October 25, 2003
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
The New York Times
Rockers Fast-Forward to Yesteryear's Rebels
By JON PARELES
My life has been flashing before my eyes during the CMJ Music Marathon, which winds up tonight. Not my whole life, just the considerable part that I've spent standing in clubs listening to noisy new bands.
Nearly every band of the dozen I sampled over the last few days has been a flashback to a specific moment: to 1960's garage-rock, to 1970's new wave and no wave, to 1980's electro. I could have been back at CBGB or Hurrah or the Mudd Club circa 1980 (minus the cigarette smoke), watching yet another band squalling and yelping and finding its dissonant voice.
While showcases of new bands like the annual CMJ marathon and South by Southwest are always full of groups that have latched on to a favorite old style, the promise has been that the old style is just a starting point. Increasingly, though, bands seem content to sit in their sonic time capsules.
The first band at CMJ's opening party at Webster Hall on Wednesday night â?? which set out to touch various collegiate bases â?? was Fever, bawling lyrics and whipping up danceable riffs under staccato, discordant guitars. Then came Black Box Recorder, which places cynical reflections in Sarah Nixey's sweet, breathy vocals and arrangements that hark back to Human League and Roxy Music. (It needed the gloss of the studio; from the stage, the band's air of ennui soon extended to the audience.) There was also an actual 1980's group on the bill, Killing Joke.
CMJ, now in its 23rd year, has been a bastion of the new. Its initials originally stood for College Media Journal, and its weekly magazine tabulates what college radio stations are playing. Through the years, college stations have been an outlet for independent and nonmainstream music, predicting mainstream phenomena like punk and grunge.
But the latest breakouts from college radio have the strumming sensitive-guy songs of Dashboard Confessional and the quasi-vintage blues-rock of the White Stripes, both decidedly old-fashioned. Hip-hop, which is now popular music's sonic laboratory, shows up on college radio and at CMJ in its so-called underground form, which is occasionally wacky and individualistic. But it's more likely to sound like a self-righteous throwback to the pre-gangsta rap of the 1980's.
The current college-radio buzz centers on the new wave and no wave revivalists that I'm tempted to call neo wave. Hearing the Prosaics on Wednesday night answered the previously unconsidered question of what Joy Division would have sounded like with David Byrne as lead singer; British Sea Power, on Thursday night, could have been David Bowie collaborating with Gang of Four around 1979. Other bands looked back further. Runner and the Thermodynamics, which performed on Thursday night, is a rowdy power trio that recaptures the string-bending, cymbal-crashing furor of garage-rock, while Jet, also on Thursday, emulated the good-time leer of the 1970's Rolling Stones and AC/DC.
A dozen bands is an inadequate sample of CMJ's hundreds, though reports of others were full of one-band, one-era characterizations. Among the bands I saw, one escaped a time capsule: the Fiery Furnaces, a smart, funny jumble of punk, blues licks, folk-rock, garage-rock, keyboard minimalism and sheer insolence.
Rock has often doubled back on itself. The Beatles needed the example of Little Richard; punk reclaimed garage-rock. The indie-rock that CMJ has promoted has always had some record-collector pride in it, touting exquisite taste in obscure influences. That continues in the neo wave. College roommates may prefer John Mayer and 50 Cent, but these musicians have sought out the Fall and Devo and dug into the Nuggets collections of garage-rock. They're bringing back good stuff, even if it now arrives predigested.
Yet while all this retro music stirs my own nostalgia, I have to wonder what archival impulse makes it so attractive to musicians in their 20's; it's about as current as a rockabilly revival was in the 1970's. Given the number of quickly forgotten acts of the last two decades, and the sorry state of mainstream rock's current grunge retreads, I can understand the temptation to retreat into yesteryear's avant-garde. But was there nothing worth saving from the later 1980's and the 1990's?
Neo-conservatism isn't necessarily a dead end. Wynton Marsalis's determination to reactivate jazz's bygone virtues gave the music a new momentum, both following through on his ideas and reacting against them. A revivalist moment won't be the death of rock, only a pause to catch its breath. And with more bands playing tonight, there's always hope.
