Rock Critics Daily Operation

If we're talking about rock critics and their fans as a subculture (and since that's the topic of this blog, I like to think we are), a great place to start is rockcritics.com. It's a really useful website run by a guy called Scott Woods, who's clearly a dedicated and informed member of the subculture, and I'll be talking about it in greater detail later on, and probably linking to it a lot, since it's all about "rock critics talking to, about, and with each other."

Anyway, rockcritics.com has a sister blog, Rockcritics Daily, which offers up updates, articles and comments about all the same stuff the website is concerned with. And it's great too. So, I sent Scott some questions about the rock critic subculture last week, and he posted his answers on the blog recently, check it out here.

It pretty much speaks for itself, but to sum it up briefly and inadequately, he makes some interesting observations on the way that rock criticism and the critical mindset filters his perceptions of the music, and about the role that the internet has played in the subculture.
He points out that while the rock criticism subculture was not originally an internet-driven subculture, it has gradually become one, as the internet helps more people to discover how often they engage in criticism themselves, among other things.

Rockin' All Over the World Movies

While we're on the topic of rockumentaries, here's an interview I did a while back with Chit Chat (formerly of MGF, if that was ever your bag) about the 'Off the Record' program of rockumentaries he's hosting on 'World Movies'.

“And then I got a phone call about two hours later, from the press… Somebody saying, “look, I’ve got a report there’s a live turkey in your band room, and that you’ve requested it…”

For eight years, the man known as Chit Chat- musician, television personality, porn director- lived the rock’n’roll dream with Machine Gun Fellatio. Now World Movies subscribers can ride the roller coaster with him as he co-hosts the ‘Off the Record’ season- featuring nine classic rockumentaries in nine weeks.

The fun kicked off on April 4 with ‘Festival Express’, the tale of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and The Band taking a private train on one of the wildest tours ever recorded, and, of course, “jamming on acid.”

“At one point, they just ran out of beer. Out of alcohol, all together. So they pass around the hat, and they pull the train over at a liquor store, and just load up with shit. Like, they get 800 bucks worth. And in 1971, that’s like 4 billion dollars on alcohol. And then the Grateful Dead just put all this jello-acid in it… I’ve never been a really big fan, but you kind of get into them.”

So, the Grateful Dead liked acid. But what can upcoming docos tell us that we don’t know, Chit Chat? Well, amongst other things, ‘Depeche Mode 101’ teaches us that Depeche Mode are “possibly heterosexual”, and were somehow one of the biggest bands in the world, able to make $82,000 in t-shirt sales from one gig in 1989.

In ‘The Filth and the Fury’, ‘24 Hour Party People’ and ‘Live Forever’, viewers will experience the highs and lows of the punk, Madchester and Britpop movements. As well as the great music, these films manage to “chuck together like 20 years of English politics”.

‘Some Kind of Monster’, the tale of Metallica in therapy, shows us that where we once “wanted to see our heroes superhuman, now we wanna see them human. Post-Osbournes and all that sort of stuff, now we demand that we see counselling and therapy sessions…”

Despite being a big fan of their music, Chit Chat insists that the Radiohead documentary ‘Meeting People is Easy’ will make you want to “whack them in the fucking heads”, although in fairness, that may not be anything new.

‘Off the Record’ will also include the ultimate rock/mock/umentary- ‘This Is Spinal Tap.’ For those that have seen the film; here’s a bit of trivia: Chit Chat claims that Nigel Tufnel - the ultimate embodiment of rock clichés and the film’s most popular character - was based on legendary guitarist Jeff Beck, a friend of actor Christopher Guest.

“Jeff Beck had Buddy Holly’s guitar in his house, which you weren’t allowed to touch. And then he had an amp that went to 11. So that whole rave is a complete rip-off of Jeff Beck. You look at him, and he actually is Jeff Beck in that role.”

Not only has Chit Chat seen this fictional tale of the world’s most dysfunctional hair-metal band “100 times”, but he’s had more than a few Spinal Tap moments himself.

Keep in mind that we’re talking about Machine Gun Fellatio here. No strangers to making bizarre requests of venues and promoters; cocaine in Wizz-Fizz packets; oven mitts, lubricant, turkey basters and finally a live turkey itself were all part of the ride(r).

At the peak of their popularity, they were denied (bizarrely) only ten sheets of A4 paper to write their set list on, and (less bizarrely) cocaine at government functions. As these rockumentaries prove, the life of a rock star takes place in a different world to the one most of us live in.

“People say you change when you get into a band. Fuckin’ oath, you do! One day, you’re working a straight job, and the next minute, you’ve got 10,000 people singing the words that you’ve written, and wanting to fuck you, and giving you lots of free coke and turkey basters, and you’ve got sneaker companies giving you free sneakers and Playstations…

“You turn up, and your hotel’s booked, and there’s a new car waiting for you, and you never have to clean up, because you’re in hotels… and you wake up, and you go, “well, what should I do with this bag of coke?””

