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[ataxi]

Cabaret is dead to me

I've been watching a tape of the band Sons and Daughters programming Rage* that I stuck on to record just before collapsing into the sack last night.

Sons and Daughters played a lot of stuff I'm going to call "cabaret-ish" where the focus narrows in on singer as icon, idealised as a replacement for some set of virtues. They

Comments

[tommmo]

** Can't really say why, but indie music at the moment seems to hold relatively few frontpeople with anything original or interesting to say. Lyricists seem to have gotten better at imagery and worse at substance. Probably, I'm just getting old.

Do you think it has much to do with the fact that, in the "indie" scene, there aren't many singers that go to lengths to project that image of "larger-than-life-ness" that was so predominant in decades past? A great many bands these days seem to go to great lengths to look and sound like they could quite conceivably live down the road from you, rather than in a gold mansion atop the clouds. Or something :P

And that probably relates to the fact that the internet has made so-called hipster music easily accessable, so a lot more of these "everyman" bands are finding their way into the greater spotlight.

If they don't want to project the image of being some sort of rock-god enigma, then maybe they don't want to put forward much of any kind of statement at all, other than a simple "I play music. Please enjoy."

*shrug*

(Jack White excepted from all of the above, obviously.)

[ataxi]

Hmm, I'm not sure I really agree. I think maybe it's one or two things: firstly, bands that do have something identifiable "to say" now often do so as a group, instead of as musicians-behind-frontperson e.g. Sleater-Kinney, Stereolab, GYBE!

The other thing is that indie lyrics have veered towards obscurantism and imagery. Often they're beautiful, but they don't have the direct meaning that's present in something by PIL, or narrative like a Nick Cave epic. It's "silver gnomes up in my dome" etc., challenge you to find any meaning in that track that isn't hidden behind layers of cobwebs ;-)

And yeah, the indie idol thing died a bit, not least because alt-pop-rock pretty much died in the charts when R&B arrived commercially in a big way in the mid 90s after grunge and MOR grunge-variant rock (currently enjoying its last hurrah in the form of Nickelback, who sound more like the Corrs than Nirvana) petered out.

The trouble with some indie bands who try hard to be just like the guys down the road is that they are everymen, i.e. they aren't any more talented or interesting than people you actually know. It also means basic clothing (Converse, Bonds T-shirts, blue jeans, unkempt hair) becomes incredibly fetishised as the gateway to looking "normal" suddenly becomes an unachievable standard of hyper-normality.