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 Hannah Golightly

Fuck The Dream. Marry for the love and not the money.

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Fuck The Dream. Let’s do what the hell we want.
by Hannah Golightly

Is it me or has The Dream become a stale old rock commodity? Is the SxSW industry festival just the end of the production line? Am I right in thinking that all The Dream amounts to is the rock’n’roll cliché of teenage bedroom dreams and legends written up by clever music PRs from the 60s onwards to crystallise the bands they heralded as the new dawn of music in the collective, mass media, consciousness?

So I am gonna suggest that we all Fuck The Dream and start once again to go in search of true love – the reality that is being created in the kitchens, bathrooms, lounges and bedrooms of the most exciting bands to emerge in recent times: yeah, bands. Those groups of musical artists who once upon a time came up with music to satisfy the pleasure button in our brains and, if we were lucky, give us a fresh view of this world and maybe even something to believe in. All wannabes, Pop Idol/American Idol/X Factor contestants and the so-called ‘bands’ that belong on these shows can fuck right off with their desperation for stardom and exposure and soft spots for covering … ho hum, I mean, er, taking inspiration from – the bands that went before them. I am only gonna put out for the real deal.

Here’s the music that’s been setting my world alight.

A Love Letter to Warpaint.
For the past few years I have been wandering in the musical wilderness scanning the listings at the Brixton Academy, occasionally venturing to poke my nose between the pages of the NME and Kerrang! magazine, racking my brains among the racks of music in HMV and feeling pretty much lost and in need of a muse or, better yet, some inspiring music to broaden my horizons with. My favourite band of all time is Hole – possibly the most prolific of all the girl bands. But Hole sort of sputtered to a halt amid Courtney Love’s latest crisis and the music suffered from her poetry-curbing prescription pills. What I needed was a band to come into my life and fill that hole.

You know when you meet a guy (or girl, whatever, that’s your business) for the first time and you fall in love and you start talking about yadda yadda yadda, “I wish I’d met you years ago”? That’s how I feel about Warpaint – especially since I found out that they’ve been going for seven years! They are so special that I actually turned around and looked at the radio when I heard them for the first time. I stopped what I was doing and fell right into their world for approx 3:33.

Their sound is like nothing else I’d ever heard, but at the same time it was cool, lo-fi, bored-wistful sounding, elegantly sky-scraping and luminous. It was psychedelic without any of the usual clichés. Lyrically, it’s poetic and straight talking, sweet and casually tough. It is the sound of girls who rock. It’s the sound of girls who don’t care if you like it or not. When I eventually found out more about Warpaint, the first thing that hit me with delight was that they were girls. This is still a rare thing. The other thing that hit me was that the music was so incredible that their being girls didn’t seem in any way to  describe them. The music said everything that needs to be said. When I finally got to see one of their music videos, I knew that it was love. With the dual vocals, cohesive band (think of The Beatles’ model in terms of unity, rather than the Stones’ Mick Jagger centre piece), beautiful and cool imagery, I was taken off this dull planet and right smack bang into the trippy firecracker world of the Warpaint dreamscape.

(more overleaf)

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