Fluxblog 308: Before Punk 72-76 | Wire / Elastica / Pavement | Crumb | Rosé
Plus: Larry Fitzmaurice on the podcast!
This week’s episode of Fluxpod features Larry Fitzmaurice, a veteran music critic who recently launched an excellent newsletter called Last Donut of the Night. This conversation is largely focused on music media - both independent, like Fluxblog and Last Donut, and our experiences working for corporate publications that are now largely driven by metrics and social media trends. We talk about what we like about doing things on our own, and what we think the broader media needs to do to break out of its creative doldrums and move away from the often poisonous cultures of the companies. You can find it on all the major podcast platforms as well as the Fluxblog Patreon.
This week’s playlist is BEFORE PUNK 1972-1976, covering the glam, proto-punk, garage rock, power-pop, art rock, and hard rock that heralded the full arrival of punk in 1977. You can find it Spotify and Apple Music.
This playlist is a companion to AFTER PUNK 1980-1983, and part of a line of playlists drawing a line from punk to post-punk to indie and alternative from the 1970s on through the 2000s. I’m closing on a full unbroken thread…
• Before Punk 1972-1976
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• After Punk 1980-1983
• Radio Free: Early Alternative 1983-1985
• What Was College Rock? 1986-1990
• What Was Indie Rock? 1991-1996
• What Was Alt-Rock? 1991-1996
• What Happened to Alt-Rock? 1997-1999
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• The Laws Have Changed: Indie Rock 2003-2007
• The New Indie 2008-2010
You can find all the playlists on my Spotify and Apple Music pages.
Here’s a few highlights from this week at 20thCenturyRocks…
Here’s this week’s Fluxblog posts…
You Want To Avoid The Inevitable
Wire “Three Girl Rhumba”
“Three Chord Rhumba” is built like a logic proof, a simple and efficient argument that stops after just a minute because the point has been made. Most of the early punks were attracted to blunt stripped down arrangements for its roots in earlier iterations of rock or for its utility in expressing anger and aggression but Wire focused in on the possibilities rock minimalism had to offer in servicing formal ideas and making it so cerebral lyrics could be presented with a musical punctuation that could make them physically engaging.
The first verse of “Three Girl Rhumba” is a structured like a game that seems designed to keep you distracted, like a musical version of Three-Card Monte. You think of numbers, open boxes, open and shut your eyes, think of more numbers. You end up with no numbers, and it doesn’t matter at all. But it’s not a nihilistic song – you end up doing the impossible to avoid the inevitable, and that seems pretty cool. Even better, the logic of the song moves towards a conclusion in which all efforts to project meaning on an experience is rejected in favor of just dancing.
Buy it from Amazon.
Elastica “Connection”
OK, here’s a different card game. This time it’s all about luck and timing, and you win by making it appear to others like you actually have control over circumstances that are entirely random. Justine Frischmann demonstrates how it works by looking and sounding like the coolest human imaginable – androgynous, mysterious, effortlessly graceful, and casually flirty in a way that seems to presume that everyone’s interested and thus it’s all very low stakes. She almost seems bored by a positive outcome: “somehow the vital connection is made,” sung with a droll sarcasm that suggests it’s impossible to avoid her inevitable victory.
“Connection” famously lifts its riff from “Three Girl Rhumba” but it’s less a copy and more like a sequel – the Aliens to Wire’s Alien, in which core ideas that were once expressed with a brute minimalism are now presented with a sleek poppy maximalism. Elastica accessorize the spikey central riff with new wave synthesizers, alt-rock crunch, and a very ‘90s sort of gloss that sounds the way shiny vinyl clothing looks. Style for miles and miles, so much style that it’s wasted…
Buy it from Amazon.
