Deaf Spots

I'm hungover but I shall be released. If you disagree with the below please remember it's just another dick with an opinion and if I can put up with all kinds of bullshit opined about things I love you can live with me holding my nose over some of this.

This is not a list of sacred cows for the slaughter; that's aiming at a barn door. Much of the following examples are of music that I am assumed to admire but have no trouble resisting:

Radiohead: I can appreciate the artistry and complexity. It's just that none of it does more than partially divert my attention for up to five minutes before I decide I prefer silence. It just sounds like stadium rock to me but stadium rock that wants you to know how ingenious it is, as though someone from Emerson Lake and Palmer or Yes put a swear word into a song and delivered it with a big arch grin. I was given home burns of OK Computer three times in the 90s and passed each disc along to someone who might like it better. And the melodic stock of the vocal melodies is impoverished. If I hear that descending whine once more over ascending chords, I'll start doing it myself. I was given Kid A and Amnesiac as home burns. They got a listen each and were passed on. I have not heard a bar's worth of anything by them since that has persuaded me to listen further. I don't hate them, I've just never found them enjoyable.

Nirvana: Before I or anyone around me knew who they were I heard Teen Spirit on as high a rotation as subscriber radio allowed and wondered it was Kiss doing REM or the other way around. Further listening brought rewards as some strong melodic work and interesting lyrics emerged. Polly, for example, is an impressively creepy song even before you know what it's about. I had Nevermind but it's overproduction (by Butch Vig who would oversaturate his own project Garbage not too long later) grew annoying to the ear. The video for that song was compelling, having a kind of subtle gravitas. But when songs that would sound distinct and rich unplugged all sounded the same through hamfisted production it will not touch me.

The other point of resistance I have with Nirvana has nothing to do with the band. When people turn thirty they resist the ageing for a time and start acting ten years younger, affecting the perceived fashions and tastes of people in their twenties or even teens. This usually passes but for that time the confusion between youthfulness and try-hard puerility is infuriating. In the early 90s Nirvana was the go-to band such people affected, more in protest than imagination. The same way I imagine thirty year olds in 1977 were all, "anarchy, man!" Not the best reason for dismissing a band (as it drops you off at the same address, really) but it was a powerful motivator.

Beach Boys: Sorry, but they aren't for me. A friend on Facebook erroneously recalled me pushing Pet Sounds about ten years before I heard most of it. As with Radiohead, I really can appreciate the artistry and greatness; it's just that I can't join in. Apart from moments in Good Vibrations it starts sounding like someone overthinking bright disposable pop to make it symphonic but only ending up with denser disposable pop. There are many exceptions to this but the BBs are here because their music consistently fails to interest me beyond the concept of it. I just don't enjoy the listening.

MC5: Over and Over came out of the shadows of the cassette of the High Time album that Win made for me and won me with its tremulous spookiness. Everything else annoyed me. Decades later I finally heard the Kick Out the Jams album and donated it to the op shop after a single listen. I was hearing rock cliches well after they had been rendered so by bands who could only imitate the likes of the MC5 but in a way this also exposed the elements of this kind of rock music that leave me cold. The posturing is audible. Apt for the time but not the ages. Not for me.

ACDC: Yob rock. Don't like a single song. The bagpipe bits of Long Way are great but then it just gets back to the same crunching beerchugging bullshit. Never for me.

Patti Smith: Her growling and rambling with extra intensity really fired a lot of people up and her cultural cache has endured for decades but she has only ever come across as a old hippy to me. I hate that she's held up as a figure of punk when the music she ranted over like a schizophrenic at a bus stop sounded like dull Woodstock style jamming. Can't listen to any of it. Sorry, shouldn't admit this but I still like her version of Because the Night.

The Clash: this is almost too easy as everywhere outside of America that they might have some following seems to have rejected their legacy. I'll just say at the time in the late 70s I found their sound too thin and chanting choruses too yobbish. When they diversified into all kinds of other music it sounded like the bubblegum version of dub or latin or whatever it was. They were one of the originals at the barricades and fought hard. They just never inspired me.

Cold Chisel: I actually like Khe San. It's a kind of war story as bush ballad and pub singalong but it does everything it says slickly and organically. The rest of it is sophisticated yob rock that aided the local resistance to punk and its offshoots. Maybe that's what we voted for, though.

The Smiths: There are some urgent standouts in their back catalogue like Suffer Little Children or most of side one of The Queen is Dead but over 80% of the Smiths' output is flavourless to me and most of that is down to Johnny Marr's ability to render interesting chord progressions into supermarket muzak. I always found it telling that the one who had the career afterwards was the affected singer who had nothing to do with the arrangements but wrote the words and vocal melodies. But those lyrics, those lyrics. I don't ever like music for the lyrics. If I don't like the music I don't listen to the words. I don't even know the words of most of my favourite songs. But as for The Smiths' lyrics, I'd swap the lot for any album by the Handsome Family. Now them's lyrics!

Midnight Oil: A shame. This band really had some good musical ideas but they buried them efficiently under big shouty slogans we were meant to sing along to as we punched the air. But it always felt to me like Uncle Cec at the home organ at Christmas lunch, playing White Christmas but winking and singing "Fight the Power" over it.

