"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The Trees
Maybe you've heard of the Jamaican tradition of "version" albums: a dozen or so tracks all built on top of the same bass-and-drum undercarriage. Different songs, different dubs, same riddim. Timbaland isn't quite so frugal with his creativity, but Tim's Bio does pretty much consist of 18 variations on that beat. For the last 18 months, Timbaland's convulsive kinesthetic — double-time kicks, crisp snares, spasmodic flurries of hi-hat — has dominated the R&B soundscape. So what's immediately striking about Bio is its failure to probe a fresh new direction.
But perhaps this complaint misses the point. Ever since it lost the "-'n'roll," rock has had a problem with repetition: Albums and shows are supposed to have dynamics, pacing, contrast, demonstrations of versatility; at a certain point more is always less. But in dance music, more is...more; repetition accumulates intensity, creates and sustains that crucial intangible known as "vibe." Black dance scenes (and their white mutations) work according to the principle Amiri Baraka dubbed "changing same": minute variations on the same building blocks (jungle's "Amen" breakbeat, Miami bass's sub-woofer-quaking 808 boom, dancehall's "pepper-seed" rhythm, and so forth). Mercenary copyists and opportunistic cloners play their part, too. For when a certain sound is doin' it the audience can't get enough of the good stuff. If you're in it, the slight tweaks and twists to the reigning formula have enormous impact whereas the uninvolved outsider hears only monolithic monotony.
That said, Timbaland really does need to come up with a new cyberfunk matrix. His frequent complaints about "beat-biters" are rich when Tim's Bio verges so frequently on self-plagiarism. Likewise the lyrics: Where last year's album with Magoo was thematically impoverished, this one's destitute, reaching its self-reflexive nadir with 'Here We Come' — a song based around the Spider Man theme. What does catch the ear is all the stuff interwoven around the basic grid-groove: the scurrying infestation of percussive detail, the digitally warped goblin vocals, the Afro-Dada grotesquerie of keyboard licks and sample squiggles, the onomatopoeic bass-talk.
The viral spread of ideas in dance culture works to erode the auteur theory, our ingrained impulse to fixate on originators. Timbaland's twitchy hypersyncopation was widely attributed to a drum'n'bass influence, something steadfastly denied by Tim and Missy. Now you can hear that imagined compliment being repaid by the children of jungle, in the form of the two-step garage style that currently rules London. Dropping the four-to-the-floor house pulse and "versioning" Timbaland's falter-funk kick, producers like Ramsey & Fen, KMA, and Dreem Teem are basically making smoov R&B filtered through a post-Ecstasy sensorium. Call it lover's jungle, strictly for the ladies' massive: midtempop bump'n'-grind, sped-up and succulent cyborg-diva vocals, a playa-pleasing patina of deluxe production. With the next phase of beat science being researched and developed in England, the "bumpy pressure" is really on for Timbaland, if he doesn't want to go the way of ex-pioneers like Jam & Lewis. The dance floor has no brand loyalty.
KING AND QUEEN OF THE BEATS: Timbaland and Missy Elliott
published as "Partners in the Engine Room of Rap"
director's cut, New York Times, August 1st 1999
by Simon Reynolds
Although history tends to focus on glamorous vocalists and
visionary songwriters with something to say,
black pop's evolution is as much
about changes in rhythm and production. From the house sounds of Motown and Philadelphia International to the
Chic Organisation's streamlined disco style and George Clinton's mini-empire of
funk bands, it's a history made not by
sacred cow artists but by session musicians and backroom technicians: musicians,
producers, engineers, and, not least, their machines.
Typically,
an up and coming producer taps some
unforeseen potential in the latest technology and, for a couple of years, rewrites the rules of rhythm. In the mid-Eighties, Janet Jackson's
producers Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis drafted a new blueprint for dance pop,
using drum machine beats and synthesized basslines to build angular, abrasive grooves. By the end of that
decade, producer Teddy Riley installed a new paradigm, marrying R&B's mellifluous
melodies with hip hop's aggressive beats and sampled loops to create the style
known variously as new jack swing or swingbeat.
