The Rock Is Gonna Get You

So Fucking Hung Over. Urgggggh. I just got coffee. I put the necessary amount of sugar in, then put in the soy milk, forgot I had put sugar in it, and put more sugar in it. Great. So this post will likely not make much sense. Speaking of sugar (super obvious foreshadowing, and I'm sorry but when you line it up like that...) I saw Sugar and Gold play last night and they were damn good. The keyboard player, Nick, actually talked to me for a while about stuff and he didn't even seem to be bothered by that. Yippie!

I don’t think that I should be included in conversation when people are discussing whatever amazing band they love and or saw live cuz then they start looking at me, waiting for me to chirp in and agree/approve (OMG, I just saw the Arcade Fire live and it was the greatest experience of my life. That type of thing). Now I tend to just plead the 5th, or if I feel that they really want my approval, I’ll lie and say “yeah, I know, right!” I used to be kind of vocal about how I felt about these bands, and I’m pretty sure that my stance about them is lame, but I can’t fight it. My basic position is that right when something first comes out it’s a clean slate or “tabula rasa” (I learned that in high school). New and ready for processing and enjoyment (or not), unhampered by society, culture, etc (of course there is always promotional advertising, the stigma of the label putting it out, and any other previously released tracks by the artist/members, any articles or shit you’ve heard about the band. So just shelve all of that for a moment). I listen to it, and it’s categorized in my mind; you’d think that the books are pretty much closed on how I feel about the music. Obviously I can revisit it later, notice things about it that initially I may have missed, start to realize some of the clear influences, downright rip-off-age or sheer originality/brilliance, and put together similarities to other music which may change my original opinion. But there is another thing that can and always does taint my tastes: the outside influence of the radio, media, advertisers, the way people act when talking about said band, the type of people that they are in my mind, and the image that the band presents. I think it is best to use a real band/song as an example, to explain my thought process. I was (and still sort of am) really into LCD Soundsystem. Not to toot my own horn, but beep beep, me, me, me, I had the Losing My Edge single on Output (before DFA was technically a label mind you) and the Give it Up 7” (god I was soooooooo ahead of the curve), and I thought the fucking world of the production on a few of the songs, and the vibe was witty. So a year or two later when they were greeted with open arms by MTV, radio, and pop music, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and continued in my support. I used to work with this douche bag sales guy at a boring computer job I had a few years back, who drove a leased Audi TT convertible and once fucked a girl (very hard) in the same room I was trying to sleep in at 2am (we shared a hotel room at a convention in Miami). You can imagine how crushed I was to hear Daft Punk Is Playing at My House blaring out of his car when he arrived at work one day. I was never a fan of that particular song, but he clearly had the whole album and even tried to make conversation with me about it, and it just hurt that now Douche-America loved the thing that I felt so closely connected to. While this doesn’t cheapen the actual tracks they’ve written in anyway, it just kills all the excitement. I’ll still probably buy the next album when it comes out, and feel like a douche when the clerk rings me up. When that song Hey Ya by Outkast (who were already a huge pop phenomenon) dropped, I thought it was pretty awesome. I think I was only 20 years old at the time, but the same thought process applied. So for the first two weeks of its debut, it was catchy. Then, you start to hear it two to three times a day just by default, from just being in the supermarket, in the car, etc… it’s in the lamest commercial on TV, it’s at the party, its everywhere. You have no control over its influence and presence; it’s pushing you back and kicking you in the face repeatedly. People that I judged as lame simply by the way that they dress or act (after writing that I feel like a debaser), still could not get enough despite its omnipotence, and they were doing the dance from the video in public. They’ll are boogie-ing down to it at the house party or requesting that I play it instead of whatever I thought would make them dance. It’s around this point that I absolutely hate the song but I don’t think that it inherently makes the song lame. It’s just that the circumstances of repetition, marketing, and money make it so I’m personally offended when I hear it or have to talk about it. Give any song those circumstances, and it will no longer rank. Is that too (ice) cold?

Again, I’m a total hypocrite as my rhetoric doesn’t always apply. I am big fan of the Rolling Stones, who are possibly some of the biggest whores to ever slang out their tunes for commercial purposes and I still get juiced every time I hear Jumping Jack Flash. I mean pop music is meant for consumption en-mass, and it’s ridiculous to fight that. I know that I shouldn’t let other people have any influence on my own tastes, but they do and that’s that. After thinking about it the repetition and advertising things are probably the only legit arguments that I really have going for me. Hearing a track repeatedly against you will, is going to eventually suck regardless if it’s Britney Spears or The Fugs. If that same track is being used to sell you some shit other than the record of the same name, then it cheapens the experience even more. That is not to say that I expect musicians to turn down thousands of dollars for simply licensing out their music. Actually, I take that back; if they are not totally broke, and it’s for the new Boost Mobile commercial, they kind of should turn that shit down.

I'm including one of my all-time favorite disco jams in this post, The Rock Is Gonna Get You by Gordon's War. I'm assuming that the group was named after the movie, which is about a soldier who comes back from Vietnam to Harlem, only to find that his wife has become a heroin addict and has died of an overdose. In order to seek revenge, he then rounds up a bunch of Vietnam Vet buddies to take back the neighborhood and eliminate all the pimps and pushers, using all the tactics that they learned when they were in the shit. Grace Jones even has a small role in the film as a drug courier. I remember this movie being really boring, and I think that I turned it off before the end. It does have a bad ass soundtrack though, with all tracks performed by Badder Than Evil and vocals by Barbara Mason and New Birth. Unfortunately I don't have any of that shit to post. In researching this, I came across this post which is saying very similar shit to what I'm saying, and posting the track too, so my originality level is pretty low on this one. I would like to point out that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to pull a parallel between two things with the same name. Also I disagree with the Ghetto Disco people (but I do like their blog) saying that the movie had nothing to do with band. I think the band saw the movie and named their band after the title. Otherwise they'd be called J.R. Bailey's Disco Band or something like that.
Gordon's War - The Rock Is Gonna Get You
B.B. & Q Band - On The Beat
Kleeer - Tonight