Song of the day – 410: Street Eaters
Here’s the quote for the barricades:
Street Eaters are just symmetrical/asymmetrical girl-boy beauty, clambering over the scratched remains of a thousand worn-0ut seven-inch singles and parading their love for POP and love for PUNK (the two are synonymous here) for those who care to see.
There was an incident in mid-1991, round the time Nirvana were recording Nevermind. Maybe it was the start of 1992. I don’t care. It was when I was hanging out in San Francisco – might’ve been LA, fairly sure it was San Fran – record-shopping for seven-inch singles with Mac from Superchunk. (Courtney Love rushed up to him the following night in LA and, pointing to me, said “Stick with this man, he’ll make you a STAR!” – a statement that didn’t endear Courtney to Mac at all. And made him look at me rather oddly for the remainder of that trip. Those slack motherfuckers.) We travelled the hills, Mac leading the way, pulling into one secret shop after another, and I ended up with a haul of around 83 choice American underground seven-inch slices of beauty and dissonance (all paid for, courtesy of IPC Media and my seemingly endless expense account). I returned home, wrote up several articles, at least one of which proclaimed that “I’d seen the future of American underground music” or something similarly crass. Whatever. I was just trying to point out that Pavement and Superchunk, Sebadoh and Bettie Serveert – these were just the tip of a very large iceberg indeed, most of which was always going to remain hidden from view unless you were driven enough to seek it out. (I mean, damn: I tried my hardest to draw attention to bands like The Grifters and Guided by Voices, Smog and Palace … but you think anyone paid any attention? Does anyone even give a fuck who Dogbowl or Will Oldham or Steve Malkmus is, 20 years down the line?) I was trying, in my clumsy way, to alert my readers to the massive sense of community that continues to permeate and fuel the US underground. The sense of artifact. The sense of occasion. The sound of gloriously (old skool) grungy basses and girl-boy vocals powering out, sweeping all before them. Slack motherfuckers. It was the time of Huggy Bear. Gigs in houses were starting to occur, more or less. And lofts. And playgrounds. And disused warehouses. The hard-won lessons of Olympia WA and Washington DC were sweeping the nation.
And so it’s continued.
Damn it. Listen. You’ll either know what I’m talking about, in which case you’ve already downloaded for free the righteous mix-tape of Secret Punk and Basement Pop I posted up here a couple of weeks ago, and you’re grooving groovily to the pure pop/noise thrills of Street Eaters, or you’ve already fucked off back to huddle secretively over your horde of unused Beach Boys bootlegs. Or maybe you’re doing both? I have no real idea.
Here’s Street Eaters. Enjoy. (You know what single phrase/word I hate most in 2012? Enjoy. Fucking reductionist retards.)
Here’s the link to the free Secret Punk and Basement Pop mix-tape – you need to click in the top left hand corner of the screen, where it says “tracks”.
