Hello.  My name's the_underwood and I'm a record geek.  Welcome to my blog. 

The Pitchfork Retort Project will be a song-by-song response to pitchfork.com's The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present.  These posts won't be reviews, exactly – you probably don't need some radom guy on livejournal to tell you that Fugazi's "Waiting Room" is a really swell tune.  Instead, these entries will contain opinions, meditations, digressions, dismissals, jokes, and praise.  I'm hoping that the Pitchfork Retort Project will be a both a look back at more than fifteen years of near-obsessive record collecting, an exploration of new sounds, and maybe, just maybe, I'll learn why I still care deeply about popular music as I enter my third decade.  This blog also shouldn't be mistaken for a fan letter to the site that published the book that inspired it.  I'm a regular 'fork reader, sure, a sometimes reluctant member of a worldwide quasi-scene that seems to have grown up around the site, but I'd like to keep things short, snappy and relevant.  In terms of style, I'd like the Retort to be the anti-Fork.  What I'd like to take from Scott Plagenhoef and Ryan Schreiber, the editors of the Pitchfork 500, is what I see as their genuine love of rock music, their commitment to exploring rock's margins and, finally, their conviction that rock isn't something we have to look back on.  Like them, I'm not ready to concede that rock music peaked back in the sainted sixties.  There are great songs are still being written today, and there are thousands that I've yet to hear.  

Oh, and in case you were already wondering, I have seen Julie and Julia.  Hush, you haters.  

All set?  Here we go.  Feel free to turn the volume up. 

It featured lamé suits, king-size bell bottoms, oceans of body glitter, and a thousand sexually transmitted diseases, but the most embarrassing thing about disco might have been its pathetic, transparent desire to be liked. Let's look at the evidence: "Stayin' Alive," "We Are Family," "I Will Survive," the immortal "YMCA." There aren't too many people in America who can't belt out the chorus to one of these songs, even if they were born long after the age of glitter faded into cultural ignominy. In one sense, that's a credit to the people who wrote these songs; good pop songs should, almost by definition, be memorable. But all of these songs overshoot the mark: there's a difference between a well-crafted earworm and a shameless, chorus-driven floor-filler that won't leave your brain's memory circuits alone, even if you wish it would. If you ask me, the original version of disco didn't have enough of a problem crossing the line that separates "catchy" from "annoying." I would swear that disco's most representative tunes are  designed to  to fly past all of our taste-and-preference-related defenses and take up permanent residence in our brains' helpless pleasure centers. Everyone, from your grandmother to your seven-year-old could dance to this stuff, and they still do. Just try to resist that little thrill you feel when ABBA hit the chorus of "Dancing Queen." Good luck.

All of this makes Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" something of a surprise. Whereas most of the disco tracks I've heard, including Summer's own "She Works Hard for the Money," try far too hard to be instantly likable, "I Feel Love" glides along with an icy, robotic cool more reminiscent of Kraftwerk than the Village People. The percussion - which is, according to Dominque Leon's bit in the Pitchfork 500, wholly electronic - clicks, taps, and whirrs as it pushes the song forward, but it lacks the obsequious, almost invasive 4/4 bounce that most people associate with the genre. Best of all, Summer's performance has none of the stagey brassiness of say, Gloria Gaynor or the Weather Girls. Her voice isn't much more than a sugary angel's sigh that floats over the song's glimmering, synthetic production. French retro-fiends Air must have fallen in love when they first heard this one: it's less an ordinary dance song to a soundtrack to pure pleasure. I wish I could float away on it wearing a lamé suit with extra-wide lapels.

    Wire were punk: they were in the right place at the right time and they knew the required three chords. Even so, not everything on Pink Flag is like punk. There's that Eno-esque sheen on the guitar chords, sure, and those ambient pieces, and there's that attitude, which Jason Crock, in his review of the song that appears in the Pitchfork 500 calls "bemused art-school detachment." Well, yes.

