#RockJournalism

[ben-winch-writer-rocker]

Broader Context

Top Five (for 2018):

Caterina Barbieri—Patterns of Consciousness,

Anouar Brahem—Blue Maqams,

Terry Riley—Persian Surgery Dervish,

Lojii—Lofeye,

Loren Connors—Airs.

(These are the albums I listened to most in 2018, not albums released in 2018.)

Backstory:

I never was a rock ’n’ roll animal. More like a werewolf, prone to sudden fits of rockism. I spent my teen years listening to Joy Division, New Order and early Cure albums. Favourite song? “All Cats Are Grey” (from Faith) or New Order’s “In A Lonely Place”. Slo-o-ow. Most bands played >75% fast. I craved >75% slow. Really, I craved atmosphere. By age 17 I was sick to death of distorted guitars. (I learnt to love ’em later, of course, but not to the exclusion of all else.) I thought music was serious business—“art”. And I thought art was “sophisticated”. So I took a stand, adopted a niche, and, to a large extent, that niche was anti-rock.

Of course, to a large extent, that stance was a pose. My first ever album purchase was Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet! I dug “Back in Black”, the Cult’s Electric, ZZ Top. But Joy Division’s Closer changed all that. The synths, the starkness, the spaciousness, the sense that anything could happen. The journey from anger through grief, resentment, resignation, desperation, and awestruck sad wonder. It’s unique, haunting, deathly serious. And though maybe what I should have done (what would have educated me more) was to hunt down Joy Division’s influences, instead I did what was easier and followed those they’d influenced. But in the back of my head was always this sense that music could do more. Of course I realise now that actually some of the straightest rock tracks are mini miracles of energy and precision, but maybe my respect for that form is heightened by the fact that, deep down, it isn’t mine. My music is (mostly) introspective, reflective, delicate. And slowly, as once-obscure albums have become more widely available, I’ve discovered other music like mine, like the music I’ve always heard in my head.

What brings me to this juncture, then—to the point of blogging about rock—is my background as a rock-fan who wanted more. Not more volume, more aggression, or more of any of the things that are normally associated with rock, but more infiltration into rock by other musics, other sounds—sounds which, in many cases, I couldn’t even identify myself, I just knew I wanted them. Keep in mind, I’d never had much money for music. I never was a collector—far from it, Never even owned a turntable. In fact, I always pirated music, first on tape, then on CD, then via download. Nowadays, I stream. So from taping friends’ albums, to burning CDs I’d taken on approval from the record store where I worked (not for long; I’m more of a bookseller), to taking whatever I could get on the Pirate Bay, to the minor miracle of Spotify and YouTube, the scope of my listening has steadily expanded.

I remember hearing Philip Glass and Steve Reich aged 20: I’d never heard anything like that before, and I never would have heard it then if not for a friend’s parent’s CD collection. I first heard Rhys Chatham and Glen Branca aged 35; even though I’d been listening to Sonic Youth since my early 20s, it took a guy ten years younger and internet-savvy—a workmate at a bookshop—to turn me onto their influences. (He turned me onto Bitches’ Brew too.) I was a late uptaker, technology-wise. I never thought music was about technology. I guess I thought I was Neil Young or something: just plug in and play and some loyal engineer would take care of recording, just as some Alan McGee or Ivo Watts-Russell would distribute the result. It didn’t happen. In 2009 I bought my first halfway-decent computer. Nowadays, almost everything I listen to is something I researched and sourced via the internet. Sometimes, an algorithm spits out something worthwhile. Maybe owing to my age and the fact I have a family, and that much of my listening is done via headphones while working on something else—that music, for the most part is background rather than foreground for me—90% of the music I listen to is ambient, predominantly textural, and distinctly lacking in melody. “In your face” it is not. But then again, maybe for that reason there’s nothing I like better than a sudden burst of rock.

One last point: maybe owing to a traumatic childhood and a lifetime’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I’ve always favoured music that subdues me rather than music that exhilarates me. Gangsta rap was good for this purpose (maybe incongruously, it reminded me of the Cure’s early days, synth-driven and minimalist and steeped in a sense of doom). The doom was crucial. I never could stomach a lot of cheese, or any false sense of reassurance. My ideal mood was a cushioned sense of doom—as if danger were all around, but I was, for the moment, safe. But maybe I’m over-simplifying. Exhilaration is fine, but usually for me it’s slow-building. The realisation of just how moving and well-constructed something is, for eg—that’s exhilarating. And then, sure, 10% of the time I like to blast myself with loud guitars and driving beats.

