Rock Acid Rock

Yesterday I was drawing this picture:


I really struggled with the composition and ended up using a technique I'd read about but never really use. It's called gesture drawing or perhaps expression drawing. It's where you are specifically drawing an action, and is meant to be a very quick fluid scribbly drawing.

I wanted to specifically capture the explosiveness of the guitar, and when I did, it set me off on an almost instant tirade. I was going to put this post into the caption where I normally post these. But since it is a picture of a friend I didn't want to detract from his moment of glory.

Anyway here is the tirade:

what the fuck is with music of the last decade. In fact if you want to get specific I can specify the exact moment I felt alien and alone in the world of music - June 8th, 1999.

The day Californication came out. You see I'd been looking forward to that Album, having spent most of my high school years catching up on Bay Area music. Red Hot Chilli Peppers' One Hot Minute and Blood Sugar Sex Magic were on high rotation. When I heard RHCP had finally replaced Navarro with Frusciante I was expecting big things.

The big thing though turned out to be 'Scar Tissue' and is perhaps the perfect illustration of exactly what I don't understand. Scar Tissue is a surfie-esque ballad for Rip-Curl wearing motherfuckers parked on the Lorne boulevard with their windows down. It is musically good. The Frusciante solo is nice, melodic, soulful. the lyrics picturesque, the promo video had some vision. It's a neat and tidy song.

It is however, utterly and horribly unexplosive. It is restrained, disciplined, lacking in energy. Aside from 'Get On Top' and to a (much) lesser extent 'Around the World' the album lacked that epileptic explosion of funk-rock-metal-punk that had been perhaps a little too much on Mothers Milk, just right for BSSM and OHM and was now almost absent from Californication.

Anyway, I had expected these guys to come back with something akin to BSSM, at the least, not this... and I remember distinctly voicing my dissappointment in the album to a cluster of guys that liked Metallica, ACDC, Regurgitator (this was 1999) that I had shared Faith No More albums with and you know what they said? YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAID?!!

'I think it's good/I like it.'

I felt outgunned, cornered, alone. Had everybody lost their senses?

Within 2 years I had come to accept that the bands I was into at the time were simply getting old. I bought this 'lifestyle' progression argument that said when musicians were young they just wanted to be technical masters, play as fast, loud and complicated as possible and eventually they all settled down to write... well scar tissue presumably.

I know MY SHIP HAS SAILED. I know it. I get it. I just don't understand why.

Let me put it this way, what I choose to believe is that if Mozart was born today he wouldn't have chosen Piano Forte as his instrument of choice, and he wouldn't have been trying to get sponsored by Austrian Royalty. He'd be picking between the East and West Coast of USA and would probably play a combination of guitar and synth. He wouldn't be doing classical, he would be trying to emulate Trent Reznor or something and more than likely surpassing him if he was indeed Mozart born today.

And by that the view I'm projecting onto the world is that which says seeing somebody play a face melting guitar solo on stage is just so much more exciting than watching a flawless recital of Rachmaninov's 3rd (or whatever), it's explosive. Thanks to magnetic coils and electricity a tiny piece of wood becomes a soul-destroying weapon. A piano forte or harpsichord, remains the same instrument.

That's what I expect of everybody else, this same vertical appreciation of explosiveness.

Now that I've painted myself as fairly parochial, let me say, I do appreciate Bach, the piano, folk music. I simply don't understand why it's so popular right now.

We live in times where the defenders of freedom are flagrantly invading other countries with little pretext and fucking shit up, where the internet makes it hard for institutional crimes to be consealed from those passively perpetrating them. This is a time to be angry and passionate. Why oh why then is the music in vogue so apathetic?

That's what I don't understand. Don't people universally have the same response to the energy levels in music. Isn't it pure physiollogy. I mean you don't see people listening to folk music ever get up and agro and get in your face. You don't see peeps headbanging at an Angus & Julia Stone concert. You do at a Pantera concert. Why do so many people want to take it easy? Why is this meme dominant. Why has it dominated for so long?

I don't understand.