COPY AND PASTE
All of a sudden, El Paseo (208 Galisteo St., 992-2848) has turned into a little punk club. Well, some nights, but that's enough for me. Last Saturday night at the nightspot-which traditionally has been more
of a
home for bands
like the poppy
Lush Life, retro Amazing Larry and open mics-felt, if not like a night in LA or Austin, at least like a night in Albuquerque.
It was somewhere around 10:30 pm, a decent-to-good-sized crowd had gathered, and not just for beers and late-night tacos. About 75 percent of them seemed
interested
in the bands; dare I say, seemed there explicitly to hear the bands, in this case Fifty on Their Heels (
www.myspace.com/fiftyontheirheels
) from California and the Duke City's very own Dirty Novels (
www.myspace.com/thedirtynovels
).
Fifty on Their Heels won me over in, oh, I dunno, about two seconds. With new wave punkish panache, the band oozes attitude and energy, owing more than a little to PiL and dance-rock bands of the '80s. Songs like "Panic" and "Occupation" were tight, smart and hot, like a pair of Spandex pants. But witnessing singer/guitarist Junior Metro's wire-y guitar parts and spiked energy, it's clear this is a group that would never wear Spandex.
What is clear is that both Fifty on Their Heels and the Dirty Novels bring up a conundrum about modern music. Call it the circle of life-or maybe just the circle of music-but both Fifty and the Novels, with an oeuvre that sounds like every band who ever played at CBGB all wrapped into one, are emblematic of the derivativeness of much of modern rock.
And yet, both bands rock; both bands are well worth plunking down yer $5 cover; both bands maintain a definitive originality in the midst of a lot of homage.
The thing is, there's really nothing new under the musical sun, at least nothing you want to listen to. I think the fact that some folks consider glitchy bits of static set to a strange-tempoed drumbeats "dance music" is a mark of desperation. It may be original, but, seriously, who wants to go there for all that long? At the same time, can we really improve on Bowie without imitating Bowie? Do we really want to?
So nowadays, bands that go down the rock road-like Interpol, or Pulp, or Fifty on Their Heels, or the Dirty Novels-get tagged with the "derivative" label. Which may be accurate, but the pejorative connotations are unfair, for three reasons:
1) Rock 'n' roll has always been derivative, and bands have always stolen from each other:
The last time anyone did anything original in rock 'n' roll was when Chuck Berry fused country and blues sensibilities to create some of the first rock songs. And, while this fusion was arguably the first of its kind, it was still based on a history of, well, stealing, as Robert Christgau argues in his essay on Berry. "Berry was the first blues-based performer," Christgau says, "to successfully reclaim guitar tricks that country and western innovators had appropriated from black people and adapted to their own uses 25 or 50 years before." So Berry stole from the people who stole.
After that came Elvis and the Beatles and the Stones, all of whom imitated and re-created and stole from artists-mainly black ones-but that doesn't dilute their greatness. Then came their imitators, and the cycle continues to this day.
2) It's the enduring nature of certain types of music that make it so copied:
Who knew the new wave and pre-new-wave and post-new-wave bands of the '70s and '80s would have lasted in popularity and contributed so much to current music? And it's not just nostalgia-witness the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' heady absorption and genuine regurgitation of anyone from Wire to Blondie. It's clear the current spate of appropriators have lovingly studied, consumed and sponged up as much as possible from those who have come before them and, despite the jaded nature of this second generation, they've left the irony behind. Why? Because the songs they copy are great songs; the performers they emulate are amazing performers; and because a true devotion to something better than you makes you better in turn. The same goes for the Rolling Stones and their Muddy Waters obsession, or the Beatles and their Chuck Berry obsession.
3) If you write good enough songs, none of this matters anyway:
There's just no getting around the fact that Fifty on Their Heels and the Dirty Novels write top-notch songs. To simply copy and paste a template from the past and make it their own work would be lame; but both groups do much more than that, incorporating the best parts of different musical eras into their own original works, making them a new but historied output. And that's the thing about rock 'n' roll: You can steal all you want, but you better make it good. You better make it worth it. And both these bands do.
WAKE WAKE
It was a quick jaunt over from El Paseo to the Cowgirl (319 S. Guadalupe St., 982-2565), Saturday night and worth every step to catch the Hollis Wake's last show-at least for an unspecified but, according to the band, "very long" time-in Santa Fe.
Yes, the group that brought City Different indie rock out from under the bedrock and into our consciousness is heading south to take up digs in Albuquerque. The final Santa Fe show, appropriately enough, was raucous and noisy and beery, and I couldn't think of a better way to end an era. Good luck, Hollis Wake!