In the last
two years, Timbaland and Missy Elliott have reigned as unchallenged king and
queen of the beats. Producing and
writing for a stable of proteges that includes Aaliyah, Ginuwine, Nicole,
Total, and Playa, they have scored a run
of hugely successful smash singles on
both the R&B and pop charts. Ms Elliott has also written hits for artists
like Brandy, Mariah Carey, SWV, and Whitney Houston, and can reportedly demand
$100, 000 per song. Ruling producers have hitherto tended to remain behind the
scenes (Jam & Lewis) or subsume themselves in a band identity (Teddy Riley now operates as part of the
harmony group Blackstreet). But Timbaland and Missy Elliott have pushed
themselves forward as stars. Timbaland released a collaboration with rapper
Magoo called Welcome To Our World in 1997 and a solo album proper late last
year; Ms Elliott has just released her second album Da Real World, the sequel
to 1997's platinum selling, Grammy-nominated Supa Dupa Fly.
The real
testament to Timbaland and Elliott's hegemony, though, is the massive influence
they've had on other R&B and rap artists. If imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery, the duo ought to be feeling pretty good about themselves.
Instead, they seem rather embattled. Only a few minutes into Da Real
World, Elliott is lambasting all the producers who have copied Timbaland's distinctive
jittery beats and stop-start grooves: "beat biter, dope style taker... you
just an imitator, stealing our beats like you're the one who made them."
That style really came together on Aaliyah's
late 1996 hit "One In A Million," which was written by Elliott, produced by
Timbaland, and typifies their collaborations
in the way the beat is as hooky as the melody. . A ballad built around a push-me-pull-you
groove, the song introduced many of Timbaland's trademark tricks: syncopated bass drums stuttering in triple
time spasms, irregular flurries of hi-hats, and skittery snares. As with
earlier rhythmic innovations, from Seventies funk to Nineties jungle, the
Timbaland sound practically enforces a new kind of dancing, full of twitches,
jerks and tics. You can see it in Missy Elliott's videos like "Beep Me
911" and the current "She's A Bitch," where the choregraphy
resembles a kind of geometrically precise epilepsy and sometimes recalls the
body-popping style of Eighties breakdancing.
Alongside
their massive influence on American R&B, Timbaland's twitchy beats have
caught the ear of British electronica artists. On their new album Surrender,
The Chemical Brothers sampled a vocal hook from Nicole & Missy Elliott's's
"Make It Hot" for their track "Music: Reponse",
transforming the sexual come-on of "I got whatcha want/I got whatcha
need" into a DJ's boast. In London, a whole scene and sound has emerged
called two-step, based around the merger of Timbaland's hyper-syncopated drums
with jungle's booming bass and house's succulent synth licks. The respect that
Timbaland and Missy Elliott have received in the electronica field shows that
although the duo are classified as R&B, their skills at digitally
manipulating rhythms and creating eerie sounds make them among the most
accomplished and innovative electronic artists on the planet. Indeed, critics
have long suggested that Timbaland's assymetrical grooves owe something to
jungle; Timbaland has denied this, but does give the nod to electronic artists
like Prodigy, Tricky, and Bjork, whom he's sampled a couple of times.
Like techno
artists, Timbaland and Elliott are obsessed with the future. They are
determined that their records sound avant-garde and futuristic, and they're infatuated with
special effects laden science fiction movies like The Matrix. The title of Ms
Elliott's new album comes from a pivotal line of dialogue in The Matrix:
"welcome to the real world".
Both Missy's music and her Hype Williams produced videos
have a hallucinatory quality. Supa Dupa Fly is a shapeshifting phantasmagoria
of sampled sound, where unlikely sources (baby's gurgles, birdsong, insect-like
chitters, horse whinnies, and dog barks) are transformed into polyrhythmic
devices. Listen closely, and beats turn out to be made from gasps or giggles, and a bassline is molded
from the human voice. It's headphone
R&B, and like electronica, it's most inventive on the level of rhythm and
texture, rather than songcraft. "Hook on songs are more major than verses.
