can't believe how bad the Libertines are

k-punk said:

But punk was more about getting past R and R; certainly post-punk was (cf Simon's new book). Keith Levene of PiL was quite upfront about wanting to destroy rock and roll. Slits, Banshees, Raincoats, Fall, Magazine, Gang of 4, none of this had anything to do with jingle-jangle maudlin melodic whining. That's one of the depressing ironies about the unbelievably crap Franz Ferdinand (they sound so stiff-jointed that I always want to reach for the WD40 every time I hear them): there was a pre-Brits puff piece on them in which they were celebrated as the 'return of real rock' or somesuch. Yes, quite, that shows how their utilization of post-punk influences is not only utterly bereft of imagination, it is actually directly contrary to everything post-punk aimed for.

Whatever happened to modernism?

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people are always wanting real rock to come back, oasis and that, solid white things that normal people can understand or some patronising stalinist dogshit.

neo post punk just copies some of the musical tropes of records that some of these bands have heard, it doesn't apply the ideas and ruptures of that period of music which is principally what music constantly needs.
god knows london at the very least can do it, fuck all these suckers.
jesus i know alot of people in appauling indie bands that they are all thinking of leaving cos they haven't found success or whatever. wastemen that should no better.

I have alot of faith in pop music doing this, its at a grass roots now in the uk but i really think this year there might be some awesome pop music, just hearing that maurice fulton version of an annie track recently, which is totally magic, also mu etc, toxic last year, i have some faith at the moment.

k-punk said:

Whatever happened to modernism?

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Modernism vs Modernity ?
I guess the music which has the quality of modernity is the one who's able to open a dialogue with the past;
I was wondering a lot about 'Modernity' as the perpetual 'NOW' these past days, writing about Scritti Politti's 'Early', how they managed to catch the sound of this era in their first release, 'Skank Bloc Bologna', especially the instrumental '28/8/78' ; a younger friend of my girl came home, saying he loved the Franz ; I played him 'Entertainment' by Gang of Four, he was stunned
Another friend going wild about Bloc Party, etc. It reminds me The Jam's 'Sound Affects', maybe not their best, but this is a great record interms of 'Dialoguing with the past', something I don't catch in BP stuff.
Shruggy ?

anyone watch the nme awards? Absolutely vindicated some of the thoughts on this thread - a procession of guitar bands with genetically-cloned power chords all using the precise same level of distortion & tone - unbelievably anodyne lyrics and songs that should have at least had the dignity to last less than 3 minutes but for some reason went on and on - ersatz passion by the shedload - i cringed and shrugged all the way through it

I'm very distant from and totally ignorant of any Libertines media hype, but I just heard the "Likely Lads" song on the radio and quite liked it, probably because of the live-ish sound quality, the little bit of blues in the guitar, the slightly dragging backing vocals and a general breeziness.

the sad thing is that all around the country there's d-i-y scenes of people in guitar bands making strange, new, amazing music- bands like The Wow, Kill yrself, Hot Club de paris, Lords, and they don't get any recognition at all. instead the NME just hypes up worthless shit for dads who buy 3 records a year.


largely, i hate my generation.
apart from grime, i can't think of one decent thing that a largish number of people my age have shown any enthusiasm for.

and i refuse to believe that ANYONE really likes stuff like athlete or snow patrol. people who think they like them don't really know what liking a band means.
saying yr into athlete is like saying that yr into M+S socks.

so, yeah, i hate my generation. i dread to think what we will be like when we're in charge of the country. i mean, if 60s radicals end up like our leaders now, what the fuck are WE going to become?!

Flyboy said:

I think that of the current crop of mainstreamy-indie guitar bands these days, you can do worse than the Libertines: Muse, Keane, Kasabian, Razorlight, Athlete, the list goes on. But that's not saying much as all those bands truly are godawful abominations.

