Back when I was a late night DJ on college radio, I paid more attention to profanity. This was because the FCC, in their attempts to be total fucking dicks, focused an inordinate amount of their scrutiny on college stations. Apparently any time a profane word made its way onto the air, the station was slapped with a prohibitively expensive fine. Needless to say, college radio stations aren’t exactly swimming in cash, so these fines really hurt. Fuckers.
As a result, every track on every album in the library had to be screened for words like “fuck,” “shit,” “pussy,” “ass face,” “cock smoker,” and “anus loving goat raper.” If these or any of the many other officially recognized profane expressions appeared anywhere on a track, that track was banned from the air. As you might imagine, this put a shitload of hip hop, metal, and punk rock in the off-limits pile.
As we’ve discussed before here at //Wire, this whole ban on profanity thing makes no sense. It’s the intent behind the use of the word that matters. For example, when The M’s sing “get your shit together” on their latest album, the profanity appears as the result of a stylistic decision. Could they have said “get your act together” or “get your stuff together?” Yes, technically they could have. Should they? No, they should not. Use of this particular colloquialism just sounds cooler than any of the other options. Note to the FCC: It’s a fucking rock song. Sounding cool is the whole motherfucking point.
On the other hand, a “radio friendly” version of an inherently profane and offensive song does not make it any less offensive. The message behind “I’m gonna smack you across the face with my *beep* and then *beep* you in the *beep* and then wipe it on the sheets” is not lost on anyone. Yet between these two songs, The M’s track is the one that would draw the fine. The imaginary hip hop song quoted above would be FCC approved for 8 year olds.
Fortunately, it appears that the rust is starting to show on the FCC. Sooner or later enforcing their profanity guidelines will be be dropped from their priority list. Until then, we have bands like Starfucker that exist to serve a glorious dual purpose. On the one hand, they play dreamy pop rock that conjures images of missed opportunities, teenage love, and sitting on the fire escape early on a summer evening. This particular track does more with a single verse than most bands do with an entire album. Listening to it makes you feel like we all somehow share some of the same memories
On the other hand, their name helps rub the futility of the profanity regulations right in the stupid fucking cunt face of the motherfucking FCC. Fuck yeah Starfucker! That’s fucking awesome.
One of the most rock n roll moments of my life - and there have been many - was when one of my elderly neighbors went ballistic during a band practice in my parents’ garage. This was back in the high school days, when we had more volume than talent. We would practice every weekend in the garage while my folks were out running errands or just generally keeping their distance. They did so with good reason; I’m told that you could hear our smokin’ hot version of “White Light/White Heat” from several blocks away.
Most of the time we tried to keep the garage door closed to limit the noise. But it would get pretty hot in the summer months, and after an hour or so we would roll up the door a few feet to let some air in. It was on one such occasion that we were confronted by the ire of one particularly crotchety old man. He must have come from a few blocks away, because he was in his car. He came screeching into the driveway and part of the way into the garage, the hood of his car just barely fitting under the half open door. He jumped out of his car and launched into one of the most hilarious tirades I or any of my teenage band mates had ever heard.
Fortunately, we were recording our performance on a cheap boom box, and we captured the whole exchange on tape. It’s been a few years since I’ve heard that recording, but I will paraphrase for the sake of this article.
Loud sounds of distorted guitars and amateurish drumming. All of a sudden the singer stops mid-song and says, “Holy shit!” A car door slams and an elderly voice can be heard in the distance.
BAND: “What are you doing in my garage? I’m pretty sure this is trespassing…”
OLD MAN: “You guys have been making this goddamn racket for months! It’s horrible! You have to stop this noise right now!”
BAND: “Um, what?”
OLD MAN: “I can hear you from three blocks away! Shut it off! It’s too loud!”
BAND: “Maybe you’re just, uh, too old…?”
OLD MAN: “Show some respect! Other people live in this neighborhood. Nobody wants to hear this racket!”
BAND: “Fuck you!”
OLD MAN: “What!? I’m calling the police! They’ll shut you down forever!
BAND MEMBER #1: “Good. When they get here we’ll tell them about how you drove your car into our garage door.”
BAND MEMBER #2: “Old people can’t drive.”
BAND MEMBER #3: “What if we play a cover of ‘Moon River?’ Would you like that?”
BAND MEMBER #4: “Will you buy us some beer?”
BAND MEMBER #2: “He’s old.”
It was around that point we broke down laughing and the old guy drove off frustrated and even more upset than when he arrived. We immediately listened to the exchange on playback and decided it would be the perfect interlude for our first album. We congratulated ourselves on our collective ability to stick it to the Man. In our minds we were the coolest 15 year olds on the block.
Eventually we all found our way to different bands with legitimate practice studios. We learned to play our instruments and eventually our sharp edges softened a little bit. Some might argue that our music got better, but we definitely lost some of the raw energy that we had back in the garage days.