True Grunge Ways

Greetings and Salutations. My blog is about the subculture of rock critics, and I'm gonna get right into it with a semi-quasi-relevant post! Yay!

Those of us at the lecture on Wednesday will remember 'Hype!', Doug Pray's Seattle-Grunge-era rockumentary. Something that interested me about it was that, probably for dramatic effect, you get the impression for a long stretch of the flick that Nirvana weren't really part of the burgeoning Seattle scene, and then came out of nowhere, stole the riff from Boston's 'More Than A Feeling' and blew the world away.

So what I thought would be interesting, being the geek that I am, was to go back and take a look at a few of the NME and Melody Maker articles from the time (handily collected into one magazine by Uncut a couple of years ago) by Everret True and his contemporaries, the writers the film credits for kick-starting the grunge phenomenon in the UK.

True's first grunge article, and the one we saw mentioned in the lecture, was 'SUB POP- Seattle: Rock City', from the March 18 1989 edition of Melody Maker. Crediting Sonic Youth's championing of Green River and John Peel's love affair with Sub Pop for kickstarting Britain's interest in grunge, a couple of things stick out about the article:

1. True loves Tad. Seriously, in a man-crush, oh-my-god-how-much-does-True-want-to-get-it-on-with-Tad sort of way. In True's own words....
"A mountain of sound. The heaviest man in all creation. The rockiest gnarliest dude you'd ever want to wake up next to. An enormous talent. From the backwoods of Idaho and trained as a butcher. If you're talking about conviction and immediacy, then you're looking at Tad."
True :3 Tad 4eva. The funny thing is, he wasn't alone. The general media vibe (meaning the "media" that cared enough to notice) in those days seemed to be that Tad were going to be grunge group that conquered the world. Speaking of which...

2. True, in 1989, in the article that broke Grunge worldwide, on Nirvana:
"Basically, this is the real thing. No rock star contrivance, no intellectual perspective, no master plan for world domination. You're talking about four guys in their early twenties from rural Washington who wanna rock, who, if they weren't doing this, would be working in a supermarket or lumber yard, fixing cars. Kurtd Kobain is a great tunesmith, although still a relatively young songwriter. He wields a riff with passion."
Of course, it goes without saying that Nirvana became rock stars, at which point their songs became intellectually (over?) analysed and they dominated the world. Nice one.
But the point is, Nirvana were right there when True embarked on his international voyage for the New Sound, so much so that he rated them ahead of Soundgarden and Mark Lanegan's Screaming Trees.
I mean, sure, they were no Tad, they weren't about to cross over to a mainstream audience or anything, but at least True acknowledged that "Kurdt Kobain" and his crew were a vital part of the scene; he'd even positively reviewed their single 'Love Buzz' in Melody Maker a month earlier.

In July 1989, Melody Maker's Edwin Pouncey raved about 'Bleach', the group's debut album...
"This is the biggest, baddest sound that Sub Pop have so far managed to unearth. So primitive that they manage to make labelmates Mudhoney sound like Genesis."
Yep, Nirvana made Mudhoney look like a band whose drummer would go on to worldwide pop stardom in his own right. Oh well, hindsight is 20-20.
Anyway, the article was fairly prescient when it noted that Nirvana were going to obliterate G'n'R, so that's cool.

Pouncey is even more on the money in his September interview with Kurtd, when he declares at the outset that the band's "grungy pop" ensured their "future as the next BIG thing."

In October (still '89), True interviewed Kurtd for Melody Maker, and noted that those in the know saw him as the "cream of the crop" among the new wave of Seattle talent. But True was also beginning to become weary of the new sound, predicting that "Soon it will be time to sweep the whole sorry mess under the carpet and wish that Jimi Hendrix had never set his guitar on fire," although I think he's making fun of the nature of trends more than anything there.

In November, they released the single 'Blew', which recieved a great notice from the NME, but got a royal ass-kicking from Simon Reynolds at the Melody Maker, who described it as "dismal, muddy, thuggish trad-rock that adds further weight to the notion that Sub Pop is the hype of '89."
I feel kinda bad for Reynolds, because amidst the Madchester scene, Nirvana circa '89 probably did sound like "muddy, thuggis trad-rock" at first, but it's still the sort of review that would have made him look bad in a few year's time. Not Rolling-Stone-giving-Britney-more-stars-than-Nevermind-bad, but still...

Rounding out the "hype of '89", in the 16 December edition of the NME, Edwin Pouncey, reviewing Nirvana's support slot for Tad at the Astoria, had this to say:
"Nirvana are Sub Pop's answer to The Beatles, pop masters with a sense of hard rock and songs that penetrate the memory of their audience. 'Blew' (their latest 45) is a classic example of this, a hit for sure if the rest of the world wasn't so stupid and half asleep."

Not to worry, Edwin, those alarm clocks would start ringing in a year or two's time. 'Hype!', indeed.

(BTW, if you liked 'Hype!', check out 'Scratch', director Doug Pray's equally great hip-hop-umentary.)