Burning Dervish

Long thought it, always garbled my words when I tried to articulate it. This weekend's New York Times has a great piece by Ben Ratliff that nicely sums up why the only music that matters is the music you like...and it focuses on one of the things that drives the hipsters most nuts...dinosaur rock reunion tours...Early on Ratliff says:

"...reunion shows will soon become a much more normal concertgoing experience than we ever knew. More than that: I think we can meet them with an open mind....If...reunited bands meant something to you in an earlier time, perhaps you’re feeling the dirty power of money, or the lameness of aging...Perhaps some part of you tells you that you don’t deserve it; you didn’t put in your time in the rooms where that band started out, at CBGB, or the Rat, or North London Polytechnic, or wherever...Or maybe something about these events feels broadly, even comically, illegitimate. Aren’t we supposed to form a community of taste around living culture, not afterlife culture? Isn’t a great band supposed to be more than just a band, but an embodiment of a particular age, a state of mind, a place? How do you identify, then, with an aging act whose members are well past their original states of mind, have mostly relocated to sunnier places, and whose prime motivation would appear to be making money..?"

Fair enough, but he goes on to conclude, "...all you have is your ears..." and "...those shows over the last few years by the reunited Pixies and Stooges, they were loud and rude and fantastic. And they were judicious. Through their set lists, they located the potential excitement in the task of explaining what the bands had been all about."

More:

"If you had working knowledge of the Pixies’ and Stooges’ albums, you may have been stunned by how sophisticated live sound has become since those bands disappeared the first time, and how they have adapted the advances to their own needs. And what about the best of those who never formally went away — a band like Slayer, a performer like Prince? They carry so much maturity after more than 20 years that even if they don’t retain perpetual youth, they have something that might be more important: complete control over their own sound (emphasis added by me)."

And the closing really nails it:

"It seems now that the audience position for rock is coming closer to that of jazz around the mid-1970s. Most of the forefathers are still with us; increasingly, they seem to have something important to teach us. And we are developing strange hungers for music of the not-so-distant past that might be bigger and deeper than the hunger we originally had...If you’re still looking for something sacred...It’s in you: It is your own reaction to how they sound. Nobody can take that away from you."

I really feel like mounting the soapbox and having a good rant of concurrence with this article, but I'll leave it to the experts and leave you with a couple of tracks from two of the reunion tours I will have the privilege of working with in my own small way this year. Enjoy. Shamelessly.

Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
The Police - Invisible Sun