Hockey, Quentin Tarantino, and Things that Bother Me

If you’re a little confused, let me clear it up: Bollocks! has not become a sports blog (that won’t happen until hurling invective becomes an Olympic event). Hockey is a band from Portland (!) that might remind astute listeners (or even not-that-astute listeners) of LCD Soundsystem or the last Yeah Yeah Yeahs record. By itself, that’s not an entirely bad thing – Hockey’s debut album, Mind Chaos is an enjoyable enough listen that doesn’t take itself too seriously. I rate it about on the level of the Killers’ first album, except the dudes in Hockey are far better musicians than the Killers.

No, Mind Chaos is not really a problem for me except that, when I listen to it, I get this feeling – a feeling a get when I watch Quentin Tarantino movies now, by the way -  well, it’s hard to explain. Let me try, by way of meandering analogy.

When I watch Tarantino movies, I sense two things: 1) Quentin Tarantino has a vast knowledge of cinematic history and is able to cobble together a usually-interesting pastiche out of that and 2) Quentin Tarantino clearly thinks that Quentin Tarantino is the coolest motherfucker who ever lived. I watched Inglourious Basterds the other night and it was filmed well, and fine as far as it goes, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tarantino probably jerked off while watching the dailies from this thing. Tarantino’s ego is obscuring his art for me at this point, and I’m no longer compelled to reward him for it. You might think that’s a terrible reason to stop watching Tarantino movies, but cultural preference being entirely subjective, I’ll offer you my usual follow-up reason for why I do or don’t like something: Fuck you, I don’t need to justify my likes or dislikes to anyone (and neither do you).

Now, Ben Grubin (whose voice is actually pretty awesome) and company may not believe themselves to be geniuses – in fact, the lyrics on much of Mind Chaos suggest that they think quite the opposite. They’re just out for a dance-rocky good time, and I’m  not gonna dump on them for that. But Hockey’s music is so hyper-stylized (I may be damning myself by saying so, but Pitchfork was right to point out Hockey’s mostly agreeable cut-and-paste job of LCD Soundsystem and the second Strokes album) that it runs the risk of devolving into a shallow aestheticism – one song is the dance hit of the summer, one (“Four Holy Photos”) is the Dylan-esque song full of seemingly random imagery and strident harmonica bits. What I fear, is that Hockey’s triumph, if achieved, is the triumph of style over substance. I feel a similar discomfort about liking the Dandy Warhols’ 13 Tales from Urban Bohemia and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Howl album. Both are fine albums from a musical perspective, but both are also indicative of two bands playing dress-up (it’s sadly telling to me that Howl remains Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s finest hour. And 13 Tales is pretty much the only Dandies album that shouldn’t go fuck itself). To Hockey’s credit, I think they’re playing dress-up to a much smaller degree than the Dandy Warhols, but I’ve always been a fan of balance, and even in the age of Lady Gaga, I think we can balance style and substance (the first person who attempts, with any seriousness of purpose, to argue to me that Lady Gaga’s music is in any way substantive will win a lifetime supply of scorn from yours truly).

I suppose some pretentious wanker who took a class in post-modernism might be compelled to suggest that maybe Hockey is striking such a large dance-rock pose to comment on poserdom itself. After all, the opening track on the album is called “Too Fake.” Surely, this wanker might suggest, that song is Grubin calling posers out as much as he’s labeling himself one, yes? My answer is a solid maybe. I know you can be in a rock band that comments on the nature of being in a rock band, but I also know that, to make it work, you have to be precisely as awesome as the Velvet Underground. But there’s nothing on Mind Chaos to suggest to me that Hockey is operating on any deeper level than the good-time music that litters the album. So I like them, but I’m careful not to like them too much until they prove that they are worth taking seriously.

And, lest I be accused of being humorless, let me clarify what I mean when I say, “worth taking seriously.” I don’t mean I want Hockey to start ingesting heavy doses of Joy Division and losing the quite-welcome spring in their step. I mean I want to hear something from them that suggests they’re doing something other than proving that any idiot can make a rock record (of course any idiot can make a rock record. How many albums does Kid Rock have? The problem is, I have no time for bands that exist to prove this point. That dead horse has been beaten enough, kids. Leave it alone). I’m certainly not asking Hockey to make a second album as colossally misguided as the Killers’ Sam’s Town, an album that crawled so far up Bruce Springsteen’s ass that I believe the Boss had to have Brandon Flowers surgically removed. I just want to know that they’re not laughing all the way to the bank. I’ll give you a for instance: “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem, probably my favorite song of the last decade (that, right there, is all the counting down of the best of the decade that I’m willing to do, folks. Take it or leave it), is an excellent dance/pop song but it resonates much deeper than that. There isn’t a happy moment that I’ve had in the last ten years that couldn’t be adequately soundtracked by that song, and I guarantee you I won’t be saying that about anything from Mind Chaos in ten years. Now, if Hockey’s second album is more Sound of Silver and less Sam’s Town, well… it probably won’t be. But I’m willing to be pleasantly surprised.

