Right after I fired off that last post I came across this interview with Ian Svenonious which is definitely worth a read. He has a reputation for being ironic and tongue-in-cheek, but I think this is earnest, and either way I pretty much agree with everything he is saying here.
Excerpt —>>
I think we’ve grown up in this era where rock bands, the rockists, they weren’t really proponents of music as they had kind of subsumed all expression, all art. They became poets, play actors, their records were art, and I think that was all based on the record cover, it was this extra dimension, it made this music physical but it also had to be filled with something. You had this big picture which lent itself this kind of importance, and then you had liner notes, and those inevitably became propaganda, just marketing.
So groups and musicians became more like cult leaders, more ritualistic, trying to recruit people into their cults. That’s really what’s interesting about rock, the people aren’t just content to play music, they have to be remembered, they demand all this kind of fealty from their subjects. To really be a fan you have to show your fandom, you have to own the t-shirt, you have to know the songs, what songs are on what record…
Follow them on tour…
You have to support them. It becomes a religious cult or a political party or whatever it is. As the record has diminished versus CD’s and now the MP3, the whole aspect of a group really diminishes. Groups are becoming much less powerful as cults, in fact I don’t think groups demand that kind of fealty anymore, people don’t really expect to give that kind of power to them
. . .
With all the Dischord groups, it’s almost like you grew up with this sense of urgency in your live shows. Every Dischord band had this incredible dynamic and it seems like it was pretty important to them. Is that maybe where that came from, just the DC scene in general, encouraging you to act out like that?
It’s all the Bad Brains. Every band in DC knew the Bad Brains were the most dynamic live band. Rites of Spring, obviously Fugazi, Minor Threat, Void. And it’s all really gnarly, physical, exciting. It’s meant to be exciting. And I think a lot of times it really was. That’s definitely the context we all came up in. And it’s interesting because it’s all like a process of unlearning to perform in another way. That’s just second nature to people from that generation in DC, to be very physical. But like British people are continental, being cool, like there’s this idea like why would I try too hard, it’s not very cool.
Just strike a pose and leave it at that…
Right, like Jesus and Mary Chain, or Oasis, any of those groups that just kind of stand there. And that’s cool too, that’s just a whole other approach…because they’re just much more focused on the record. That’s the thing, Dischord and DC, punk, hardcore, it all came out of a context where there was a feeling that there was no access, and there was all this anger and just like “how do we get across?” We had to do it physically with our bodies. In England, they’ve always had access. Now bands in America feel like they have access. There’s no longer any anger, no sense of a need to exert yourself because you can do it through YouTube or you can do it through the blogs, do you know what I mean?
