So you'd like to... Be an Anti-Gen Xer (Part 1 of 2) | |
A guide by David Gasten (Denver CO USA) |
Products sampled from this guide:
Generation X (or Gen X for short) is the accepted name for a large group of individuals who are currently in their 30’s and 40’s, live in Western countries (usually in an urban or suburban environment), and tend to act in a similar manner because they watch and listen to the same stuff. They were at one time the kids that worshiped Nirvana and wrote bad poetry when Kurt K*Blam did the mortal deed. They were the ones who took Ernie puppets with them to Green Day concerts. They loved to be miserable and act smugly oblivious to everything, they loved to make ironic and snide comments, write in all lower case letters, and hate capitalism because their university professors said it was bad. But this group has a problem: they are now adults with real responsibilities. They now have good jobs, spouses/live-ins, kids, homes, stocks, credit cards, new cars, and all the trappings of a reasonable middle-class lifestyle, a far cry from the early deaths and oblivious utopia they thought they would live in as eternal nineties adolescents. But that does not stop them from having ambitions of being hipper, more intelligent, important, individual, and refined than they are in reality. A cursory look at Amazon’s top sellers list in music will reveal Gen Xers as Amazon's top demographic. Somehow by listening to U2, Radiohead, Nirvana, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, and Jack Johnson, Gen Xers feel that their music listening habits are hipper, more intelligent, important, individual, and refined than they really are, which fits in very well with their overall ambitions as described above. They feel that by listening to these music choices, they are being very “alternative” and against the grain just like they thought they were in the nineties, but, then as now, what they feel like they are and what they really are are two different things. If you aspire to be an anti-Gen Xer, then it is your goal to set yourself apart and therefore show the Gen Xers in your life how uniform they really look in their bedhead hairdos, "Vote for Pedro" shirts, low-rider jeans, and Crocs. It is your mission to have your Gen X colleagues scratching their heads or not knowing what to do with themselves (or you) when you are doing nothing more than showing them what clones they really are. A lot of the material I will show you here will also help you be an anti-indie rocker. If you are tired of indie rockers that try to make you feel stupid because you don’t know who this or that musical idol they worship is, then this how-to guide will also give you some ammunition and maybe some comfort in knowing that a lot of their idols are not so great or special after all. It will also help you see that in listening to The Velvet Underground, Nick Drake, and Can, that the snobby indie-rock crowd are following the herd far more than they realize. Here are some practical ways of thinking that are very anti-Gen X and can show a Gen Xer near you how to REALLY think outside the box. The Velvet Underground are Old Hat Oh, I can feel the atmosphere getting tense already—we’re off to a good start! Caucasian rock music has essentially followed two parallel (and oftentimes overlapping) ways of doing things since the initial musical renaissance that was the late 1960’s. One is the “straight ahead” direction, which psych and prog, heavy metal, roots rock, blues rock, and ground zero pop/rock all run in. Then there is an “alternative” direction started by the Velvet Underground, which includes some of the seventies glam/glitter rock, seventies punk rock, early new wave, hardcore punk, eighties college rock, alternative, and now indie rock and emo (in that exact chronological order). A Gen Xer is likely to put a stronger stress on the “alternative” thread started by the Velvet Underground. He/she will think that it was a glorious populist movement akin to the "Battleship Potemkin" and has probably written a pretentious university research paper about its importance. And of course a large portion of their collection will still reflect this, with groups like The Ramones, Intropol, U2, REM, and Radiohead dominating their collection. The indie rocker in your neighborhood will be even more adamant about his love for VU. If he has a band, he will very likely wear his Velvet Underground influence on his sleeve and probably even performs sloppy covers of “Femme Fatale” or “Sister Ray”. Time to face the facts. The Velvet Underground have been around for OVER 40 YEARS NOW. Yes, they are a good group, but let’s face it, every idea that they have offered us on the four Lou Reed-period albums (all of which are available on the Peel Slowly & See ![]() If you want to be different, find things that others wouldn’t think to have as influences and listen to those instead. There’s plenty of ideas in this anti-Gen X list alone to get you going. Or here’s another idea: draw some influence from Doug Yule and the oft-maligned "Squeeze" (1973) album. That sole post-Lou Reed record is a lot more fun than you may realize, not to mention that Doug Yule has a pretty uncanny resemblance to Lou Reed in a lot of ways. Check it out. The MC5 and the New York Dolls are proto HEAVY METAL moreso than proto punk Supposedly the BIG THREE of proto-punk bands are the MC5, The Stooges, and the New York Dolls. In my mind the only one of those groups who really deserves the “proto-punk” moniker is The Stooges. It's tough to ignore that “I Got a Right” is as 1977 as it comes, and that was recorded in 1972. But the MC5? I recommend you listen to Blue Cheer’s Vincebus Eruptum ![]() ![]() The MC5's "Kick Out the Jams" roars like a Rat Fink muscle car and is unabashedly heavy and ballsy to the core; listen to the heavy mid-tempo roar of "Borderline", "Ramblin' Rose", and "Come Together" to see what I mean. Punk rock gets its very name from the word "punk" which is essentially the post-pubescent