Wire exhibit, in a roundabout way, the same musical tendency that Simon Reynolds identifies in the mods and the Northern Soul gang: They were British kids who adopted the sonics of Black American music but surgically extracted its soul, replacing it with a jittery, nervous beat. Pink Flag's basslines sound restrained and buttoned-up, like John Entwistle's do on The Who's sharpest stuff. It has punk's minimalism and its speed, along with some of its politics and its guitar noise, but much exudes a buzzy, speedy, clicky energy, rather than the Stooges' bluesy grind, as it whooshes from song to song. Robert Gotobed's vocals sometimes seem more like a performative line reading than an actual performance. What's missing from Wire's formula, the very important thing that they were conceptually brilliant enough to remove from punk rock's emerging template, was its defining emotion: anger. "Ex-Lion Tamer"  doesn't have the barbed sarcasm of other notable punk rock odes to the idiot box, like Black Flag's "TV Party," nor does it have much interest in displaying the adolescent outrage of the Clash's "London's Burning." In fact, it's difficult to tell what emotion, if any, Robert Gotobed, never the most emotive of singers, is trying to put across here.  In their place, "Ex-Lion Tamer" has a couple of curiously poetic lines that might evoke William Carlos Williams at his most concise and painterly, or else Wayne Thiebaud's "Five Hot Dogs:" "Fish fingers all in a line / The milk bottles stand empty."  This doesn't strike me as a protest against mass culture; in fact, it's hardly even of a critique. It's more like a description, really. But listen to that undeniable hook! Feel that bracing sonic velocity! This is still punk, but it's what punk might sound like if you did away with all that messy angst. It's a brilliant Warhol move, which seems appropriate coming from a band that was made up of four guys who went to art school but didn't like to call themselves musicians. Still, perhaps isn't too surprising that they moved away from punk just about as quickly as they could. Chairs Missing lacks neither good songs nor a sense of sonic adventure, but I doubt it would find a receptive audience in many punk clubs. In truth, it took Wire just twenty-one songs and thirty-five minutes to outrun the barely discernible constraints of the genre. I doubt any band has ever moved so fast, before or since.

In his Pitchfork 500 piece on the Adverts' "One Cord Wonders," Marc Hogan notes that one of the class of '77's signal achievements was to add a "thick coat of irony to the self reflexivity" rock already displayed. Maybe, but irony's meant for an inner circle, those "in the know." Were you hip enough to find meaning in what most people would reject as meaningless noise? Could you feel punk's secret heartbeat under the squall and the cynicism?

Listening to "One Chord Wonder" now, though, I wonder if anyone had to try that hard. As the band chants "The wonders don't care," lead singer T.V. Smith answers them with "we don't give a damn!" Sure you don't, honey. There you are on the cover of my (iTunes) copy of The Adverts Anthology, sprawled out , shirtless and contorted by your very dramatic emotional distress, the very picture of indifference. As "One Chord Wonders" stomps to a close, Mr. Smith can't help but let punk's biggest, most important, and most obvious secret slip: he cares, and he's absolutely dripping with feeling, mostly self-pity. In fact, he sounds so wounded, despite all the doomy guitar noise around him, that he might as well be begging for a puppy and a blanket.

"One Chord Wonders" reminds me of another less groundbreaking and far less arch example of the punk genre: Anti-Nowhere League's "I Hate People," which I found on a cheaply packaged three-disc punk comp that proved to consist mostly of the genre's justly forgotten leftovers. "I Hate People" is a winner, though, a jaunty, buzzy declaration of charmingly named lead singer Animal's distaste for humanity. In the chorus, he informs us that he hates both the human race and your ugly face and, after declaring that his "head's a fuckin' mess," he adds, in a tone so defensive that you can almost hear him choking back a sob, "they hate me!" The way he cuts through his own bluster makes me want to pat him on his mohawk-bedecked head, really; seldom have I heard anyone sound so nakedly vulnerable on record. Whoever said that punk rock was crass and unfeeling was dead wrong. No wonder new wave girls were dying to date punk rock guys. Under all they hair dye and leather, they were perfect darlings.  

