Skeletal!
Last week, I talked about how punk’s impetus to strip things down often accentuated melody.
But even the original punks quickly got bored with punk, and started looking for ways to change it up…and thus, punk begat post-punk.
When used as an aesthetic, not strictly temporal, descriptor, “post-punk” generally does a couple things – one, it sometimes strips things even further down – to the point of leaving spaces or holes in the sonics. Cut the chords; they’ve got too many notes.
Consequently, if punk often bursts with melody, post-punk often prizes rhythm. It’s no coincidence that one of the big post-punk tropes is to elevate the prominence of the bass guitar, often letting it fill the role that lead guitar would traditionally take in a rock band.
Likewise, post-punk often looks outside rock to draw from other forms of pop music – like funk’s chicken-scratch guitars, or the thump of disco.
Or the cavernous echo of dub (why isn’t there more gothic dub? That is just two great tastes that taste great together, if you ask me):
Indeed.
About 25 years ago, one of my band’s first real shows in a real rock & roll venue, Cannibal Club in Austin, was opening for Pylon, whom I knew to revere because REM cited them as a huge hometown influence. I was practically delirious with proximal glory, though I’d never heard any Pylon songs or known anything else about them, pre-YouTube/Wikipedia. They were the least “we’re-in-a-band”-looking group of musicians I’d ever seen at that point. They made the staff take all the colored gels out of the lights and had an almost perfectly bare stage. They were an absolutely terrific band, and their drummer scolded me for asking them to autograph the poster for the show (us and Pylon!!!), which I somehow subsequently lost.
I haven’t heard those songs since, probably. That was great listening. It’s a wonderful age we’re living in, where we can just dial up pretty much anything that exists and enjoy it instantly.Report
Dude you opened for Pylon? That’s huge!
I definitely came to them through R.E.M. (their cover of “Crazy”) and B-52’s. And they’ve been one of my favorite bands ever since. Kind of the American Gang of Four (though not nearly so political, and strangely IMO even less well-known).
This post was pretty much inspired when I stumbled across that video for “Beep”. I didn’t think they HAD any videos. I have the original Chomp vinyl LP, the cover of which has a serrated top edge (you know, like it was chomped).:
http://www.amazon.com/Chomp-More-Pylon/dp/B002P0QHQO
Dangit, let’s do just a few more:
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“Dude you opened for Pylon? That’s huge!”
I guess I am kind of a big deal.
It was a good illustration of the reality of indie-rock* immortality. The singer told us that she was using up her vacation days from her job at Kinko’s to go on tour.
* The term didn’t exist back then, I don’t think, or at least hadn’t yet taken on the meaning of “guitar rock with incompetent singing.”Report
I watched a short bit on Pylon (it might have been part of the Athens Inside Out doc?) and IIRC they originally split when they felt they had made all the music they needed to make. This despite fans and other bands like R.E.M. sort of pressuring them to reform or continue; supposedly they had no animosity towards each other, they just saw Pylon as a complete, done thing, and had no desire or ambition to take it to the next level. I don’t know if they didn’t want mass success, or truly thought there was no other place to take their sound, but they didn’t seem bitter or regretful about it, Pylon was just a thing they had done when they were kids, they were almost confused that anybody else cared.
Which is another thing about “indie rock immortality” – people like you and me cared. Much as I love, say, the world-conquering Stones, there’s always something about those bit players in the out-of-the-way corners, the underdogs who never got their due, that really excite a certain kind of rock fan’s imagination. Even more so when they appear to mostly discount their own importance and ego and aren’t bitter or disillusioned, but seem to have a healthy outlook on life.Report
“. . . They just saw Pylon as a complete, done thing, and had no desire or ambition to take it to the next level.”
There is that. There is also the thing that is kind of hard to explain to people who love your music, the obstacle to the great movie that can’t be made about tragically ignored geniuses like Big Star: Playing and making great music is really hard work, and is almost never rewarding enough to keep at it for more than a few years. I mean, it needs to provide certain regular amounts of fun and remuneration, and that balance is incredibly hard to get and maintain. Those points are sporadic punctuation marks in a dreary and demoralizing novel-length run-on sentence.
You have to admire people like Pylon, who had the wisdom to recognize that they were more likely to have fun for a short time than make enough money to do it as a job. You have to salute them for having the guts not to go for it.Report
I will reiterate that I’m 100% fine with “guitar rock with incompetent singing” – my complaint is that the term too often today dispenses with the first two words of that description.Report
Awesome.Report
“why isn’t there more gothic dub?”
do you even witch house, bro? 🙂Report
I tried, but my keyboard didn’t have those characters!
(Seriously, I remember when “Witch House” was a thing and everyone was competing for the most arcane hard-to-Google “name”, and I just wrote the whole thing off. Any suggestions?)Report
You know what, I just went to the “Witch House” wikipedia page, and ferget it.Report
salem is decent stuff.Report
“If there’s No Future, we might as well dance.”
And also if there is one.Report