People hardly remember verses,"
Elliot told rap magazine The Source. For the most part, Elliott's vocal
hooks are delivered in a style midway between singing and rapping, and
generally work percussively as much as melodically. She specialises in devising
complex vocal arrangements which interlock with the rhythm tracks like cogs.
Timbaland and Elliott also pepper their tracks with tiny, almost subliminal
vocal riffs--onomatopeic noises and nonsense chants, half-spoken ad libs--which add to the
rhythmic density of the music.
Da Real
World arrives at a critical moment for the Elliot/Timbaland dynasty, when the duo's influence remains endemic but their own
momentum shows signs of flagging. They've maintained their profile in 1999 with
Elliot penning the R&B smash "Where My Girls At?" for diva trio
702 and Timbaland producing Ginuwine's second album and the hit track
"Jigga What?" for rapper Jay-Z.
But Timbaland's solo album was generally received as a disappointment,
and some wonder if his production skills peaked with last year's astonishing
Aaliyah hit "Are You That Somebody?."
It's an abiding dilemma for pop innovators. Do you repeat what was so
successful before at the risk of adding your own self-plagiarism to the melee
of clones and copyists? Or do you struggle for self-reinvention at the risk of
alienating your audience? This quandary has undone many artists in the past.
Synth-pop pioneers Kraftwerk, for instance, became paralysed by the enormity of
their own influence and the challenge of staying ahead of the state-of-art.
Da Real
World sees Elliott and Timbaland
struggling to come up with fresh twists to their formula. Sonically, Da Real World marks a shift to a
harsher sound that Timbaland has called "real dark, real ghetto". The
new style includes bombastic quasi-orchestral riffs, booming sub-bass, and
stiff, angular beats and booming sub-bass, all of which sometimes recall Curtis Mantronik's late Eighties productions
for T. La Rock and Mantronix in the late
Eighties, but is more likely a nod to the current popularity of New Orleans bounce, an electro-influenced
style of rap. Persona-wise, Elliot has
swapped the playfulness of Supa Dupa
Fly for a pugnacious "street"
attitude and a dramatically increased level of profanity. Abandoning Supa's kooky surrealism and free
associational lyrics, Elliott has penned
a series of tough-talking songs: "You Don't Know" threatens a girl
who's trying to steal her man, "All 'N My Grill" reprimands a
deadbeat live-in lover who won't pay his
way, and "Hot Boyz" is a hormone-crazed paean to sexy roughnecks who
tote machine guns, flex Platinum Visa cards and drive expensive jeeps. The
harder, ghettocentric sound and lyrics smack somewhat of a calculated attempt
at repositioning Elliot in a market where "real-ness" is back in
favor thanks to rappers like DMX and Jay-Z.
Coming from
a debut artist, Da Real World would be garlanded with acclaim. But given the
expectation that Missy and Timbaland would rewrite the rules of R&B again,
the album is anti-climactic. Da Real World peaked at #10 on the pop charts and
rapidly slid to #22. Furthermore, Missy Elliot's audience seem unconvinced or,
worse, alienated by her image tweak. The first single off the album,
"She's A Bitch"--a strained and tuneless attempt to project bad
attitude, with a baleful monochrome video markedlly different to the
polychromatic psychedelia of the earlier promos--only reached #30 on the R&B charts. For an artist of
Missy Elliott's stature and track record, that's a flop.
But then
the rap and R&B marketplace is cruel even by pop standards; brand loyalty
barely exists, artists are only as hot as their latest track. So are Missy and
Timbaland going to go the way of other ex-pioneers, like Jam & Lewis?
