Rock in a hard place

Act one of the third millennium pop panto starred Eminem as the rebel without a pause, Britney as the hot to trot professional virgin and Destiny’s Child as ghetto-fabulous valedictorians, while the nu-metal back-of-the-bus boys, with their skateboards and cut-off trousers and New York Yankees baseball caps, yelled obscenities from the wings.

This last clique hogged the show, mainly ’cos they hollered the loudest. The half dozen major labels harvested, processed and shat out as many obnoxious rap-metal clones as the machinery could handle, generating sonic boomtime for in-house stables of producers, video directors and stylists. Week after week, the product poured through this writer’s letterbox in CD-sized slabs of mass-produced lard.

“The blues had a grandson, too,” Charles Shaar Murray wrote in the NME back in 1984, “a malformed idiot thing that stays chained up in the cellar most of the time. When visitors call or when it is taken out for an airing, it gibbers and hoots, flexing its muscles and masturbating frantically. It brags incessantly of its strength and its masculinity… it fuels itself on fantasies of adventure and power and sexual conquest… it says it will never die. The thing’s name is heavy metal.”

The blues also had a great-grandson, and nu-metal was it. Early this year, your reporter became aware of a phrase that perfectly summed up the genre’s cut and thrust, a phrase that could’ve been heard anywhere from Oprah to Ally McBeal to Fight Club: Sport Fucking. Copulation as a callisthenic workout. A wet dry hump.

There were many culprits: Limp Bizkit (the most wilfully ignorant noise since Oi!); Crazy Town (Barry White with body piercings), Staind (Ronnie James Dio-style power ballads), Alien Ant Farm, Linkin Park and more. This was a frat boys’ circle jerk of old Chili Peppers licks and rap posturing, teenage infantilism just ripe for niche-marketing through every sports-metal chain store in the western world.

Fred Durst and his homeboys copped metal’s most boneheaded characteristics and married it with hip-hop’s entrepreneurial spirit and nepotistic codes of plug-thy-neighbour (the singer is the MD at Flawless Records, home to Puddle Of Mudd and Kenna, and also acts as an A&R executive for the Flip label, whose roster includes the Bizkit themselves, plus Cold, Staind and Dope). The enfant terrible of Woodstock 3 turned out to be just another all-American opportunist, hanging out at the Hefner mansion, dabbling in video direction and scoring himself a Senior Vice President position at Interscope.

Even godfather figures like Iggy Pop were susceptible to the virus, with Mr Osterberg aping his nu-metal inferiors at Virgin’s behest on the lacklustre Beat ’Em Up. Elsewhere, third generation punk runts like American Hi-Fi, Sum 41 and Blink 182 offered little respite. When the latter act beseeched the German audience to “support punk rock” at the MTV Europe awards last month, they might as well have been asking them to buy Nike.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d hate to be thought of as one of those sad hacks moping around complaining about rock’ n’ roll being redundant, then moving on to some more “adult” medium like jazz or classical ’cos ‘Louie Louie’ doesn’t do for them what Viagra can. You could see these talking heads on RTE arts review shows all year dismissing fine works by REM or Nick Cave, the subtext being that rock ‘n’ roll had somehow become irrelevant in 2001. What pundits really mean when they say this is that they’ve become irrelevant to rock ‘n’ roll.

Which brings us to John Waters’ Magill story on U2 last September, one of the more inept attempts at hatchet-jobbing a homegrown act. Again, don’t get me wrong: I was looking forward to reading a shrewd and incisive critique of U2 to balance all the Funday Sindo prattle, and having authored Race Of Angels, Waters was the man to do it.

Except he blew the whole thing by backing up his attack (the thrust of which was that U2 are too old and bored with each other to do the job) with arguments that were last relevant in 1975: Neolithic riffs about white boys pillaging the black man’s blues – a debt long redressed by hip-hop’s and r&b’s pilfering of white rock – and that old chestnut about rock ‘n’ roll being the language of revolt, therefore the preserve of the young.

Yes, rock n’ roll is the language of revolt (and you have to admit, Limp Bizkit are pretty revolting) but that doesn’t stop it from also being an old man’s game, capable of dealing with Shakespearian themes of age, death and despair. Stand up Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Patti Smith et al.

So, even in a time of drought, a little rain must fall. There were some ferocious rock records around if you sought them out and listened without prejudice. For instance, Marilyn Manson’s Holywood – whose key tracks ‘Fight Song’ and ‘Disposable Teens’ showed up the nu-metal boys for the musical retards they were – sold diddley squat, but it was easily his magnum opus (and until this year, I was a confirmed unbeliever).

At The Drive In produced the most tightly-coiled, white-hot, furiously dysfunctional rock album in years, a boiler room of ideas that could fuse Jane’s Addiction, Rage Against The Machine, the MC5, The Who, the Sex Pistols, U2 and David Bowie. Then the silly fuckers disbanded.

Elsewhere, Garbage defied radio and MTV homogeneity by sounding like a different band on every track of their lush beautifulgarbage, The Strokes showed what you can do with a little style and a lot of tunes, and Ash made an album full of killer singles that sounded like the Crystals on crystal meth.