Germfree Adolescents is one of those records that you always see near the top of those "Top Fifty Punk Records of All Time" lists that music magazines put out every time that 1977 has another milestone birthday. Still, when I bought it, as a bright-eyed, fresh-faced, sarcastic asshole of a know-it-all teenager, I didn't like it. For starters, the Spex themselves didn't sound like much of a backing band. Like their scenemates the Sex Pistols, they trod the line between  "didn't need chops" and "couldn't play their instruments" at their peril, but there was also the difficult matter of Poly Styrene's voice. Punk's supposed to be abrasive, of course, and I liked my sounds rough back then, but Poly's voice was downright unpleasant to listen to, an uncontrolled banshee shriek barely in time with the "talent-free two chord buzz" churned out by her band. The upper register of the human voice is often a difficult proposition in punk:  the genre seems tailor-made to growly speak-shouters like Henry Rollins; Singers like Carrie Brownstien and Mark Arm start out with two strikes against them.  I put Germfree Adolescents aside, listened to other stuff, and sold it a couple of years later. My roommates were probably relieved.

Listening to "Oh Bondage! Up Yours!" now makes me think that I might have missed something the first time round. Chronologically speaking, the X-Ray Spex were part of British punk's first wave, but, listening to them now, I think they might have more in common with the dissonant, clever anti-groove bands – like the Contortions, or the Flying Lizards – that emerged in the Sex Pistol's wake. Much of the appeal of "Oh Bondage!" hinges, I think, on the disparity between the band's clumsy fuzz-and-thud the barely controlled wailing of its twin leads: Lora Logic's saxophone and Poly's voice. And now I see that Ms. Styrene's voice really is a marvelous punk instrument: it slides between a yell to an urgent, piercing, nearly animal yelp as effortlessly as Steve Mackay's sax does on the Stooges' "Fun House." Never mind the kink-themed lyrics, hearing Poly tauntingly recite the phrase, "Some people think that little girls should be seen and not heard" before launching into the song is like seeing someone take a running jump into the void and laughing hysterically on the way down. Maybe I need to give Germfree Adolescents another look; Poly's performance on this one is punk rock at its spine-tingling, soul-baring, boundary-pushing best.

One of rock criticism's standard tropes is that punk was the genre that made theory sexy. Johnny Rotten went to art school and steeped himself in situationist theory, Scritti Pollitti wrote a musical love letter to Jacques Derrida, CRASS got their minds blown by Bahktin and wouldn't shut about it or learn to play their instruments properly. I don't know how much of this argument I actually buy; how many graduates of the class of '77 were just there for the beer and the crashing guitars? I sure as heck never understood much of punk's intellectual import until I read Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. Back when I first heard Never Mind the Bollocks, I couldn't figure out what Johnny meant when he said he wanted to destroy a passerby. Still,  the noise and thrill of punk was still emotionally intelligible to me and that, in the end, was probably enough.

The Subway Sect's "Parallel Lines" falls somewhere in this punk-as-university-lecture tradition. It's contains barely any proper nouns – the lyrics only make one tossed-off reference to Dr. Who before they get abstract. The song's a classic example of punk's most basic reflex: denial. Vic and friends don't believe in God, in class warfare, in sense. They may not even believe in the song they're not through singing yet. That's fine. This sort of axiomatic, system-crashing negation is what makes punk such a weirdly compelling musical movement to so many people, but "Parallel Lines" loses points because the music sounds like something of an afterthought. Vic himself has an unconvincing soprano, the bass plods instead of grooves, and the guitar line's a trebly, nervous jangle that foreshadows art-punk's spiky jitters. No wonder this stuff sounded more like lectures than songs to many of the era's hard rock fans. As an philosophical statement and punk-scene time capsule, "Parallel Lines" works well enough. You can put me down for a classicist, though, because I'm not convinced it works as a song. In the end, thrill, noise and post-structuralist theory might not be enough. 