Elliott has her own major label funded imprint Gold Mind and a long line of
proteges waiting in the wings. Timbaland might want to consider a strategic
retreat from the spotlight in order to concentrate on crafting tunes for his
proven hitmakers Ginuwine and Aaliyah, and to R&D some new gimmicks (he's
talked about creating beats built from the sound of a stylus skipping on a
scratched record). Perhaps the greatest solace for the duo is that there's no
powerhouse producer threatening to usurp their throne. (Although there might
have been a hint of anxiety when Timbaland recently gave his seal of approval
to a young pretender: Swizz Beats, who's crafted beats for Jay-Z and for his
own outfit Ruff Ryders). At the moment,
there's an interregnum in R&B--everyone's waiting for the new king of the
beats to take over.
In Atlanta, Georgia, the Replacements play me a tape of Husker Du’s live appearance on The JoanRivers Show. It’s more than a little mind-blowing. The band unleash the great grey gust that is ‘Could You Be The One’, then troop over for a ‘chat’ with the lady herself.
It’s one of the most embarrassing pieces of television I’ve ever seen. Rivers is clearly terrified of the band, doesn’t know how to place or approach them, stammers out something to the effect that they used to be kind of radical and underground, but now aren’t quite so radical and underground, isn’t that so?
What’s unnerving her is that the band aren’t selling themselves on any level, either as outrage or as light entertainment, aren’t making anything of this opportunity to project themselves. They’re polite, awkward, somehow not-there. It’s not so much that they’re deliberately aloof as that they’re irretrievably apart. Rivers asks a question and I think she’s saying: "Which one of you is the wild member of the group and which is the commie one?" – turns out she said "calming". Then they traipse off again, to play ‘She’s A Woman’, having left an irreparable crease in the sleek fabric of the show.
It made me wonder whether a group like Husker Du can interact with this thing Pop. The Smiths, at least, make a drama of their exile – their anti-glamour can be consumed as glamour.
But Husker Du refuse to act up – the ‘outrage’ they perpetrated on Joan Rivers was of an altogether quieter, less ostentatious order – they didn’t play up to the role of Misfit, they just failed to connect, to communicate on Pop’s terms at all – an eloquent incoherence. How, then, do they cope with things like videos?
Grant Hart: "The videos are of straight performances of the songs. Seeing as none of our songs are particularly etched in fantasy, they’re best portrayed naturalistically."
Like the other American thinking rock bands I’ve encountered (Throwing Muses and The Replacements) Husker Du loathe the exigencies of presentation and marketing, have a chronic fear of anything that suggests contrivance. American rock has never seen image and packaging as a means of expression in the way that much British rock has.
Perhaps this is because American daily life is more heavily saturated with showbiz glitz and advertising pizazz than British life, and so it seems more urgent to escape the all-pervasive environment of kitsch, escape from the escapist, into the authentic, the Real. Probably, it has a lot to do with the absence in America of the artschool/artrock interface that’s has been so hugely important in British pop history.
Either way, American rock (outside New York) has no notion of glamour as something you can radicalise: Throwing Muses will turn up for photo sessions in their tattiest, most everyday clothes, The Replacements will refuse to throw shapes for the camera and Husker Du will resist anything in the way of video presentation that’s redolent of advertising and its manipulation of the consumer.
Bob Mould: "The problem with videos is that, before they existed, you’d make up your own story, your own mental pictures, to go with a song. That’s what music’s for – attaching your own meanings to."
Somewhere along the way, pop ceased to be something that gave people a heightened sense of their own agency, and became something that programmed desires. What Husker Du hate above all is when things get fixed – they like to leave things open, in a flux. Maybe they’d get on better if they did give people one easy handle, if they weren’t so keen to leave things up to people’s imagination. Maybe the only way to get a hit is to work from the premise that most people’s imaginations are enfeebled, through under-use. As it is, they’re not even let near those kind of people.
Bob: "Our videos don’t get heavy rotation. Our records get played on college radio and on the progressive commercial radio stations. Whereas all the people in here - " (gestures at Billboard) "- get played several times a day on every radio station in America."
