Geraldine Fibbers
On the surface rock ‘n’ roll may be about fucking or fighting or driving really fast, but the subtext of most of it is that these are just things we do to escape our boredom with the world, to push down, if just for a moment, that sense of futility that would otherwise drive us to fritter away our lives watching TV in our bathrobes.
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Ennui is an affliction of the relatively privileged; there’s no pretty French word for the daily exhaustion and hopelessness that poverty can produce. In fact, middle-class kids have often been drawn to the music of poor people, from blues to bluegrass to hip-hop, in search of what they’ve perceived as a greater intensity of living, a determination to squeeze every drop out of an unyielding life. Inspired, they did their best to find intensity in their own lives. Then, at some point in the last decade, people with a lot of money gave those kids the idea that ennui all by itself was all they needed, and now the market is glutted with music made by well-meaning young men and women who celebrate their low-grade anxieties with a flatness that perpetuates the very state it acknowledges. Richard Hell did not in fact belong to the blank generation, but Liz Phair and Pavement certainly do.
In his 40,000-word, ennui-free on-line diary of a tour with Mike Watt that year, avant-garde guitarist Nels Cline wrote voluminously about the Fibbers, who were opening for them. He said their mournful, perpetually climaxing “Lilybelle” moved him to tears every night. By a few twists of fate, Cline is now the Fibbers’ guitarist, replacing Keenan, who suffers from tendonitis, and his contributions from the world of free improvisation spur the band to yet greater heights on its new album, Butch. Bozulich at last seems to have brought together a group that can keep up with her and even occasionally drown her out. On the fast-enough-for-hardcore “I Killed the Cuckoo,” she seems to deliberately retreat into the mix, only to emerge in a sudden pocket of silence, purring and then howling in her distinctive mountain-lion screech (which she only ever overdoes on the wickedly excessive bit of Method acting that turns the Fibbers’ version of Can’s “You Doo Right” into a sly parable of near pornographic obsession).
