Postby Bent Fabric » 15 Oct 2018, 12:20
It's a potentially maddening thing to parse out, because there is ultimately so much non-translatable "eye of the beholder" baggage at the very heart of it.
I look at a band like Yes playing something like "Heart of the Sunrise" and (for all of its various movements and joins and cross stitching and apparent technique) it seems no different than some other person (let's just say John Fogerty or Neil Young or Little Richard, for the sake of making a point) executing THEIR best idea to maximum effect and intensity. There's people who would puke to hear me say such a thing, but...in terms of what's actually happening (people basically putting themselves out there in some effective and compelling way), it's as close to the core of "why we bother" as anything I could name. Like a dog barking as if to say "Look, I'm a fucking dog, okay? Do you truly not expect me to bark? My bark may be more elaborate, but...I'm still just trying to let you know the mailman's nearby."
And then you have these sort of obsessively and pathologically "down to earth" people who are believed (and/or believe themselves) to be honoring some timeworn, primal, bare bones function of the form (popular music, I guess - in its most insufferably purist "unpretentious music for fucking and dancing and cannibalism"/"they saved rock and roll" stick in the mud rigidity), and there's something so deeply "wanting" about it...you could say that some essential friction is missing, perhaps...I know heckling a band like Oasis is a shopworn trope in and of itself (Stereophonics? Fabulous Thunderbirds? Primal Scream?), but...often wherever the sort of "apparent aim" is to be Jerry Lee Lewis, early Ramones, Slade, early Who, AC/DC, etc. - there is such an utter "failure to launch" that you think...I'd be better off trying to cop a buzz from something (on the surface) far more baroque and bejeweled (Queen?). "Deliberately unpretentious intent" is as lofty a perch as any, when the practitioner fails to reach the summit.
Which, I suppose, brings up the relative "nobility of failure". Does a more ridiculous goal earn a begrudging respect on the basis of "Fuck - God loves a trier.", in a way that failing to be Humble Pie or the Sonics might just elicit a "meh"?