Ah, Billboard – whenever I look at magazines like Billboard or Music Week, it does my head in: I think of all the things that music means to me – dissension, speculation, complex pleasures, never-never dreams, the criss-cross currents of making sacred and sacrilege – and then look at how these people discuss pop – crossover between different radio sectors, aggressive marketing, instore promotion... Who knows which kind of talk is more out of touch with the ‘reality’ of pop.
"Well, yes, it all depends on whether your conception of success is related to the outside world or to your own mind. With us, it ‘s the latter, so every song is a ‘hit’."
Quite. What is a ‘hit’ these days? Something that wreaks havoc in the private lives of a few people, or something that resounds widely and weakly across the surfaces of the globe? We’re back with Stubbs’ dichotomy between the small and significant and "huge insignificances" like Alison Moyet or Curiosity Killed The Cat. Two rival definitions of impact – purity of vision or breadth of effect.
All I know is that Husker Du hit me – this feels like the elusive ‘perfect pop’, the swoon and the surge. In one sense (sales) Husker Du are a ‘small’ band – in every other sense they are massive – in the scale and reach of their music, in the way they give a grandeur to mundane tribulations and quandaries – a musical equivalent of the pathetic fallacy (thunder and lightning as the dramatic externalisation of inner turmoil).
What is it about this ‘perfect pop’ that dooms it to be as distant from real Eighties Pop as the moon? That the music is too imposing, while the band, as individuals are too self-effacing, hiding behind the noise? That the music’s too violent, while the feelings that inspire it are too sensitive. That the songs deal with the loose ends of life but refuse to tie things up satisfactorily, instead confronting the listener again and again with the insoluble?
All these things distance Husker Du from today’s secular pop, with its twin poles of levity and sentimentality. But there are more material reasons why they don’t belong. The very fabric of their sound has no place in pop ’87, a blizzard that makes no appeal to the dancing body, but dances in the head.
Move in close and you see activity too furious for pop – flurry-hurry chords, febrile drumming – step back ten paces and you can take in the sweep and curve of the cloud shapes stirred up by the frenzy. Only AR Kane come close as sublime choreographers of harmonic haze. The stricken voices, the almost unbearable candour of their bewilderment and desolation, jar with Pop’s soul-derived universal voice of self-possession and narcissism.
‘Ice Cold Ice’, the fabulous new single off the Warehouse double, says it all – the chill of awe instead of the fire of passion, frost instead of flesh, the ghost of folk instead of the residue of R&B. Pop ’87’s aerobic humanism can’t take on this kind of enchantment.
But what do they think is the most unique thing they offer?
Grant: "The outlook, I guess... we’re creating music for human beings, not pop idols."
Bob: "I don’t see many people trying to be as honest as we are... I think the lyrics are enlightening without being too philosophical... I don’t think you associate a clothing style or a lifestyle with what we do... in that sense we’re not exclusive to anyone, we don’t exclude."
Do you agree that part of the appeal of being a band is the chance to prolong adolescence, to leave things open a little longer, to avoid the closures of adulthood?
Grant: "Well, there’s growing up and there’s growing boring, and the two are not necessarily inseparable. Generally, though, as a person gets established in their life, and the things that surround them are theirs rather than their parents’, they start to settle down. I see friends that are worrying about their bank overdrafts – all the things I worry about too, but not to the exclusion of everything else. And the next step is that you start playing the game, kissing up to the boss, all to ensure the security you’re afraid to lose. But what you do lose is the ability to live for the moment, because life gets so bound up with planning and providence. People get conservative as they look to preserving their life investment."
One of the first things to go when this settling down sets in, is music, or at least rock of the Husker Du ilk. People cease to be able to take on such music. It’s too demanding – literally, in terms of investment of energy and attention; but also in the sense that rock is like a reproach, can get to be an unwelcome nagging reminder of dreams that have been foregone. It becomes unbearable to listen to music, after a while.
