random thoughts

I bought three new releases in the past week. What does it say about me that two of them, the Living Sisters' Love to Live and Sharon Jones's I Learned the Hard Way are unabashedly retro. I have a blog entry coming about how interesting it is the very traditional songs have very modern sentiments. That is, if I wrote blog entries...

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of a good historical analog for the million of crappy glo-fi bands. The best I've come up with is the crappy Look-out! pop-punk bands from the early to mid-90's. The Look-out! bands would be those like Screeching Weasel and the Queers who sounded just like the Ramones and wrote songs about growing up in suburbia. Heck, I kind of liked these bands, but I was still in high school and should have known better even then. Repetitive, snide, somewhat clever. Some songwriting talent there (especially in Screeching Weasel, their song "Leather Jacket" is a pretty good kiss-off song) but forced through a very narrow channel. Maybe it helped me get through high school. Still, I can't imagine anyone not already initiated wanting to listen to this. And anyone already initiated should have been buying records by the Buzzcocks, the Clash, Ramones, X, Television, Blondie, or even records not obviously "punk." Nevermind what the indie kids would have been listening to at the time like Pavement or Fugazi or Guided by Voices. Hell, you got to a record store that carries, say, Screeching Weasel, it carries music by lots of other bands. But maybe that music says nothing to them about their lives... So I guess as fun as it is to say, "Damn kids with their Neon Indians and their Ducktails and their the Memory Tapes," I have as dark a secret in my past. And I'm not even bringing up the third wave ska.

So perhaps I'm bugged by the glo-fi blip not because I'm old and don't get it, but because I'm old and I do get it. In the 15 years since my pop-punk days, I've developed a somewhat wider perspective and my instincts are to be bored with the music and try find a historical analog and try to understand why I don't like it... This doesn't even touch on the difference in attitudes. Blissed-out, gauzy glo-fi is worlds away from dumb angry punk (cue Michael Azerad). Which is just reminds me that the kids have it different these days.

By the way, the 2000's pop-punk band Exploding Hearts were transcendent. Possibly better than the Buzzcocks.