Soundwave Epiphany 1 of 2

It's the riff. The riff is the epiphany.

I was at Soundwave festival in Melbourne Yesterday, mainly to see Faith No More again, and I'll just say that you can't see a band live for the first time twice. It was still the highlight although the crowd wasn't as good as at their sideshow, but they are a phenomenal fucking band.

So anyway, there was stage 1 and stage 2, and from when we arrived it seemed as if stage 1 was for the old timers and 2 was for the kids. I mean it went from some band called 'Paramor' to 'Placebo' whom while not my cup of tea I at least recognised and the dude has a good voice and I could tell their tracks apart. Then to AFI who can play but for some reason just seem totally emasculated, plus their fanbase look like children to me. Then Jane's Addiction, who were awesomely rad, as one of my heavy rotation bands through my adolescent years and just for being a fucking good band. The drummer can play, Perry can sing, you can actually hear the bass lines which drive the songs and Dave Navarro is the third truly A grade guitarist I've seen live.

Then JimmyEatWorld that I described to my brother as 'Folk-Punk' except we both had earplugs in so he kept arguing that they weren't 'Post-Punk' and that Talking Heads were Post-punk.

This triggerred the epiphany.

I admit, that the reason all the kids punk bands sets blended into one droning punk concert for me was that I haven't invested the time to actually get familiar with the tracks. I'm listening to Street Sweeper Social Club on my ipohd at the moment and the first few times through I couldn't distinguish between each track. But like beer, punk is something that once given my first taste I have never had an urge to aquire a taste for it. I can appreciate people who like Punk, are fucking into it and all that - but they strike me as just like the teenagers that got way into beer because they wanted to get drunk - nobs.

But the genre's were the tip off here's two lists:

List #1 Inexhaustive List of Bands I Love:
Faith No More
Primus
Rage Against The Machine
Tool
Cream
De La Soul
A Tribe Called Quest
Jane's Addiction
Stone Temple Pilots
Pearl Jam
Soundgarden
Nirvana

List #2 Inexhaustive List of Genres
Alternative Metal
Funk Rock
Rock-Rap
Anarcho punk
Death metal
Folk metal
Glam metal
Groove metal
Industrial metal
Nu metal
Progressive metal
Sludge metal
Speed metal
Stoner metal
Thrash metal
Crust Punk
Garage punk
Glam punk
Grunge
Hardcore punk
Horror punk
Skate punk
Street punk

And these would not be sufficient to describe all the genres ascribed to the list of bands I like.

I just called the scene I was into 'Alternative' and I liked the big 3 Grunge band. But even then, I can't hear sufficient differences between say a skate punk band like Blink 182 vs. The Clash being a classic Punk-Rock band. I don't understand the need for genus/sub-genre shite. It must mean something to somebody, but not to me. Again I think punk fans and metal fans are the kind to have monochromatic taste buds in music such that they can actually distinguish between two different breeds of strawberry. (That was a pretty tortured analogy).

But my collection of 10 or so bands there are all over the place. For example, there's no system way to say 'Oh you like a Rap-Metal act like RATM? Then you should definitely check out Primus!' until yesterday I didn't really understand why that statement made sense, when on the surface there's no reason a fan of a rap-metal act would be a fan of an 'experimental rock' or as is the case with all bands too hard to describe in style 'funk metal'. But it's the riff.

It's the common thread between all music I like. They are all based around a combination of melody and tempo that forms the basic unit of a song. Punk tends to be chord based and the tempo to be simply 'as fast as possible' hence it loses me. But even a relatively tight genre definition like 'Grunge' is inadequate given the vast gulf between a seminal band like Nirvana, a borderline metal act like Soundgarden and what in the 90's I considered 'Grunge for Girls' in Pearl Jam.

In fact while Pearl Jam may be 1/3rd of seattle's big 3, I would put it in the other 'big 3' being the '90's girl's album collection - Pearl Jam, Jeff Buckley and Ben Harper. Those three bands combined so often in my female friends playlists that you'd think they would logically belong to the same genre. But no, they have nothing in common, Buckley being a cover band, Ben Harper being Folk Rock and Pearl Jam being Grunge.

The genres are largely meaningless except to hard core genre fans and they in turn are largely meaningless to greater society aka the mass market. I just called it 'alternative' because in Ballarat there was Power FM which played the spice girls and Video Hits that played clip after clip of groups dancing in futuristic hallways, and then there was triple j, recovery and rage that played everything else. Not the syrup for the mass market, but still pretty massive and this was the 'alternative' in the 90s.

But yeah, seeing Dave Navarro play guitar was sweet, fucking sweet because it's always great to see somebody who really knows their vocation, a master of their instrument. Now, I might lose some of you here because Dave Chappelle's sketch is funny because it has a basis in truth - many people are glad to see the death of 80's overplaying.

I think beyond white people loving guitars and black people loving drums and latino's loving electric keyboards, I would add that in my teenage experience females seem far more partial to acoustic music while males seem to prefer (or have greater preference for) amplified music. Acoustic and Punk tend to be chord based, rather than note based in generating melodies and once again the simplistic riffs come across as boring to me.

So maybe due to the various emasculating market forces that are bringing men cosmetics, tight jeans, crash dieting and everything else to make men as profitable and feeling as ugly as a woman, it was natural that the chord based accoustic music that started with 'Time of Your Life' and has brought us acts like 'Mountain Goats' and other folksy type stuff.

Or it could just be that the balance has shifted from melody to rythm thanks to hip-hop becoming the mainstream over the latter half of the 90's listened to by more suburban white boys than African Americans by a factor of 10-1 (or something).