Other influences: Autechre, Tricky, J Dilla—Donuts, Miles Davis—Bitches’ Brew, Coltrane—Crescent, Floating Points, Visible Cloaks, Oneohtrix Point Never, Howard Shore—Crash, Stephan Bodzin, Plastikman, Flying Lotus, John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, James Carr, Leonard Cohen.

Observations:

Ultimately, I can fist-punch and air-guitar with the best of ’em, but only on full moons. Which is to say, I love rock ’n’ roll, but not as a lifestyle, not as a religion. I like light and shade, always have. I’ve got my own take on rock, and to some extent it’s an outsider’s. I like bands whose aims are different from the average—who try for reactions other than fist-pumping.

More importantly for me personally, the fact of my slow education in music other than rock means I came to that music through rock. My skills as a musician and a critic (if I have any skills as a critic) are rock-centric. I want more than the average rock band offers, but it needn’t be more musicianship (though that’d be nice). I believe in a minimum of means. I believe in punk. I believe “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye”. But I also wanna see rock grow up.

ROCK THEORY, then? It’s about what I want rock to be, based on what I’ve loved in rock and outside of it in the past. The best rock has a magic to it. And it’s that magic I’m hunting here, trying to pin it down, to examine it. Why? In the name of science, I guess.

[2losersanda12gaugeshotgun]

The Dandelion

This is going to be interesting. Perhaps for now, we have no idea whether this little project we have thrown ourselves into is going to make it big or just fizzle out. And this journal is just going to float around aimlessly in the worldwide web, like a dandelion out in the field with no sense of purpose or meaning. In the event that we do make it big with the press and fans fighting around facts regarding our beginnings, I may throw this journal out and unveil the mysteries of our inception in true rockstar biographical fashion ‘to set the record straight’.  But then again, I may not. Or I may not because this project indeed met its uncharacteristic demise and this dandelion of a journal just broke into fragments and scattered to the four winds.

Sometime around the second month of this quarantine period, my wife had posted one of those live Facebook performances from the home of one local duo act. My childhood friend and lead guitar of our former band who I played rhythm with was eager to place a comment that it was us my wife should have posted instead. I brushed it off in an instant. My childhood friend, who I shall name N2, is a notorious procrastinator. We have been discussing about this project of doing a YouTube channel where we could showcase our meager guitar skills and we have been discussing it for years with no concrete plan. You could say we were just dreaming. We would meet each other again in one of our barbeque weekends with friends, he would lay down the idea and I would reply in jest that we would still be planning over the same thing come his daughter’s 18th birthday. His daughter is not even 10 yet. The possibility of it happening (the joke, not the project) is so high that it hurts to laugh. We imagined we would be old dads in one corner of that party and he would present again this particular idea of his about a rock medley that we should do and we would laugh because it still had not materialized after all those years.

But he messaged me direct after putting out that Facebook comment and asked if I could do the guitar parts of that one heavy metal song we had planned on playing. Since we were on lockdown, I was to record the parts while filming myself , give him the shared drive link and he would take care of the rest. Of course I could and I did it in one take, but I added another guitar solo attempt in case parts had to be redone. And just like that I found myself searching for a Band Name or a Project name with which we could give our YouTube and Facebook channels. All of a sudden I had the ball and I was stalling. The video was done and I was in a mad rush for a Project Name – we could think of a band name later on when other members come on board but I did not want to make the mistake of being recognized in a name we will not be using in the future. In the end we settled for something historical as we were both armchair historians. It involved the attack on our hometown by foreign invaders the then end of the 19th century and the emblem we used for profile photos was the revolutionary forces’ banner.

The problem now was on how to sell that first video.

