"Authenticity"
This is going to be rambling.
I've been wrestling with Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic for months, and it felt for the longest time the asshole was just trying to depress me. If this was how sorry the state of music was in the eighties, where the hell do we go now? It seemed to paint the bleakest picture.
This reading coincided with my band's newest struggle (getting any gig anywhere, especially while not having social media) and my ongoing personal attempts to reach self-actualization (or maybe "All") and figure out what was phony, what was authentic, what was me. Carducci's book just seemed to complicate matters; I found myself looking at everything thru a prism and felt the air being crushed out of me by some megalithic corporate apparatus intent on destroying things truly unique just to sell them back to us in watered-down form. And what I thought was, wasn't, and what the common idiot thought was even stupider than I originally conceived and, well, hell, how do we get out of here?
And all turned to saccharine nostalgia and "born in the wrong generation" and "O! everything was so perfect back then when rock 'n' roll was king and existed unfettered and pure..." but of course it never did. Unflinching commitment to aesthetic principles doesn't make money and for all the good Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Little Richard and Elvis and The Coasters did, they wanted to sell records. The conditions were simply so primitive in the studio (and the songs so powerful) that they happened to make some pretty fucked-up-sounding records and get away with it.
And Minutemen and Black Flag and everybody else had a terrible time touring and playing to no one in the '80s, so why should my experience be any different? Carducci points out the rock-pop connection as a mere fluke, rock 'n' roll is troublesome hard work and not appealing to those who want to make money, they just lucked out for a few years as the industry "perfected" its recording process and succeeded in sucking all aspects of live performance (chance, luck, interplay) out of the recordings.
Spirituality and soul went missing by design because true creative thinking doesn't sell records to dummies—and let's face it, most of us are dummies. And rock isn't wallpaper, cannot be ignored, and therefore totally sucks for radio station programmers or club DJs or "content creators" or booking agents or people who "just listen to whatever's on the radio." Ditto jazz.
I was listening to Double Nickels on the Dime again on the way home from Ann Arbor (yuppie central) last night and it got me thinking about earnest creative expression. I thought, after doing the home-recorded LP I did and this new stuff with TOAD-EATER, that I had reached some sort of zenith or had all the answers or was actually an authentic songwriter now or something.
What I really did was figure out how to kinda adequately transmit some of my feelings (mostly the bad ones) to the listener through words. There is still a major lack of cohesion between the music and the words, and everything is far too literal, and the music too formulaic. I really appreciate literal songwriting (I've been listening to a lot of Lucinda Williams this week) but that isn't the only option. I have not been practicing poetic writing nor trying to access or use my subconscious, which can be a great tool.
There's also economy to consider. I write short songs, I try not to repeat parts or let things drag on (A three minute song? C'mon, Mozart...) but there is not an economy of WORDS in my writing. I've been toying with the idea of putting together a record of extremely short songs for months but am so intimidated by it that I haven't done much work to that end. So where's the fear coming from? Fear of falling on my face? In front of whom? Most of these considerations are the product of overthinking (so's this blog post) and the cure is, uh, just doing it.
Where Minutemen really come in is in regard to "authenticity." That band has an overwhelming true-to-yourself-ness I've not really heard anywhere else (maybe in the music of a few favorites like Jonathan Richman or the later Wreckless Eric records).
As a unit they are not afraid to be odd or grating or boundlessly joyful. They are unapologetic and truly themselves without consideration for the recording industry or what will or won't sell or what audiences might like. They don't really cut thru the bullshit, they operate as if it isn't there. It is the sound of a bunch of individuals who really know themselves, somehow, even though they were the same age as me when these records came out. Or if they didn't know themselves, they at least weren't afraid of expressing all that was there, and doing so artfully. And doing it on their own, with the help of a small circle of talented and dedicated friends.
I don't see why the same thing can't happen today. We have all the same tools, it's just the landscape that has changed. It's gonna be a ton of hard fucking work and failures and closed doors.
But what else do I have to do on the weekend?