Punk Snot Dead
Dylan, Amyl, and Lambrini Girls vs the Grammys
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.
~ Mark Anthony, in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
~ Oscar Wilde
The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown played, as pundits have lined up to tell us, fast and loose with the facts. It could not do otherwise and succeed at conveying the meaning of the events it distorted. Cinema is, to quote Spike Lee quoting D. W. Griffith, “history written in lightning”, and lightning is not known for its accuracy or subtlety. Dylan going electric was a watershed in American culture (Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test captures the way Dylan’s electric music hung over the nascent psychedelic culture like a religious text). What Dylan brought to folk music, in his versions of traditional songs as well as in the songs based on them like ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright’, was a more voluptuous way with melody (and its supporting chords) than was then considered authentic in folk - he brought folk into mainstream pop, and no-one seemed to mind. But in going electric, and wrapping the riddling in his lyrics around a personal point, he became rock’s first seer. People minded, both ways. If you watch ‘Don’t Look Back’, D.A. Pennebaker’s amazingly candid fly-on-the-wall documentary of Dylan’s 1965 tour of the UK, shortly before that famous Newport Folk Festival, you’ll learn that the electric ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ had already been released, and wasn’t doing too badly in the charts, but there he is, on stage with his acoustic guitar, in town after town, playing the folk hits, and not playing his latest record.1 So his breakout, the necessity for his art to cross some Rubicon, is understandable. But it’s hardly a clean break - once Dylan falls off his bike in ‘66, he’ll release plenty more trad and original folk music, and if you read his first book, Tarantula, written in ‘64-65, you can find under its surreal surface swirl an enthralling structural analysis of both the Jim Crow/John Birch America of those years and the crazy music business Dylan had stepped into. Guitar rock was never the only thing on his mind, but when he wanted to make a statement with it, he knew how, as in his New Wave-styled performance of 1984 hit ‘Jokerman’ on the David Letterman show, with guitarist JJ Holiday and the rhythm section from LA Latino punk band The Plugz, who had the first DIY punk label in LA and many of whose songs featured on the Repo Man soundtrack.
Guitar rock, from my peculiar, sheltered perspective, has, like folk before it, been in eclipse for some time lately, obscured by the forms of electronica that have kept on doing what it was supposed to do. These may include guitars, as autosampled and precise soundbites, but by guitar rock I mean a petulant style of rock with riffing and through-played licking or even soloing, the sound that once automatically grabbed the hearts of rebels. The element which Bob Dylan adds to the folk-blues at the Newport Folk Festival, which he got from its originator Chuck Berry - ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ wears its debt to Berry’s ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ openly.
Dave Moore was kind enough to link to a summary of the year-2024-in-music by Chuck Eddy, whose taste I still trust because nearly 50 years ago he gave the Puddle’s Pop. Lib. a favourable and, more importantly, understanding review titled “Mistakes Don’t Matter”, which is what we needed to hear. Chuck says
”Scrolling down the 2024 Album of the Year aggregate, I see Fontaines D.C. at #2, the Cure #3, Mannequin Pussy #13, English Teacher #18, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds #20, the Last Dinner Party #21, but I’d be surprised if any of those passed Carducci’s (or okay, also my) muster as rock bands.”2
I’m sure Mannequin Pussy from that list is a guitar rock band, or they wouldn’t remind me of Neil Young and Crazy Horse so much. Punk bands can be guitar rock bands, but post-punk and shoegaze bands struggle. Someone was asking on Substack Notes “any rock bands since the 2000’s” and people named names like The Strokes and The Killers. The former maybe, but are the latter, driving slabs of sound around chord changes, in which the guitars may as well be keyboards, really unhinged enough? I’m sure that, if they were, I would have listened to their music, given its availability, enough to be sure of the answer.
Attitude is everything. Rock starts as a petulant expression of frustrated teen entitlement. Sexual frustration is evidence of structural oppression, and love is a sensation of revolt (vide Chalamet’s Dylan spinning ‘You Really Got Me’ in A Complete Unknown). By the time we get to heavy rock, grandiosity has arrived; metal, perhaps the most emotionally mature version of guitar rock, displays radical acceptance of the state of things, or rages against the cosmos itself. In punk ressentiment has a bitter edge, because growing up will change nothing. All of these emotional states are justified by the guitar, which serves as a wand of power in each.
