I have previously written of Taqwacore in a blog post that has vapourised. I also briefly mention it here. Primarily Pakistan based, but it has spread elsewhere, as have the various bastard strains of metal. Music is a revolutionary force – you can have all the military interventions you want, but they will never seed social change like angry young folks with guitars. Deny it all you want, but the Sex Pistols did change the world.
Afghanistan has a little known rock subculture too. While not Taqwacore per se, Kabul Dreams echo the sentiments. Three Afghani kids from three separate tribes that spend most of their time butchering each other. There is hope. They have released an album.
I grew up withMaximumRockNRoll. Whilst far too often wallowing in identity politic nihilism, it was a priceless resource for alt.culture in the pre-internet stone age. It kept many of us sane, providing endless resources to other folks like us cruelly separated by the tyranny of distance. The premier issue was July 1982 – which makes us scumfucs that remember pushing 50 and beyond. The age that we used to hate with a fearsome passion.
Central to MRR’s appeal was knowing you were not alone. That there were others on the planet that held the same contempt for what passed as pop culture of the time. For me personally, rock bottom was reached here, also in 1982 – ABC and Look of Love[masochists can click here]. I cannot articulate the despair that was evoked by this nothingness that was everywhere – every music teevee show, every commercial radio channel, every shopping mall, pub and club. Noxious, spotty teenagers pumping dimes in jukeboxes playing the same non-music, bubblegum garbage everywhere. There was no escape. But there was MRR – and it was a lifeline.
The most wonderful feature of MRR, and similar zines such as Metal Forces for the headbangers, was the personals section where folks would post real addresses for correspondence and, most importantly, cassette tape trading of music – very much the Napster of its day. (more…)
Know Your Product, after (I’m) Stranded, is what people remember The Saints by. Those that are grounded in their culture anyway. No, Your product is the real depth. Awesome. A beast that burned too briefly.
All these people are dead bar the singer. They lived a richer life than you’ll ever hope to, especially if you’re a baboon. Back when music had real venom. When the neighbours could get told to get fucked and the cops were too scared to interfere. The carpets were sticky and there was a faint stench of vomit in the air that was blue with cigarette smoke. There was a real chance if you entered, you might not leave. The gutters of Sydney punk circa 1980, I present X, still the greatest rock-n-roll band ever. Weep at what you will never experience -
The Great One died earlier this year, magically at the age of 69. The man who painted with sound and ended his days painting with paint. As with his music, his visual art did not simply defy convention, it refused to acknowledge it.
The Captain was not like us – he was a precious idiot-god. Probably functionally illiterate, seeing music in drawings and drawings in sounds, I doubt anyone could have ever seen the reality he perceived – an endless source of grief for him, especially when bumping into immovable objects like Zappa.
He was without a doubt the man who poisoned me – life changed when at age 16 I had my mind permanently deformed by Doc At The Radar Station. I blaspheme by considering this his greatest work, alongside Lick My Decals Off Baby. Trout Mask is, dunno, beyond me, but still a masterwork, a communion for once a year perhaps, a sacred experience – black putty music. But Doc and Decals do it for me.
So, 35 years later, something all of us with fins have been waiting for, is finally being released from the vaults of Virgin records after being stuck in legal limbo. Bat Chain Puller is coming. There are many tracks from this that were subsequently re-recorded and added to later vinyl, much of it amongst the best of the best, like the sublime Owed t’Alex(raw live version, no doubt in a pub with sticky carpet and a faint vomit smell, the way I like it)-
Here’s a cut from Doc: Sue Egypt -
And one from Decals: Buggy Boogie Woogie (probably my all time fave) -
Perhaps the greatest tragedy to befall avante guano1 was The Residentsactually earning enough money to buy real instruments and start believing all the bullshit from music pundits praising their genius.
How to destroy creativity – reward it and relieve it from hand-to-mouth starvation.
The Residents last worthwhile output was probably Diskomo, in my elitist opinion. Ever since then, they have started believing the nonsense that they are artists – and the volume of crap they churn out has grown exponentially to feed the less discerning.
Their music was most interesting when they didn’t know how to play and used trash and toy instruments – not the state of the art electronica they now employ.
Following on from an earlier item lamenting the past, and the assertion that by 1977, punk was already something that, for the main part, had run its course, most of its raw creative energy spent.
I drew the comparison to Dada, as have numerous other commentators, and I think it is a valid one – the heady, defining days of the movement were an expression of absolute rejection of existing norms and contempt for the meaninglessness of consumer culture, undermining it by, literally, fucking the system off and doing everything yourself with its discarded scraps. From a creative perspective it was utopian, but as a business model it was worthless. (more…)
Punk shits me. Especially the dogmatic little dweebs that insist it’s a British creation. Super-especially the talking rectums with monkey-see-monkey-do eyebrow piercings (which I always have to fight temptation to grab and twist) and Green Day t-shirts today that insist in proclaiming it’s “not dead!”
Even if you do place some tiny bit of credence in the British perspective on this matter, it was dead by 1977, everything since is just marketing. *FLOOMPH* – like a firework factory fire, it burned very brightly and very, very briefly. And was a wonderful thing, while it lasted.
In actuality it was a much broader cultural explosion fueled by the general social despairs of the times – in Britain particularly, as the entire country was falling to pieces whilst the proletariat was being distracted by the bread and circuses of the Royal Silver Jubilee, a crisis which eventually resulted in Thatcherism as radical remedy, compounding everyone’s despair. There were a LOT of pissed off people. This was also the birth place of the industrial scene, best exemplified by Throbbing Gristle. (more…)
