Competition Skank! Competion Skank! Competition Skank!

Last Saturday was the Westheimer Street Festival here in Houston which is like a buffet of local acts for any music fan. While I'd hoped to at least catch a few bands, my 8-year-old hard drive (which I had planned on replacing in April) had other ideas. Thus my afternoon was spent rescuing data because there is nothing I love doing more than booting into the command line and entering Unix commands!* This is neither here nor there but I did regret missing a few acts especially when I saw this picture of Rusted Shut from ADR.

So, I began writing a post to a local board lamenting this when, on MyYahoo, I saw that there was an image of another band whom I was very happy to have missed at the same festival and I felt it was a funny juxtaposition of bands. I mean both bands have a shtick, sure, but while one lead singer looks like he got up from a bad night of drinking and likely would make you keel over if he breathed on you (Rusted Shut), the other was a spectacle of hippy-dippy shirtless narcissism. I posted the images with no other commentary other than "Cons - Missing this:" and "Pros - Missing this:" (a minor and I felt innocuous jab at best) and I got flamed for being meanspirited. Well, maybe I do have a mean streak when it comes to bands like that one but, by the same token, I have a mean streak against films like "Mr. Hollands Opus" and "Patch Adams". Yes, they have little effect on my life but I find them infinitely grating and worthy of ridicule; I just can't help myself. I can spot one of those movies a mile away and the same goes for bands whose hair is better than their music.

Am I being too Judgmental?

OK! I am pretty guilty of sizing-up bands and making snap judgments based on how they present themselves but I make no apologies for it because I think that to some degree there is some validity to my aversion for certain types of bands. Now, I'm not going to use the band from my post the other day because I pretty much had my say a year ago on them and have been pretty good about not beating up on them and this isn't really about them anyhow so, to illustrate my point, take a look at these two (we'll leave them unnamed) Houston and Austin bands:

OK, seriously, can go back to the Don Walsh Photo?



See. Is it only me? I mean, I don't know about you but I know which band I'd rather be listening to just from these photos. Am I being prejudicial? Sure. I just have this big aversion to bands with a stylist. If you look like you spend at least as much on grooming as you do on your equipment, you've got to overcome a big mountain with me because I like my bands stinky, sweaty, and ill-mannered or at the very least comprised of members with poor social skills and a fashion sense borne out of necessity. If you are in a band, you are there to make music not to fuck around with primping yourself. I don't mind you doing a stage show like Dio or go all Pink Floyd with the lights; there you are putting on a SHOW that hopefully will compliment the music! Yet, if the stage show is just making yourself pretty, my gut tells me the focus isn't the music, it isn't the audience, it's yourself.

The Great 1985 Metal Album Experiment

Maybe it all goes back to participating in the 1985 Metal LP experiment lead by my esteemed colleagues Mike Schaeffer and Brian Firr . Mike's idea was that there was not enough new metal in our record stacks so off we went to Sound Warehouse to buy a dozen metal LPs. Surely we could find at least one good album and expand our metal universe beyond Black Sabbath. Out of the stack, one album (and only one) stood out as the one that rocked while the rest were rubbish. Now mind you the albums were bought completely at random with no prior knowledge of any of the bands but I think it was pretty easy to figure out which LP was most likely to kick ass just from the band photos on their back covers. Here are two of the bands from that stack. One photo represents one of the 11 shitty albums and the other photo was the one gem. See if you can guess which one kicked ass based purely on the band images.

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That's right, the ugly pimply-faced poorly dressed guys who looked like the guys you saw in the smoking section in High School. See what I mean? Don't lie, even if you didn't know that the latter was Metallica you'd know without hearing a note which band rocked harder. In fact the only thing you could say for bands like Keel and their ilk is that more than likely they got more action than Metallica. Fine, all I know is we went back and bought Ride the Lightning the following week and pitched the other albums in a field - case closed.

Maybe This is Purely an American Phenomenon!

I hear you, Echo and the Bunnymen had their goofy haircuts, Bauhaus wasn't far behind, and I'm sure you are thinking of a bunch of others who were great bands along those lines but those were English bands and the bands from the UK are simply able to get away with dressing up much more than we can. When we try to play dress up on this side of the pond this is what we get:

That's right, David Johansen in drag - easily the ugliest drag queen ever! Now if there was ever an award for band trying to find a look, failing miserably, and fooling nobody, it was the Dolls. Despite the bad drag and their best efforts, they still couldn't get the stink of a ratty New York bar out of that photo. I suppose that, in failing in a look, the Dolls succeed in being even more vile and skanky, and when you get down to it, skank is what Rock and Roll is all about. But some bands simply can't handle the skank and the result is this:

If you were around in the 90's, you could tell this band was going to suck eggs the instant you saw them. They could dress up all they wanted but these guys were from Minneapolis and, to this day, I sure as hell can't catch even a whiff of Schell from this photo. Husker Du, the Replacements, Prince, and The Time; each embraced their hometown skank in their own way. What does dressing Eurotrash have anything to do with Minneapolis? Nothing.

Rock Lives So Long as You Embrace The Skank!

Here is the thing. Rock wasn't some form of music that was sponsored by the elites of society, it was the bastard child borne from populist forms of music that no self-respecting white adult would touch in the 50s. It stunk, was boorish, ugly, and worst of all had the taint of the "lower" classes and races. Rock and Roll was simply too skanky to go over well at the Rotary Club unless they could get Pat Boone to butcher it.

Over the years, as rock has become just another genre with its catalog of tropes that could be recognized by anyone of the babyboomer or younger generation, it has lost its skank. In the place of skank is an SUV being sold to you with the Buzzcocks as background music. Gone are the days of radio banning instrumentals like Link Wray's Rumble and instead bands like Of Montreal can whore it up with a restaurant chain and nobody bats an eye since nothing sticks it more to the man than being on the man's payroll.

But don't call the mortician yet. You see somewhere in your city skank lives. This was reaffirmed for me when Rosa took me to Southmore House the other day. Inside was a scene that thrives despite zero local press coverage or respect. Here were a bunch of kids in a ratty building with spray paint on the walls and a bathroom that smelled worse than a drive through Pasadena's infamous refineries. The place was pretty hot and here it was only March but that didn't stop anyone. On stage and on the floor were Humanicide - a band that wore its politics on its sleeve as it ground out music that was loud, heavy, and fast. The heat, the sweat, the volume, the smell, and enthusiasm all without concern for fashion or approval told me that, contrary to a lot of literature, rock is not dead nor is it reduced to being a soundtrack to a consumer culture. As long as there are people who have music drip off of their sweat-drenched shirts every week, it lives.

I know it's only rock and roll but I like it, like it, yes I do.

Links:
Rusted Shut
Houmanicide
Gulf Coast Hardcore

Photo Credits in order:
Don Walsh image ADR
Penny Royal by Andaleeb Kazi (I mock the band but it is a nice photograph. I like the saturated color.)
Dames Violet by Brian Baggett
Keel, Metallica, New York Dolls, Information Society - Hey I tried to find th ephotographers but have had no luck. If anyone knows please let me know.
Humanicide at Southmore by Rosa Foto

* In case you are counting that's two Nappers whose computers have crashed in the span of a week.