Jane's addiction represent a now dying era where the guitar was played like this:



Such that to me it appears that these days this is how the guitar is played:



Now hopefully if you checked out both clips you will be hearing this song through my ears and maybe they will be fresh ears. Just as when John K talks about how great packaging used to be vs how much modern day sucks he contrasts it in a way that allows me to see it through his eyes.

But yeah, I also know (myself included) that 80's overplaying was a bit over the top, all the 'wiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggidawiggida-Wow!' solo's and stadium rock and the charity festivals and shit people just got tired of it, it got too big and large and people couldn't handle the bombardment.

Navarro clearly has hangovers from the 80's style metal solos, but I think the difference between riff based rock and solo/overplaying based rock is finding that sweet spot between melody and rythm in your riff creation. The music scene I identify with emerged out from the flavor of the day which was Hair-metal that I find emasculated and just generally crappy (I can enjoy it now in a more kitsch way) that was Guns 'N Roses, Aerosmith, Mr. Big, Poison, Warwick etc. or as Mike 'Puff' Bordin put it in an interview about Faith No More's origins 'Guys who wore white sneakers and sang ballads'.

Jane's being one of the forgotten founders of the alternative scene (a lot of material I read in the 90's attributed it to Smashing Pumpkins, which is a bit like saying Obama is a contributor to the civil rights movement rather than a recipient [Which is what many people do say]) They have riffs rooted in the bass line that create space for a modest (awesome) amount of solo's and improv on guitar, drums etc.

Again though, I realise many people actually hate solo's. Many people hate rock. The wool was lifted from my eyes going on booze cruises and instead of rotating through the albums of the 1994 woodstock lineup, teenagers were grooving along to Van Morrison's 'Brown Eyed Girl'. A lot of people hate rock. I appreciate that, they like folk, accoustic and groan audibly at the concept of a solo.

The riff is what I look for, the pinacle of riffage is probably 'Killing In The Name Of' by Rage Against the Machine, no other track combines so many great riffs into one explosive song, but they do. I groan at the thought of having to endure an hour of chord based songs. Be it punk or folk.

Now it may be said that I'm trying to make a scientifically objective case for why my taste in music is superior. On the contrary, the Vampire Weekend track up top is a good song, sure I'm appalled that somebody would pick up the guitar and want to play it that way, but at the same time I believe in the core of my grey grey soul, that virtuosity and technical ability should never get in the way of good songwriting.

Scott McCloud in 'Making Comics' made up some jungian type 'artistic camps' for comic books that probably apply to all forms of arts. You have 'animist' that believe in storytelling above all else, don't let the artwork, or technical ability detract from the underlying story. What serves the story makes all the decisions for you. Every song has a story and if solo's don't help, don't do them.

Then I think punk is equivalent to comics 'iconoclast' which I personally hate. But it is where it's all about 'not selling out' and given that I'm 'animist-clasicist' in my approach, I find it hard to empathise with this artistic vision, I find it pretentious and self indulgent. I'm sure the reverse is true. I believe it is an important message though and shouldn't be done away with, but when it is in vogue I find it unbearable. In nutshell, it's the philosophy that 'everyone deserves a voice' this I can agree with, what bugs me is that in practice it tends to produce 'everyone deserves a voice - even if they have nothing worth saying' like punk bands with no message that contributes anything that the Sex Pistols haven't said already AND as despair.com says 'Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few.' and I fully appreciate the irony of posting that on my blog.

But I lean towards the classicist camp which is all about steadily building on the craftsmenship of those that preceded me. Annoyingly it seems we are doomed to live life bemoaning the state of things and talking nostalgically about 'Golden Eras' for which in music I feel was the 60's and 90's where technical proficiency was met with relative creative freedom. Just like John K's Ren & Stimpy was a breakout cartoon because he was a classicly trained animator finally given license to create a cartoon that wasn't a marketing campaign for some toy.

The culmination is the riff, watch people (if you can keep still) at a punk concert vs. one of the 90's riff based bands that headline - Punk appears to consist of raising one hand and headbanging furiously, where in the alternative acts, people's movements are simple, but complex - the head still nods but slower than punk and their torso twists in rythm, dropping one shoulder or the other and their are micro 'static' positions where the movement changes directions.

Same thing happens with hip hop due to the complexity of the beats, but often the emotions are monochromatic (to me, my love of hip-hop is the combo of wordplay and beats) in the mainstream macho-posturing, I'm great, nothing more and often less.

The last thing I'll talk about is the guitars role on a stage. In punk it becomes a drum almost. rythmic strumming of the cords, but when somebody is A grade like Navarro and 'can play' as we say, then we are talking about Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000 hour' rule, they master the guitar, and it becomes a voice. It speaks a tonal language, but can be manipulated almost as expressively as a human voice. The great guitar players are often on even footing with a bands 'front man' typically the vocalist. Often they are the same person, and in the cases where the vocalist is pretty lacklustre, outshine them.

it's because these great guitarists have invested the time to get a voice from their instrument, they can speak through it like Terminator X speaks with his hands. You hear the voice and don't know the words, but you know how it feels and this is lost when reduced to cord strumming, they simply serve as compliments to the vocals not a stand alone voice that articulates emotions without any semantic confusion.

Lost you? I'm surprised if you got this far, what an essay my simple epiphany was. But Bryce went to a Big Day Out and saw Lupe Fiasco that year and told me the next week that he 'never wanted to see another guitar on stage again' and I sympathised with him, because most guys on a stage are doing little more than holding a guitar and acting pretentious. I'm sure there are competent guitarists out there they are underground, teenagers that are obsessed with the early 90's, late 80's and early 70's late 60's acts. I just hope they come to the fore again soon, a decade of strummers is wearing me thin. I'll do what I can to create a platform for them... if I ever get the means.