Music So Far as I Could Tell
It’s Friday. I do not feel like writing about the viaduct or Mike McGavick or Maria Cantwell or Greg Nickels or net neutrality or even Linnea Noreen. At all.
What I feel like Slogging about, or at least sharing, is this Village Voice rock review from 1984. It’s a review of a Meat Puppets gig. I’m not sure what the bizarre suggestion to Henry Rollins is about—although, it seems well stated. Anyway, this far-flung bit of alternative paper poĂ©sie made my week.
Here are the last two paragraphs:
The crowd, of course, was there for headliners Black Flag, and gave the openers a respectable-at-least reception—but the makeup of the audience itself made a much better analogy for the Meat Puppets’ declaration of the twists in everybody’s roots than for Black Flag’s newly bombastic dirges (suggested lyric for Henry Rollins: `I want to speak French but I don’t know how/Gonna beat my head in’). The crowd was a likably eclectic bunch, unideological even about (their) alienation—not only hardcore fans, but flannel-shirt types, college kids, a surprising number of women, aging counter-culturists, somebody’s mom. There we all were, a hopeless residue on the periphery of a culture that had made losers of us all, and liking it. When the Meat Puppets ended their set with `Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds,’ it didn’t sound like a gag, it sounded like a bedraggled anthem for what we all had in common, and I didn’t even care that so far as I could tell nobody else in the room thought so at all. —Tom Carson, Village Voice, 4/24/84
Josh, that is AWESOME!! it serves to remind me there is something HUGE missing today, an immediate clarity and unity, It was what MADE the '80s scene(s) so important, one which I reckon will never ever again be regained. sad really. and at the time we had no idea how good we had it, but now to look around at the "scene" and all that is has brought...well, it only makes me want to close my eyes and never look again.