Bring the Noise

For the post-rock groups, Sonic Youth’s idea of ‘reinventing the guitar’ really means un-rocking the guitar; sometimes the next step is ditching the guitar altogether. Disco Inferno’s Iain Crause says he always wanted to make his guitar sound like ‘actual physical things’, such as waterfalls, but in DI’s early days (when the group sounded closer to Joy Division and The Durutti Column) he had to do it with masses of effects.

And there’s none more rigorous than Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Carducci may be a bit of a reactionary, but his theory of rock is grounded in a precise, materialist definition of it as music, rather than ‘attitude’, ‘spirit’, ‘rebellion’, or any other metaphysical notions. Rock’s essence, says Carducci, is the real-time interaction of drums, bass and rhythm guitar. A group should be a rhythmic engine creating kinetic energy; ‘breathing’ as an organic entity.

Like a clapped-out stretch limo cranked in reverse, today’s ‘alternative rock’ is synonymous with a retreat to one of a number of period genres from rock history. For Primal Scream think Exile on Main Street-era Stones. For Suede think Ziggy-phase Bowie. In 1994, just six short years from a new millennium, this is where the money is at: in the musical equivalent of reproduction antiques.

Even after Bill Clinton’s victory, things look bleak for American youth. Paying off the deficit will depress the US economy for years. So you can expect to hear US bands singing the ‘born to lose’ blues for a long time to come.

As one real-life teenager in the book says, ‘no job is worth cutting your hair for’.

All year, the US alternative scene has been dominated by bands who take their cues from the early seventies, when groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Mountain, etc. bastardized and brutalized the blues.

If The Smiths had only produced sunny, cuddly stuff like ‘Heaven Knows’, ‘Ask’, ‘Vicar in a Tutu’, they would have merely presaged the perky negligibility of The Housemartins, the sound that grins itself to death.

In The Smiths, for instance, the refusal of maturity is as much a rejection of the strictures of adult sexuality as of work.

Moreover, latent in our indie scene are ideas that echo the concerns of the sexual/psychoanalytical politics of the sixties. The flirtation with androgyny and camp, the prevalence of love songs with genderless love objects and free of fixed sexual protocol, the defence of sensitivity and ‘the wimp’, the refusal of performance-oriented sex – all these connect not just with feminism but with radical psychoanalysis’s project of a return to the ‘polymorphous perversity’ of the child (an undirected and limitless sensuality).

The irony is that these indie hipsters tend to be more politically aware than most, more keen to align themselves with anti-racism, yet are totally estranged from black culture.