It's an offhand reference to a Traffic song, not an Extreme song, by the way. I'm more attuned to music that came before my time than after it, though I guess I probably wasn't the only twelve-year-old who heard Low Spark on FM radio and thought it was really cool back in the seventies. I didn't think I understood the song, back then. The funny part of it is, I actually didn't fail to understand the song -- on the surface, Low Spark is just a slightly dyspeptic estimation of the music industry. I always wondered if there wasn't more to it, but according to several articles I've read (includng the review of the song on Allmusic), it's no more than Jim Capaldi waxing bitter on the state of the music industry in the seventies.
And sometimes as Freud is (possibly apocryphally) supposed to have said, 'sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'
It hasn't been a bad year for power pop and songs that stick in your head, actually, 2005. I could regret more still being at least quasi-interested in the movement of popular music. While I think they're possibly a wee tad overrated, I admit I rather like the White Stripes. I'm not sure there aren't plenty of people whose tastes exclude irony work like the Stripes do, though. You have to have some sense of a broad range of styles of music over a broad vista of music, or else be fairly new to music, to like them. I grew up on seventies AM radio hits, which included but was not limited to disco rock, rockabilly, slightly effete Manhattan singer/songwriter stuff, and Canadian sap pop. I also had some experience with live blues, and heard a lot of early progressive and the stuff that influenced it; folk music, from several folk traditions; church music (most of it bad).
To a degree, I see what the White Stripes are doing to/with blues rock and progressive rock what Cheap Trick did to British Invasion guitar pop -- it's pastiche mixed with equal parts reverence and irony. I don't like all the White Stripes I hear, but most of it I "get" -- Jack White loves the genres from which he borrows, but he doesn't love them so much he's afraid to have a go at their pretensions. I don't know, maybe I respect what they're doing or seem to be attempting even more than I like the songs. They don't seem to be overwhelmingly serious about themselves, either.
The comparison to Cheap Trick isn't completely empty on another level, either -- anybody who caught on to CT early on knows damned good and well they lied through their teeth for years about who any of the members of the band were, and wrote fake biographies for the album covers and journalists to use. Jack and Meg did much the same thing -- I suspect, as much to throw people off the personal information and try to "fool" them into judging the music on its own merits as anything else. Or maybe they just liked taking the piss with journalists, which Cheap Trick certainly did back in the late seventies.
I only chose the White Stripes because they're relatively ubiquitous -- should you stumble on this journal, you won't wonder "who the hell is this windbag blowing about?" in other words. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three or four years, you know who the hell they are. If you haven't, and you don't, just move on and put on your Celine Dion disc and forget you ever stopped here, mkay? 'Cause returnin' here ain't gonna tell you nothin' you need to know.
There are other bands around right now who are doing much the same thing with other genres of music -- just heard another Grandaddy song this evening, for instance. Is it just me, or does Grandaddy sound a hell of a lot like grouchy teenagers rewriting Alan Parsons Project songs based on the premise "what if the Alan Parsons Project had Chris Squire as a bassist"? I like Grandaddy more than I liked APP, for that matter, for pure songwriting and musicianship. Hewlett's Daughter is one of the most incomprehensible songs I've ever heard -- it's like Todd Rundgren's Range War on X -- but I know, I know, Alan Parsons is a megalith in his own right, apart from the Project.
I'm not mackin' on Alan Parsons the producer/engineer. 'Abbey Road' alone gave him the right to essay a career as a writer of borderline mediocre progressive pop songs. It's just that Grandaddy took the music alone and twisted it around a Moebius train of thought that brought it out somewhere in BFEgypt. And it's pretty cool. Even if Hewlett's Daughter don't make a goddamn bit of sense to me.
I don't even want to get into the usual suspects right now -- My Chemical Romance, the Postal Service/Death Cab For Cutie conglomerate, Rilo Kiley and an unending march of power pop bands, some good, some bad, some mediocre.
Oh, yeah -- another thing. I love a good band. I can be entertained by a bad band. I hate a mediocre band, because I figure either they got their chance for the wrong reason or they're not trying hard enough. Either way, a band that can't commit either to work hard enough to be really good or give up and be entertainingly, but creatively, bad deserves nothing but a yawn.
I'll go back for Cheap Trick, Todd Rundgren (and Utopia, in the power pop phase), Sloan, any of a score or more genuinely good, or at least innovative, power pop writers every time. But midnight is coming for the new year, and one hopes things will improve. Too much about our world is mediocre or worse, right now. We can do better -- we can be kinder, waste less, destroy fewer things that aren't replaceable, foster less hate and intolerance, listen to better music and expect better of our leaders. Good luck with that, but really -- we can do this. Call, write, or just refuse to support mediocrity of thought, deed and expectation. Expect better, and let the bastards know when they don't deliver. It's our duty.
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