My neighbour, Ben, had to knock on the door and ask me to
turn the noise down as his was wife was not feeling well. It was mid evening,
Friday, and I was playing dumb Hollywood noise through the bassy surround sound
and that was preventing his wife from continuing her healing mode. I am a
patient and sensitive neighbour so I wanted to be neighbourly. As it happened
I had finished the paid Apple TV dumbnity – Gangster Squad, if you insisted in asking,
and that was as straight up as dumb a way to spend both $3.99 and 113 minutes of
my life as goes – so I was happy to comply and turn it off. I had been crowning
the likely-too-loud Josh Brolin inanity with a preview of a documentary about a
Detroit proto punk band called Death from the early 70’s which seemed to rely
on a Jack White quote as being its only tenuous link to modern culture’s view
of the roots of punk.
Punk, as viewed by someone on the very fringes at the time of
the nascent movement, was always about lo-fi, do-it-yourself responses to
stadium excess-fueled old fart rock. When it reached me as a student 150 miles
north of its Chiswick epicenter I embraced it with the same enthusiasm as post
depression youth in the US in 1932 must have treated the repeal of Prohibition,
“I can have this much fun for so little money, yes please!” I had heard the NewYork Dolls and the Velvets so could see a path from them to the one chord
wonders and it was fun to dress up in the best that thrift stores were able to serve
up. We embraced our father’s 60’s suits with thin lapels, the thin ties and
jeans that said we were not loons, that we were no hippies and that we were
young, dammit! We did not wear bondage pants, torn Sex Pistol t-shirts or sport
bright red Mohawks. That came later when “Punk” had been packaged and sold to
the suburban disenchanted youff.
I remember vividly from those days the contrast of the
iceberg youth culture called Teddy Boys.
These discharged floating detritus from the glacial late
50’s and early 60’s sported elaborate pomaded quiffs, equally elaborate brocade
waistcoats beneath long frock coat jackets with contrast collars – the
Edwardian look, shortened by the popular media to Teddy. They also sported what today would
be called skinny jeans but were known then as drainpipes and the whole look
supported by crepe soled ‘brothel creepers’. The name of the shoes says more
about cultural mores from the 1950’s than hours of dry docudrama. What
completed their fossilized fall from grace was that most of them by the time I encountered
them as adults in the 70’s was that the archetypal look worked well with mal
nourished child products of post-war rationing – low protein diet’s answer to
heroin chic – but less well on middle age men fueled by beer carbohydrates a
plenty. The women in their crinoline petticoats, stiletto heels, patent belts
and beehives were obviously struggling with the adjustment in diet too by the
time I saw them. So they were all reduced to caricatures, middle age, defeated
and fading. They remind me of Green Day and the troops of suburban punk fans
flocking to the Cat Club each weekend. Dreams shrunken into a two-decade reduction
sauce thickened by the intervening grasp of gravity, gravy and grogg.
So what sounds drive the heart of today’s young punks at a
furious pace and if not protest, at least position their taste to the south of
radio-driven pap? You are not fighting Reaganism, Thatcherism, the end of
Socialism but you are young, you must be angry about something for fuck’s sake?
How about continuing institutionalized sexism? No, you like your porn and your
film stars a shaven silly-coned. How about the ever widening poverty gap as the rich
2% grab more and more while selling the Globe's future down the river? No, you
really only care about whether the Galaxy 4S is cooler or not than the i-phone.
So here we are, much ado about nothing? Life is shit but we
no longer care enough to need a protest songbook, it’s just a question of
paying off the student debt and keeping up on Facebook or Reddit? Occupy
ourselves might be a starting point. If my cynicism is too shaded to the grey
depressive wallpapered end of the hallway of culture we will only need to look
at our new and engaging popular music as a counterpoint. The light burns
brightly thanks to American Idol, the always so relevant Grammys and Swedish
House Mafia doing Vodka ads with robotic greyhounds. Or we throw ourselves off
the cultural bridge into the traffic below.
Meanwhile the glacier that is garage music continues its
inexorable slither through the city, the suburbs and the sentient undergrowth
that lives outside of the mainstream.
It’s beat is fast, it’s heart is open. It’s drums are loud,
quick and up front. It’s guitar is riffy and it’s keyboards are driving me
home. It’s vocals are catchy, mumbling, strident and simplistic – this is not a
tale of a topographic ocean nor a rococo suburb. It likes fuzz. It likes distortion;
in fact distortion is a creed to be followed with total commitment.
I remembered when songs that lasted less than 3 minutes meant
more than 3 albums of self indulgent crap and garage music highlights what
dance music forgets sometimes in its chemical exuberance, less is actually more
after all.
I love the Thee Oh Sees for being alive, noisy and active.
They play lots of gigs around town, always up for fundraisers; play gay leather
pubs as often as the Fillmore. They appeared today on a free compilation which
was sponsored by Doctor Pepper. At this point you could justifiably be forgiven
for throwing up a spicy spume of sassafras flavored invective but God Bless
those folks at Adult Swim for creating a uniformly outstanding collection of
coherent choice cuts from the likes of Black Lips, Apache Drop Out, King Kahn
and the Gris Gris and the Thee Oh Sees.
Its free, go get it now here, right now! Go!
And when you get it - play it and drink beer. Lots of beer.
Buckets of beer, everything craft or in a cute label-sporting bottle is too
bourgeois so I suggest it must be PBR, yes, PBR tall cans is what is called
for. Now….