[airstudia]

Moscow-Praha-Moscow 1968

[parkersbighead]

Picked this up yesterday, started reading a few hours ago. I'm still kinda new to the cult of The Replacements, but so far this is a lot of fun and everyone nails what it is I see in this band. #thereplacements #themats #rockjournalism

[findthebeautyinbreakdowns]

Some light reading! #rockjournalism #reading #book #internship

[asexualadvice]

Thanks for the blog. I'm not ace, but I appreciate being able to learn about what it entails. I truly believe that sexual orientation is not binary by any means, and that there are ways of expressing just about any orientation out there. Keep up the good work, and screw the haters! Sincerely, a proud ally :)

Aww, thank you! I'm glad we're getting some outreach done here, and so glad that you're learning and supporting us!

[valdmont]

Noel en el Four Seasons, Distrito Federal 11 de abril de 2012

Noel at Four Seasons Mexico City April 11 2012

Fotos tomadas por mi // Pictures taken by me.

[valdmont]

Never Mess With The Original

Un viejo texto que publique para "El Fanzine"

An old text I published on "El Fanzine", a mexican magazine.

Recientemente, leyendo entre las líneas de los blogs de NME, me encontré con algo que llamó mucho mi atención: un cover de “Sex on Fire”, sí, aquella gran canción de los Kings of Leon. Tal vez esto no tiene nada de espectacular, pero todo cambió cuando me di cuenta de quién se había atrevido a hacer el cover: ni más ni menos que una boy band de los noventas, Westlife.

Esto no es nada nuevo para la boy band, pues no se si recuerdan que en el clímax de su carrera sacaron “Uptown Girl” de Billy Joel y no es que hagan una interpretación mala de “Sex on Fire”, pues como sea, los muchachos irlandeses cantan bien, pero me remonta al tema de cuando Ryan Murphy le pidió a los hermanos Followill que si sus canciones podían aparecer en su show Glee, petición a la cual los Kings of Leon se negaron y todavía criticaron al programa, ¿qué pensaran respecto a esto?

Al terminar de ver una terrible coreografía durante el coro, me quedé pensando… nos gusta mucho ver a las bandas covereando canciones de otros y existen muchos aciertos como, “Hurt” con Johnny Cash, “Ziggy Stardust” con Bauhaus o la versión de Feist de “Inside and Out” de los Bee Gees, pero como todo en esta vida, también hay quienes han vuelto hermosas melodías en basura para los oídos, es por eso que me dí a la tarea de encontrar algunos de estos desastres musicales:

Johnny Cash y su versión de "Hurt", original de Nine Inch Nails.

Tras hacer esta investigación, me impresioné al saber el número de personas que han hecho un cover a aquella joya de los noventas,  “Smells like teen spirit” de Nirvana. Desde Tori Amos hasta Miley Cyrus (sí, usted leyó bien), han versionado esta canción, sin embargo, a mi parecer, la peor interpretación fue la dePaul Anka. Pese a su increíble voz, el jazz y el swing hacen que “Smells like teen spirit” pierda su identidad y su enojo.

Más adelante, me encontré con algo que no solo yo catalogué como malo, sino también una encuesta en cierta revista de música; “You Shook Me All Night Long” covereada por Celine Dion y Anastacia. No me meteré con la voz de la Señora Dion, ni se puede decir que la canción es mala (puesto que la original es muy pegajosa), pero lo lamentable es verla pretendiendo rockear como el mismísimo Brian Johnson.

No se puede decir que los malos covers solo involucran a las estrellas de pop, puesto que también muchos artistas de rock han llegado a destrozar algunos clásicos de la música. Tal fue el caso de Bono, vocalista de U2, quien, por alguna razón, pensó que sería llamativo o interesante hacer una versión hablada de aquella joya escrita por Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”, sin duda la gloria sólo se encuentra cuando termina de sonar la voz del irlandés.

O ¿qué pensarían de una versión “washawasheada” de “Chop Suey” de System of a Down hecha por Avril Lavigne? Increíblemente esto sí pasó en uno de sus conciertos, donde en más de dos versos de la canción no se entendía nada de lo que cantaba la canadiense y además se podía notar que tanto ella como la banda lo estaban disfrutando.

Lo cierto es que muchas veces adoramos a quienes tocan el cover de alguna canción que amamos… pero me pregunto, con versiones como estas, ¿tenemos fundamentos para criticar lo que hacen en Glee?