What I'm Listening To, 2025.05.05
"Evolution is a process too slow to save my soul"
Sorry for the late column this week. I was under the weather a bit this weekend and am only now catching up.
Mark Fisher talked about certain music feeling like an abduction. Like it was smuggling you into a world where other things were possible. Fisher talked about it in the context of the politics of music, but I've been thinking about it lately in terms of the alien. Of the sense of being dragged into a fully-fledged world that you cannot comprehend.
Those are some of my favorite kinds of art. For the right art, I'm a willing and enthusiastic abductee.
You don't find much music like that anymore. Fisher talked about that sensation of abduction the first time he heard Public Enemy. For whatever reason, I don't think we have that many radically new artists anymore. (I have thoughts one some of the reasons why that is, but I haven't written enough about it yet to really know what I think.)
When I think of my early musical abductions, one that I can't quite explain is the Germs. Like most West Coast punk bands of the era, they weren't good musicians by any stretch of the imagination. They barely knew how to play their instruments at first. They turned their stage shows (which I am regrettably far too young and too Northwestern to have ever seen) into libidinal chaotic spasms of sound and violence. Music critic Robert Hilburn is reputed to have said (I cannot find an original citation) that “A Germs set doesn’t end — it self-destructs.”
For a teenager in a small town in the high desert, the music was inscrutable. A friend had made me a copy of the complete collection (M.I.A.: Complete Anthology) of the Germs' music. It feels strange to say that I liked it, though I did. Rather I was fascinated by it. In particular, I kept coming back to "Manimal".
The track starts in a way that almost sounds like it plans on being a rough-but-competent rock track. Then it breaks down into noise and what can only generously be described as growls. It's perhaps befitting the title that Darby Crash sounds more like a tortured creature than a vocalist.
"Evolution is a process too slow to save my soul." I would say that it's the kind of punchline that would resonate with any angsty teen, but shit, I'm in my early 40s and it still hits pretty hard today.
In a distant corner of the punk rock topology (punk may be dead now, but whatever it was, it was never a genre), I was intoxicated by the Clash from the first time I heard them. I still am, really. I’m such an annoying Clash dork that after three beers I will commandeer any jukebox and start calling them The Only Band That Matters.
I guess one thing to take away from this exploration is that my taste in rock and roll hasn't changed that much in the past two decades. I put on London Calling this weekend while I was convalescing on the couch and it did me at least as much good as the DayQuil I’d taken.
Of course, calling the Clash a punk band is kind of cheating. They were so eclectic in their influences and talents that what genre they are “as a band” changes from song to song. “Guns of Brixton” is pretty clearly straight reggae. It’s also amazing that the song still feels dangerous today. If it were released today it would cause a moral panic on both sides of the Atlantic. Hell, if it didn’t sound laid back and have such a pleasing groove and been released a decade later, maybe it would have caused something like the panic around Ice-T’s “Cop Killer”.
As long as we’re on the topic of songs about social ills and righteous violence, this new track from Moon Walker, “Monopoly Money” has been everywhere in my various recommendation feeds. It feels like a failed attempt at Fisher-ian “abduction”. It’s trying too hard to break molds and take an extreme stance.
It’s got a few good lines and it’s a nice, simple, straight-forward rock track, but it’s a little too on the nose. The fuzz over the whole thing blurs out anything musically interesting and the lyrics are too direct to be subversive and so come off as merely edgy. (Which isn’t in itself bad, edginess has its place, but it has to be in service of a specific message to be worth it.) I think I find it a little frustrating because it could been a great track with a little more polish and a little more lyrical subtlety.
I think it’s somewhat ironic that it was forced into my attention by the algorithmic bloodlines of Capitalism and it styles itself an anti-Capitalist song. I think it might be a sign that Luigi Mangione as a pop figure might have finished his cycle of Capitalist co-option.