Music Tapes
When I was a teenager, my friends and I worshiped Cream–or as they arrogantly liked to call themselves, the Cream, meaning the royalty of England’s blues-rock musicians. We were all learning to play instruments back then, and we honed our chops on endless, shapeless jams of “White Room” and “Sunshine of Your Love.” We played rock ‘n’ roll for the same reasons teenage boys have always played it: to expend our limitless aggression, to burnish our fragile egos, and most of all, to get girls. But we also took a certain amount of pride in our musicianship: like our perpetually noodling heroes, we wanted to master our instruments. Guitar feedback isn’t very sexy, but controlled feedback–what could be sexier than that?
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Punk rock changed everything. Suddenly Cream was synonymous with empty virtuosity, and jamming with flatulence or masturbation–both pleasurable activities, but nothing you’d want to do in front of an audience. (Unless, of course, you were really punk rock, and even then both would be cooler than jamming.) Eric Clapton might have been God in 1965, but by 1979 the messiah was Sid Vicious, who’d done his best work with a bass guitar when he was swinging it at someone. Punk proved that you could make compelling music with a minimum of technical skill; mastering an instrument would only inhibit your ability to express yourself. Like the folk movement of the 50s, it tore music out of the hands of the recording stars and handed it back to “regular people,” whatever that means. It offered a gospel of democracy, of empowerment, and by the mid-80s “DIY”–the admonition do it yourself–had spawned an alternate music industry that encompassed everything from hardcore to psychedelia to fey pop.
I still believe the real measure of a band is in its stage show, and even the cream of the Elephant 6 crop have serious trouble finding their way around a guitar. Black Foliage, the latest CD by Olivia Tremor Control, is a spellbinding tapestry of song fragments and sonic experimentation, without question one of the year’s best records. But a few months ago, when OTC played the material at Lounge Ax, the opening act, Britain’s Super Furry Animals, mopped the floor with them. Neutral Milk Hotel was a ragged mess when it came through town to perform In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, its members tripping over each other and soloing on instruments they could barely play. Both these shows laid bare the utter presumptuousness behind DIY: I’m a trombonist because I’m here onstage blowing into a trombone.
