Oh I, I’m Still Alive

As counterpoint to last week’s article about musicians gone too soon, I thought I would talk this week about living musicians that inspire me. The use of a Pearl Jam lyric as a title is a bit ironic, however, given that I now wish Eddie Vedder was dead. In fact I long ago sold my copy of Ten, and if I hear “Jeremy” on the radio it makes me want to puke. Oh well.

These are musicians whose talents I view with such reverance that I often find myself daydreaming about being close friends with them. Like, we would just hang out, you know, and talk about stuff because we view the world in the same way. This except for the inevitable restraining order that would follow an episode or two of overzealous fanboy antics. It’s probably better this way, though, because I can gush freely about them in this blog.

Maynard James Keenan – lead singer of Tool and A Perfect Circle. Maynard is the author of so many good lyrics that it’s hard to know where to start. Most of these have come from his work with Tool, who to me define the term anti-establishment rock band. That they continue to record albums is a minor miracle in light of the shameless overpromotion of talentless bands that is the American music industry today. Their fan base is completely grass roots, and so devoted that their last album Lateralus (2001) sold several hundred thousand copies it’s first week despite a near complete lack of promotion.

Maynard often uses the songs as vehicles to critique the largesse of American society. He paints us ultimately as what we are - consumed by consumption. This is particularly well voiced in the song “Hooker With a Penis” off of Aenima:

All you read and wear or see and
Hear on TV is a product
Begging for your fatass dirty dollar
So ... shut up and buy my new record

This may seem a little self-serving but you have to hear how he sings it to realize how brilliant it is. Maynard’s voice is so powerful that all things superficial are simply laid to waste in it’s path. It simultaneously expresses the burden and obligation of our materialistic culture and his efforts to best cope with it.

Ian MacKaye – lead singer of Fugazi. This is a man with so much integrity that even after all these years, he still records and distributes Fugazi’s records himself through his D.C. based independent label. If you look on the cd, it will say something like “This recording available directly from Dischord records for $6 postage paid.” This is MacKaye’s mechanism to subvert any attempts by record stores to charge more for the albums than he originally intended. You can also still see the band live for around $5 and usually at a club that’s all ages. His vision was simply to allow people to experience music without the commercial intermediary.

As for the music it’s as much activist as it is hard core punk. Fugazi songs are more than mere anthems of alienation. They often deal directly with hot-button political issues such as war or the plight of the disenfranchised. The band’s proximity to the nation’s capital gives the message even greater weight. One of my favorites is song called Reclamation, a song about reproductive rights off of the album Steady Diet of Nothing:

These are our demands:
We want control of our bodies.
Decisions will now be ours.
You can carry out your noble actions,
We will carry our noble scars.

Again, the written lyrics alone do not convey the full impact. As with Tool it is the method of delivery which is most profound. There are probably many people in the audience who don’t realize the gravity of the subject matter but enjoy the music anyway. It’s the fact that he never felt the need to abandon the message and sell out that makes MacKaye such a hero of mine.

Thom Yorke – lead singer of Radiohead. I know it seems like I only ever talk about the lead singers of bands. Maybe it’s because they are the literal as well as figurative voice of the band, and hence I tend to ascribe much of the band’s personality to them. Or maybe it’s because I was once the lead singer of a band and am an insufferable egotist. Of course I realize it is a collaborative effort, but people will always remember John Lennon over Ringo Starr, so maybe it’s justified.

At any rate, Thom Yorke is the reason that one out of every 6,000 songs on the radio is worth listening to. When Radiohead first arrived on the scene with the “Creep” in 1993, I thought it might be a short-lived Weezer-like existence for them. Instead they went on to reinvent themselves 3 or 4 times, and though they have alternately endeared and alienated their fan base with consecutive releases, they have always remained true to their artistic sensibilities. They are lucky that the popularity of songs off of early albums now makes the playing of more recent (and more challenging) material compulsory for most alternative rock stations, but this does nothing to diminish the height of their craft.

Unlike others I have mentioned in this article, Yorke’s lyrics tend to deal with abstract themes over real-life issues. It seems appropriate in the modern age that the mere proper expression of alienation is a relief, particularly when it is done so poorly by other bands (System of a Down comes to mind.) Yorke’s melodic sensibility helps a lot, as is evident from the song Let Down from OK Computer:

Transport, motorways and tramlines,
starting and then stopping,
taking off and landing,
the emptiest of feelings,
disappointed people, clinging on to bottles,
and when it comes it's so, so, disappointing.

Let down and hanging around,
crushed like a bug in the ground.
Let down and hanging around.

This would seem to be a total downer of a song, and yet the melody makes it feel light and airy, almost optimistic. It gets back to something I’ve expressed before. Good lyrics may not hide the jagged edges of reality but that doesn’t preclude the music from being beautiful. Thom Yorke makes it feel good to feel bad.

OK enough with these lists, I promise next time I’ll talk about something more esoteric like the link between on-stage transvestitism and homosexual liberation in the glam rock period of the seventies. In the meantime, to learn more about the bands I've mentioned, please follow the links below:

http://www.toolband.com/

http://www.dischord.com/bands/fugazi.shtml

http://www.radiohead.com/