The Case Against Green Day

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how much I dislike Green Day. I’m serious – this is the fourth draft of this post that I’ve started because it’s also really hard to decide where to start discussing all the things I don’t like about them. Do I start with all the better bands they’re ripping off? Do I start with the black-dominated wardrobes and guyliner? Do I start with some of the laziest, most cringe-inducing songwriting I’ve ever heard? Do I start with the fact that they’re considered by some people who may or may not have cognitive disabilities (including themselves) to be a punk band?

Maybe I’ll start there, because that bugs the living shit out of me (and because I have a lot of love for good punk music. A lot of love). When I think of punk bands, I think of (who doesn’t?) the Clash, the Stooges, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead Kennedys, the Jim Carroll Band, early Bad Religion, and – for some current reference – the Thermals, the Old Haunts, Titus Andronicus, and the Future of the Left. Green Day is, at best – at best – a dull, lifeless distillation of the style of music those awesome (and vastly superior) bands play(ed). The Clash gave us, “Let fury have the hour/ anger can be power”; Green Day’s “Know Your Enemy” (one of the most repetitive, godawful songs I’ve heard all year. Billy Joe Armstrong knows one word that rhymes with enemy: “enemy.” Oh wait. That’s the same word. I hate this band) literally waters that down to “Violence is an energy” and “Bringing on the fury” and maybe I’m paranoid, but that seems a little close to be coincidence. Am I accusing Green Day of callously ripping of their betters? You bet your ass I am. And even their peers – one of 21st Century Breakdown‘s many awful tracks is “East Jesus Nowhere” which features a guitar riff eerily similar to (and by “eerily similar to”, I mean “shamelessly ripped off from”) Marilyn Manson’s “Disposable Teens.” Have you left no sense of decency, Green Day? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

When American Idiot came along back in 2004, lots of people loved it because they hated the President and all the bullshit he was up to. But what did that album really say about…well, anything? The answer is (drum roll please) fuckall. Sure, they got their best line ever on the title track (“I’m not a part of a redneck agenda”) but the rest of that album was generic suburban alienation bullshit. They spent 13 tracks saying nothing the Clash didn’t say better in “Lost in the Supermarket”.  The best moment of that album is “American Idiot” and it’s eclipsed in every way by (take your pick) “White Riot” by the Clash, “California Uber Alles” by the Dead Kennedys, “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, and even “Time for Heroes” by the Libertines*.  And Green Day’s utter lack of ability to handle anything approaching substance led them to squander a great song title in “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” Any punk band worth a damn (hell, any kind of band with any kind of sense) doing a song with that title in 2004 could’ve made an awesome song about how frustrating it is, only a few years after 9/11, to be constantly reminded to “never forget.” But what does Green Day give us? “The innocent can never last.” Really? That’s all you got? And this was their Big Meaningful album, folks. Not only does that fail to scratch the surface, it fails to come anywhere near the surface. It floats around in space, consulting maps and charts in a futile attempt to determine the location of the surface. And it’s fucking banal, musically and lyrically. Especially lyrically. In the span of one song, we get that prize-winner about the innocent and “here comes the rain again/ falling from the stars/ drenched in my pain again/ becoming who we are.” That might be fine for any given 8th grader’s Live Journal entry, but it doesn’t cut it for discerning listeners of rock music (much less bands that claim to make rock music). It’s like Armstrong just pulled words from his copy of Poetic Imagery for Dummies Pretentious Assholes. And don’t even get me started on “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” By itself, that song puts Green Day at the top of the list of bands that need a serious cock-punching.

But people are buying their shit at an ungodly rate. Rolling Stone, a magazine whose irrelevance actually increases exponentially with every review, raved about 21st Century Breakdown‘s “rage filled punk anthems.” The Los Angeles Times called the album a “dazzling musical journey.” If “Know Your Enemy” and “21 Guns” are rage-filled punk anthems and/or dazzling musical journeys, we’re in trouble. You can like whatever you want, but I’m warning you: if you let bands like Green Day (or My Chemical Romance or any other band that is just dying to write the anthems of your prepubescent/adolescent/adult angst) climb to the top of the punk and/or rock heap, you’re running the risk of creating a nation of black-clad, whiny dullards who are capable of expressing their feelings/desires/politics only in the most vague and offensively bromidic terms. That’s a nation where Green Day dominates the radio, every television show and movie is about emo vampires, and people think Dane Cook is funny. Believe me, America: we can do better than that. We must do better.

