Totally Wired 8.31.02: Unpopular Pop Music

Posted by Garrett Martin on 08.31.2002

Plastic Trash: An Overview of the Fake Underground

Greetings, all, to the very first edition of Totally
Wired. In the future I’ll be writing about rock
groups and artists that the mainstream media generally
neglects. The bands you’ll be reading about most
likely won’t be topping the charts anytime soon.
Their photographs may not be published in Rolling
Stone or Blender, but if you pay close enough
attention, you might’ve heard of them, and if you
listen to college radio or read magazines like Magnet
they could be some of your favorite bands. In a way
it’s like the world of independent wrestling; most of
us have still never witnessed an A. J. Styles match,
but through on-line coverage of NWA Wildside and the
new NWA: TNA a lot of wrestling fans now at least know
of his reputation. And that’s the purpose of this
column, to shed some light on great bands that remain
generally unknown. This first week, however, we’ll
take a quick look at some of the hot-shit bands that
many people think of when they think of “underground”
or “indie” rock.

Don’t look now, local indie-punk hipster, but the
sounds that have influenced your favorite bands are
once again popping up on the MTV, in the mainstream
rock magazines, and even on good ol’ close-minded
commercial rock radio. Recently an article in
Entertainment Weekly about the “new” garage-rock
revival caught my eye; trotting out the usual major
label fake-or-former-underground suspects (the
Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives, the Vines), the
blind and/or paid off writer tried to portray these
bands (and, admittedly, a few genuinely underground
and attention-starved groups) as the current and
contemporary saviors of the whole rock/roll whatsis.
The message sent differed in content but not in tone
from what the corporations that run everything
regularly shovel down our cultural gullet; the new
corporate-financed major-label rock might now dress in
New York hipster attire instead of skate-punk or
hip-hop garb, and they might sound more like college
radio than 99X or the End, but your money will still
be going to the same five companies anyway.
Realizing that the stuff they’ve forced upon us for
the past few years is growing stale, the major labels
are now selling us the illusion of change and of a
false alternative.

Every ten years or so this happens, of course, but
after the doldrums of rap-metal and teen-pop it’s
still come as something of a surprise. Yes, just as
late-‘70’s punk got co-opted into early-‘80’s new
wave, and just as late-‘80’s college/indie-rock became
early-‘90’s alternative after having its soul and
essence sucked out by the major labels, bands like the
Hives, the Strokes, and the White Stripes are now
scoring minor hits with their reworkings of the
Stooges, the Velvet Underground, and, um, Led
Zeppelin. Obviously the Zep doesn’t fit the bill as
punk forefather, or anything, but that does help
illustrate my point. This new-fangled garage-punk
“revival” is as bloodless and insubstantial as the
dunderheaded neo-classic rock pop-metal nonsense of
the Nickelback, Hoobastank, and Injected crowd. Both
sects look to the past to fashion nothing other than a
reasonable musical facsimile of that past, with little
innovation or forward motion to sweeten the pot.

There is still a sizable difference between Stroke 9
and the Strokes, though; the latter and their ilk do
tip their hats to the past a bit too blatantly, but
the past they’re recreating isn’t exactly one littered
with hit singles. Copping from Television rather than
Kansas evidences good taste, if not outright
commercialism or genuine ingenuity. Whereas the mooks
in Nickelback and the rest have Led Zeppelin’s
insincerity and laughably overwrought bombast down
pat, the White Stripes at least have the good sense to
rip off not just Zep but the old bluesmen Zep
themselves frequently ripped off. But while reliving
musical obscurities might lead to a mountain of hype
and maybe even some actual rock-star success (or at
least excess), it doesn’t lead to music that’s all
that especially vital or important. When fans resort
to playing “spot-the-reference” (and a particularly
easy version of said game, at that) with supposedly
“groundbreaking” or “cutting edge” artists, the hype
should become readily apparent.

But this isn’t to say that the Strokes, the Hives, the
White Stripes, or Clinic are charlatans, or even all
that bad, necessarily. Once you look past the hype,
all of these bands should be evaluated by what should
really matter, not promotional machines or marketing
budgets or the ever-buzzing horseflies of hype, but
the songs, dammit. Observing one of these bands
reveals a pattern that more or less holds up when
observing all of them. And as calculated as they
might be, from their too-perfect fashion sense to
their too-good-to-be-fake names, the Strokes pass the
musical test by having a few damn good pop songs on
their debut record. It’s sad to think that a record
that sounds like an underproduced, scruffier Tom Petty
can be considered “difficult” or “uncommercial”. Of
this current crop of fake underground bands, the
Strokes are both the most accessible and also the most
successful; their songs may not be earth-shattering,
but they are occasionally very good, catchy rock songs
with just enough swagger to not sound completely
sissified. They don’t sound nearly as much like the
Velvet Underground or Television as every lazy Spin or
Rolling Stone hack would have you think, either.

Similarly, the White Stripes, the Hives, et al are
nothing extraordinary, and really aren’t worth getting
too excited about. The Stripes probably deserve the
attention the most, based on the work they've done
over the last few years; since 1999 they’ve released
three albums on small California indie Sympathy for
the Record Industry and have traversed the country on
numerous small-time rock tours. They also have some
great songs, like “You’re Pretty Good Looking” from
2000’s De Stijl, and “We’re Going to Be Friends” from
2001’s White Blood Cells. At the same time, though,
they do make some flat-out boring blues-derivative
drivel. Their peak moments outshine the Strokes, but
likewise their lows are canyons compared to the
Strokes’ valleys.

The Hives, meanwhile, do what very few humans should
ever even think about trying to do, which is to play
at being the Stooges. Sorry, young charismatic
Scandinavian frontman, but you are hardly even a
third-rate Iggy. Doing the Stooges is 100% boring 99%
of the time, and frankly the Hives are utterly ill
equipped to buck those odds. Clinic’s queer
combination of kraut-rock, Velvets, and
feedback-drenched pop songs (in the style of Jesus and
Mary Chain) remains the most obscure and enigmatic out
of this bunch, but their sound is little more than a
rigid formula that loses its appeal once the code is
cracked. It is still downright bizarre that they’re
now on an honest-to-God major now, though. The Vines
seem like little more than a boy-band that’s patterned
itself on Nirvana instead of Boyz II Men; their
attempts at sounding like Kurt and Co. sound like
Stone Temple Pilots’ bitchy little brother, instead.
And finally, the less said about the pathetic
sub-sub-sub-Buzzcocks tribute bands that
ethics-impaired Vagrant Records have somehow conned
open-minded 15-year-olds nationwide into pledging
allegiance to, the better. Vagrant does indie-rock
genuine harm by actually being an independent label
that operates in the same semi-legal, psuedo-Payola
fashion as the major labels, and their minor success
is as depressing as that of Limp Bizkit.

But so my point is, laughable nonsense like that
Entertainment Weekly hypejob doesn’t do justice to
either the bands covered or to the worthy groups that
are currently slogging through the overlooked
“underground”. None of these fake-underground bands
deserve their hyperbolic hype; in some cases the bar
is set too high for the truly interesting yet not
amazing bands, and in other cases the hype lavished
over mediocre or outright bad groups is a detriment
both to their more qualified contemporaries and to the
legions of far superior yet ignored artists toiling in
the corpse-ridden ghetto of modern-day indie-rock.

From here on out, I’ll keep coverage of major-label
rock bands to an absolute minimum. The occasional
Sonic Youth or Built to Spill newsbit might slip in,
but otherwise I’ll try to maintain a strictly
independent frame of reference. Hopefully some of you
might actually care enough to pay attention. You can
drop me a line at [e-mail].