version of a "brat", or alternately, "[S]omeone who took it up the..." (and that's a direct quote from William Burroughs in Please Kill Me ![]() ![]() Regarding the New York Dolls, the Dolls played at punk hangout Max's Kansas City, yes. Television and the Sex Pistols loved the Dolls, yes. And the Dolls were definitely a left-field glitter/70’s glam band, yes. But the Dolls’ real influence (musically and visually) is felt more on the glam rock of the eighties via Kiss and Hanoi Rocks. Where do you think Kiss and Jetboy got their names from? Dolls songs. As for the “punk” Dolls, listen to the first two Kiss albums (Kiss ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In the meantime, if you are interested in finding out where punk really came from, check out The Stooges' Year of Iguana ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Yes, ELP, and Queen kick tail! (And they are less pretentious than you are) I think it’s incredibly amusing how the music press has tried to demonize progressive rock (aka prog rock) over the years, essentially marking classical influences as a “no go zone” (unless the classical in question is John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen, but that’s a different story altogether). It has also created a culture where music listeners are pretentious in their lack of pretension and perceive musical ability and entertainment value as something to be scorned rather than admired. It leaves pyrotechnical groups like Queen and ELP on everybody’s “worst of” lists while everyone has a big circle jerk about how great The Germs or The Dead Boys’ "Young Loud and Sloppy" were. Whatever. Queen cover so much ground musically that there’s really no comparison; they even make the Beatles look conservative. They really were the “next Beatles”, just not too many people want to admit it. As mentioned previously, check out “Modern Times Rock and Roll” (on Queen ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As for Yes and ELP, you as an anti-Gen Xer understand that music doesn’t have to all be three-minute pop songs (although that is fine too). You also understand that there is a place for the more concentrated listening that Yes and ELP require, which is akin to the soundtrack listening that Gen Xers take part in whether they want to admit it or not. Therefore, you can see the hypocrisy when they call Keith Emerson "pretentious" and Ennio Morricone "a genius", especially because you are aware that Keith Emerson has done some amazing soundtrack work as well. Your expanded "soundtrack listening" abilities therefore allow you to listen to the surround sound rerecording of ELP’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (on the Return of the Manticore ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() You also explore from there. You’ve heard Twelfth Night’s almost flawless concept album Fact & Fiction ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Late Eighties and Early Nineties Weren’t So Bad After All I always get a kick out of hearing Gen Xers talk about how Nirvana and grunge “killed metal”, never mind that there are far more metal bands than alternative bands from that period that are still with us today. I also love how the nineties sought to bring us an “alternative” to pop, rap, dance, and metal, only to give us music that was worse. (Sponge and Bush are better than Bon Jovi and Motley Crue? Come on, now…) The funniest of all is how open-minded the Gen Xers of the nineties supposedly were, when they were just terrified to listen to any nineties band that “nobody has ever heard of”. Meanwhile, the metalheads that came before them devoured every metal album in the Noise, Metal Blade, Megaforce, Combat, and Enigma catalogs, and begged for more. This was uniformly true for all subgenres of heavy metal, from glam to thrash to extreme metal to the straight ahead stuff. I personally have a lot more fun reading about and digging through heavy metal than punk or alternative. For one thing you don’t have the pages and pages of pretentious braying about the “glorious revolution” and ridiculous debates like you do with punk. You don't have to deal with "Hey, we've got a new CD out!" kinderwhores, one-word titles that are supposed to be SOOO deep but really aren't, or "the "Nyaaaah--We're So Alternative (*Sproooing!*)" recklessness of mid-90's alternative. You don’t have to fool with politics and political correctness as much either. Heavy metal music speaks its mind (read the online magazine "Metal Sludge" to see what I mean), and is way more confident and muscular. And frankly, for every Winger, Bon Jovi, Warrant or Trixter, there’s a Trouble (Trouble ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() If you take a closer look at the supposed dry spell of the late eighties and early nineties, you will find that it was OK to rock, everyone was having a lot more fun, and there is a lot more interesting stuff from that period than you remember, just a lot of it didn’t get played on the radio. 1989 was in particular a good year for records; that year gave us Nothingface ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And that was just in the world of heavy metal. The college rock scene of the period also has plenty to offer, although as I've gone back and listened to more of the college rock from that period, I realize now how musically conservative and PC that stuff really is compared to the straight ahead music of the period (that was most definitely a ghost of things to come). Regardless, Love and Rockets (Express ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Stay Tuned for Part Two, where we will explore: —I'm Supposed to be Impressed That You Listen to Can?! I Can Dig a Lot Deeper than That.. —That “One-Hit Wonder” is Your Loss and My Gain —Nick Drake and Elliot Smith, Pioneers of "Wuss Pop" —Whatever Happened to Your Sense of Humor? and finally, the dubious —Unholy Trinity of Evil: U2 (Satan), Radiohead (The Antichrist), and Coldplay (The False Prophet) |