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people, people - keane are NOT a guitar band. they have NO guitars!

agreed on doherty, though. he's rubbish musically and, more to the point, a very unwell person. the complicity of the media in his downward spiral makes me want to barf. no matter how many supermodels he fucks (or probably doesn't, given the anti-aphrodisiac effect of opiates), heroin is never going to be a glamorous thing to do, but this intense concentration on his unravelling only serves to make it appear so.

on a slightly different note - has anyone seen any of the nme awards things on channel 4 late at nightthis last week? each one a solid half-hour of soul-crushing tedium... i mean really fucking PAINFUL to watch because music is so much better than what is being thrown at people from all angles these days.

Elbow are pretty good in fact - their last album was excellent.

i can remember a time when i didnt know what liking a band meant
at some level people do need help getting started from what the media throws them. maybe zines, file sharing, mp3 blogs can do part of that but todays methods either lack the reach or permenance (blogs) or are blunt tools (file sharing) compared to a john peel or the sea bourne commercially viable pirates of the sixties.
grime within london has its own medium but the DIY scenes of england in general dont. partly because the format is so superficially similar looking to all the big boring rubbish out there - so no-ones going to distribute (or probably buy) your 'real' punk/guitar zine because they already have the NME talking about superficially postpunk bands. and even at the lower level you have a multitude of 'normal' indie journals like art-rocker or careless-talk-costs-lives, that tell you about the bands your expecting and keep you feeling comfortable.
it would be cool to do a magazine with entirely obscure music which wasnt alienating because it carried a sampler (i suppose thats what wire and wire tapper thinks it is but its still seems needlessly faux intellectualising and culturally narrow to me).

> for dads who buy 3 records a year.

the 40-50 year segment is the age bracket spending the most on music
- even more than teenagers (for the first time in history).

I hate the whole lot of these new touchie-feelie-guitar bands (from Codplay to Slow Patrol),
I guess it's the same lot who likes U2 and REM who are into these?
Ie old "indie"-kids and new ones? And that scaringly seems to be a hell of big market ...

I would not put Franz Ferdindand, The Bravery etc in with the above lot.
They might come from post-punk (Coldplay etc clearly does not) - but not the postpunk of
of Gang of Four, Wire, Joy Division, but rather Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen
and even a band like Martha&the Muffins.

And while I am it: Interpol - not the new Joy Division, but if they are the new anything
it's the new Psychedelic Furs.

I see K-Punk hate FF - I have my "suspicions" about all these new "clever" bands
- but I find myself liking some of them.

If nothing else because there is some traction (as mentioned, good expression) and
crucially because I liked the Teardrop Explodes and mid-period Blondie the first time
around ... I haven't finished listening to Bloc Party's album yet - but on first hearing it
does not really deliver ...

I think we have to wait a very long time before we get anything like
Joy Division, Television or early Ultravox! (or say Young Marble Giants/Wire).

---

tangent (parental advisory - it mentions the unmentionables: prog-rock, country and white blues)

I read K-punk's top-100+ list the other day:
if I was to list the top 100 British albums, then "Jesus of Cool"/Nick Lowe would easily be in the
top-50 ... not to mention the odd prog-rock album (say "Red"/King Crimson and "Green"/Steve Hillage to sort of theme it).

But bless Mark for having Virginia Astley's wonderful "From Gardens Where We Feel Secure" in there.

I guess the advantage of living in remote part of Europe is that we didn't know
what we were "supposed" to listen to
- even if we saw ourselves as "punks" in the late '70s we would
listen to _anything_. That included Krautrock, Prog, Pop and *cough* even disco.

And pure crap from the continent like Focus (discarded, but I would still try it).

When I speak to British friends who were punks in the '70s there seem to be an
intense dislike to _anything_ prog (prog seems to always mean ELP and Yes etc ) and that the only reason they ever listened to Kraut was that Julian Cope (?) wrote a book about it.

I am generalising here of course (and I know for a fact that several member of Diss does not fall
into this category) - but it seems like the "musical borders" are/were much harder in the UK than in Scandinavia.

