to rock'n'rolls homebase than the acts who are these days so worshiped for continuing the evolution of rock music.
The twenty-first century has so far looked to the underground and the indie-rock bands to recieve the baton from the rock-revivalists of the late 90's, and before them the grunge addicts. It was Franz Ferdinand who threw a fairly large stone into a still pond, and spawned an entire breed of British look-alike bands who rode the wave of the post-punk revival until NME and Pitchfork tired of it and killed the party. The most fitting equivalent of the last three years must surely be Animal Collective.
I have often described the 'wow' around this band by fans and the music press as "heralding the messiahs". This is both accurate and fair. Animal Collective alongside an entire set of stepping-stone stage freaks have carried the torch of rock evolution from the guitar to the synthesiser and the mixing table with wonderous results:
What troubles me tonight is how today's 'messiahs' are treating the gift that Animal Collective and others have produced. For example, I enjoy 2009's 'messiahs' Grizzly Bear and Deerhunter but interpret them as the smoke rings blown from a joint. They are not the future of indie-rock. Although Pitchfork would have you believe "this little microcosm of imperfection indie rock's been working through lately could use a foil like (Grizzly Bear album) Veckatimest", I fail to see anything original the band is doing to reinvigorate the genre. They mask themselves in a thin haze of attempted aura. They adopt the work the labourers before them accomplished, but hide behind pretentious lyrics and woeful melodies. I can not find the gospel anywhere in their music. Let me make this explicitly clear: I have no doubt Grizzly Bear make intelligent, pretty music but it is sad if this is what 'indie rock' - this generations torch carrier - is becoming, because it contains no elements of the spirit of rock'n'roll in any mood or variety.
They sure are cute and it sure sounds cool. And I believe the messages of apathy they're communicating in this song, but not as much as I believe Bill Hicks: "play from your fucking heart!" Hell, even the quintessential cutsey indie-rock bands such as The Decemberists have displayed they know what rock'n'roll is.
This is why I love Handsome Furs.
Dan Boeckner. Handsome Furs. This is a band who have spliced the soul with the synthesiser. Boeckner's singing is not wistful, resigned, and allusive. It is in your face. It echoes and haunts and makes explicitly clear what he is feeling. In other words, he bares his soul. Alexei's beats don't shyly slump against the speaker. They punch you. The guitar doesn't put on it's make up and contribute only unconfident, apologetic, momentary outbursts. It comes at you with a knife.
It doesn't sound perfect. They might not be as beautiful looking. The singing might be off. But they're there, in a fucking singlet throwing their music at you, bareing their soul. They're real, and utilising the tools that progressive indie-rock bands have delivered in conjunction with the foundations of rock'n'roll to make real music.
I do not mean to suggest that the future of indie-rock has to be indie aethetics with a rock veil. But I am nonetheless concerned for the latter half of 'indie-rock'. Also, Handsome Furs is not necessarily how I believe rock'n'roll should continue the torch of musical evolution in the twenty-first century, but it is a damn fine example of something close. Because, as I've stressed a number of times it is something real. It is something you can feel. Yes, I am talking about authenticity, but in a very tangible sense.
Rock'n'roll comes from the anguish and eventual realease of the human spirit, the most sensitive of phenomenons. Everything one has bottled throughout their lives suddenly explodes. If you can't feel rock'n'roll, it's not there; if indie-rock is this generations rock'n'roll, then indie-rock needs to refind its gospel. I have hope with bands like Handsome Furs alongside an army of equally compelling musicians (such as Amanda Palmer, James Murphy, Jonsi Birgisson, and Pete Cafarella) leading the way.
Go forth brave soldiers.
2 comments:
I remember you said Salient kind of killed it for you but I think you should give music journalism another go...
Mims
Hooray! Am considering it. I thought it took too much out of me to write about music, but it seems all I'm able to write about these days :P
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