In this context, the label “garage rock” starts to make a lot of sense for that genre of music. Bands that play under this banner may have more skill than we did back in the salad days, but they still embody the energy and insolence that we were so proud of. Take the band Thunders from Indianapolis. Their new EP “The Sympathetic Oscillations” sounds like the reverb was pounded into it with a baseball bat. The songs bristle with the spirit of a teenager high on whippets. When singer Ryan Reidy yelps, “There’s a party in my brain and it won’t end” you get the sense that this band has turned (the) garage into a platform for taunting all the party-poopers and angry seniors in their neighborhood.
You can put this theory to the test by setting up some speakers in your garage. Open the door, throw on Thunders and turn the volume up to 10. If anybody comes complaining about the volume, remember the classic rock axiom: If it’s too loud, you’re too old.
Next time you find yourself looking for silver linings, here’s something to consider: the one good thing that came out of the deaths of Biggie and Tupac was the end of the West Coast/East Coast beef. While Americans certainly love a good fight, I think it’s safe to say that a nationwide gang war is not what anybody wants. When these two iconic rappers died, it forced everybody to cool their jets a little. Sure, things got strange in the aftermath - Diddy became an overblown caricature of himself, Jay-Z stabbed a dude, and the dirty south blew up on the strength of beats inspired by cough syrup - but all in all hip hop moved in a better direction.
Another interesting effect was that hip hop sounds simultaneously became a little more homogeneous and a little more unique. Dirty south trap music and crunk melted together to form the template for radio friendly club tracks everywhere. “East Coast” became the de facto style for most people outside of that mold. The remaining groups took off in wildly different directions: ghetto tech, neo old skool, grime, etc. And of course there was still the West Coast doing its own crazy-ass thing.
Hyphy was here for a hot minute - just long enough to get its own sports drink, documentary, and vernacular. You still have plenty of up and comers trying to sound like E-40, but hyphy pretty much died on the vine. This disappointed a lot of people who were holding their collective breath, waiting for hyphy to put Northern California back on the map. For better or worse that didn’t happen, and people turned their attention elsewhere.
The thing is, you can’t really ignore the California influence on hip hop. This is the land of big stars, small bikinis and perennially temperate weather. California has some of the richest, most beautiful people in the world. It’s also home to some of the scariest prisons and the most violent street gangs. It is inevitable that this influence would seep into the music and make it that much more attractive to people who live in flat, cold parts of the country.
The aptly named Pacific Division perfectly embody this Left Coast vibe. Their blissed out beats shimmer from the speakers, practically begging the listener to take the day off and head to the beach. The lyrics second this emotion, with slacker anthems dedicated to overgrown kids and starry-eyed daydreamers. Pac Div seems to have done away with both clouds and silver linings, opting instead for endless blue skies. Be sure to check them out the next time you find yourself in a California state of mind.
I don’t know if it’s the proliferation of cheap recording technology or the fact that Guitar Center is always having crazy, once-in-a-lifetime blow out sales, but for some reason everybody and their mother thinks they should be in a band these days. This is all well and good when the wanna-be Coldplays and the would-be Limp Bizkits keep their ill-fated dreams locked up in a practice studio somewhere. That way the public’s ears are safe and none of us ever have to be subjected to their self delusion and extra shitty music.
The thing is, most of these bands insist on playing live. (The rest of them send me CDs). By way of either luck or tenacity they end up opening for bands that are much better than them. Allow me to address these cut rate opening bands for a moment: Do not do this. I understand you have dreams of rock stardom, but it is simply not in the cards for you. When your lame-ass, no talent band gets up on stage and sucks at full volume, it only makes you look bad. And it makes the band you’re opening for look that much better.
Case in point: I went to see We Are Wolves last night at Cafe Du Nord. There were two opening bands. One of them dressed like a group of drug-addled Burning Man cast-offs and played psychedelic electro dance rock. They were ok. At the very least they got the early crowd dancing and they seemed to be either really enjoying themselves or really high on peyote.
It was the band that came on next that was the problem. They were god awful. The drummer was off time, the guitar player just made noise, and the singer couldn’t sing - although from the look on his face you would have thought he was a finalist on American Idol. By the time they lurched into their second song the whole audience had escaped to the bar in the front room, leaving behind three people near the stage that were clearly relatives.
Why keep playing at that point? If you can’t even make music mediocre enough for people to ignore, if your music literally repels them, why not just give up? Do you think a surgeon would keep cutting people open if everyone he touched died on the operating table? Do you think a race car driver would keep getting behind the wheel if his cars blew up as soon as he crossed the starting line? No, they would not. So why do you insist on playing music when it is so clearly not meant to be?
Really the only acceptable answer is this: The incredibly terrible band whose name I didn’t even bother to look up was there just to make We Are Wolves sound awesome by contrast. If that’s the case, then congratulations on a job well done. When WAW hit the stage and began cranking out their trademark brand of electro-punk, it was like drinking a cool milkshake after 45 minutes of hot shit sandwiches. The crowd came streaming back into the room, twice as large as it was before. Everybody danced and drank. WAW didn’t waste any time with mumbled banter in between songs. They just turned their amps up and rocked like it was meant to be.
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