Why Everett True is right
First, let’s define “great”. A little while back, Everett True linked to a band called No Mas Bodas, who sounded like this:
I’m stretching a bit to call them “great” because I haven’t heard a whole album, but for these purposes I’m assuming that every track is this good. It was very exciting to hear it because I had never heard anything quite like that before. Now, 20 years ago, a band like that would come out and they’d get featured on a TV show watched by millions of people (there were fewer TV channels), written about in magazines (there were fewer publications, each widely-read), and before too long you’d get a glut of new bands coming out who sounded like them. This is how you got genres and ‘scenes’. Now, you have 300 channels but even MTV doesn’t focus on music any more. A lot of people read Pitchfork but even more don’t read any music publications and just get their music tips from fashion magazines. Yes, there’s MySpace and Youtube but how do you even know where to start looking? 20 years ago, a band like My Bloody Valentine – making music the likes of which has just never been made before – could sell 225,000 copies of their album. If they came out now, they’d sink without trace.
So you’re defining greatness purely in terms of innovation?
No. There have been plenty of innovative bands who were just bloody awful, but I just don’t think it’s possible to be truly great if you’re not pushing things forward in some way. It’s like how there are probably some bands out there who formed because they wanted to be like Warpaint or The Editors, but those bands aren’t doing anything new, so why even bother? You know, they’re pretty tunes, but you might as well go further back – to shoegazing or post-punk respectively – and pick up the inspiration from the source. The flipside of that coin is that when you only get one innovative act in isolation and no accompanying ‘scene’, it’s difficult to build the momentum so the great bands that exist – like how No Mas Bodas could be if they had more songs like that – just fizzle out after a while and it’s like they were never there. Great bands are defined by their legacy.
So, any bright ideas?
Well, for a start we should stop championing drivel. When a band with one great song releases an album that is just seven more repeats of that great song, call them up on it. Don’t say it’s bad, because it’s not – but don’t pretend like it’s great because it can’t be. A truly great album must surprise in different ways from track to track – it needs light and shade and differences in tone and style and subject and different emotions, and must do all of it well. An album that is eight competent reiterations of the single can only be very good, at best. Then if you get an album that’s worse than that – just one or two good songs and the rest of it’s boring – really call them out on it. We’re too eager to over-praise bands for having a good sound, and get overexcited about a few catchy tunes, when we should reserve our delight for the truly delightful.
And savage the crap ones?
If you like. Although that means listening to it repeatedly, which can be pretty depressing. The point is, if everyone’s shouting at the tops of their lungs about Arcade Fire then how the hell are they ever going to hear about No Mas Bodas? They just get lost in the cacophony of regurgitated press releases that passes for music writing these days. So we need to shut up about the average. Ignore the ordinary. Damn with faint praise the ones that are OK for two or three tracks. Then when we hear something that jolts us out of our stupor, then we shout it from the rooftops until people take notice.
Oh, and then hopefully they’ll be inspired to form bands and take the baton forward and develop new interpretations and form new genres and scenes and become the new Pink Floyds and David Bowies?
And Kate Bushes.
4 Responses to Why Everett True is right