The rock album in my 2023 AOTY list seems to have been Hackney Diamonds, an album by men even older than me. That was the state of it. A hill I might die on at the moment is that there’s more of ‘Sister Ray’ in the Sly Chaos remix of Jaz Patterson’s ‘Jealous’ than in anything I’ve heard lately from bands that presumably see themselves as being in the VU tradition. The title track from Mannequin Pussy’s ‘I Got Heaven’ was a promising start in 2024, with its rage against the cosmos, but it’s the far less songwriterly songs on Amyl and the Sniffer’s Cartoon Darkness that are beginning to sound like rock songs should.
I’d heard Amy Taylor’s appealingly hoarse voice on a Sleaford Mods track, ‘Nudge It’, but the moment I really got her purpose was hearing ’U Should Not Be Doing That’, a lyric that brings rock’s ancient petulance into a modern psychobabble frame wherein “their” critique is internalized, so that Amy is in a dialogue with herself as well as haters and well-meaning nincompoops, and I don’t know where the boundaries are but I’m on her side, who wouldn’t be, whatever it is.
I was in LA, shaking my shit
While you were down in Melbourne saying, "Fuck that bitch"
You were in New York, getting shit on
And they were down in Melbourne saying, "You should not be doing that"
I'm in my head, doing the work
I'm putting on these shoes and these socks 'cause I gotta get out of here
Another person saying I'm not doin' it right
Another person tryna give me some kinda internal fight, but
I'm working own my worth, I'm working on my work, I'm working on who I am
I'm working on what is wrong, what is right, and where I am
I know my worth, I'm not the worst you told me once I was
I cannot do this anymore, I gotta hit the buzz
Or the “ballad”, Big Dreams, with its sparsely guitared, faltering first verse, and a build-up that reminds me of The Saints. There’s a deliberate roughness in these proceedings that tells us there’s no click track and nothing’s been quantized (whether this is true or not).
Cartoon Darkness is Amyl and the Sniffer’s third album, and sounding a little like The Saints from time to time is something they’ve always done, and, if you’re not familiar with Aussie and Punk history, this is a compliment.3
It’s taken a while for Mannequin Pussy (on their fourth album) and Amyl and the Sniffers to reach my shores, but Brighton, UK band Lambrini Girls, caught up in Chuck Eddy’s round-up because of a “pub rock revival” that’s blowing away the stay-at-home cobwebs of the Covid era, have made the perfect punk debut album with Who Let The Dogs Out.
UK punk was, by the terms of its existence, a limited and undeveloped genre, but new people keep visiting and leaving little contributions, and it’s obviously in good enough health to be picked up and used by those whose parents weren’t born the first time it went around. As the Bandcamp liner notes say, “The album rips through a laundry list of social ills” with humour and radical humanism. The only band namechecked in these notes is Bikini Kill, a hint of the smartness on offer here as well as the politics, and, like Kathleen Hannah, Lambrini Girls aren’t afraid to use a synth or a sequencer to hit the spot, best of all on the Brat-toned single ‘Cuntology 101’, which is the song that first spoke to me.
Healing your inner child is cunty
Getting therapised is cunty
C-U-N-T
I'm gonna do what's best for me
I'm cunty
That's cunty
C-U-N-T
I'll prioritise my own needs
I'm cunty
That's cunty, cunty, cunty4
One social ill that needs a good kicking is the way people born with money and influence hog all the limelight these days. As I’ve written before, this was less of a problem when making rock and pop was a disreputable practice, but now rock and pop has been well and truly gentrified, and there are now fewer, and worse, opportunities for working-class genius and genuine starved-in-a-garret bohemianism running on talent and ideas alone.5 As the music press shrivels, the bought press, and the bought playlist curators, and the bought influencers proliferate like maggots on its corpse, pumping out advertorial content about the limited number of artists who can afford their services or will sell their souls to pay for them.6
If you want success to last
Fetishise the working class
From your 5 bed house in Surrey
To be an industry success
Sponsored adds decent press
Born with a golden pot to piss in
I heard Rod Stewart's nephew
Best friend twice removed
Is the next big thing
about to break through
With a noise rock project
and that's on fucking nepotism
In ’Love’, Lambrini Girls pause their one-two punk pulse briefly for a passage of exquisite finger picking, chords that ‘65 Dylan could have written, which, set against that grunty fuzz-bass, epitomizes Who Let The Dogs Out’s colourful production.