Bob: "Well, almost everyone does give up music, sooner or later – it’s a matter of when..."
Grant: "But there are those who give everything up all the time and right from the start. So even to hold out for a while is not so bad."
Who do they feel are their kindred spirits in rock?
Bob: "Who’s at Number 186 in the Billboard Chart this week, ha ha ha ha! No, there are some like-minded groups about, groups that have abandoned the idea of pop stardom – we’ve even been accused of triggering that off... bands like R.E.M., Meat Puppets, Black Flag... bands who can be widely successful in their own minds because of the psychic rewards of what they do. A band like R.E.M. that has a very internally run programme – they’ve got a manager that’s been with them since day one, they’re very homebase-oriented, having refused to move to New York or L.A. Similarly, we decided to stay in Minneapolis right from the start. Now things are turned around so that a friend of a friend knows a musician who moved from Hollywood to Minneapolis, in order to be discovered!
"I like the fact that we’re self-sufficient, that we look after our own finances, that we don’t have a set regimen dictated by a corporation or anybody. One of the results of the life we lead is that we don’t divide work and play. When I’m not working on music or doing specific administrative tasks, I’m writing or reading or drawing, but all these things have an input into the music."
How do you want people to be affected by the music?
Grant: "This may sound a little overwhelming, but I’d like them to come out a better person than when they came in, as a result of an effort by both audience and the performers. We’re appreciated by a different enough range of people – rednecks, hippies, punks, 50-year-old jazz buffs – that I personally am really satisfied that there’s so much love going down. I’m also proud of the pride we take in what we do... I wish they made drums like that!"
Is there a kind of politics in Husker Du, in that you deal with the discrepancy between the promise of America and most people’s lived reality of deadlock and impasse?
"There’s politics in the sense of people trying to gain control of their own destiny. Life is too short to worry about who’s on top at any given time – politics is like advertising, the basic products beneath the different wrappers are much the same – it’s more important to avoid being stepped on, to find a life that doesn’t involve a giant foot hovering over your head perpetually. The golden rule is: be neither a foot over someone’s head, nor a head under someone’s foot."
And are there ‘spiritual’ concerns, too?
Bob: "I’m a questioning person. I’d like to find out why certain things are the way they are and, if that’s spiritual, then I’m a spiritual person. Things like time interest me. I overheard a guy on the airplane saying that the Japanese are 25 years ahead of us. Now which 25 years did he mean – 1780 to 1805, or 1962 to 1987? How do you qualify time? Is time the same for a guy aged 25 who’s never eaten meat and for a guy of the same age who’s taken speed for the last 10 years..."
Grant: "In hamburgers!"
Bob: "A good question is so much better than a bad answer. If you had all the answers, why go on? There goes all your spirit, your reason for living."
Husker Du
Candy Apple Grey
Melody Maker, March 22nd 1986
by Simon Reynolds
Listening to this vast, volatile music, swept up in its power and space, I suddenly realised that these attributes are the precise opposite of the experiences Husker Du actually sing about — the lived reality of inertia, claustrophobia, isolation. The paradox of transfiguration — Husker Du's music wrenches numbness into fury and exultation. Only the Smiths make an equivalent alchemy of the grey areas of existence.
The Byrdsy harmonies, the desolate purity of Hart and Mould's voices, a discreet trippiness, these are further clues. Husker Du (like the Smiths) use traces of folk, a roots music, to write songs about rootlessness. Both groups look to the ‘60s only to reinvoke what's most positive about the time — doubt about the costs of living a normal life, yearning for an indefinable more.
Husker Du's music trembles with all the nameless longings that ache beneath the skin. Sometimes they remind me of the Jimi Hendrix Experience — another power trio of virtuoso ability who created a rock noise that was spiritual. And I wonder if Husker Du's 'Somewhere' was our lost 'I Don't Live Today'.