*This song features the line, “Did you see the stylish kids in the riot,” which I mention only because it occurs to me that Green Day are the stylish kids in the riot (the kids who show up to say they were there, but don’t expect them to hurl any bricks, thank you very much). For the sake of contrast, Joe Strummer, who wrote “White Riot” actually participated in a riot. He and Paul Simonon attempted to set a police car on fire while the British cops beat up some black kids. I’m not advocating destroying cop cars in hilarious ways, but it’s certainly nice to know that Strummer and the Clash weren’t afraid to put their money where their mouths were.

The Boy Least Likely To Impress Me

Admittedly, a large portion of the music I like could be, maybe possibly, filed under the header “Indie.” And here’s why I hate that: it’s meaningless as a genre, for starters. It’d be better to call it “music the radio doesn’t play because the radio sucks” (unless it’s Minnesota’s 89.3 The Current). The Boy Least Likely To is another reason I try to just list bands I like instead of saying I like “Indie” music. Because I’m afraid, deathly afraid, that someone will hear that I like indie stuff and think I like Sufjan Stevens and The Boy Least Likely To.

I can’t even remember why I thought I would like The Law of the Playground. Because I really don’t. It’s actually almost everything about indie I hate. Childlike innocence I can deal with, but The Law of the Playground is so prancingly aw-shucks that it makes me want to puke. It’s an album that would scream, “Look at me! I’m innocent and cute!” except that it doesn’t scream anything ever. It just whispers everything to you and waits for you to find it precious. Well, I don’t.

I was discouraged by album opener “Saddle Up,” because it made me ask, out loud when only the dog could hear me, “Are they serious?” Who is this music for? My niece might dig this shit, but I’m guessing it’s too cute even for her (kid likes pirate movies and Wolf Parade for dog’s sake). By the time I got t0 “When Life Gives Me Lemons, I Make Lemonade,” I stopped.

That’s right. I stopped. I know I say that I listen to every album a bunch of times before I write about it and that’s almost always true. But I couldn’t get past the third track on this record. I’m afraid if my friends hear me listening to it, they’ll pinch my cheek and call me “Sport.” It’s what I’d do if I caught any of them listening to it. I’ve only just made it to Track 4 right now because I’m too busy typing to change the album. It’s a song called “I Box Up All the Butterflies.” I’m going to box up this album and throw it off a bridge.

The Pitchfork review tried to convince me that there was some kind of underlying darkness or tension to The Law of the Playground, but all that little argument did is remind me of the Patton Oswalt bit about trying to convince people in Sterling, Virginia, that Phil Collins is really dark and out there. No…fucking…dice.

This is not to say that I’m immune or somehow enraged by cute things. It’s nearly universally agreed that my fiance is cute as hell, and I love her. Okay, fine, if you wanna pin me strictly to music, let me ask you this: did you read just the other day when I was all gooey about the new Metric album? Of course you didn’t, but that album is pretty fucking cute. Dressy Bessy makes cute music and doesn’t piss me off. I’d even say that there are one or two Sigur Ros tunes I would describe as cute and I definitely don’t want to assault them.

The trouble is this: the guys in The Boy Least Like To Impress Me (Jof Owen and some other guy I don’t care about) give me the sense that this child-like cuteness is their thing. It reminds me of the scene in Adaptation where Donald announces, “My genre’s the thriller, what’s yours?” The Boy Least Likely To Ever Get Laid has staked out sounding like innocent children as their little niche and indie kids who pay too much for old-looking sweaters and think that this review is just plain mean might just eat up this OshKosh-sporting bullshit, but I don’t. If you want a lesson in the childlike wonder department, listen to, I dunno, almost any Flaming Lips song. Wayne Coyne’s wonder isn’t preciously innocent, it’s hard-won and the better for it. The Boy Least Like To Keep His Milk Money strikes me as a band who is marketing their music to my inner child. Well, guess what? My inner child just downed two pints of Guinness and is riding down a hill on bicycle with no helmet while shouting Tom Waits’s “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” at the top of his little lungs. My inner child doesn’t need The Boy Least Likely To Read Bollocks! and neither do I.

And there are two songs on this album with the band’s name in them. That’s another too-cute for words gimmick that I won’t tolerate. Unless your band is called Fuck You and every song on your album is called “Fuck You”, I’m not interested in your coy incorporation of your band name into song names. Fuck you.

Even the album cover pisses me off at this point. It’s a terrified, cute little animal in a toy tank. Isn’t that precious? I realize I’m raggin pretty hard on the cuteness thing, but here’s the point: no band – no band – has any business worrying about being cute or innocent or tough or sexy or any fucking thing. If you’re in a band, your focus should be on making good music. Everything about The Boy Least Likely To Make A Good Album from the album cover to the song titles to the Blues Clues cuteness of Jof Owen’s vocal “stylings” is designed to make me tell my fiance (or some other hapless bystander) that The Boy Least Likely To Say “Shit” Even if He Had A Mouthful is just so gosh darn refreshingly cute. Well, I’m the boy least likely to ever tell anyone to listen to The Boy Least Likely To. And I’m apparently out of jokes about their name.