RISD BANDS DON'T ROCK
Okay, here's where I'm going to start a fight. We're all friends here, right? Just stay with me for a moment...For the longest time, I really didn't care about the new wave of ironic hardcore by bands like the Locust and then Black Dice and now Total Shutdown. I didn't and still don't really like those bands. I thought what they were doing was really silly. But I never thought any of them took themselves seriously, so I never really cared. Besides, the few people that I've met from all of those bands are really quite nice. I always figured, "fair enough, they're nice to me and they probably don't care for J Church either…"
But now it's gone too far. The new wave of totally apathetic / grad school / poseur hardcore has become too much for me to stand. It all has to do with them crossing the line and insulting a musical form that I hold dearly.
I subscribe to the avant-garde newsgroup at Yahoo because I love hearing postings about Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, etc from people that worked with them if not from the artists themselves. I've never posted because I've never felt I've had anything to contribute. It's just a source of great free information. Avant-garde and free jazz… it's a musical scene that means something, if for no other reason than history. You're talking about the reclaiming of a music form specifically for the African-American community. It was creativity and activism that merged art and politics as equal footed aspects of "cultural" analysis. The very idea of going far beyond the rigid order of traditional jazz and music in general was an abstraction that had direct ramifications on the socio-political landscape of the late `60s and early `70s. If the music world is a microcosm of the world at large, then music constructs had to be questioned like any other one in society… and vice versa. It was counter-culture and DIY methods that pre-cursed Crass and the anarcho punk movement.
It fucking means something to me.
So when I saw a listing in the avant-garde newsgroup for Black Dice and Total Shutdown playing a gig in San Francisco, I was fucking pissed off. These little shits were trying to disguise the fact that they were just a bunch of punk kids who "outgrew" punk and thought that they were really clever if they made a bunch of noise (which is the one aspect of these bands that I do like. But free jazz isn't just what's on the surface) and called themselves "artists". But these fucks take all the pretensions and all the posing, all the bullshit that most people hate so much about the art world and offer no tangible reason to think that they've done something of character or of cultural significance. Art is a mirror and these bands reflect nothing. It's a pose.
Avant-garde and free jazz was inherently connected to black power. Just ask Bill Dixon or anyone from the Art Ensemble of Chicago or Archie Shepp. What do Black Dice and the bands like them have to do with black power? Could they ever do something as ideologically radical?
Now, I haven't cared that much about hardcore in some time. There are still bands out there that I like. But I don't care that much. Still, it makes me sad to think that bands like Black Dice could in anyway be the wave of the future. I like to think that they are an insignificant blip on the map of music history (like J Church, of course). They probably are. But I worry that they are the shape of things to come. It's a shame when that kind of cynicism is the only way to combat the un-imaginative status quo of `90s hardcore. There are still some people in that scene involved for the politics and "art" of it rather than the empty slogans and macho poses. Black Dice are, sadly, the logical extent of Sonic Youth's half ironic interest in hardcore punk. They are the kids that won't really commit to anything because they would rather laugh at it. Shit, Black Dice must be doing something because I haven't been worried about the "state of hardcore" in years.
Hopefully, this will all play itself out. Black Dice aren't gonna survive in the avant-garde world doing what they're doing. They'll have to change and that might be a good thing.