Will you still love me tomorrow? Sure, babe. Who'll stop the rain? Changing weather patterns, or St. Peter. Are you experienced? I think my résumé speaks for itself. Do they owe us a living? They most certainly do not, you filthy, nasty hippie layabout, you. Is this burning an eternal flame? Probably not, but you might want to go down to the clinic and have it looked at anyway. Are you gonna go my way? Not if you don't stop recording painfully obvious sixties retreads that get featured in car commercials.

There's no two ways about it: "What do I get" is one of rock's greatest rhetorical questions, and I don't have to tell you that answer is "nuffink." No girl (or boy), no happiness, and, since is punk rock, no emotional perspective at all. The listener, however, gets a torqued-up, treble-heavy,  Ramones-aping three minute speedball that more or less defines adolescent romantic desperation, immortalized on magnetic tape for all eternity. Oh, and Thora Birch dying her hair teal in the bathroom in Ghost World. We're lucky to get that much, really. 

When I listen to it today what strikes me about "What Do I Get" is how easily punk's blunt vocabulary, which was first used for making grand political statements, transferred to the realm of the personal, or at least could. Coming out of Johnny Rotten's smirking, unhygienic mouth the question asked in the title would have been an angry political demand, but for Shelly's its a romantic entreaty, a self-pitying whine, and an existential lament. When he finally answers himself ("'Cause I don't get......you!"), the response is so simple, and so sweetly wounded, that it almost seems like an anticlimax. 

"(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais" kicks off with Joe Strummer reading aloud from a poster promoting a reggae show that he, or some other all-night drug-hungry wolf, might or might not have attended at the eponymous London venue.  It seems like the real deal – heck, even I recognize some of these names from the tracklists to my Trojan box sets – but, wouldn't you know it, Strummer, or whoever, feels let down. There's music, sure, and he's, like, the only white guy there, but, well, the songs are lousy, the mix sucks, the bands ain't speaking' the truth to the youth from the stage, and the promised revolution doesn't burn down Babylon. More than thirty years after the fact, I'm just sitting here and asking myself, "who does this kid think he is?" Sure, he doesn't put his foot in his mouth as badly as Patti Smith did a few songs back, but who is Joe Strummer, the former John Graham Mellor, whose father was a foreign service diplomat, for God's sake, to pass judgment on black revolution, or even black music? Kid, you've got a ticket to the hottest reggae show in town, and all you can do is complain about it? The cheek of some (white men), I tell you.  

Of course, all whining aside, "(White Man)" is really about how tightly expectation and disappointment are intertwined, especially for music obsessives and scene insiders like our narrator here. Reggae's not all that he expected it would be. Even though it's only the summer of '78 and punk can't be more than two years old, Strummer already sounds heartily sick of it. (Sure, this is decades before Blink–182 would sell out stadiums and Green Day would open a Broadway musical, but that's a whine for another time.) My favorite thing about this song, though, as much as I enjoy its shambling, fuzzed-up groove and Strummer's affectionate mush-mouthed recounting of some long-ago night on the town, is how its genuinely hopeful sentiment belies its pithy lyrical content. Check out the version included on Live: From Here to Eternity, where Strummer tacks on an extra verse, "Hey, why don't you go down to Hammersmith tonight?/ Well, sounds like it could be all right/ All clean air, and the whole world's yours, / all those natty rhythms…" The excitement, and the immediacy, is still there, and when, right before he launches into a stinging indictment of the UK's punk scene, Strummer announces the last train to ska-ville over the click-clack of a stuttering cowbell, he sounds like a man who's still headed for wide-open musical horizons. Gorgeous.

Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols was my first punk rock album, but it was a real disappointment.  I knew the album by reputation before I purchased it:  it was the founding document of this “punk” thing; it’d sparked real chaos when it had been released in Britain fifteen years before; Johnny Rotten was a guy so mean that he’d tear out your liver without so much as an “excuse me;” Sid Vicious was dead.  Just carrying this one to the record store’s checkout counter made me feel like a bit of a badass.  In the same way that The Catcher in the Rye’s creepily spare maroon-and-yellow cover made it look like a book somebody would want to ban, the garish fluorescent colors and ransom-note lettering that adorned the cover of Never Mind promised something truly transgressive and dangerous.  I expected Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols to be the eardrum-damaging, worldview-shattering, parent-horrifying record of all time.  This was going to be some high-grade sonic dynamite. 

 

I got something else entirely.  Never Mind’s best tracks had a purposeful, bludgeoning momentum, but their guitars sounded curiously muted and flanged-out, and, in terms of technique, Steve Jones seemed just a step or two removed from seventies-era classic rock ax-slingers. The rhythm section often sounded muddled and grooveless.  I decided that Nirvana’s In Utero, with its ear-shredding distortion, howling vocals, and unsettling lyrics about  butter-smelling babies and edible cancers, made the Sex Pistols look sort of soft.  Though Never Mind the Bollocks stayed in my collection, I moved on to rot my brain with Minor Threat, the Dead Kennedys, and dozens of other American hardcore acts.  I saw Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy and read Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, but even after this fascinating, wide-ranging book made me appreciate Never Mind the Bollocks’s unique role in the development of popular culture, the album itself still sounded like a museum piece, or perhaps a missed opportunity.  “Well,” I told myself.  “Maybe the Pistols were great live.”   

 

The passage of time and my inevitable disenchantment with loud-and-fast punk rock has only made some of Never Mind’s deficiencies more glaring, but Johnny Rotten’s performance has, surprisingly enough, held up rather well.  He’s still one of punk’s nastiest, most caustic vocalists, a singer that managed to elevate petulant anger to the level of art through the sheer force of his personality.  Many of his one-liners still zing, and “Bodies” remains one of rock’s most gruesome performances, a barely-controlled expression of loathing and all-purpose body horror.   On the album’s lesser tracks, though, he’s so woefully out-of-synch with his bandmates that he sounds like a man trying to make himself heard in a windstorm.  During “Pretty Vacant,” he even screams “I can’t hear fuck all!” into a live mic.

 

Never Mind the Bollocks’s shortcomings raise the uncomfortable question of whether the Pistols really understood punk rock as a musical form, even though they more or less brought it into being as a distinct genre.  In a sense, it’s ridiculous to criticize them for their lack of musicianship; nobody, after all, expects punks to have chops.  Still, other punk bands, like Wire or the Ramones, pared their songwriting down to obscure, or even complement, their lack of musical dexterity – nobody can tell that you’re not a great guitarist if you’re only playing a one-minute two-chord song.  The Pistols, on the other hand, often sound downright incompetent, and much of Never Mind sounds less like a brand-new musical form than a gleefully malicious pisstake on the rock and roll that preceded it.  It’s often been noted that Steve Jones borrowed many of his riffs from Chuck Berry, and the backing vocals of “EMI” are lifted right from the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner.”  These familiar, formerly pleasant musical elements are rendered almost unrecognizable after they’ve been submerged in the Pistols’ unholy racket.  Perhaps we should conclude that deliberate musical disfigurement was the goal of their project. 

 

The other signal difference between Never Mind the Bollocks and much of the punk rock that it inspired has to do with its peculiar lyrical approach.  Many of the Pistols’ contemporaries sought to dismantle the universalist hippie pieties of seventies rock by employing an unadorned, unpretentious vocabulary that more accurately captured the stuff of their everyday lives.  Topics like sniffing glue, shoplifting, and teenage boredom were suddenly fair game; short, blunt sentences were the preferred vehicle.  Thirty years on, the Pistols’ lyrics are often striking for their high-flown impersonality.  Rotten is, of course, remembered for being one of punk’s most notable theorists, an art-school kid who figured out a way to incorporate situationalist theory into pop songs without missing a beat.  The inevitable downside of this achievement, however, is that songs like “God Save the Queen” can seem more like sermons than honest testimony.  His use of the second person (“They made you a moron”) sometimes seems to distance him from his intended audience of prospective musical revolutionaries.  I’ve heard “Anarchy in the U.K.”, the Pistols’ other great single, described as punk’s great rock star performance, and perhaps it is.  This might also be perceived as something of a backhanded compliment, suggesting that Rotten hadn’t quite figured out how to break down the wall between performer and audience.  “God Save the Queen’s” refrain is “no future for you!”  Excuse me, Mr. Lydon, but shouldn’t that be, “No future for us?”   