Big Star: Tried to get into them a few years back but cannot reconcile their reputation with the tide of mediocrity that is most of their output. There are big exceptions to this but the reason I like the third album so much is that it doesn't sound much like them.

Nick Cave: I don't know of anyone who emerged from the punk scene of anywhere who works so hard for his audience as the Nickster. He comes up with record after record and delights his fans with forays into film and novel writing. The problem for me is that his earlier solo/Bad Seeds efforts only ever feel try hard to me. The later stuff is bland but not in the way that Vegas Elvis stuff was (a lot of that came out of a weird poor little rich suffering that no one knew about until after his death) bland as later New Order or ex-Beatle records. It's like listening to the selfconsciously intense guy at the party cornering the girls with lines like, "I don't fucking care if you slap me in the face, but just for me you gotta live for tonight." Yes, it is a problem for me that that crap works.

Funk: Of any kind. The only exceptions are when other elements lift it from the aural constipation that I hear when it's on. Hate it.

Prog rock: I would swap the entire back catalogues of Genesis, Yes, ELP and anyone else under that banner for a few singles by The Ted Mulry Gang any day of the week.

Madonna and Prince: In the eighties you were meant to like her for being in control of her career and him for his astounding musicality but I never liked anything by either ever.

Frank Zappa: School stoners and older silblings liked this stuff in my day, thinking he was the big leery antidote to the conservativism of the mid 70s on. I can forgive that by recalling that part of me still thinks the Sex Pistols' Bodies is the most confronting song from the rock eon (The Beatles Revolution 9 has more of a claim but anyway).

I admire Frank Zappa for publicly taking the dirty old man out of libertarianism but have no admiration for his putting him back into his music. I get how serious he was as a composer but only the smidgiest of smidgeons have ever appealed to me. This is from someone who doesn't think you have to be into Jim Morrison to like The Doors as the music is so strong. The music of Frank Zappa has the consitution of an ox. I just can't stand it.

ELO: they were meant to be a fun mix of pure pop and classical, an extension of Jeff Lynne's old band The Move. John Lennon, when asked what the Beatles might have sounded like if they were still together in the 70s, said, "probably like ELO." Jeff Lynne took that as a compliment (even at about 14 years old I heard it as snide). Big 'n' fat 'n' overproduced and never anything else. Horrible, like prog rock in a chewy cough drop.

Fleetwood Mac: I need to take a little care with this one as this band (meaning the Stevie Nicks lineup) has been adopted by musicians in their twenties who have obviously run out of decent material to copy without modification. Don't want ot appear like a Gen X stick in the mud. Fuck it, I will. This was a ghastly band who rivalled only The Eagles for justifiable homicide by punk. Yes, I know, they won and punk lost but they are hovering still over our precious young and should be lost to even the memory of those who had to suffer them. I HATE this music. See also, The Eagles.

Black Sabbath: Did far more than Led Zepellin to forge heavy metal as a genre. That's my point. Cannot listen to this. See also Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax and any other metal. I know you have to be into the culture of it but even when young and gothic minded I thought it sounded like loud panto.

90s + copyists: Yeah yeah yeah, all rock is regurgitation but in generations before mine folk thrilled to the fabs trying to copy the Everlys and getting it wrong but making it right by sounding like themselves (eg. Love Me Do). A co-vintaged friend of mine tried to sell me the talents of Blur, pointing out how authentically Syd Barrett-sounding one of the tracks was. It was. The point? None. The limping excuse that it's all just a rolypoly of good songs doesn't cut it for me when it just sounds like an impoverished imagination. Don't care about po-mo or irony or any other smokescreen for creative laziness they are, for the most part, bullshit arguments.

I was at a party in the mid 90s and suggested we have a touch of trip hop (still very fresh then) and was pushed back by the host who thought the stale cranking posing of Oasis was newer than Massive Attack or Tricky or Portishead because the album had been recorded more recently (we're talking about a year or two, here). Unbelievable bullshit!

To his credit, Jarvis Cocker admitted to being saddened that his career was part of a revival rather than a wave of revolution. Gets worse, though. My Bloody Valentine, who were among the final practitioners of innovation in rock recently released a decades-delayed new album which sounded like their last one only less inspired. Rock started copying itself without improvement after the early 90s and has never recovered, like a jogger who runs out of breath and panics that he will never regain it. The sole innovation from that time to this was electronica. The trip hops, the technos the dubsteps the anything but guitar band treadmills that roll hour after hour on the stages of the endless festivals and clog the airwaves with crud that begs nostalgia as soon as it's released.

Me? I go to the back catalogue or find things in the margins. I would rather listen to drones. No really, I'm serious, any music that cares more about exploration of sound and its relation to us actually feels better to listen to. It's like diving into a cool stream on a hot day and luxuriating in the life affirming chill of the water.

Am I a hyprocrite for continuing to make music with guitars and chord progressions etc? Maybe. Only last July I finished a project to record or re-record songs I wrote that had been poorly recorded first time around or not even finished enough to record at all. Every single one of them was from a base of early 80s sounding 60s. But folks, there's not a smidge of a claim that any of it was new. I even describe it as a nostalgic effort. Also, it's just not all I do. I'm not alone in this but it's getting more claustrophic in the corridors with the erosion of the difference between mainstream rock and the socalled indie version (a term itself copied from a previous generation).

Epilogue: Well, that was better than codeine. Time for a nap.