But Husker Du have an ascetic quality that contrasts with Hendrix's febrile sensuality — their music rises above the body, refuses to solicit it (says don't dance, flip your wig). Their love songs are chaste devotionals, almost hymnal. Husker Du approach the world, and their loves, with a mixture of pained bewilderment and awe. Their flight from the flesh is the only response to pop's soulless, sweaty sextravaganza.
I think also of another ‘60s-obsessed group. Where the Jesus And Mary Chain make pop fresh again by juxtaposing its sweetness with noise, Husker Du turn pop into noise — flaying these songs into a haze, smudging voice into guitar.
The feared corporate bland-out has not happened. There's a touch more clarity, a few more ballads. But this was coming anyway — Husker Du had taken velocity and noise as far as they could. The only way forward for them is to become gentler. Husker Du's achievement is a musical violence untainted with machismo: a violence that, paradoxically, heals. All they've done is to bring out more clearly the grace and compassion that always did rage at the heart of their ravaged sound.
Besides, these soft songs are the cruellest. No music mangles my heart so completely. The intimacy of 'Hardly Getting Over It' almost destroys. 'Eiffel Tower High' features a sublime loop of melody that will crush the breath out of you.
There's never been anything cultish or difficult about Husker Du — please don't deny yourself this beauty any longer. For I don't know how much longer it can last — already Husker Du repeat themselves, musically and lyrically.
For the moment, though, I live for this pain.
HUSKER DU
Warehouse: Songs and Stories (WEA)
Melody Maker, July 1987
by Simon Reynolds
This is ROCK. Not rock’n’roll, not swingin’, groovy, lean and compact. Not even raunch. this is ROCK -- powerchords that would crack apart the sky. Husker Du don’t belong with the new authentics, bar bands sweating out a closeknit clinch with their fans. Unlike Springsteen (who by sheer presence can shrink stadiums back to the dimensions of the primal R&B joint), there’s no intimacy, no sweat, nothing earthy. Husker Du are making a monument, a mountain, a glacier, out of rock again, rather than burrowing along at grass roots.
Oblivion. “Nothing changes fast enough/Your hurry worry days/It makes you want to give it up/And drift into a haze”--“These Important Years.” Rock noise is the uptight white adolescent’s release, emptying the mind, then filling it with nothing but its own dancing frenzy. Noise as metaphor for inner turmoil and its transfiguration. Over five LPs (and this is their second double) Husker Du have turned over and over the details of drift and bewilderment, yet still manage to wrest an improbably grandeur from the small squalor of everyday inertia. Fuck the chirpy, unforgiveable “Road to Nowhere”-- this is the true, hurting sound of the spirit chafing against the rut of existence, chafing at the intractable. The “violence” of this music is an attempt to flay past numbness, through dulled senses, to reawaken feeling.
“Think with your hips” has been the message of rock’n’roll, of pop. But this rock says: rise above, kiss the sky. Like U2/REM/J&MC, this music is psychedelia without drugs, a rock that has left behind loins, juice, even heat, and found a new, frosty kind of intensity. A celestial impulse.
This is a new sound. Heavy metal is bastardized R&B, R&B sexuality coarsened and stiffened and blunt. But Husker Du “bastardize” or metallize folk. They strip folk of roots and soil, blast it to the heavens. Imagine the Jimi Hendrix Experience playing The Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday.
Better than ever. Voices midway between scar and balm, savaging as they soothe. Harmonies that swell, soar, then bleed into the horizon. Divine lullabies like “Up in the Air,” cracked apart by blocks of noise. “No Reservation,” “She’s A Woman,” “You Can Live At Home,” “Friend,” “You’re A Soldier,” “Ice Cold Ice”…classic pop structures, almost borne under by the foaming weight of noise brought to bear.
My fantasy. A million heads wigging out, blissed out, in rock noise. A soulboy’s bad dream. Style, rhetoric, tassled loafers, import 12-inches, blown, scattered to the winds. A million heads, lost in music, in worship. The return of ROCK.