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

 

                                                            – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

 

Hoo boy, where to start?  Well, let’s not start in the obvious place: the hated, celebrated, and endlessly debated n-word.  Let’s start with Patti Smith’s contention that a noisy guitar, an insistent drumbeat, and a few lines of poetry can transform you into an outcast, a pariah, a ­– well, you know.  Is this song’s title shocking?  Frankly, I’m more surprised that somebody in 1978 could still hold such romantic notions about rock and roll.  I mean, weren’t the punks the smarts here?  Didn’t they know?  Weren’t Johnny Rotten and Poly Styrene aware that they lived in a thoroughly commercialized society, one bought and sold pop music no differently than  any other commodity on the supermarket shelf?  When Patti declares that she wants to be “outside of society” and makes the starry-eyed assertion that “those who have suffered understand suffering” she comes off as a naïve kid, a dreamer, a hippie. 

 

And frankly, Smith doesn’t help herself much by equating rock musicians like herself with real-deal visual artists like Jackson Pollock and penning lyrics like “blessed is the grass and the herb and the true thorn and light,” say nothing of delivering them in a rushed monotone familiar to anyone who’s ever found themselves trapped at a second-rate poetry slam.  She fares better elsewhere in the libretto – her gutsy, driving vocals are more Exene Cervenka than Janis Joplin.  Still, I’m not at all convinced that this song didn’t already sound a little dated on the day it was released.  Despite Smith’s convincing delivery, its chugging piano line and overlong, functionally useless outro make this one sound like the output of a particularly agitated late-seventies boogie band.

 

There’s nothing left to discuss but this song’s, uh, problematic racial dimension.  It’s pretty clear that Smith means to identify with the most marginalized members of society, but “owning” a pejorative term usually works better after it’s been applied to you, and, as the original white boho artist chick, Smith lacks the necessary jurisdiction.  Punk rock was never really great on race issues anyway; if you don’t believe me, go read “The White Noise Supremacists,” Lester Bangs’s probing, insightful interrogation of the new wave’s racial politics.  Still, it’s surprising how artlessly Smith throws the term in question around here.  She name-checks Jimi Hendrix, seemingly oblivious that his blackness, as opposed to say, that of “Jesus Christ and Grandma,” wasn’t merely metaphorical.  When she and Lenny Kaye chant the n-word as the music surges behind them, they seem completely unaware that the term carries any particular cultural weight. 

 

As a resident of the year 2010, I can only ask myself how Smith and Kaye ever thought that this was a good idea.  You couldn’t, of course, do this one on stage these days.  Today, playing this live today might result in a riot, a walkout, or, at the very least, a seriously uncomfortable vibe.  If I were feeling charitable, and perhaps if I thought this were a better song, I might choose to see Smith’s use of this term as merely the far end of a continuum.  Appropriation across racial lines is, after all, an essential dynamic in rock’s development. If Paul McCartney could borrow Chuck Berry’s chord changes, then, why couldn’t Smith use this particular racial epithet for her own purposes?  While they might not go so far as to apply it to themselves, I suspect that some white hip-hop artists might not have too many qualms about employing the n-word in their lyrics.  As The Wire’s Ellis Carver ruefully observed after hearing one white drug dealer ask another if he wanted to be “his nigga,” “They steal everything, don’t they?”