While I was writing this screed you’re reading, the death of rock was announced officially at the Grammy Awards show, in the form of the posthumous, AI-assisted, and really quite bland (I don’t think anyone who cares has really listened to it lately) ‘Now And Then’, by the so-called Beatles, receiving the Rock Performance Of The Year award (accepted on their behalf by a properly embarrassed Sean Lennon). The Grammys have always been a joke, with the odd wild card that’s just enough to keep the brand going - Doechii this year - but they tell you what the industry’s thinking, and our industry wants us dead.
Morrissey, the thinking person’s Kanye, saw this years ago.
There’s a scene in Don’t Look Back where Dylan’s feisty manager Albert Grossman, who steals every scene he’s in, and is arguably the film’s real star, drops in on a UK promoter and they discuss business. It’s an appalling spectacle - two gangsters dividing up music between themselves - and shows, like little else I’ve ever seen, the spirit that lurks behind the Grammys window-dressing. These guys would have invented Spotify if they could have.
The Grammys involve a kind of category error - everything is given a category, but the spirit of things, the force that sells records before mimetic desire sets in, or attracts intense fandoms for acts that will sell relatively few records, or just makes you start a band, doesn’t fit any category. Unless someone wrote the manifesto and the other acts cited it, arguably the case with OG UK Punk, naming genres is revisionism (how many Dunedin musicians have reacted against the Dunedin Sound label? Almost all of them), and progress tends to involve mixing genre sounds or fraying them at the edges.
Even nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Hearing Black Sabbath on the normie TV news, and seeing their wild barbarian style, because they’re back for one more go, still sounds and looks like progress to me.
Algorithmic reminder - Bored Teenagers (live OGWT, 1978) by The Adverts
Don’t Look Back, which Hayley and I watched after A Complete Unknown, was full of previously unnoticed wonders. That’s ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ Joan Baez is singing, and she’s singing it to Sally Grossman, not Dylan. The young “science student” Bob cruelly demolishes was Terry Ellis who, undaunted, would go on to found Chrysalis records and help give birth to prog rock.
Eddy is referring to Joe Carducci’s Rock and the Pop Narcotic, a polemic I haven’t read. In trying to get to the bottom of Carducci’s definition through Goodreads reviews I found a reference to this prophecy in Eddy’s 90’s metal tome Stairway to Hell - “his assumption of prophetic powers (he predicted disco-metal as the future, while the grunge tsunami swelled just offshore) seems both quaint and brave in retrospect.” Maybe Chuck was just a little further ahead of his time than most. After all, it took hundreds of years for the Prophesies of Nostradamus to come true.
Ed Kuepper’s guitar and increasingly ambitious songwriting defined The Saints sound as it matured, and when the band called it a day his Laughing Clowns were a one-off, state of the art-rock experience and my favourite early 80’s Aussie band. Graeme Hill recently shared his latest with me, and Kuepper still has those ambitions, and the richest sound going.
One of the more annoying things on RNZ, our PMC’s media mouthpiece, is the plethora of interchangeable American-accented experts in sociology and psychology telling us how to manage out affairs. Because yours have worked out so well, right. The Listener is a cut above, and still a good read you can buy cheap at the supermarket, but I was especially annoyed a couple of years ago to read a piece on bad language that quoted John McWhorter (US conservative linguist who once said something interesting about the blues that I could never find again to quote here) as saying that the C-word is always a sexist slur and should never ever be spoken. Because a “cunt” in our own language is, aside from its literal meaning, a selfish or deliberately unobliging person, a meaning overlapping with that of “arsehole”, and of “dick”, a selfish and thoughtless person, except that, among friends, “cunt” can be complementary; “are any of youse cunts going to the pub” is a warmly inclusive invitation, and “you’re a good cunt” is the ultimate accolade. Whether or not one can safely use “cunt” in this way is as close as Kiwis get to the tu/vous distinction.
In Biblical times, a talent was a unit of measurement for weight and money; the authors of the Bible turned it into a metaphor for mental and spiritual gifts.
It’s gotten so bad here that I’ve only been able to learn about some of the best local sounds through the court news.