Gimmie Indie Rock V. 1
As more and more subcultures get named, made into graspable, thinkable, salable objects, more and more people get the queasy pleasure of recognizing themselves as natives, of being spied on and having the pictures sold. More often than not, the natives are selling them to each other, a situation exemplified by Christopher Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, a much-decorated independent documentary by and about a fan who becomes the “grunge consultant” to Columbia House. He’s a wage slave, selling icons of freedom to a sonic puppy mill, but he records the experience to maintain some kind of productive distance on his own co-optation. Gimme Indie Rock was compiled in part by Scott Becker, who founded Option magazine, which used to be a decent place to learn about music you couldn’t read about anywhere else. Thanks to his cooperation, here are the secret songs I discovered to resist the 80s, now as accessible as the Flashdance sound track I was trying to escape in the first place.
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But one difference between Columbia House and K-tel is significant. Columbia House was trying to jump on a moving bandwagon. K-tel’s exclusive province is to scavenge bandwagons that’ve been overturned, and they’re pretty good at it. Their early-house compilation, released only in the UK, The Hits of House Are Here, featuring Coldcut’s signal “7 Minutes of Madness” remix of Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” has been hailed by hard-core techno fans as fantastic. And while Gimme Indie Rock is predictably distorted in favor of American bands and big indies like Homestead and SST, it’s not a bad picture of what kids at college radio stations and young adults in clubs like the late Lounge Ax found important.
The collection flows like a good mix tape, a junk sculpture of neat ideas, wacko juxtapositions, and a thrillingly broad range of sounds and feelings–it’s easy to get the sense that a lot of rock since 1990 has just been a retreat from the frontiers these bands bumped into. Wedding Present singer David Gedge’s exquisite sensitivity to his own pain on “My Favourite Dress” is redeemed by a compulsive, ringing guitar line and a shockingly big oom-pah bass line–it sounds like the marching band outside the window is celebrating his girlfriend’s infidelity. On “Slipping Into Something,” the Feelies build something taut, driving, and calmly ecstatic out of such cool, slight rhythms that you wonder why no one else has managed to do it since; Yo La Tengo’s astonishing “Barnaby, Hardly Working” isn’t so much a song as a series of spectacularly beautiful clouds drifting past, gradual fade-ins and fade-outs building a huge, warm universe out of wispy riffs. The clipped punch of the Melvins’ kick drum on “Creepy Smell” feels like a pounding on some giant tympanic membrane, just behind the wall, always about to break through, and when the guitar kicks in, it’s heavy metal melted into a liquid and splashed around in a horribly irresponsible manner. The Lips’ “Everything’s Exploding” starts with the band bequeathing the song to you and is about being so loud that everyone, living and dead, wakes up.