The terrorist attacks on New York cleaved the year in two, and on either side of the divide, rock ‘n’ roll meant very different things. This was a gulf the self-glorifying likes of Mariah Carey and Michael Jackson fell into head-first – as David Fricke recently pointed out in Mojo, it just wasn’t the time for vanity film projects and album titles like Invincible.

As I write, it’s almost three months after the Twin Towers attacks, three months of picking through debris, of avoiding tickertape headlines and the constant vicious circles of Sky and CNN reports, three months of wondering how something as trivial as rock ‘n’ roll became necessary for sanity and survival.

This writer had planned to make his first visit to New York in August, but a crippling heatwave put me off dragging small children around the subway. Back home less than a month later, the phone rang at two o’clock in the afternoon and a friend from Massachusetts told me the news, in tears.

Over the next week the fear was everywhere. I covered Radiohead in Belfast the Friday after the attacks – they diagnosed the problem accurately enough, but could prescribe no cure. No band could. Friends, acquaintances and even total strangers releasing records that month described in e-mails, phone calls and interviews how inconsequential they felt.

What good was rock ‘n’ roll?

Well, it depended on what you were listening to.

The same day as the terrorist attacks, September 11th, Bob Dylan’s Love And Theft album was released. It’s a record of comedy and dread, peculiarities and gravities, like no other released this year. In an interview with Mikal Gilmore for one of those occasional aces Rolling Stone magazine still manages to pull from its sleeve every so often, Dylan said this: “... it is time now for great men to come forward. With small men, no great thing can be accomplished... things will have to change. And one of these things that will have to change: People will have to change their internal world.”

In October U2 went back on the road in America for the last leg of their Elevation tour, finding that the landscape had once again shifted, and with it the meanings of half the songs in their set. If the quartet weren’t the only band touring the US this fall, then they must’ve felt like it. Punters and peers alike described the intensely charged atmosphere at those shows in even more quasi-religious terms than usual, and the songs on All That You Can’t Leave Behind, with their recurring images of walking through adversity to begin again, with nothing, could hardly have borne any more weight.

Before this though, the Tribute To Heroes telecast staged a couple of weeks after the attacks was many things: moving, grotesque, repulsive, magnetic – it all depended on whomever you were watching. Some of the actors’ monologues, true-life stories of civilian heartbreak and heroism, were affecting beyond belief, some were disturbing. Maybe Clint Eastwood just couldn’t read the autocue, but he looked shook, and if Dirty Harry couldn’t keep it together then we were all fucked.

Equally paralysed by the trauma, the younger rock acts couldn’t cut it, supermen rendered limp-dicked by the kryptonite of the Twin Towers rubble. Our old friend Fred Durst, for example, could only offer his feeble version of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’.

Maybe the older acts did better because they had the weight of history and social turmoil at their backs; maybe you had to live through the Bay Of Pigs, Vietnam, the Nixon era, the oil crisis, Reaganomics, Thatcherism and the Gulf War to have anything in your canon that could offer any relevance.

So, Bruce Springsteen, who only last year had the NYPD picketing his gigs over ‘American Skin’, growled, “C’mon rise up” like a pissed off grizzly bear in a new song called ‘My City Of Ruin’. Tom Petty sang ‘I Won’t Back Down’ with the composure of a man about to break somebody’s jaw, his skin almost jaundiced with repressed anger. Billy Joel, a guy whose music I never liked, betrayed his pugilistic past as he sang ‘New York State Of Mind’ like one elongated sneer. And Neil Young essayed John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, a wise, sad, old buzzard.

But one image stayed with me longer than any other. It occurred during the Concert For Heroes, Madison Square Gardens, October.

Here’s the scene: The Who are on stage, halfway through a rough but robust ‘Baba O’ Riley’. Once an anthem for lost suburban souls, the song now has a mind and a heart of its own, taking a route its authors could never have engineered.“Don’t cry,” Pete Townsend sings, his reedy voice all worn and ragged, “Don’t raise your eyes/It’s only teenage wasteland.” And as the lights go up, you can see the men and women of the NYPD and fire departments, many of whom probably haven’t been to a concert in decades, with their fists raised in some kind of, I dunno, an affirmation. A realisation that their teenage wasteland has become a real one, the Manhattan skyline itself maimed, but they’re still here.

Then Townsend splays his legs, and the years fall off him as he windmills out powerchords that say more about resilience and defiance and sheer fuck-you than any news reports or presidential addresses. This is rock ‘n’ roll: a balding middle-aged half-deaf English guy using a stock pose to re-ignite some innate stubbornness, a refusal to roll over.

Watching this, I thought of lines from another song, Peggy Seeger’s ‘Springhill Mining Disaster’:

“ …listen to the call of the rescue team

We have no water, light or bread

So we’re living on songs and hope instead

Living on songs and hope instead.”

2001: What good was rock ‘n’ roll? No good at all, and yet, we couldn’t get through without it. The old codger doesn’t have to go away and quietly die like a dog. As it gets older, more awkward, more out of place, more unseemly and angrier, it sometimes gets better. And in a climate of fear and recession, the big chill, the plague Pete Hamill talked about in the sleeve notes for Blood On The Tracks, anything that makes us feel more human has got to be worth something.