Bob Lind. Pulp. 2001. Island.

 Maybe the first thing you notice about the lyric for Bob Lind is that it’s an entertainingly accurate narrative detailing the psychological desperation following a breakup. You also notice what a great time the vocalist Jarvis Cocker is having recounting the experience, imparting to the sense of desperation a heady feeling of momentum, as if the process of recovery were actually a race to see how fast you can once again acquire love. Cocker also subjects himself to, in his finely controlled surrender to lyricism, a good deal of self-appraisal, of the kind typically associated with what has come to be called accountability. Other songwriters who have practiced this poetry of self-critique are Jason Lytle, Paul Westerberg, and James Murphy, all of whom are determined to hold themselves accountable, but only to the extent that accountability transforms the sin of self-involvement into an ironic, glamorous form of self-annihilation, always a welcome topic in rock and roll. What’s also welcome is a plethora of energy and a clearly stated sense of direction. Bob Lind is all positive release, a self reckoning that doesn’t bother naming our flaws because anyone who’s been in a relationship knows already what they all are. The seminal role played by neurotics in pop music history can’t be overstated; “fuckups,” as Cocker rightly identifies us in the Bob Lind lyric, are to the body politic what our psychological flaws—often times the result of an imbalance in brain chemistry—are to the body human. It was outcasts and misfits who erected the scaffolding upon which today’s mega billions, largely conservative, rock and roll industry was built. In 2021, onstage for his band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, drummer Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters thanked the band’s management team, “For making us a shitload of money.” A year later, Hawkins was found dead in a Bogota, Colombia, hotel room, killed by cardiac arrest. According to the official record a variety of drugs—including antidepressants, marijuana, opioids, and benzodiazepines, which are often taken to treat anxiety and insomnia—was discovered in his system. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...
Read more

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, a...
Read more

Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...
Read more