Cases in point: I ventured into those two small record shops in West Croydon the other
week and was stunned when the first one said he "really didn't do grime"? The sign on the outside
says "Garage" though. The second shop had plenty of white label 12"s (I picked up two - at
8 quid a pop it's bloody expensive ... at least compared to Aim High and Run the Road).

Back home you will have Deathprod working with modern jazzers like Jaga Jazzist,
electronic genius Biosphere and modern-prog rockers Motorpsycho (who plays C&w in their
spare time). And Ralph Myerz Band wearing Death-metal T-shirts ...

Although Brits are extremely open minded it does not seem to last?

If I mention country ("those first two Lyle Lovett albums were rather good")
to anyone they will just laugh hollowly or mention that they listen
to Johnny Cash (but only after those late "trendy" albums ...).
Oh well. We are all different ...

Some people get touched by U2 and Coldplay and even Snow Patrol -
some of us does not.

(I'll write a long piece of why Johnny Winter's "Fast Life Rider" matters sometime.
Bless Hendrix, but as Mr Strong mentions in his big discography bible thingie -
Winter was probably the most talented of all those white guys trying to play the
blues (and that includes Clapton/Beck). I know shit all about how good guitarists are "technically" -
seeing Bill Nelson last year I was horrified by this guy behind me going on for minutes on
"is he as fast/good as Eddie Van Halen?" - who fekken cares?)

---

Ahh - The Libertines. Overrated in deed.

Ay-man. Dissensus-vortex sucking me in again ... Apologies if you made it this far ...

I like him and them, mainly for the fact they don't give a fuck and the kids love them you old farts

I hope he turns it around, some of the stuff is very good and I'd share a pint with him...

Martin Dust said:

I like him and them, mainly for the fact they don't give a fuck and the kids love them you old farts

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You're winding us up! Old farts indeed ...

But the Libertines are just SO empty...

... I'm actually beginning to quite like Franz Ferdinand though. All their songs are flawed but the good bits of say take me out are, well, good. Best of all they can actually say something in interviews -- they rocked on radio four .

2stepfan said:

I'm always happy to reveal a liking for popular / unpopular / take-yer-pick music -- I mean I like and have bought records by Coldplay for example, which puts me some way beyond the pale of most Dissenssians --

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paul you uber-trendy. any fule kno that coldplay are an insiders tip. same with you and your ruddy hartfloor thing innit.

pop-Indie is properly growing on me these days, after years of steadfast refusal. It's impossible to hate that Modest Mouse song, and Willy Mason is kind of good too. Also, the out hud album is excellent, on first listen. Dunno, life in that old corpse yet, although maybe only in the US...

Wasn't post-punk all a bit over-rated? Most of those bands who sounded good in '79 ended up getting stupid haircuts and trousers, and spent the early-80s producing absolute tosh (esp. PiL, Go4, Scritti, etc). As for the Banshees, let's be honest, apart from Hong Kong Garden and Voices (which are brilliant), they were fucking abysmal, music for Hampstead mums to take hot baths to. I actually find Muse and Keane painful to listen to, their music's like being urinated on by a furvert, it just goes on and on til the saccharine clogs up your brain stalks. It's then that I realise how amazing Lady Sovereign truly is.

martin said:

I actually find Muse and Keane painful to listen to, their music's like being urinated on by a furvert, it just goes on and on til the saccharine clogs up your brain stalks. It's then that I realise how amazing Lady Sovereign truly is.

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"Cocaine is one helluva drug......"

martin said:

As for the Banshees, let's be honest, apart from Hong Kong Garden and Voices (which are brilliant), they were fucking abysmal,

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Monitor, Metal postcard, Spellbound, loads more...

You know the funny thing, the other week watching the Brits, Siouxsie looked EXACTLY like my English teacher from school. I don't mean she resembled her a bit, or they were similar. They were identical - right down to the hair and make up. I thought my life was flashing before my eyes.