Pavement “Westy Can’t Drum”
Stephen Malkmus is playing a game too; it’s called Telephone. He deliberately lifts the riff from a song that everyone knows to be a “rip off” – the essence of popular music if we’re being real, but being a clever songwriter he only just uses it as a starting point before heading off in his own direction. So maybe the game he’s playing is actually Exquisite Corpse? He complicates the riff a bit while keeping its energy – always a smart way to avoid legal issues – and by the middle he’s off on more of a Stereolab-gone-feral tangent.
Malkmus possesses a slacker elegance similar to that of Frischmann and a playful mind comparable to Newman, but he doesn’t come off anywhere near as severe as either. “Westy” is very silly in a way that feels distinctly American to me in much the same way that Frischmann’s version of sexiness and Newman’s sort of intensity feels specifically English. Malkmus stacks evocative phrases like he’s fully in the zone with a magnetic poetry kit, each verse ending in a punchline – “all embrace and segue to the burning masses,” “brings to mind the portraits on the coinages and Lincoln’s beard…but why’s he got a horse’s body??” The impossibilities that are inevitable here are all fanciful and strange.
Buy it from Amazon.
Chew Yourself Right To The Bone
Crumb “Trophy”
Crumb is a band that arrived with such a fully-formed and distinctive aesthetic that it raises the question of whether they’re the sort of group who will largely remain the same for the long haul while changing in relatively minor ways – Clinic, The Fall – or the type that will mutate a few times over while retaining their identity, like Stereolab or Sonic Youth. “Trophy,” the band’s first new single since releasing their excellent debut Jinx in 2019, is a lateral move for them, which is to say that it sounds like it could’ve been on Jinx. The drums are a little crisper and the bass is a bit warmer and womb-like, but it’s the same melodic sensibilities and stoned, vaguely dissociated vibe. Two key bits in this one: that quick swirl of sound at the end of the pause a minute into the song, and the subsequent bridge sequence in which Lila Ramani sings a few lines that give context to the zoned out passivity of the lyrics in the verses and refrains: “the test, it came back / said you’re prone to chew yourself right to the bone / I guess you don’t like to be alone.”
Buy it from Bandcamp.
Seems Electric
Rosé “On the Ground”
It’s been interesting to me how while Taylor Swift has been a major star for well over a decade now it’s only been in the past couple years that her influence as a songwriter has become very apparent in other musicians. This makes some sense, as the songwriters coming up now are those who grew up with as a formative artist. I mostly hear Swift’s influence in particular melodies and cadences paired with an introspective wordiness – for example, listen to the bridge into the chorus on this Rosé song, which could fit neatly into any of Swift’s pre-Folklore records. As to be expected from K-pop, “On the Ground” isn’t all just one thing but more of a well-seasoned stew of pop elements from different periods, with a particular emphasis on reinterpreting sounds from the 2000s. Sure, there’s Taylor Swift in the mix here, but I also hear a lot of…Natasha Bedingfield?
Rosé is best known as a member of Blackpink and this is her first push as a solo artist. The song is sung entirely in English and is as accessible as pop singles can get, so clearly Rosé and the Blackpink machine are aiming very high here with this ballad/bop hybrid. The lyrics, which are basically about realizing you need to be grounded and not lose touch with your roots as you experience success, hit a good balance of pathos and sentimentality. Squint a little and it’s almost one of those “wait, fame is awful!” songs alt-rockers always did in the ‘90s after having a hit.
Buy it from Amazon.
LINKS LINKS LINKS
• I was going through my bookmarks and rediscovered this very helpful and extensive name pronunciation guide from the New England Jazz Radio Cooperative. It’s worth checking out if just so you never have to embarrass yourself by mispronouncing “Cal Tjader” or “Grachan Moncur III.”
• And Introducing began their new Our Band Could Be Your Life series this week with an episode about Black Flag! This is a great time to jump into their show, check it out.
• Amanda Petrusich wrote a really interesting essay for The New Yorker about how genre-centric fandom is shifting/disappearing with changes in technology, new generations of musicians, and the slow, sad fade-out of music retail.
• Hey, how about a long, detailed interview with The Edge from U2 in 1986 about his guitar gear setup?